The Billionaire Who Wasn't Read online

  The young Feeney was a lively boy, and a bit mischievous, according to his sister Arlene. “He got thrown out of kindergarten in Bradley Beach for being cheeky. Not that he got into a lot of trouble or anything, but he was always funny. The highlight of my day was to sit with him and laugh. He was a clown. He had a quick wit. He was my mother’s favorite. She would say, ‘My Charles, my Charles. . . .’”

  As early as ten years old, Feeney was displaying a talent for making money. “We didn’t have anything,” recalled his friend, Francis “Skip” Downey. “A dime was a dime in those days.” His first entrepreneurial venture was selling Christmas cards door-to-door, provided by his pal Jack Blewitt’s father. Blewitt had the local streets booked for himself, so Feeney went to another neighborhood. He earned a few dimes more helping the mailman post letters coming up to Christmas, and when it snowed he and a friend, Moose Foley, offered to clear people’s driveways. “I would call and collect the 25 cents and Moose would dig the snow, and we would split the money,” he said. Here he learned his first lesson in overextending a business. “If I got too far ahead collecting money, I had to help out with the shoveling!”

  He was always thinking up new money-making schemes, however unrealistic. One summer afternoon, when he was eleven and hanging out at Skip Downey’s house, he got a black crayon and wrote the words “Downey’s Beer and Pretzels” on the porch, on the off chance that someone might come by and pay them to fetch an order. Skip’s mother saw it and told the young Feeney, “Charles, if that is not gone by sundown, you will not see the sun come up.” But she adored Chuck, said Skip, now a retired Exxon executive. “He was such a happy-go-lucky guy. She called him ‘the mayor’ because he knew everyone.”

  Charles Feeney went to St. Genevieve’s Grammar School on Princeton Road, Elizabeth, and in eighth grade he became the only boy to win a scholarship to Regis High School on East Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan. This was a Jesuit college for “Roman Catholic young men from New York metropolitan area who demonstrate superior intellectual and leadership potential” and who could not otherwise afford a Catholic education. He hated it. He had to get up every morning and walk forty minutes to the station to catch the 7:45 train to the boat pier and get a ferry across the Hudson River, then a subway to Eighty-sixth street. He often didn’t get back until 7:00 PM, and then he had homework assignments to do. He couldn’t make new friends in Manhattan when he had to commute so far, and all his boyhood pals had gone to St. Mary’s of the Assumption High School in Elizabeth, at the top of a hill just at the end of the main street. After a year and a half of misery, and watching his parents scrimp and save to pay his fares, he got himself expelled from Regis High. “I got caught cribbing in a religion exam, but it was part of my plot. If you get caught cribbing in a religious exam they asked you to leave.”

  At St. Mary’s, Feeney was much happier. Practically all the kids were Irish like himself. He was at the center of everything going on. He played Wayne in the school presentation of the comedy The Divine Flora, and wore the No. 38 jersey for the high school football squad. He was voted the “wittiest” in his class by the seniors in 1947. His peers voted him the class “cutup” because, said his friend Bob Cogan, “he was always fooling around and he made fun out of everything.” He and his best friend, John “Jack” Costello, put on a comedy show. The school magazine for 1948 carried an advertisement: “For an Evening of Pleasant Entertainment Visit The Club Carefree Featuring America’s New Comedy Sensation, CHARLIE FEENEY and JOHN COSTELLO.” For teenage boys, St. Mary’s was like heaven: There were 100 girls to only thirty-five boys in Feeney’s year, and there was an all-girls’ school across the road. Charlie Feeney had developed into a lean, good-looking youth and “they screamed at us like we were the Beatles,” said Cogan.

  Always on the make, Feeney made pocket money on weekends caddying at a golf course near Port Elizabeth. “It was nine holes for $1.00 with a tip of 25 cents, or eighteen holes for $1.75 and a tip of 25 cents,” he recalled. “I would always look for two nine-hole players.” During the summer holidays, when his mother took leave from nursing to rent a rooming house at Point Pleasant on the New Jersey shore and take in paying guests, he got jobs on the boardwalk renting beach towels and umbrellas, and allowing himself to be “dunked” in a tub by contestants throwing balls at him for a few cents. He got so good at winning cuddly toy prizes on the Skee-ball machines that he had to go to another district. In the end, the owner of the machines gave him a job giving out change.

