In the Chicago probate court proceedings that declared Steve Fossett legally dead last February, it was revealed that his estate was “vast, surpassing eight figures in liquid assets, various entities and real estate.”
As a celebrity adventurer, Fossett belonged to the world. But he made the money that underwrote his fabulous adventures in Chicago.
A successful options trader beginning in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, he proved to be an expert bull market trader, colleagues and friends said in profiles and news articles about his exploits over the years.
But although Fossett’s accomplishments seemed to be everywhere — some tastes even found him overexposed — he kept his private life well insulated from his public persona as a tireless adventurer.
In 2002, Fossett’s friends told the Tribune that Chicago always felt like home to him. It is where he owned a condo with his wife, Peggy, at Water Tower Place. But he also had homes in Beaver Creek, Colo., where friends say he spent most of his time, and in Carmel, Calif., closer to where he grew up.
And his life’s work had no address.
Fossett was born April 22, 1944, in Jackson, Tenn., and his family moved to Garden Grove, Calif., when he was a boy. According to his autobiography “Chasing the Wind” and earlier profiles, he climbed Mt. San Jacinto when he was 12 and earned his Eagle Scout badge when he was 13.
It wasn’t enough for him, said Joseph Ritchie, a friend of Fossett’s all of his adult life in Chicago. When Fossett graduated from Garden Grove High School in 1962, he spent that summer hiking California’s John Muir Trail. Sometime in his teens, he decided adventuring was a way to make people remember who he was.
After getting a bachelor’s degree from Stanford and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, Fossett struggled through his early career.
He programmed computers at IBM. He consulted for Drexel Burnham & Co. in Detroit, where he was fired. He came to Chicago, worked briefly at Marshall Field’s, hired Ritchie, then quit.
While driving a Yellow cab here, he looked into more lucrative pursuits. The city’s financial markets caught his eye.
From then on, he was a self-made man, rising and falling with the commodities markets. He joined Merrill Lynch in 1973 and earned acclaim selling commodities. Grinding through trades at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, he made his first million dollars at 33. It was 1977. He lost all of it in 1979 when the market tanked. Ritchie said Fossett would cheerfully stake out huge positions that terrified other investors.
With the can-do resolve that characterized his reaction to failed adventures, he started his own trading firm in 1980, Lakota Trading. He later founded Marathon Securities, where he built a reputation as a prince of the bull markets. He bought 30 seats on the CBOE and founded Larkspur Securities.
A handful of friends knew Fossett built his fortune so carefully over 30 years solely to pay for his ambitions for human achievement. Still fewer heard him explain he chased those records to erase a seemingly meaningless flaw from his high school years. When Ritchie asked what drove him to the edge of endurance, the answer surprised him.
“He said, ‘When I was in high school, I never lettered in a sport,'” Ritchie said. “And I could tell by the way he said it that he really wanted to, but he never cut it. He was saying this as kind of his own personal explanation.”
Where athleticism failed him, Fossett got into record books through endurance, willpower and a fat checkbook. He was willing to “tough it out,” Ritchie said. He could bankroll his own schemes.
“It almost sounded like he needed it, that there was that gap that was left,” Ritchie said.
The yearning was never gone. When one challenge fell, another always loomed.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Fossett swam the English Channel, raced in the Iditarod dog sled race, and climbed famous peaks.
He was named to the National Aviation Hall of Fame in July 2007 for more than 100 record attempts in high-flying balloons, gliders, jets and boats. They either succeeded or failed spectacularly, but a resolved Fossett would emerge unhurt, still wealthy and ready to try again. He hung around with fellow billionaire adventurer Sir Richard Branson as well as the merely very rich, including hotelier Barron Hilton.
Intensely private, he socialized only with longtime friends. Even after breaking records, he would shy away from presentations because he was loath to talk about himself, friends said.
On Sept. 3, 2007, Fossett was staying at Hilton’s Nevada ranch when he took off about 8:45 a.m. in a borrowed Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon, a single-engine plane. He said he was looking for a big dry lake bed on which he could chase a land speed record.
He didn’t return.
Wild speculation began on the Internet almost as soon as Fossett was reported missing, including whether he was shot down for flying too near to Area 51. One message-board poster wondered whether Fossett possessed “technical” knowledge considered too advanced, making him a target. By July, conspiracy theorists asked whether Fossett faked his own death.
His wife, Peggy, petitioned for him to be declared legally dead in November 2007. Cook County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Malak obliged on Feb. 16.
On Monday, a hiker in the rugged California Sierra Nevadas found the aviator’s dog-eared pilot’s license and more than $1,000 in tattered $100 bills. Wednesday, a helicopter pilot called to the items’ coordinates spotted scattered wreckage on a craggy mountainside 200 feet below.
It had been missed in 19 previous searches.
Late that night, investigators hiked up the mountain and confirmed the debris were those of the Super Decathlon that Fossett had been piloting, and that it had crashed at high speed into the mountainside.
On Thursday, they found signs of human remains.
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jjanega@tribune.com
