Inside Ronald Read's safe deposit box was a stack of paper stock certificates.
Piled together, it stood five inches high.
One purchase went back to January 1959: 39 shares of a California power company. In the decades that followed, he kept going. By the end, he owned at least 95 different stocks. Railroads. Banks. Utilities. Healthcare. Household names like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and J.M. Smucker.
His method never changed. He chose companies that paid dividends, and he used the dividends to buy more shares. He stayed away from anything he didn't understand, like technology stocks. And he held on.
Even when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, taking his shares with it, the damage was small. His money was spread too wide to break.
While Brattleboro saw a janitor, the pile kept growing.
Year after year. Certificate by certificate.