A Life Redeemed
Phoenix financier and multi-millionaire Morris Callaman chooses his words with evident care. Even his name, a subtle reconstruction of Callahan, the name of his adopted family, was done with great deliberation, requiring that only one letter be replaced, to create an entirely new legal identity. You might attribute such thoughtfulness about language to education—Callaman holds degrees in engineering, business and law. But there is a level of caution as well that points to earlier, tougher times in which saying the wrong thing could lead to dire consequences.
Callaman has a story to tell. Born in 1969, he relates that he was essentially abandoned by his parents as an infant. He believes his father, an engineer with Honeywell and Motorola, and his mother, both suffered from mental illness. When they split, he was given up for adoption. He apparently was slow to develop motor function and was thought to be mentally retarded. (Years later, while in law school, IQ testing placed him in the “ultra genius” category.)
Callaman was passed around between relatives, friends and foster care, attending 13
elementary schools in a dozen states. He was physically and sexually abused. While in 8th grade, he learned the whereabouts of his biological father and made arrangements to move in with him. As difficult and neglectful as Callaman’s life had been in foster care, this choice proved to be disastrous.
The high hopes for a family reunion and a sense of home soured into intense disappointment when his father and new family proved to be as unloving and disinterested as the others. In despair, he says he tried to kill himself by swallowing 20 Quaaludes, bought on the street as “black beauties”. Turned out they were not the real thing or they would have killed him. Instead, he woke 20 hours later with the suicide note he’d written still lying on his chest where he’d left it. No one had noticed.
Shortly thereafter, Morris snuck out a bedroom window and never returned. He had just finished eighth grade at Ironwood Junior High School. He slept in Acoma Park and other places. He says he can pick up a street map of Phoenix and recall the various parks, streets and alleys where he lived. This was the landscape of his coming of age.
Eventually, his one brother found him and got him a job picking up trash on the construction site, where the brother was doing masonry work. “I found it much more reliable than stealing,” Callaman says.
When the masonry tradesmen were finished on the job site, they passed Callaman along to the next set of contractors who put him to work. Eventually, he came in contact with a forklift driver named Russ Druckenmiller.
“Russ redeemed my faith in humanity,” Callaman says, “for two years he treated me like a son.”
Not exactly. But Callaman never had a proper point of reference for the comparison. As he tells it, Druckenmiller was a “complete alcoholic”, and while Druckenmiller didn’t take him into his home, he did look out for him. On the construction sites, Callaman got promoted from garbage collector to ditch digger to mortar maker and so on. At age 16, he worked his way up to living in an apartment on 59th Avenue. But the hard labor and the drinking and the dead end world he found himself in was taking its toll.
“I felt like I was 40 years old, like my life was gone,” Callaman recalls. A life that had never had the opportunity to take off had hit bottom.
It was at this point of utter devastation that inspiration came to him. “Something happened that told me it’s not over for me,” he says. “I’m not a religious person but I felt like I was talking to someone that wasn’t me, at least not in a conscious sense, that said it would be ok, and allowed me to hang on a little bit longer.”
Feeling there had to be something more for him, Callaman went to Glendale Community College to register for classes. Told he needed to get a GED certificate since he had not finished high school, he took and passed the exam that same day. So started his journey out of the shadows.
Callaman is short in stature, in the five foot six range, with boyish good looks reminiscent of a character out of a Charles Dickens novel like Oliver Twist. His appearance only adds to the sense of disconnect between his immensely difficult childhood and impressively accomplished adulthood.
Ultimately, it would take Callaman nine years of night classes to earn his degree in engineering from Arizona State University. But he was on his way. He got married and had a son. The birth was a healing moment for him.
“I had never loved another human being,” he says, “when I saw that tuft of hair appear, that’s when I discovered love.”
He gained corporate work experience and eventually joined the consulting business of Ernst & Young in 1999, where he worked on accounts such as Disney, American Express and Chrysler.
“He looked so young,” says Todd Cameron, who worked with Callaman there, and today is a Vice President of Outsourcing for North America at CapGemini, which acquired Earnst & Young, “that when I first met him, he looked like he was fresh out of grad school. But he learned fast and understood what needed to be done.”
Brian Queenin was the global leader for Business Intelligence at Ernst & Young and is now CEO of Xtropian, a business intelligence strategy firm. He remembers Callaman as being “crisp, clear and focused. He get’s it. He knew what I wanted and went and did it. He doesn’t get flustered. The sky could be falling and he would be calculating the speed of descent.”
When asked if, in retrospect, he recognizes anything of the homeless boy in the business professional, Queenin answered: “Probably his drive to achieve, to prove himself. He turned it into a motivational engine that really pushed him forward to be the professional he is.”
Indeed Callaman threw himself into his work and eventually became a principal at Ernst & Young, at the unprecedentedly young age of 33 (He says the firm actually thought he was 35). While working full time at Ernst & Young, he continued his education, earning an MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU in May of 2000.
By that summer, he says the long hours had caught up with him and he arranged to take a nine month sabbatical. For Callaman, time off meant enrolling in law school at ASU.
While in his second year of law school, he returned to Ernst & Young, unbenowst to the law school and against American Bar Association rules, that limit students to 10 hours of work a week. Callaman proceeded to head up the Mitsubishi account, requiring him to commute to law school from Tokyo. He says he came to the first class and the last one each semester and crammed for the tests.
“As a supporter, Morris has become active in the law school, probably more so than when he was there,” says Patricia White with a wry chuckle. She was Dean of the law school at the time, and has since become a friend.
In 2005, Callaman left Ernst & Young to enter private practice. Today he operates what he calls a “micro” venture capital firm, Callaman Ventures. “I use money together with what I’ve learned of and from life, to help others who choose to succeed”, he says.
Callaman was an early investor in LifeLock, the fast growing identity theft protection company. He recently invested $250,000 in the Phoenix based Door and Screen Company of American.
Yet he remains perhaps understandably insecure in his wealth. “I have a Holocaust mentality when it comes to money,” he says, meaning he tends to save against upcoming disaster. He saves 90% of his earnings, has no expensive hobbies, still lives in the Chandler home where his son, now in fifth grade, was born, and drives a Ford Thunderbird with 70,000 miles on it. “I remember being dirty and hungry,” he says, with typical frankness.
While the memories of his struggles remain vivid, Callaman has not allowed them to stop him from prospering and helping others to do the same. He finds himself compelled to help people, often giving them free business advice along the way. He humorously refers to this as “pro bono venture capital.”
Callaman has also been an enthusiastic supporter of Arizona State University, whom he credits with having played a pivotal role in his success story. For his generous giving, he was named a University Sponsor. In addition, Callaman has also been active in helping the poor and homeless through such organizations as the Saint Mary’s / West Side food bank, on whose board of directors he served. “I was the only member who had also been a client,” he says, able to grin about it now, in a testament to the unlikely journey he has made.