And the weird thing is: I know Tom, we’ve spent a little time together, smoking cigars and polluting the air with stories that are too good to be true, and at no point did he ever say one word about how he made his money. And because we were sitting on the terrace of his ranch, looking over a significant piece of real estate, he clearly made a great deal of money.

Why didn’t he brag about it?

I didn’t think much about that because Tom is the husband of my friend Frances Schultz, who is the author of a book I like a lot, The Bee Cottage Story: How I Made a Muddle of Things and Decorated My Way Back to Happiness, and as usual with husbands, at first I thought he was merely company for her. You know, furniture.

Then I read Tom’s book. It starts like this:

“We’re going to Portugal to go bird shooting,” George Barley said.
“No, George, all we do is shoot, and it costs a fortune!” I told him. “I’m not going. No. Not a chance.”
We did it anyway, because George could talk me into just about anything. We stayed at a very nice house in Alentejo, in the cork country. At that time, in the mid ’80s, most of the world’s cork came from there.
There were sixteen of us in the shooting party: King Constantine II of Greece, his wife Queen Anne-Marie, some of the Hanovers, some of the Hapsburgs, George Barley, and me. All of those European royals are related.
Dinner the first night was held in the wine cellar. Our hosts had invited fourteen of their friends, and we sat at a table long enough to easily seat all thirty of us. Behind each of our chairs stood a footman ready to wait on us. From one end of the table to the other were piles of fresh shellfish. At each place setting were two silver buckets, one for the shells, and one for the wine. The footmen emptied our shells and refilled our glasses frequently.
The next morning the men went shooting, and the women followed later in horse-drawn carriages. We all met in the field for elevenses, which is usually a light snack and tea served at eleven o’clock. Then we all returned to the house, where we had drinks outside under the trees and waited for lunch. Suddenly these amazing, fancy white horses began trotting out, and I couldn’t believe it. They were Lipizzan stallions! Honest to God, it was the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. The Spanish Riding School is the oldest school of its kind in the world, and the Hapsburgs, relatives of some in our shooting party, developed the Lipizzan breed in the sixteenth century.
I was blown away. I had never seen anything like it in my life. I had never had dinner with a king, with a footman at each chair; I had never had elevenses; and I had never been to a lunch where the Spanish Riding School gave a private performance.
Hey! I’m just an Iowa farm boy.

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D**n! That was good. I read on. And discovered that “farm boy” was a bit of an exaggeration.

Evelyn Jewel Robertson had sex once and she became pregnant at sixteen. She married Marlin Dittmer because that’s just what you did then. She was seventeen when I was born and she never graduated from high school. The year was 1942. Marlin left soon after my birth to join the Navy, and my mother and I moved into a small apartment above a dry cleaner. My parents divorced by the time I was a year old. I didn’t see Marlin again until I was eighteen.

He was loved at home. School was something else; he had trouble reading and stuttered. He graduated high school second from the bottom of his class. He decided he was going to go to college.

“Your high school transcripts look disastrous and you failed out of the University of Iowa summer school. You won’t be coming here,” said Dr. Frankenthaller, the admissions director of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.
“Dr. Frankenthaller, I have to come here,” I said.
“No, Mr. Dittmer, your grades are too bad.”
I was sitting in his waiting room. When he left for the day, I was still sitting there. I went home, then got up early the next day and was sitting right there in his waiting room when he arrived. That night when he left, I was still there. Then I went home, got up early again, and went right back to the admissions office. Finally he said, “Okay, Dittmer, come here.” I went into his office, and he said, “We’re going to give you the test that we give the Sioux Indians on the reservation. The big question is, do you want to be a plumber or a fireman?” I guess he figured that was the height of my potential. “Pick fireman,” he told me. He admitted me into the school, but he was wrong about one thing. Firemen get the girls, but plumbers make the money.

