"John, there's a big demand," Joe insisted. He was 9 years old, just starting out. The idea was to sell the crickets to the neighbors as garden accessories. He had ordered 1,000 of them. "He was going to make a lot of money," his father recalls. "But they all died." So much for an early entrepreneurial success story.
Joe Mansueto's father, Mario, was born in Italy in a poor hill town east of Naples. He is the son of a laborer who came to America, found work on railroads and in factories near Chicago, and saved for the day, 10 years later, in 1928, when his wife and children would join him. Mario was a bright student, strong in math. He won a scholarship to Purdue and became the first in his family to go to college. The navy put him through medical school. After his service was up, he settled in Calumet City, Ill., not far from his parents' house, and opened his own practice as an ear, nose, and throat specialist. He married Sara Smart, a nurse.
There were four children. Joe was the second, the oldest of three sons. If you go looking for signs of a budding entrepreneurial spirit in Joe's childhood, they're not hard to find. After the cricket debacle, there were successes. Once -- was it in sixth grade? -- he bought a vintage Drake 2-B shortwave receiver for $100 at a gathering of ham-radio enthusiasts, and turned around and sold it two weeks later for $300. That was neat -- "the first time I ever made any real money," he says -- but you shouldn't read too much into that statement. The pleasure Joe got from ham radio had little to do with discovering bargains at ham fests. It was the community that mattered, the tight camaraderie, the shared sense of mission.
"If you had a problem, other people would join in and help you solve it," Mansueto says. "If you were building a transmitter and it didn't work, we'd kind of tinker with it, and it would be like an intellectual exercise. It was never 'What's in it for me?' It was 'How do you solve this problem?" Mansueto hasn't fooled with ham radio for more than 20 years, but he hasn't forgotten Morse code and can still recite his catchy call letters: WB9DGY.
The end of his ham-radio phase coincided roughly with the family's move -- two towns south, one rung up the social ladder -- to Munster, Ind. The Mansuetos settled into a modern ranch house on a large lot in an oak-filled subdivision a short walk from the park, the public library, and the high school. At Munster High, Mansueto was a standout student, active (but not necessarily a leader) in peripheral groups. His picture never made it into the yearbook senior year, but his list of club memberships did: Drama (he was on the stage crew); Musical; Thespians; Science Club; Chess Club; Speech. (Was he a geek? Mansueto says no, not him, but his friends were. "I hung around with a lot of geeks, people who were very good in math and science. I kind of like those people.")
When the time came, Mansueto applied to Purdue (a state university), Northwestern, and the University of Chicago, and was accepted at all three. He chose the University of Chicago because he could choose -- his parents were paying -- and because "it seemed to tolerate eccentrics a little more than Northwestern. It had a little more focus on pure learning, less on all the rigmarole. I just felt more at home there."
Joe Mansueto might have been a doctor. He had the academic skills, and his father encouraged him. But while he took the same physics and chemistry courses in college that the premed students did, he had no interest in practicing medicine. His indifference was partly a contrarian's natural reaction to the times. In the mid-1970s, at elite schools like Chicago, it seemed as if almost everybody was premed. Mansueto was turned off by all that: by the pack mentality and the fierce competition to get into medical school that started when you were a freshman, and by the plain fact that so many were choosing the profession for all the wrong reasons. "People were doing it just to make money," Mansueto says, "not because they wanted to be doctors."
Mansueto was interested in "a gazillion things": architecture, the guitar, literature. His best subjects in high school had been math and science; reading had always been a chore. Animal Farm, Wuthering Heights, Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- those are the titles he remembers from then. Even today they elicit groans. Until he got to college, he didn't know reading could be thrilling. But then it clicked, and he began to read voraciously.
Among the first books Mansueto read at Chicago was Thoreau's Walden, the last line of which is, "The sun is but a morning star." "I remember very vividly," he says. "It was the 10th week of the fall quarter, right before finals. I was sitting up in the library, looking out over the quads, finishing Walden. The name Morningstar comes from that book. To me it's a very optimistic statement, that the sun is just the beginning, that there's a rebirth, something beyond, and that there's more to life than what exists today." (Fine. But Nancy Morningstar, if you're reading this, Mansueto hasn't forgotten you, either. "Oh, yes!" he says, blushing. You were one year ahead of him at Munster High, you had blond hair, you were "kind of this beautiful girl," he says dreamily. Let's just say the word resonates in a pleasant way for Mansueto, and leave it at that.)
Mansueto still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Why should he have to apologize for that? He was not his grandfather, after all, who'd had to take a job, any job, and be glad to have it. And he was not his father, who had come to medicine "just on a whim," because his roommate at the boarding house in West Lafayette where he'd lived while attending Purdue had been premed, and because being a doctor was plainly better than working in a factory. Joe Mansueto was another animal altogether, an upper-middle-class kid from the suburbs -- smart, idealistic, naïve. "I was not that interested in making money," he says. "I kind of looked down on that. I was focused more on learning."
