The character arc of Chris Gardner

Who is Chris Gardner?

The cavalry is not coming. His mother told him that.

His father was in Louisiana when he was born and his stepfather was violent with his mother and his sisters, so he grew up frightened. He was in foster care twice, the second time at eight, when his mother was imprisoned. He met his uncles then, and Henry, the one who mattered most, drowned in the Mississippi when he was nine. The children learned their mother was in prison when she turned up at Henry funeral with a guard.

His mother is still the source of the whole thing. She told him he could only depend on himself, that the cavalry is not coming, and he decided early that everything he had grown up around was a list of things to avoid. Inspired by Henry Navy stories he enlisted, spent four years as a hospital corpsman at Camp Lejeune, and was recruited by a San Francisco cardiac surgeon into clinical research. By 1976 he was running a laboratory and had co-authored papers.

Then he gave it up. Ten years of training stood between him and practising, and the profession would be unrecognisable by the time he got there, so a few days before his twenty sixth birthday he told his wife Sherry he was not going to be a doctor. The marriage did not survive it; he left her for Jackie Medina, who was pregnant, and his son Christopher was born in January 1981.

A lab assistant salary of eight thousand dollars a year would not keep three people, so he doubled it selling medical equipment. Then, outside San Francisco General, he asked a well dressed man in a red Ferrari what he did for a living. The answer was stockbroker, and that was the decision made. The man, Bob Bridges, took him seriously, introduced him to branch managers at the big firms, and for two months he cancelled his sales calls and went to meetings while his car collected tickets. He got into a training programme at one firm, quit his job for it, and arrived to find the manager who hired him had been sacked. Then he was taken into custody after an altercation with Jackie, over which she did not press charges, and a licence check turned up 1,200 dollars of unpaid tickets, for which a judge kept him in jail for ten days. He came out to an empty apartment, and got into the Dean Witter Reynolds programme in the clothes he had been arrested in.

The programme paid nothing. He made two hundred calls a day, arrived early, stayed late, and passed the Series 7 at the first attempt in 1982. Jackie brought his son back and left him, and the rooming house he could afford did not allow children, so for nearly a year he and a toddler were homeless in the Tenderloin while he worked: soup kitchens, the office after hours, motels, parks, buses, and a locked bathroom at a train station, until a minister let them into a shelter. Nobody at work knew. His son, asked about it now, says he could not tell you they were homeless, only that they were always having to go. Gardner was recruited by Bear Stearns, founded Gardner Rich and Co in 1987, sold his stake in 2006 and published the memoir that became The Pursuit of Happyness.

The moments

Chris Gardner's timeline.

Chris Gardner: frequently asked questions

What people ask about his line.

Sources

• Chris Gardner, English Wikipedia biography, filed under living people.
• The Pursuit of Happyness, his 2006 memoir, and the film made from it.
• His mother own words, as he quotes them there.
• His son recollection of the homeless year, as quoted there.