Chris Gardner: An inspirations to others

What a story. I plan on seeing the movie over the holidays... A man with a dream..

It took him 10 months of knocking on doors to land a trainee spot. The stock business was a white man's profession, but Gardner doesn't blame race for how hard it was to get a foot in. He says it was "place-ism" -- or really, class. He didn't have a college degree or parents who were professionals. He didn't play golf or have a network of well-to-do friends who could be prospective clients.
Finally, he got a break. He had survived several rounds of interviews at Dean Witter, and had one more to go. That's when a police officer checking his tags discovered he had $1,200 in outstanding parking tickets.

With no money to pay them he was jailed for 10 days. When he got out, he discovered his girlfriend, his son and all his clothes gone. He showed up for the interview in the same clothes he'd worn before going to jail. Rather than try to make up a story, he told the truth. Turned out the interviewer had been through a messy divorce or two. Gardner got the job.

A few months later, his girlfriend showed up at his boardinghouse with their son. She couldn't take care of him anymore, she told Gardner. It was his turn. The boardinghouse did not allow children, and with another mouth to feed and diapers and day care costs on his $1,000-a-month trainee salary, Gardner and his son took to flophouses, soup kitchens and the streets.
Between the help from Glide and his slow but steady success as a stockbroker, Gardner says, he was able to break free after a year of homelessness.

He moved over to Bear Stearns, and a few years later, he moved to New York City to work for the firm on Wall Street. Then, in 1989 he opened his own stock brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co., in Chicago. And he finally bought that Ferrari: from Michael Jordan.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/10/10/DDGVLF4AI81.DTL