  In those days the beach was run by the junior branch of the New Jersey mafia. They had the concessions, including a 25-cent admission fee to parts of the sands. “If you came for a day’s stay on the beach, they sold you a colored ribbon that you wore with a safety pin,” said Feeney. “They had a bunch of guys who would say, ‘Let me see your entrance ribbon, kid.’” His mother provided ribbons to her lodgers. A school friend figured out how to make an extra few cents by reusing ribbons or cutting them in two. “The mob was not pleased and let them know and they stopped,” said Arlene.

  As a teenager, Charlie Feeney would invite his friends to come for the weekend to the rooming house and bunk down with him in the attic. In the morning he took them for breakfast to a store where donuts were left in a box outside before it opened, allowing hungry boys to help themselves. In the evenings they roamed the boardwalk or went to the cinema. Skip Downey recalled driving Feeney, when they were sixteen, to the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, the place on the New Jersey shore to take a girlfriend on a date. The guy at the back door recognized Feeney and let them in free. They climbed a ladder behind the screen, crossed a catwalk and went down a ladder at the other side to get to the seats.

  His friend Joe Cash years later remembered Feeney as “the type of guy who made you feel he was your best friend and whenever you talked to him he always seemed to be going down the road; he was always thinking ahead.” Jack Costello would recall his friend as a hustler who sold umbrellas on the Point Pleasant boardwalk and who “was always working and always making money.”

  Four months after he graduated in June 1948, and still only seventeen, Feeney went with Costello to the recruiting office in Newark and signed up for the U.S. Air Force. “He volunteered,” said his sister Ursula. “He didn’t have to. He tried to go even earlier than that with Frankie Corrigan. One night they tried to sneak away from the house. They couldn’t go anywhere. The car wouldn’t start! They were going to join up and lie about their age, and they wanted me to come down and sign some papers that their mother had given them permission.” At the time, three years after the end of World War II, there was still conscription and Feeney knew that he would be drafted anyway within a couple of years. “So I felt, well, I’ll just be scratching my ass, I may as well get it over with, so I signed up for three years.”

  Joining the military opened up new horizons for the New Jersey teenager. After training as a radio operator at Lackland Air Base in Texas, he was sent to serve with the American occupying force in Japan. It was his first time out of the United States. He now had a new life and a new first name—in the Air Force everyone started calling him Chuck. As an exceptionally bright recruit, he was assigned to the U.S. Fifth Air Force Radio Squadron’s Mobile Detachment 12 at Ashiya Air Base, on the southern tip of Japan. This was the nearest air base to the Korean Peninsula. His squadron was part of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)—an arm of the National Security Agency that had broken the Japanese military code near the end of the war.

  Japan was in ruins after the war, but life was not hard for a young serviceman. “Duty there was considered a sweet tour by American soldiers,” wrote David Halberstam.1 “American dollars went far, the Japanese women were friendly and ordinary enlisted men lived like aristocrats.” Staff Sergeant Feeney, however, spent a lot of spare time learning Japanese to improve his intelligence skills. He took lessons at the U.S. military language school and read Japanese comic books, much to the amusement of Japanese children.

  When
the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Ashiya Air Base became a staging post for F-80 fighter jets and C-119 planes that dropped supplies to U.S. soldiers on the front line. Feeney’s tour was extended from three to four years. He wasn’t sent to the fighting, but his desk job turned more serious. His squadron’s task was to intercept radio communications used by the Russians flying sorties over the Sea of Japan. Soviet pilots would pick up the frequency of aircraft the United States sent up from Ashiya. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union would become a local hot war if a line in the sky was crossed, and the American planes could only go so far before entering hostile air space. One new pilot, just out of his teens, flew across the line for five minutes, enough time for the Russians to scramble. His plane was shot down and he was killed, along with two Russian language specialists on the flight who had been on the shift with Feeney two nights before. He heard their screams in his earphones. When he returned to the United States, Feeney visited the family of one of his fallen comrades in the Bronx district of New York. He didn’t know what to say. “They were dead because this guy didn’t follow orders which were very clear—don’t go over the line.”

