ILLINOIS: The Horsepower

Maurice Goldblatt is a brash, unpolished little man who dedicated himself at an early age to a relentless pursuit of wealth. He made a pile. In the process, he became one of the ranking merchant princes of Chicago’s famed State Street.

But three years ago, at 51, Maurice Goldblatt made the striking discovery that there are things that money won’t buy. The discovery came with the death of his brother Nathan. Nathan was a year younger than Maurice. As boys in Poland, they had slept in the same bed. They had emigrated to the U.S. 40-odd years ago. They sold newspapers together. When they had saved up a few hundred dollars, they opened a small dry-goods store together. They prospered and bought more stores.

Their crowning achievement was buying into State Street in 1936. The newcomers were none too popular with such established State Streeters as Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott. But Goldblatt bargains were attractive, and sales zoomed. Maurice and Nathan kept their profits in one bank account. They drove to work in the same Duesenberg.

When Nathan died, Maurice lost his zest for business. He got to brooding about the thing that had killed his brother —cancer. One day he announced: “From now on, all I want is to see cancer licked.” As soon as the two younger Goldblatt brothers, Joel and Louis, returned from the war, Maurice turned the family’s 15-store, $86-million-a-year business over to them and went out to fight cancer.

Handy Old Weapon. The only weapon he knew how to use was money. After looking over the field, Maurice concluded that his money would do the most good at the University of Chicago. The university was already spending upwards of $500,000 a year on cancer research. The scientists of several departments, including nuclear physicists who helped develop the atom bomb, had worked out a cooperative program to find cancer’s cause & cure.

Maurice Goldblatt went down to the Midway to see what new facilities were needed. At first, he and the scientists found each other mutually forbidding. The fast-talking little (5 ft. 4 in.) merchant used business lingo and bad grammar. (Once, when a woman innocently asked Goldblatt if he spoke French, he replied: “Lady, I don’t even speak English.”) What the scientists said seemed like Greek to Goldblatt, until he told them to “write it down and draw pictures.” Eventually he learned that they wanted a new research hospital (cost: $1,600,000), a cyclotron ($1,550,000), and an isotope laboratory ($2,000,000).

“O.K.,” said Goldblatt, “you’ll get everything. Good scientists can’t do business without good merchandise.” But the total bill was too staggering for Goldblatt to meet by himself. He dug up $1,000,000 in cash from his own and his family’s fortunes. Then he went out to raise more.

In a New World. Into the job went all his former selling zeal, plus a furious new evangelism. “I can’t rest,” he says, “I’m in a new world.”

But he goes back to his old world of business to raise the money. He tells Chicago businessmen: “As sure as God made little green apples, one out of every four men between 40 and 65 will die of cancer this year—and you could be the one.” Usually, this is enough. Goldblatt volubly objects to promises of bequests in wills. “Do I have to hope you die to get this money?” he snaps. “We need it now.” So far, no one has been able to withstand his persistent badgering. “In this work,” he says, “the difference between a success and a failure is the horsepower.”

Goldblatt turned the horsepower on full blast a month ago. By then, the University of Chicago Cancer Research Foundation, of which he is president, had raised $2,580,000. To get the remaining $2,570,000, the foundation launched a community-wide campaign. This week, Maurice Goldblatt reported that another $603,000 was in.

Simultaneously, another and bolder prediction was made by University of Chicago Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins in the American Magazine. With the full application of atomic knowledge to medical research, said Bob Hutchins, the mystery of cancer will probably be dispelled within seven years. This would be none too soon for impatient Maurice Goldblatt. Said he: “It’s too bad it takes a year to put up those buildings.”