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Barrett Fund Stocks Up for the Future
By Mark J. Cadigan
It’s safe to say that during the past 50 years, Jim Barrett '46 has done quite well with his stock investments, first as a single man and later with his wife, Eva.
“We’ve been very, very fortunate, very lucky, and had friends who gave us good advice,” he says.
A case in point is the stock that eventually started the Barrett Fund at Holy Cross: Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock. Barrett originally heard about it from a former classmate from the Harvard Business School, where both received their M.B.A. He bought some shares of the stock for about $110 per share in 1974, he says.
Through the years, he bought more shares of the stock, then priced from $380 to $3,900 per share. “And the rest is history!” says Rev. Francis X. Miller, S.J. ’46, vice-president emeritus and a Holy Cross classmate of Barrett’s.
Since 1986, Barrett has given Holy Cross 66 shares of that Class A stock, which have been placed in the fund that bears his name. Largely because of the efforts of Warren Buffett, whom Barrett calls, “a very astute investor,” and who has diversified Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings via involvement with companies such as American Express, General Re, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and Gillette, a share of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock was trading for $74,000 as of late August. That equates to a market value of $4,884,000 for the Barrett Fund.
One of the unusual aspects of the fund is that it exists at all. Holy Cross currently has a policy of selling stock on the same day that it is given to the school. But in the mid-`80s, when the College’s development effort was led by its then-president, Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., ’49 (now emeritus), and then-vice-president, Fr. Miller, the school agreed to hold onto shares of stock donated by Barrett. It created the Barrett Fund, which grew with subsequent stock deposits from Barrett over the years. The fund has supported the philanthropic and educational improvements that the Barretts have focused on at Holy Cross.
For more about this story, see Holy Cross Magazine.