Mansueto admits to no inner wavering during that period in his life, no sense of drift. Others, observing him, were less sure. He was 27 years old, four years out of business school, and already he had turned his back on at least three viable, lucrative careers (four if you count the private-investment partnership he managed for family and friends, the Mansueto Value Fund; five if you don't dismiss the two-month stint as a night manager at Arby's learning about the fast-food business). His doubts about SRR, it turns out, were unfounded. Two years after Mansueto cashed out, Hanson put the company on the Inc. 500 (#176 in 1987, #217 in 1988); revenues reached $5 million in 1993. And how could he have left Golder Thoma? "My father had a hard time understanding that," says Mansueto.
Then again, Mario Mansueto had never understood the concept of choice the way his son Joe did. For Joe (thanks to Mario and Sara), opportunities were just that, opportunities. Some were better than others, but none had to be taken. What Joe really wanted now, more than anything else, was to start his own business. "Deep down, I missed that entrepreneurial environment," he says. "I wasn't controlling my own time."
Enough said. Time to move on. "For a man is rich," Thoreau wrote, "in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."
* * *
Once, late on a summer night in 1988, Mansueto felt a sharp pain in his chest and thought he was having a heart attack. Later it was diagnosed as pericarditis -- an inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the heart. It was a onetime occurrence and, in Mansueto's case, not serious. He doesn't run marathons anymore, but he still works out daily. The only reason the episode bears mentioning is that it occurred on the day Mansueto asked a woman to marry him. Of course, as Mansueto is quick to point out, "correlation is not necessarily causation. We make that point in our fund analyses all the time." And probably he deserves the benefit of the doubt -- doctors know of no connection between pericarditis and stress. But the illness did help him change his mind. Mansueto continues to see the woman, but six years later he's still single.
Today Mansueto lives the kind of life that other people his age -- who may have families with small children, and lives that pull them in several directions at once -- cannot fathom. Home is a rented one-bedroom apartment in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, four blocks from the one-bedroom apartment where, working alone during the summer of 1984, he researched and wrote the first issue of his first publication, Mutual Fund Sourcebook. He sleeps on a futon. In the center of the living room is a large Japanese table, maybe a foot off the ground. On another, smaller table -- also knee height -- is a computer. There are no chairs, only black pillows scattered on the floor. There are books, of course, and a stereo; the television is in the bedroom. Otherwise, there's not much. "It's amazing," says Joe Sutton, Morningstar's chief financial officer, about Mansueto's apartment. "There are very few things on top of other things."
"I think that may be in response to the chaos he grew up in," says his mother, Sara, unapologetically. Sara was pregnant so often in the early years of her marriage that she had to give up her nursing career. But, she says, "I wouldn't want to give the impression that I didn't pursue my own development." She set up soup kitchens in Gary, Ind., and Calumet City, worked with alcoholics, and earned two more undergraduate degrees, in history and business. She didn't always have a whole lot of time left over to clean house. "He always tried to find order on his own," she recalls. "He was very particular about his room. He kept everything straight, whereas I'm pretty sloppy. I think that kind of bothered him. In fact, he used to take me to task about my housekeeping."
Mansueto gets up every morning at 5:30 and goes for a run. On the days he doesn't play tennis at Chicago's East Bank Club ("He's a keep-the-ball-in-play, patient guy," says MMF editor John Rekenthaler. "Doesn't go for the kill at all"), he arrives at the office, by taxi, at around 7:30, and devotes an hour to reading the newspapers. Every night, after a 12-hour day, he walks home, a straight shot three miles up La Salle Street or, when he's in the mood, a longer, prettier stroll up Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive, past the high-rise luxury apartments, and through the park. His normal bedtime is 9:30 p.m.
His social life is . . . predictable. Lunch with his father in town most Wednesdays, Sunday dinner in Munster with his parents, regular (though not as frequent as they used to be) dinners with Hanson and two other college friends (the Bainbridge Club, they call themselves). His former fiancée lives in North Carolina now, but the two still see each other; recently they went to France with Mansueto's parents. "I think Joe's happy," says his mom, "but I think he'd be happier if he got married, I really do. It's good to be close to your family, but we're not always going to be here. I'd like Joe to get married and have children and live a normal life."
