I never met James Sorenson. We didn't run in the same business circles. Banks called him to see if they could buy him lunch. Banks call me to tell me I can't buy lunch.
Sorenson, who died this week at the age of 86, was Utah's richest man. His fortune was estimated by Forbes at $4.5 billion. That made him the 177th wealthiest person in the world and the 68th wealthiest person in America, ahead of such famous rich people as Ross Perot ($4.4 billion), Steve Wynn ($3.9), Donald Trump ($3.0), Mark Cuban ($2.6), Oprah Winfrey ($2.5), William Randolph Hearst III ($2.4), Richard Marriott ($2.1) and the second wealthiest Utahn, Jon Huntsman ($1.9).
Sorenson had so much money he could have made instant millionaires of the entire population of Garfield County (pop. 4,703), or pretty much the entire city of Moab (pop. 4,807). He could have stood on a street corner and passed out $1,000 to every man, woman and child in Utah and still had $2 billion left over.
He could have turned us all into spoiled brats.
What makes the story all the more remarkable are two details: One is that 86 years ago he started out with the same thing the little boy shot at — nothing. The other is that he amassed his fortune helping the world, not ripping it off.
He would have been 8 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression that moved his family from Rexburg, Idaho, to California for a fresh start. He was handed nothing as a boy and nothing as a man. No trust fund. No inheritance. Everything he made, he made from scratch. His medical inventions and innovations that are commonplace in hospitals around the world came out of that necessity.
The closest I came to meeting him was three years ago following the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people. One of the Sorenson companies, Sorenson Genomics, was contacted by an American-Asian businessman named Dave Rockwood about using its cutting-edge DNA technology to identify victims lying in makeshift morgues all over Thailand.
Rockwood, who had served an LDS mission to Thailand before becoming a businessman there, asked James Sorenson if he could get his help at cost.
"He said, 'Sure, let's go do it,"' recalled Rockwood this week. "Then, after I'd say about a week into the project and he saw everything that was going on, he said he wasn't going to charge anything at all. 'Dave don't worry about it,' he said, 'we want to do this; it's part of what we do."'
The Sorenson lab ended up running DNA on more than 1,200 bodies at an average cost of about $1,200 each. The total bill was at least $1.5 million.
"It was pure charity," said Rockwood, who also points out the charitable nonprofit nature of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogical Foundation that is in the process of collecting DNA data from around the world that will help with both disease detection and prevention, and genealogical identity.
"The foundation got going about the same time as the tsunami," said Rockwood, "and everybody wanted to know what the angle was for Sorenson, and there was no angle. He just wanted to find as many DNAs as he could so he could help people and get down to that commonness that we all have. He liked to say that when people find out they're related, they tend not to be so ornery with each other."
"It's interesting," said Rockwood. "Despite the wealth and power he had accumulated, he just seemed like one of grandpa's old buddies. He never seemed like a rich guy. The guy had no attitude, no malice. He didn't drive outlandish cars. He had a nice comfortable home in Salt Lake, but 90 percent of the homes in Park City are nicer.
"He had a way of making complicated things simple. He was just a good guy. To think he was worth over $4 billion, it's something I can't fathom."
And a fine legacy for a man who could have turned all of Moab into millionaires.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.