Peter G. Peterson, the son of Greek immigrants who ran a diner in Kearney, Nebraska, grew up in a family so frugal that the parents and two sons took turns using the same water to bathe on Saturday nights, The Wall Street Journal reports. “It was never clear to me whether I was cleaner after the bath, or before,” he wrote in a memoir.
His Depression boyhood taught him the “lesson of never, even in bad times, spending more than you earned.” Peterson, who became secretary of commerce in the Nixon administration and a billionaire as co-founder of the private-equity firm Blackstone Group, never forgot that lesson. He gave the bulk of his fortune to a foundation seeking to educate Americans about the dangers of deficit spending and unfunded government commitments for health care.
