Small Medium Business Success Stories: Who was John Marks Templeton?
The profile of a successful small medium business icon
Meet John Marks Templeton, born on the 29th of November in the year 1912. Raised in Winchester, a little town in Tennessee 60 miles going to Dayton and baptized in a Presbyterian family. He was the foremost student in that town to reach college by sustaining himself during the Depression era at Yale. He finished by 1934 as one of the highest ranking in his batch, received a scholarship from Rhodes to Balliol College at Oxford and acquired a master’s degree in law. He professionally started by 1937 at Wall Street, New York.
In the same year, he met Judith Folk and they raised a brood of 3. By 1951, his wife died and seven years after, he met Irene Reynolds Butler, and married her. His stepson, together with his other children, watched in awe as he became one of the greatest small to medium business entrepreneurs.
His professional excellence lasted seventy years. He made his mark in Wall Street, establishing a legacy of mutual funds in his era, as he took the initiative in foreign markets for other investors, formed charities that provided for 70 million underprivileged people annually, published books about finance, spirituality, and supported the quest to find solutions to what he describes are “Big Questions” in the fields of science, faith, God, and humanity’s purpose.
He purchased a small and medium business by 1940 that was to become the pillar of his business domain. He called it Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance.
His achievements included the label as one of the world’s richest men. He left the United States and resided in the Bahamas. Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him the rank of a Knight and his generosity was well-known to certain celebrated personalities such as Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksander I, Solzhenitsyn, Freeman Dyson, Charles Taylor and other noteworthy spiritual thinkers and innovators that benefited from a piece of his wealth.
Despite such support and generosity, his detractors followed his every movement. His aid organizations were questioned due to the nature of providing aid in terms of “discoveries” in some areas that were considered oddities. They charged him of using his charities of using science to advance religion. Majority of the critics find that the concept of “progress” in faith was crossing unknown boundaries.
Unperturbed, Templeton’s philosophy about spirituality was extensive, defied dogmatic concepts about heaven and hell, and promoted a different kind of religion about humanity and God. He advocated that small and medium businesses should adopt a higher degree of ethics in their organizations and believed that it can achieve success.
He passed away in Doctors Hospital by 2007. He was 95 and was diagnosed with pneumonia according to Donald Lehr, spokesperson for the John Templeton Foundation.
His legacy is passed on to his two sons from his first wife, retired Surgeon, Chairman and President of the John Templeton Foundation, John M. Jr., and Christopher of Colfax, Iowa. He is also survived by his stepdaughter from his second wife, Delray Beach Florida resident Wendy Brooks. He has three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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