From a BART Station Floor to Wall Street

In the early 1980s, Chris Gardner was a medical supplies salesman who had set his sights on becoming a stockbroker. A 2006 profile in The Spokesman-Review explains how the plan unravelled. After he was arrested over unpaid parking tickets and spent time in jail, his girlfriend left. He was then raising his young son alone, and the boarding house they had been using did not allow children. The two had nowhere to live.

The profile lists the places they stayed: a hotel that cost 25 dollars a night, parks, under his office desk and, for a few nights, an Oakland BART station. They later lived at a homeless hotel in San Francisco. Gardner's son, who was about two, learned a game called SHHHH, which meant staying quiet behind a locked door no matter who pounded on it. Because the hotel had no keys, everything they owned went with them each day, and when it rained, Gardner covered the stroller with plastic sheets from the dry cleaners. He carried their belongings daily for a year.

Days before a job interview with the firm Dean Witter, police arrested him over about 1,200 dollars in parking tickets, and he spent ten days in jail. He wore his jail clothes, jeans and paint-splattered Adidas, to the interview, and he got the job as a trainee stockbroker. It took about a year of saving on a trainee's pay to move into their own home.

In 1987 he opened his own brokerage firm in Chicago, which had 15 employees at first. At the time of the article he was chief executive of Gardner Rich and Company, a multimillion-dollar brokerage. His memoir, The Pursuit of Happyness, had just come out, and a film of his story, with Will Smith playing Gardner, was due that December. On set, Gardner stood in a train station bathroom where he had once slept about 25 years earlier.