Sam Zell would have turned 84 today.
It is hard to understand Zell’s relentless belief in the American Dream without knowing the story of how his parents got here.
In August 1939, his father read the headline that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact. He knew instantly what it meant: Poland would be carved up and destroyed. Within hours, he rushed home, told his wife to pack what she could, and they boarded the last train out of their hometown before the Nazis bombed the tracks.
What followed was nearly two years of flight. They moved across Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union in the dead of winter, traveling 5,600 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then through Japan. They carried a diamond hidden in his sister’s shoe to pay for their journey. Thousands of relatives and neighbors who stayed behind were murdered in the Holocaust.
When his parents finally arrived in Seattle in 1941 with almost nothing left, they saw America as pure possibility. Every year they celebrated the date of their arrival with a toast to the United States, a tradition Sam carried in his bones. He grew up with the conviction that in America, drive mattered more than birth or religion, and that there were no limits on how far you could go.
That belief shaped his career. Zell became one of the most successful and unconventional investors of his era, never forgetting the urgency, gratitude, and resilience his parents had instilled.
On what would have been his birthday, it is worth remembering: Sam Zell’s version of the American Dream was not theoretical. It was survival turned into opportunity.
Happy heavenly birthday Sam.
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