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Archetypical of this take-charge generation are the six men on the cover. All of them are under 40. All began with little or no capital. All have built productive wealth by creating jobs, purchasing power and useful ideas. They are not only men of considerable imagination but able managers and administrators who realize that even a million-dollar idea is useless unless the man who has it knows how to put it to work and has the courage to take risks. The case histories of these six—and of their self-made compatriots—add up to a primer on the art of becoming wealthy.
Mobile Manufacturer
Arthur Julius Decio, 35, of Elkhart, Ind., is a millionaire because he early recognized and exploited the billion-dollar-a-year market for low-cost mobile homes. As president of Skyline Homes, the industry's biggest producer, he is worth just over $5,000,000. Skyline's sales in the past four years have jumped 500% to $59 million, and Decio expects to race along with the fast expansion of the two population groups that buy the most mobile homes: young marrieds and retired oldsters.
Decio started in the garage behind his childhood home in Elkhart, which is next to—and on the wrong side of—the New York Central Railroad tracks. His father, an Italian immigrant grocer, sank some savings into mobile homes in 1951, but did poorly and begged son Art to try either to rescue or liquidate the small company. Decio, then a steel salesman, put in $3,200 of his own, recruited three friends and started to work.
He quickly saw that many small, regional producers were competing in the crowded field, and that Skyline would have to build a unique model and carve out a distinct market to survive. To do that, he designed a 20-ft., smaller-than-usual mobile home that had the advantage of being cheaper and more easily transportable than competing models. Once Skyline was on its feet, Decio got the idea of imitating the automakers' methods of frequent model changes and nationwide distribution. He introduced a "research and development" department to design new styles of mobile homes, started building a network of 2,300 dealers that now covers the entire U.S. He brought out four lines of mobile homes, each competing with the others. "That way," he says, "we can get our products in the hands of four different dealers in the same market. Such a system works for General Motors, and it works for us."
Man of Many Parts
Charles Bluhdorn, 39, Manhattan-based chairman of Gulf & Western Industries, a widely diversified company specializing in auto parts, began as a penniless immigrant. Now he is worth more than $15 million.
A wartime refugee, Vienna-born Bluhdorn came to Manhattan at 16, immediately went to work as a $15-a-week clerk in a cotton brokerage house. Later he rose to a $60-a-week job in a commodities house, where he learned the intricacies of that gyrating business and discovered the secret that got him going: fortunes can be made on a meager stake in international trade. At 23, he invested $3,000 and started his own export-import business in a small Manhattan office. Within eight years he had bagged his first million by buying an awful lot of coffee from Brazil.