‘Happyness’ millionaire tells story of homelessness
By Susan Harrison Wolffis For a year, he was homeless, a single father who sought refuge wherever he and his 2-year-old son could sleep in safety. Sometimes it was at a church mission or emergency shelter. But just as often as not, it was in a hotel lobby, an airport or even in a park, weather permitting. When they had no place else to turn, Christopher Gardner and his baby boy spent their nights locked in a bathroom at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Oakland, Calif. At the end of that desperate year in 1981, during which they were “homeless but not hopeless,” Gardner was offered a job at Dean Witter Reynolds — one of this nation’s top brokerage firms. Six years later, well on his way to being a millionaire, Gardner founded his own brokerage firm. If all this sounds like the stuff of Hollywood, it is. Gardner’s real-life story, told in his autobiography, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” was inspiration for the box office hit of the same name, starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith. “Whenever I talk about all this, I have the same thought,” Gardner told a standing-room-only audience at the Dogwood Center for Performing Arts in Fremont Wednesday night. “Those people (in Hollywood) spent $70 million to recreate something I did for nothing.” For nearly two hours, Gardner, 54, told his story at Fremont Area Community Foundation’s Speaker Series with unflinching honesty. “People always want to know: Was it drugs? Was it alcohol? Is that why we were homeless?” he said. “No, it was something more lethal than either of them. It was life.” He could have entertained the audience solely with stories of Hollywood and what it was like hanging around with Will Smith. But Gardner came to Fremont with a serious message. “I’m going to use this 15 minutes of fame I have,” Gardner said. “ Did you know 12 percent of America’s homeless have jobs? Did you know that tonight 300,000 veterans are homeless or on the streets?” And then he hit people with a statistic that made many in the audience gasp in disbelief. “Did you know that a half-million children under the age of 4 are homeless on the streets or in shelters?” he asked. “Are children lazy? Is it their fault they’re homeless?” Gardner is the owner and CEO of Christopher Gardner International Holdings with offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. He first told his rags-to-riches story “reluctantly,” he said, to ABC- TV news legend Barbara Walters in 2003. Two days later, he had offers from Hollywood and book publishers. From that time forward, he has been in the public eye as an advocate for the homeless, as well as for fathers being involved in their children’s lives. He has two children — son Christopher Jr. and daughter Jacintha, both of whom he’s raised as a single father. During a television interview, Oprah Winfrey asked Gardner’s son what image or memory he took with him from childhood. “All I remember is every time I looked up, my father was there,” Christopher Gardner Jr. said.
As many times as Gardner has told his story, he had to stop to regain his composure when he repeated a heart-grabbing line from the movie. One day when Gardner was at his lowest point emotionally, his sonsaid: “Papa, you know what? You’re a good Papa.” That said, Gardner, a man who never knew his own father but who vowed he’d always be involved in his children’s lives, stared down his audience. “If that don’t get your fire going,” he said, “your world must be wet.”