Richard H. Driehaus, Champion of Classic Architecture, Dies at 78

He began raising money for the family as a coin collector in the third grade. He subscribed to a coin magazine, he later recalled, and “looked in the back of the publication to see what they were actually trying to buy for their own accounts, rather than what they wanted to unload on the public.”

Intrigued when he was 13 by a page in The Chicago American “with corporate names, numerous columns, and numbers showing lots of fractional changes in small print,” he decided that “this was the industry for me” and invested the money he made from delivering The Southtown Economist in stocks recommended by financial columnists. The stocks tanked, teaching him to research each company’s growth potential on his own.

He flunked out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, enrolled in Southeast Junior College and then transferred to DePaul, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in business administration in 1970. He worked for the investment bank A.G. Becker Company, becoming its youngest portfolio manager, and for several other firms before starting his own, Driehaus Securities, in 1979. He founded Driehaus Capital Management in 1982.

He married when he was in his early 50s; the marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by three daughters, Tereza, Caroline and Katherine Driehaus, and two sisters, Dorothy Driehaus Mellin and Elizabeth Mellin.

“I never did anything until I was 50,” Mr. Driehaus told The New York Times in 2008. “I spent my early years making money for my clients. Now I’m ready to have some fun.”

He did, staging his own extravagant themed birthday parties for hundreds of guests at his mansion on Lake Geneva (at one gala, he made his grand entrance on an elephant) and indulging his passion for collecting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/arts/design/richard-h-driehaus-dead.html