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Fame & Fortune: Comedian Al
Franken
Laughing to the bank and (maybe) the Senate |
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Franken: No, I grew up
very middle class. My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad
was not a high school graduate -- he didn't have a career as such;
he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.
My grandmother, my dad's mother, was widowed pretty
young, and she was a German "hausfrau" and she never spent
a dime. We moved to Minnesota and she lived in New York, and every
Sunday morning at 9 a.m. sharp during the 1950s and '60s we would
get a call from my grandmother and she would tell the operator to
interrupt her at three minutes, and that was it. My dad would pick
up the phone and go, "Liebchen," because they were German
immigrants, and after three minutes, that was it. And she, by virtue
of investing and stuff like that, left our family a couple hundred
thousand dollars or something, which actually meant something then.
It was sort of what carried my parents through and got us through
college.
Bankrate:
She sounds like a character.
Franken: It was a very
odd wrinkle in my family's financial history. She was one step up
from a lady who collects cans and leaves $200,000 to the city of
Memphis or something. She lived in this little apartment in Washington
Heights, in this lousy area of New York that became lousier every
day. And if you'd come she would bake an apple pie, and she'd have
the same dress and shoes on that she'd worn for 60 years, and she'd
steam stamps off envelopes, that kind of thing. I still have a vestige
of that mentality, and my wife certainly has it because her father
died when she was 17 months old. She had a sister who was three
months old, she had three other siblings, and her mother had a high
school education and worked at a grocery store in the produce department.
They had the heat turned off, the phone turned off, there wasn't
enough food.
Bankrate: Which explains
why she manages the finances, right?
Franken: Well, before
I married my wife, I said either I should marry someone really rich
or someone who grew up really poor because the really poor person
won't expect much. But what I found out is that she also is so conservative
that it's crazy. For instance, I used to do corporate speeches a
lot, and every once in a while I would do a corporate speech for
a group and come home and say, "Honey, we should buy this stock,"
and she'll go, "No. We don't buy stock; we buy mutual funds
that our business manager picks out and they're very conservative."
And I go, "Yeah, but let's buy this stock." So finally
last January, after I've had a number of very good years because
I've been writing the books and stuff, we're meeting with our business
managers or accountants or whatever they are, and I said, "Can
I buy a stock? One stock? Because I'm sure about this stock."
I won't say what the company was, but I gave a speech there in the
fall of 2002, I went to their place of business, everyone seemed
very happy. I gave a speech to a group of people who used their
products, who were professionals and very smart, loved their product.
I met the CEO and thought he was great, and he's Republican. She
wouldn't let me buy it in 2002, so finally in late January 2005,
she let me buy one stock. And it has almost doubled (laughs). It's
the only one that I've ever really been sure of.
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