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Life Is Rewarding for Georgia ALS Patient
Who Learned the Ins and Outs of Investing
by Gary Wosk, ALSA Staff Writer
Some people might be tempted to hit Las Vegas and risk it all on the roulette wheel or a slot machine if told they had a serious disease. “What is there to lose,” they might reason. Not 67-year-old Jack Hurst, who has lived with ALS for 17 years and is currently in stable condition.
“Bud,” as his neurologist calls him, has decided to follow the road to a more independent life, a path of discovery that led to a greater appreciation for his wife, a sense of perseverance, a healthy dose of stubbornness and confidence in his caregivers.
Hurst and his wife, Anna, are charter members of ALSA’s Georgia Chapter, founded in 1988. The Hursts have been not been as active lately because Jack Hurst is more or less home bound. Chapter Executive Director Susan Constantine met him last year at a Chapter picnic, the first time he had been on an outing in several years.
“He told me had a very wonderful time. He met many people with ALS,” remembered Constantine. “He’s very confident when using his augmentative communications device. He is very inspiring in his acceptance of the disease and his ability to still find happiness. He is a role model for all those who know him and all people with ALS.”
Hurst avoided the allure of the city that never sleeps − after all, he had planned to continue his climb up the ladder of the American dream, or over the last few years, he has considered becoming a preacher like his grandfather and great grandfather − to concentrate on something much more important: investing in his and his family’s future, something he began doing in 1973 while serving in the Army by purchasing stock in Mattel Toys and Clorox.
Despite his paralysis and inability to speak, the former avid jogger, who was diagnosed with ALS in 1987, has turned a negative into a positive, amassing a nice little nest egg by investing in stocks and mutual funds. The financial good fortune helps to offset the cost of the monthly medical bill. However, he will tell you that the biggest dividends in his life are his wife, his faith in God, friends and neighbors.
Referred to as “The Colonel” by a neighbor because of the commander in chief way he goes about contemplating his next move, Hurst monitors the wheeling and dealing on Wall Street from a recliner in his Marietta, Georgia home and makes his moves through an electrode connected to his right cheek. The device, which Atlanta-based company Neural Signals designed for him, converts the electrical activity in his facial muscles into signals that are transmitted to a laptop computer.
Beginning in the late morning and lasting until the evening, Hurst, while connected to a ventilator and feeding tubes, manages his small fortune by watching CNBC during trading hours, a passion that is preceded by receiving intensive physical and pulmonary therapy in the early morning hours.
Hurst is the first to admit that he is no Alan Greenspan; that he has a slight advantage as a money manager versus the average person who has a 9 to 5 job. “I am not necessarily a better investor than before having ALS; it’s simply that I can devote more time to it.”
Between transactions, which are few since he is a “fairly conservative” strategist, Hurst, a retired Army communications officer who worked as a sales agent for General Electric for seven years before the ALS diagnosis, also finds the time to update his Jack’s Place website. In “Jack’s Opinion” he describes how he is doing and makes other observations. There also are family photos and a page where the general public can make a donation to fight ALS.
“Sunday morning during my church service, I heard an interesting thought which I’d heard before but thought it worth passing on,” wrote Hurst in “Jack’s Opinion.” “The preacher said if you have negative people in your life, get them out of your life. Sometimes that’s very difficult to do especially if they’re friends or relatives. The point being, negative people bring you down with their generally blaming others for their situation, never themselves. Enough said. If you’re an optimist you understand.”
If the action between Wall Street and the website becomes too hot and heavy, there’s always the fantastic view Hurst enjoys: hummingbirds hovering at the feeder outside and the pinewoods. And there’s also the family’s calico cat Samantha to curl up next to.
The value of his diverse and solid portfolio of 27 stocks and eight mutual funds increased by 10 percent to more than $300,000 last year and includes some of the biggest names on Dow Jones − Coca-Cola, Home Depot and McDonald’s to mention a few. However, the real Blue Chips in his portfolio of life, he said, are tenacity, strength and courage, and one other important virtue. “Patience is perhaps the most difficult because pre-ALS, I considered myself a doer, not a procrastinator.”
In a story published last winter in Money Magazine about Hurst, writer Jason Zweig wrote that the Ochlocknee, Georgia-born Hurst embodied the most important virtues of an investor as ascribed by great financial analyst Benjamin Graham: ”…patience, prudence, independence, and discipline.”
“I have known plenty of money managers who analyze stocks better or have flashier records than Hurst,” said Zweigh. “But I have met almost none who better embodies the traits Graham had in mind. Jack Hurst doesn’t just have the virtues of a great investor. More than almost anyone else I’ve ever met, he personifies them.”
His most dependent Blue Chipper is Anna Hurst, who, except for two stays of her own in the hospital for breast cancer, has never been away from Hurst and has come to his rescue on many of an occasion, including in lightning bolt speed reconnecting him to a ventilator that a nurse accidentally unplugged and administering the Heimlich maneuver time and again.
“I certainly credit Anna and God with my longevity,” said Hurst. “Without Anna’s loving care, I would have been dead years ago.”
“According to our friends and all those strangers who responded to the Money Magazine article, Jack is an inspiration to everyone who knows him or knows of him,” said Anna Hurst. “He is thoughtful, caring and mindful of the needs of others. His attitude and the frequent smile on his face make it easy for me to take care of him. I feel blessed to share my life with him.”
There is much more to Hurst than dollars and a lot of sense. There’s his close knit circle of family of friends and interests that help fill out his day.
“I just finished reading the King James Version of the Bible last year and have done a lot of research on other religions,” he said. “Since finishing the Bible, I’ve been involved in genealogy. I am very concerned with the direction of our country and write many letters to my representatives in Washington.”
Hurst has some advice for people with ALS interested in following in his footsteps.
“They should only invest in stocks if they can afford to lose their money,” he offered. “If people with ALS had time and some spare cash, I think it would be great to have an online investment club and an excellent way for them to get to know each other.”
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