By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director
The vast majority of the modern world knows Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies. The more I watch the original and the two sequels (I’m purely a Ralph Macchio/Billy Zabka/Martin Kove guy), the more convinced I am that Morita was a brilliant actor.
The heavy Japanese accent Morita portrays was a fake (it’s still a little jarring to hear the Californian speak in his normal voice during interviews), and his performance as he drunkenly mourned his dead wife and son in the original Karate Kid movie should have won him an Oscar (he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1985 but lost to Haing S. Ngor for The Killing Fields).
While the racial stereotype comedy that he portrayed in the TV series Happy Days and Sanford and Son hasn’t aged particularly well, there’s no doubt Morita was a pure talent. But like many famous actors, he had money problems early in his career. Luckily for him, Redd Fox, one of the dirtiest comedians who was well known for his party albums (basically, raunchy live comedy albums that could be played at parties) before he exploded as Fred Sanford in the 1970s, was there to bail out Morita.
[I’ve always loved history. I’ve always loved the idea of taking a peek into the past and studying it from the current-day perspective. The idea of time travel also fascinates me. And now that I’ve found a passion for writing about finance, I’m combining all of it together in an occasional column for WCI called “The Financial Wayback Machine.”
I want to journey back in time and look at those supposedly great ideas that now seem ridiculous, all the good and terrible predictions (crystal balls have never not been cloudy), the doctors who did great (and shady) things, and all the seemingly minor news nuggets that ended up making huge waves. It’ll be fun, it’ll be silly, and maybe it’ll be a good lesson for what not to do with your money today.
After all, as WCI Founder Dr. Jim Dahle once said on the podcast, “If you’ve never read history, you’re destined to repeat it.”
Step into the Financial Wayback Machine with me, and let’s travel back in time.]
How Redd Foxx Helped Save Pat Morita (and Robin Williams) with Cash
As Morita explained in an interview, he and his wife wanted to buy a house and needed a 20% down payment. Sadly, he was $3,500 short of that down payment goal. Morita, who said he had begged and borrowed and hawked his belongings to save up the money, was explaining the problem to Foxx. Morita told Foxx that, if he could borrow the money, he would do whatever he needed to do to pay back the loan. After checking his pockets and discovering he didn’t have “any small change on me now,” Foxx called on his assistant to bring him his checkbook.
Said Morita: “As he’s writing, before he signs his name, he says, “Now, look here. I don’t want to hear about no papers, no payback, no IOU, no nothing. You want to pay me back? I know you’re going to make it one day, son. You do this for somebody.’ I never forgot it.”
Later, Morita would pay that generosity forward, always making sure he gave the same conditions to his beneficiaries. After you make it, pay it forward.
According to Nick Ragone of This Date in History, Morita, several years later, watched Robin Williams perform at a San Francisco comedy club. Williams joked during the show that he was in poverty, and after the set was over, Morita approached Williams, pulled out his checkbook, and wrote a check for the same amount he had received from Foxx.
Then, of course, Williams became an even bigger star than Morita and Foxx. In the years since Williams’ death in 2014, stories of his legendary generosity with his fellow comedians and actors have continued to build his own legacy. Williams always paid it forward.
Check out the interview below, which features Morita’s spot-on impression of Foxx.
More information here:
A Solemn Happy Anniversary to the Doctor Who Tried to Save the President’s Life
A Doc Created the Coolest Shoe in the Whole World
Why ‘Old Fogies’ Kept Buying Despite the Death of Equities in the 1970s
Forty-five years ago, BusinessWeek subscribers found this headline in their mailboxes, “The Death of Equities.” The cover story that week explained that, considering the Dow Jones had been trading well under its all-time high for the previous six years and with inflation at 9% and with energy problems galore, perhaps it was time to look to invest in different asset classes—particularly since, as Bill Bernstein pointed out in the Humble Dollar, a dollar invested in 1973 was only worth 71 cents six years later.
As BusinessWeek wrote:
“Even institutions that have so far remained in the financial markets are pouring money into short-term investments and such ‘alternate equity’ investments as mortgage-backed paper, foreign securities, venture capital, leases, guaranteed insurance contracts, indexed bonds, stock options, and futures. At the same time, individuals who are not gobbling up hard assets are flocking into money market funds to nail down high rates, or into municipal bonds to escape heavy taxes on inflated incomes. Few corporations can find buyers for their stocks, forcing them to add debt to a point where balance sheets seem permanently out of whack. On Wall Street, the flight from stocks has forced firms to push alternative investments hard—thereby drawing still more money from the stock market.
Further, this ‘death of equity’ can no longer be seen as something a stock market rally—however strong—will check. It has persisted for more than 10 years through market rallies, business cycles, recession, recoveries, and booms.”
The article looked kindly back on the equity boom in the 1950s and early 1960s and lamented that those days were probably gone for good. Most notably, that was because young people were not putting their money into the market and “only the elderly who have not understood the changes in the nation’s financial markets, or who are unable to adjust to them, are sticking with stocks.” There was also a trend toward speculative investments like futures and options.
Some banks allowed customers to put gold, silver, and diamonds into their pension accounts, while the Minneapolis Teachers Retirement Fund Association bought fast food restaurants (Pizza Hut, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken) that it could then lease out to franchisees for more money.
As one young investor said, “Have you been to an American stockholders’ meeting lately? They’re all old fogies. The stock market is just not where the action’s at.”
As Bernstein points out in his Humble Dollar article, the old fogies were staying in stocks not because they were too oblivious to realize that the investing world had shifted. It’s because they knew it really hadn’t, at least for the long term.