  Throughout his four years of service in Japan, Feeney did not return home once. He was on the other side of the world, and there was a war on. “When he called at Christmas, we’d all sit in the kitchen and wait for the phone call,” his sister Arlene remembered. They would accept charges. “We didn’t have the money, so it was always—‘Don’t talk too long!’” His family never saw him in person wearing a uniform. However, the Elizabeth Daily Journal published a photograph of Sergeant Feeney and Corporal Costello, both in U.S. Air Force uniform, hair parted and Bryl-Creamed, enjoying a three-day furlough together in Tokyo. Costello was less fortunate than Feeney. He was sent into combat in Korea as a ground radio operator, though he survived the war and fathered a large family. The caption quoted Feeney saying, “It takes more than a war to keep Jack and me from getting together.”

  In his letters home, Feeney wrote that he was not allowed to disclose what he was doing. “Maybe that’s where he got some of the secrecy from,” said Arlene. “When he got out and came home he’d be sitting there doing that”—she rapidly tapped the kitchen table—“tap, tap, tap: then he’d say, ‘I’m sorry, Morse code, used it in the service.’ I don’t know whether he ‘thought’ in it, but he kept on doing it every once in a while, going like this, tap, tap, tap.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Sandwich Man

  While still in Japan in the spring of 1952, Chuck Feeney began to think of how he might take advantage of the GI scholarship he was entitled to after his discharge. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 GI Bill of Rights, money was made available to returning World War II veterans to go on to higher education, and the scheme was renewed for Korean War veterans. It changed the lives of many Americans who served in the armed forces, such as Donald R. Keough, who went on to run Coca-Cola, and Bob Dole, who became a U.S. senator. Skip Downey suspected that his old school friend had his eye on a GI scholarship all along. The family didn’t have the money to send him to college, but “in his mind he knew he was going to college and he went to the Air Force to be eligible for the GI Bill.”

  Feeney went to the base library and began to read up on universities. He found an article in the Readers’ Digest, entitled “A School for Cooks,” which featured Cornell University’s School of Hotel Management. “I sort of thought, I could do that, I could look after people.” The course offered an outlet for his entrepreneurial bent. Cornell, located in the town of Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, was the first university in the world to establish a bachelor’s degree in hotel management. Feeney had never set foot inside the two grand hotels in Elizabeth, the Winfield Scott and the Elizabeth Carteret, since defunct, but he liked the idea of “travel, elegant surroundings, people serving you.” He applied for admission and was called for an interview in Tokyo with a Cornell recruiter. The woman who ran his Japanese language school knew the interviewer, and “she looked over the guy’s shoulder to see he wrote only nice things about me!”

  He was discharged from the U.S. Air Force on July 1, 1952, with $634.33 back pay and made his way home to New Jersey to await the result of his application to Cornell. He got a rapturous reception after such a long absence, but his parents weren’t happy about his choice of university. In those days, Catholic boys from St. Mary’s didn’t go to Ivy League universities. His father’s best friend, a Catholic high school principal, John Dwyer, suggested instead that they drive up one day and take a look at Seton Hall, a private Catholic university closer to home, where Dwyer had some connections. He was nervous that the young Feeney might be aspiring too high in seeking admission to a major Brahmin establishment. The next day, however, the acceptance letter to Cornell Hotel School came in the mail. Feeney was invited to enroll in September. From his class at St. Mary’s, only two boys went to university. The other got a scholarship to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

  The letter of acceptance was a major event for the Feeneys. No one in the family had ever been to a university. But Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. “He did not believe he was ever going to get admitted to Cornell,” said John J. (Jack) Clark Jr., a past dean of the Hotel School from Boston, Massachusetts, who also had an Irish Catholic background and understood how big a thing it was for the young Feeney to cross the line. “Most of Chuck’s generation and mine were the first generation that started going to college. There weren’t a lot of Catholics at Cornell in the fifties or in the Ivy League.”

