Sir John M. Templeton (CT & Balliol '34)
Billionaire investor dies at 95By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 8, 2008; 2:45 PM
John Marks Templeton, 95, a billionaire investor whose lifelong fascination with science and the spiritual and their mutual connection to the meaning of life prompted him to establish the Templeton Prize, died early this morning of pneumonia at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas. A naturalized British citizen, he lived in Nassau.
Templeton, who began his career on Wall Street in 1937, founded Templeton Mutual Funds, one of the largest and most successful international investment funds in the world. Described by Money magazine in 1999 as "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century," he sold Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group in 1992 for $440 million. At the time of the sale, Templeton Funds had assets of $22 billion.
He established the Templeton Prize in 1972 as a way of recognizing exemplary achievement in work related to life's spiritual dimension. He always made sure that its monetary award exceeded the Nobel prizes, underscoring his contention that advances in the spiritual domain are no less important than those in other areas of human endeavor.
Templeton contributed a sizeable portion of his fortune to the John Templeton Foundation, established in 1987 and based in West Conshohocken, Pa. Foundation grants support academic research in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and social sciences related to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose and the nature of religious belief. With an endowment of about $1.5 billion, the foundation gives out some $70 million annually.
Born Nov. 29, 1912, he was the first, and only, native of Winchester, Tenn., to be knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth (in 1987, after he settled in the Bahamas in 1969); he was a naturalized British citizen. As a 12-year-old, he got his first exposure to the colliding worlds of science and faith by following the Scopes trial as it unfolded in a nearby county.
He evinced an early fascination with numbers and with celestial bodies he observed through a telescope he set up on the roof of the family home. He also developed a lifelong passion for butterflies -- for spiritual reasons.
"None of us know what's going to happen after we die, anymore than that caterpillar knows what's going to happen after he forms a pupa," he told CNN in 1995, "but the caterpillar is born again into something more magnificent than a caterpillar could imagine, and so maybe you will be, too."
When he got straight As on his first first-grade report card, his father challenged him with a business proposition, as he recalled on CNN: " 'Well now, each time you get anything less than an A, you give me a bale of cotton, and each time you get nothing except As, I will give you a bale of cotton.' And he thought that, in the long run, I would wind up owing him a lot of bales of cotton, and he would forgive me."
Twelve years later, when Templeton graduated from high school first in his class, his father owed him 22 bales. The son forgave the father his debt.
He was the first in his town to attend college -- Yale University. With his family squeezed by the Depression, he helped pay for his tuition, books and board with dormitory poker winnings.
Templeton graduated from Yale in 1934 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he received a master's degree in law.
Returning to the United States in 1937, he went to work on Wall Street and three years later bought a small investment advisory firm that became Templeton, Dobbrow and Vance Inc. He focused on investing worldwide.
Taking the "buy low, sell high" maxim to an extreme, he often focused on nations, industries and companies that had hit rock-bottom; he called them "points of maximum pessimism." When war broke out in Europe in 1939, he borrowed money to buy 100 shares each in 104 companies that were selling at one dollar per share or less, including 34 companies that were in bankruptcy. Only four turned out to be worthless. He turned slightly more modest profits in the others.
He entered the mutual fund industry in 1954 when he established the Templeton Growth Fund, which was incorporated in Canada as a way to reduce the tax liability of its shareholders. (Canada had no capital gains tax at the time.) It was one of the first global funds to focus on the securities of companies that derived their income from outside the United States.
In 1956, he and marketing consultant William Damroth created the Nucleonics, Chemistry and Electronics Fund, a specialty fund that reflected his interest in science and technology. Templeton Damroth went public in 1959.
Templeton sold his stake in the company in 1962 and, over the next 25 years, created some of the most successful international investment funds in the world. Ten thousand dollars invested in the flagship Templeton Growth Fund in 1954, with distributions reinvested, would have grown to $2 million by 1992, when Templeton sold the fund.
Templeton established the annual Templeton Prize believing that an honor equivalent to a Nobel Prize should be given to living innovators in spiritual action and thought. Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the first Templeton laureate in 1973. Other winners include Billy Graham, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson and the philosopher Charles Taylor. Recipients have included Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.
The notion of spiritual progress evoked its share of skepticism. "Surely, some recipients like Mother Teresa might qualify as modern saints, and others certainly qualified as major thinkers," New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels observed in 2007. "But was this somehow 'progress' over Siddhartha Gautama, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas or Moses Maimonides?"
Templeton insisted that spiritual advances are just as plausible as scientific advances. "I formed charity foundations," he told the Saturday Evening Post in 2003, "for the main purpose of persuading people that, with the proper scientific research, it's possible to eventually make discoveries of spiritual realities so that, within a century, humans will know a hundred times more about divinity and spiritual principles as any human has known to date."
His first wife, Judith Folk Templeton, died in a motorbike accident in 1951. His second wife, Irene Butler Templeton, died in 1993. A daughter, Anne Templeton Zimmerman, died in 2005; his stepson, Malcolm Butler, died in 1995.
Survivors include two sons, John M. "Jack" Templeton Jr., who retired as a pediatric surgeon in 1995 to become president of the John Templeton Foundation, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., and Christopher Templeton of Colfax, Iowa; a stepdaughter from the second marriage, Wendy Brooks of Delray Beach, Fla.; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
"Yeah, I'm afraid of death," Templeton said in the 1995 CNN interview. "Everybody -- I think it's very rare for a person not to be afraid of death, because we don't know, because it's an uncertainty there. And I try to postpone death as far as I can, but at the same time, I have to recognize that God is a thousand times wiser than I and probably He has something in store for me that I can't imagine."