After college, he joined the Army, where he charmed his way to the White House as a social aide. His first job was as a runner on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. After paying for rent and other expenses, he had enough for one meal a day; he went from 185 pounds to 155 in four months. He wangled a job as a trader, made cold calls, climbed the ladder. In 1969, he formed a partnership with his stepfather: Ray E. Friedman & Co., or Refco. He was a fearless, brilliant commodities trader, and those stories, though true, read like very funny fables. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

With success comes adventures: evenings with Castro (who was fascinated by his plane), trips to Russia (“America had to make the Soviets seem scary to keep increasing the US defense budget. But we could see for ourselves there was nothing there.”). And then there was a Sheikh who wanted to corner the copper market and lost $100 million.

No one is more boring than a self-made white man who’s made money in finance and thrills to the sight of all the zeroes in his bank account. And no one is more exciting than a self-made white man who uses his money to leverage social change. Tom Dittmer went looking for a school in Chicago. He found Providence St. Mel.

Paul Adams was principal, teacher, maintenance man, and bus driver. He lived above the school in the attic with a cot and a hot plate. “That’s good,” I said. “You just go down the stairs and you’re at work.” He told me the school had a budget of about $900,000 a year, and he was paid out of whatever was left. It might have been $900 or $9,000. This guy was walking the walk.
I went to the school and saw that it was all black kids and was located in one of the most violent neighborhoods in America. The nearby houses were all government projects and the colors on the buildings told you which gangs controlled the territory. If you were a Red, you walked all the way around that street so you didn’t have to go through the Yellow because if you did, you’d get killed.
“That’s why I have a gun and a baseball bat,” Paul told me. “I know who the gang bangers are and they don’t come to my school because I’m head of my gang, and they’re head of theirs, and the twain should not meet.”
Paul would do anything he could to raise money for the school—fish fries, bingo games, bake sales, you name it. At one time they even had a McDonald’s in the basement of the school, but they had to close it because it kept getting robbed. I asked Paul to give me a list of things that he needed to do and we’d go from there. I gave him some money to fund scholarships for more kids to attend the school. I hired Betty Graham as the development director. She was part of a big-time Chicago family, and I paid her $200,000 out of my own pocket — plus a bonus — to help raise money to get the school in shape. She was fabulous, and within six months she had raised $3 million. From there it went to $7 million and up.
Since PSM began, 100 percent of every graduating class has been accepted to college. Not 100 percent have been able to attend, for financial or other reasons, but 100 percent have been accepted. But that’s not the impressive news. What’s impressive is that 77 percent of them graduate from college in four years. The national average is less than half that. Out of each graduating class, 70 percent of them go to first-tier schools or better. Better! We’re talking MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard. These kids are prepared to succeed.
In 1993, we held a big fundraising dinner for the school at the Hyatt Regency. Karen Pritzker, another board member, and Stedman introduced Oprah as the special guest. It was really cute. She got up on the stage holding a shoebox and said that she wanted to clean out her shoe closet and give the profits to Providence St. Mel. So she held a sale at Harpo Studios and charged $10 for shoes and $5 for sneakers. It came to more than $600. She handed Paul Adams the little box with the check. “I thought I had more shoes than that,” she said. Paul Adams opened the box and pulled out another check for $1 million. That was Oprah.

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Yeah, but that was also Tom Dittmer. He takes the focus off the lovely things he does, but his kids and others contribute short chapters, and they sneak in the sweeter side of his personality, leaving him the jester’s role: talkin’ big and telling tales. Typically, he doesn’t mention anywhere in these pages that all the book’s profits go to Providence St. Mel. And the wisdom he dispenses is almost offhand. But the gratitude and the humility shine through. At the end of the book:

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in Sioux City driving the Coke truck on my best day. The fact that I stumbled out and got to do what I do is a miracle.

A rich man who counts his blessings? Who lives, as a friend says, “from the heart?” Who inspires people? This guy. I can’t think of another.

Memoir of the year, say I. And he’s not even a writer. It’s just not right.

This article originally appeared on The Head Butler

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