Con Man Or Saint * Story Of A Sharecropper Who Turned $5,000 Into $100, 000, - Hardcover

Dust jacket notes: This is the true story of Glenn W. Turner, a harelip sharecropper--a ninth grade drop-out -- who borrowed $5,000 to open his own business in August, 1967 (at age 33) and by August, 1969, had turned that $5,000 into One Hundred Million Dollars! But this is more than a story of financial success. Pulitzer Prize Winner John Frasca has written an in-depth study of Turner, the child of poverty who seemed destined to follow a plow all of his life on the tobacco farm that earned his father less than $500 a year. For Glenn Turner, every day of childhood held torment. Harelip and poverty seemed insurmountable odds. But he was determined to pull himslef out of the poverty, even if he could not escape his physical handicap. He chose the most difficult route for a harelip -- salesmanship, where the spoken word is the only tool. In these pages, John Frasca has recorded the successes and failures of Glenn Turner: Success selling sewing machines. Failure (three times) trying to start his own sewing machine company. Success in the furniture business. Failure in the furniture business. And Success with the company he formed in 1967--and with twenty-seven corporations he now owns. Intertwined with the story of failure, struggle and success, are the stories of the people who influenced Glenn Turner's life -- the Opportunity School Director who was instrumental in getting an operation on his harelip (and teaching him the value of love); his wife, who bore his first son, then slowly died of Hodgkins disease; his mother and father, brothers and sister; the second wife who believed in him and made him believe in himself; the college professor who became his first "disciple"; the people to whom he is a "saint" -- and those to whom he is still a con man.