(Fortune Magazine) -- In 1982, Chris Gardner was just another go-getter in the training program at Dean Witter's San Francisco office, making $1,000 a month. He was also homeless. Gardner couldn't afford both day care for his 20-month-old son, whom he was raising alone, and a place to live.
So for a year he and Chris Jr. slept where they could - cheap hotel rooms in West Oakland, a shelter at a church in the Tenderloin, under his office desk, even, on occasion, the bathroom at the Bay Area Rapid Transit MacArthur station. He remembered the words of his mother, Bettye Jean Triplett, another single parent, who grew up during the Depression outside Rayville, La., where slavery was still a living memory: "You can only depend on yourself. The cavalry ain't coming."
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So Gardner worked, making 200 calls a day to snag clients for Dean Witter. "Every time I picked up the phone," he recalls, "I knew I was getting closer to digging myself out of the hole." Within five years he had opened his own institutional brokerage firm in Chicago called Gardner Rich, which is still thriving today.
Then, in 2002, a story on local TV set in motion a series of events that will culminate this December, when a movie based on his life, "The Pursuit of Happyness", hits the theaters, with Will Smith playing the lead role.
For More Go to the Money/CNN article.
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