Since 1988, our mission at Welch Hornsby has been unwavering. Provide uncompromising commitment to build and preserve the wealth of individuals, families, and institutions. It’s more than our philosophy. It’s our life. We are bound by the belief that the most significant investment we can make is the investment in a life of uncompromising commitment. Throughout history, many men and women have made that belief their guiding principle. Their mantra. They voiced opposition when the majority was wrong. They stayed later, worked harder, and ran faster. They imposed self-discipline, tapped into deeper energies, and ignored all distractions until they reached their goals. They saw what was right, pointed their feet in that direction, and walked. Some earned universal fame and recognition for their contributions. Some slipped beneath the public’s gaze. All showed what happens when one commits without compromise. Those men and women inspire us. This website chronicles their stories.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Confidence…thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.” It could be said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lived his life through his definition of confidence.
At the age of 39, he contracted polio, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. FDR refused to accept the permanence of his paralysis, trying a vast range of therapies. He painstakingly pushed himself to learn to walk feeling it was critical to improve his condition as not to lose the American people’s faith in his abilities to serve in public office and ultimately attain his lofty goal of becoming President of the United States.
Oliver Wendell Holmes called FDR, “a second-class intellect, but a first class temperament.” Though shared by many, that opinion never deterred FDR from his ambitions. He was elected president in 1933 during the worst depression in U.S. history. With persistent optimism he led the United States out of the depths of despair, instituting the New Deal aimed to produce “relief, recovery & reform.” Over the course of his Presidency, FDR never wavered in his positive attitude whatever obstacles befell him. He built unprecedented national unity in times of crisis and led America’s courageous fight to secure Allied victory in World War II. Winston Churchill, another great man largely underestimated in his own time, said of Roosevelt, “Meeting him was like opening a bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”
The longest serving president in U.S. history, Roosevelt is widely touted today as one of the top three presidents of all time, a leader whose confidence, once dismissed as arrogance, thrived on his principles and service to his country.
His was an investment in a life of uncompromising commitment.
Chester Carlson
Chester Carlson had ample reason to be discouraged. Six years after he invented the technology for modern-day copy making known as xerography, he had offered the idea to more than 20 companies and been rejected by all of them.
Carlson did not have the means to take the technology to market on his own. What he did have was a patent and a persistent belief in its potential. “Several times I decided to drop the idea completely,” he later remembered. “But each time I returned to try again. I was thoroughly convinced that the invention was too promising to be dormant.”
The non-profit Battelle Memorial Institute finally agreed to put resources into developing the concept in 1944. Within a few years Battelle found a buyer in a small photo-paper company known as Haloid, which later became Xerox Corporation. Still, even Haloid seemed to treat the xerographic copier as the redheaded stepchild of inventions, first producing a disastrously ill-designed prototype and then relegating the second try to a group of young physicists working offsite in an old dilapidated house.
After hiring Carlson himself as a consultant—and lead cheerleader—for the project, Haloid at long last unveiled the world’s first automatic plain-paper commercial copier in 1959. The product became an office staple, just as Carlson always thought it would. Today the number of documents produced with xerographic technology runs in the trillions.
Remarkably, the man who waited so long for his payday—ultimately earning nearly $200 million from the invention—could not wait to give the money away. In the 10 years before his death in 1968, Carlson gave more than $100 million to causes he was passionate about, including world peace, civil rights and education. If he personally never achieved the kind of household-name recognition that his invention did, that was by design. Carlson preferred to remain anonymous, once paying for a new physics center at the California Institute for Technology with the caveat that his name appear nowhere on it.
U Thant, secretary general of the United Nations, was a friend and admirer of Carlson’s and wrote this about the inventor’s legacy: “He was generally known as the inventor of xerography, and although it was an extraordinary achievement in the technological and scientific field, I respected him more as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist.”
His was an investment in a life of uncompromising commitment.
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens used to tell people that he had loved to run for as long as he could remember. “It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power,” he would say. “You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted…seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”
It’s an apt metaphor for how Jesse lived his life. The son of a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave, he grew up to achieve the highest plateau in sports. Ohio State University didn’t have a scholarship to offer him in 1933, but Jesse worked his way through school, and along the way made track and field history when he shattered three world records in 1935.
When he arrived to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis were decrying African-American athletes as “auxiliaries” at best and “non-human” at worst, but Jesse was focused on the task at hand. He won four gleaming gold medals—more than any American track-and-field athlete had ever won in a single Olympiad—and took the world’s breath away.
Fans cheered the humiliation of Hitler, but it was never about politics for Jesse, who understood that he lived in a complex world where his victories brought him acclaim but not civil rights. He said his greatest satisfaction came from working to empower underprivileged youth. In his lifetime Jesse received such high honors as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When he died in 1980, his family and friends established the Jesse Owens Foundation in memory of the man who started out in life with nothing but the strength of his own feet. To this day the foundation gives scholarships to individuals with the “ambition, dedication and courage to achieve success against significant personal odds.”
His was an investment in a life of uncompromising commitment.