As Bernstein wrote, “They were the only ones who still remembered how to value stocks by traditional criteria, which told them that stocks were cheap, cheap, cheap. They were the only investors with experience enough to know that severe bear markets are usually followed by powerful bull markets.”
Those old fogies were spot on. When the magazine story was released, the Dow Jones was trading at about 875. Last week, it set another record at more than 41,000. Those old-timers made themselves a lot of money by not abandoning those shareholder meetings.
More information here:
The Most Athletic Doctor Ever and Andy Warhol’s Cookie Jar Collection
A Sad Farewell to the Basketball Shot-Blocker Who Wanted to Be a Doctor
Dikembe Mutombo—one of the best shot-blockers of all time, a Hall of Famer, and a four-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year—died from brain cancer on September 30 at the age of 58. Until I read some of his obituaries, I hadn’t known that the original goal for the man who would grow to be 7-foot-2 and have one of the most fun-loving sports taunts of all time (that finger wag) was to become a doctor.
Growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, malnutrition and death were all around him.
As Sports Illustrated wrote:
“Ask him to articulate his country’s problems—and potential solutions—and his responses tend to be peppered with detail, but encourage him to revisit his formative years in a working-class family in Kinshasa and he falls silent, offering only that he lost ‘so many’ friends while refusing to delve into those grim details. The median age in Congo is 16.7, compared to 38.5 in the United States, so seeing schoolmates felled by the likes of malaria and malnutrition proved inescapable. To spare others comparable pain, he hoped to one day become a doctor. Mutombo’s father, Samuel, was educated in Europe and returned to Congo to work as a teacher and school administrator rather than pursue a more comfortable life abroad—an example that gave his tallest son purpose.
Because of that height, however, Mutombo spent his time at Georgetown from 1987-1991 studying opposing Big East centers instead of anatomy. Though he never became a physician, he now routinely seeks their counsel.”
Most importantly, Mutombo was a humanitarian, donating $15 million of his own money to help build a 300-room hospital in his home country to provide healthcare for the poor. In 2020, his foundation helped fund and construct a $4 million tuition-free school near where his parents grew up in Congo.
“Basketball was a vehicle that I used to get me where I’m going,” Mutombo told Sports Illustrated in 2022. “My inspiration in life is to improve the living condition of my people.”
Money Song of the Week
One of my favorite musical finds of the past few years is the seminal punk band NOFX. Though the band was established in 1983 and started gaining fame (at least in the punk rock sense) in the early 1990s, I didn’t start listening regularly until I saw my first of two final tour shows in early 2023. It only took 40 years of NOFX’s existence for me to come around.
Sadly, after three shows last weekend in the Los Angeles era, NOFX has retired. A slight controversy surrounded that decision, mostly because the band’s leader/bassist/singer Fat Mike was the one who decided to walk away. The rest of the band wasn’t quite on board.
NOFX still draws thousands of fans to every show (earlier this year, 20,000 fans came out to see the band in Montreal, apparently the most it’s ever drawn as a headliner), and the band still makes money. Guitarist El Hefe said the rest of the band resented Fat Mike for making the decision, and according to Mike, “Smelly [the band’s drummer] was so pissed. I just took away his livelihood. I gave him no choice. And everyone was like, what are we going to do for money?”
I imagine the band won’t go away completely (maybe it’ll do one-off shows here or there or maybe it’ll release another studio album or two), but its days of touring appear to be over. I also imagine it won’t stop hating the record industry that compelled the band to go the DIY route. It’s all illustrated in the 2000 tune Dinosaurs Will Die, especially when Mike sings about his hatred for the major labels and the industry they created:
“I’m gonna make a toast when it falls apart/I’m gonna raise my glass above my heart/Then someone shouts, ‘That’s what they get.’
For all the years of hit-and-run/For all the piss-broke bands on VH1/Where did all their money go? Don’t we all know?
Parasitic music industry/As it destroys itself/We’ll show them how it’s supposed to be/
Music written from devotion/Not ambition/Not for fame/Zero people are exploited/There are no tricks up our sleeve.”
Spoiler alert: the song contains two F-bombs.
NOFX never reached the heights of some of the punk bands from the 1990s. But NOFX never really cared about that kind of fame and fortune.
When the other band members (El Hefe on guitar, Melvin on rhythm guitar, and Smelly on drums) wondered if it’d been better to sign with a major record label and make millions like Blink 182 or Green Day, Fat Mike convinced them otherwise. He told them, “You are getting into bed with a corporation. You are not an artist. You are an employee.”
Said Mike to the New York Times, “I convinced the guys. It took me four months . . . We were doing fine. We bought houses. I asked the guys, ‘Are you happy with what you’re doing?’”
They said they were. Fat Mike said,
“If we just keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll have one of the most awesome careers ever and we’ll be happy the whole time.”
Turns out he was right.
“People don’t understand money or success,” Fat Mike said. “Success is happiness. And if you’re happy, you know what there isn’t? More happiness.”
Though NOFX ended its final show with its 18-minute masterpiece The Decline (seriously, it’s one of the best songs, punk or otherwise, I’ve ever heard), it wouldn’t have been inappropriate for NOFX to call it a career by singing these lyrics from 2006’s 60% (Reprise).
“We’re the self-crowned kings of candor, sultans of slander/Bastions of DIY.
Which means we make more money/We’ve got better prescriptions/We own most of our own music/No one’s got their hands in our pockets.
We don’t have management/We get to play loaded/And only three months a year/Some years we just take off/Vacations are a write off. And so is going out.
I suppose that’s how we’ll go out/Played out and way after our time.”
More information here:
Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published
Thread of the Week
It’s all about perspective, I suppose. And in what part of the country you live.
[Editor’s Note: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
