He bought a thousand dollars of Walgreens and bought a nature reserve
He held the shares for about seventy years and then turned them into four hundred acres of wilderness.
Russ Gremel was a Chicago lawyer and lifelong volunteer with the scouting movement. As a young man, around the 1940s, he invested roughly $1,000 in Walgreens — the pharmacy chain — and held it.
In 2017, in his late nineties, he donated the holding, by then worth about $2 million, to the Illinois Audubon Society. It funded the acquisition of roughly four hundred acres, established as a wildlife refuge.
What he actually did
- One purchase, in a company whose shops he used and could observe.
- No sales for approximately seventy years, through every recession and every market panic in that span.
- Dividends reinvested, splits accumulating, and nothing withdrawn.
- A frugal life — he lived in the same modest house and by his own account spent very little.
Single or few holdings, a surviving company, seven decades untouched, and a life organised so the money was never needed. See Ronald Read, Grace Groner and Oseola McCarty. Four people, four different instruments, one behaviour.
The part he said himself
Interviewed about it, he was straightforward that he had not done anything clever — he had bought a good company and left it alone, and the length of time did the rest. He also said he wanted to see the gift made while he was alive, which distinguishes him from most of this group.
The mechanism
Thinking in decades is explained in Thinking in decades, in the Learn curriculum.
Where to check this
- Gremel Wildlife Sanctuary — Illinois Audubon Society
- Chicago man turns stock into nature preserve — Chicago Tribune
More from the quiet compounders
All Reckonings- Ronald Read — The janitor with an $8 million portfolio
- Alan Naiman — The social worker who spent his life around children with nothing
- Curt Degerman — The man who read the Financial Times in the bins