  Of all the colleges and schools at Cornell, the Hotel School accepted the lowest SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, the standard used to judge a student’s potential, but consistently produced the most successful entrepreneurs, such as James W. McLamore and David R. Edgerton, cofounders of Burger King, and Michael Egan, who built up the Alamo car rental business. “The rest of the university kind of looked down on us,” said Clark. “One did not need to know the entire history of Greek culture to get accepted into the Hotel School, but it looked for a good combination of brains and physical energy.”

  At first Feeney felt he had strayed out of his social depth, his sisters believed. Everyone else seemed to come from prep schools and had cars. But he quickly adjusted to life in Ithaca. He found himself in the company of a lot of guys of like mind—budding entrepreneurs, eager to get an education, explore the world, and make their fortunes. “Once they let me in I was certainly capable of competing with the people who were in there,” he recalled. “I had to get there to figure that out.”

  He soon showed just how talented an entrepreneur he was. He spotted a niche market right away. There was no Wendy’s or McDonald’s in Ithaca then. The students got hungry at night, and most were privileged, with cash in their pockets. Feeney began to make and sell sandwiches around the fraternities and sororities. He soon became known on the campus as the “Sandwich Man.” He needed the extra income to survive at Cornell, as his GI scholarship provided only $110 a month during each term to cover tuition, leaving him with little disposable income. At the start, he paid for the ingredients at the store late on Friday so that his checks would not be cashed until Monday. “It was my first experience of deficit financing,” he recalled. Feeney took the sandwiches to his customers in a basket, wearing an old army field jacket with big pockets for the change and blowing a whistle outside the fraternities to announce his presence. A contemporary in the Hotel School, Fred Antil, remembered Feeney coming around to his fraternity, and the running joke he had with him about how thin the sandwiches were.

  Good-looking, crew-cut, and gregarious, Feeney made friends easily and was able to persuade helpers to come to his apartment to make and cut the sandwiches. “He was a hustler, he always had a smile. I figured out I made 16,000 sandwiches for him, working in t
he early evenings,” said a former roommate, Tass Dueland. At his peak, he reckoned that he averaged 700 sandwich sales a week. Feeney had trouble getting dates because they had to be good sandwich makers, joked Chuck Rolles, a graduate of Binghamton Central High School in New York state who became Feeney’s lifelong friend and later founded the Chuck’s Steak House chain—another Cornell Hotel School success story. Retired and living in Aspen, Colorado, Rolles recalled that the Sandwich Man would tell his team to make sure there was only one slice of ham on the “baloney and cheese” sandwiches so as not to cut into his profits.

  Feeney was in on every move. When Chuck Rolles got the concession to sell programs in the football stadium because of his sporting prowess—despite his small stature he had set a national school record in basketball in 1952—Feeney became one of his salesmen at the football stadium. “He always had a great wit,” said Rolles. “I remember a guy from Princeton who we were playing that day came up to Chuck and joked, ‘I don’t need a program, I can’t read,’ and Chuck said, ‘Oh you must be from Princeton!’”

  As a sideline, Feeney sold Christmas cards on campus, and during vacation worked as a trainee at Industrial Food Crafts in Elizabeth, managed the Summer Club on Fire Island, New York, and acted as a taster and tester for Duncan Hines, the bread and cake maker.

  On their last summer vacation in 1955, Chuck Feeney and Chuck Rolles took a working holiday together in Hawaii, so that Rolles could spend time with his classmate girlfriend, Jean Kelley, whose father, Roy C. Kelley, owned a chain of hotels there. “We got off the airplane and went to the hotel and checked in, and all of a sudden Chuck started speaking Japanese to the waitresses,” said Rolles. “I didn’t know he could speak Japanese.” They lived in a rented cottage for the summer, and Feeney worked as a night clerk in the Edgeware Reef Hotel in Honolulu, where one of his jobs was security duty—letting guests back into their rooms who had locked themselves out. Then twenty-four years old, Feeney was getting his first experience of the hotel business outside the United States—Hawaii had not yet become a state—and he loved the exotic location. He had gotten the travel bug. And though he could not know it at the time, destiny would beckon him back to Hawaii.