Front & Center: Investor and adviser proves benefit to many

The first stock Bill Fix ever bought was Washington Water Power.

“It was an initial public offering,” he recalls. “My father asked me how many shares I could handle, and I said, ‘Make it 25.’”

Fix was all of 15 years old at the time, and paid his stockbroker father with money earned mowing lawns and making Christmas wreaths.

Today – 76 years later – Fix still owns stock in the Spokane-based utility (which rebranded itself Avista in 1999).

The stock has done well, and so have Fix’s investment clients, including Whitworth University, St. John’s Cathedral and Fairmount Memorial Association.

And together with his late wife, Harriet, Fix has given away millions of dollars through the couple’s Johnston-Fix Foundation.

Once an enthusiastic mountaineer – his rope mates included the celebrated climber and author Fred Beckey – these days Fix is content exploring the lives of past U.S. presidents, seeking perspective on the current White House occupant.

During a recent interview, Fix discussed famous men, his favorite stock and frugality.

S-R: Where did you grow up?

Fix: In southeast Seattle – the Mount Baker neighborhood. I attended Lakeside School.

S-R: What were your interests?

Fix: Sports – track and field, and cross-country.

S-R: Did you have a favorite class?

Fix: English – particularly my junior year, because the teacher covered multiple areas, including one of the four Gospels, “The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens,” “The Mind in the Making” and a book of our choice. I chose “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (James Agee’s essays about Southern sharecroppers).

S-R: What was your first real job?

Fix: Working for the Seattle Parks Department. I was in charge of a playground. I was 17.

S-R: Where did you go to college?

Fix: I’d won an academic scholarship to Yale. But I enlisted on D-Day (June 6, 1944) and enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 College Training Program at the University of Washington. We met every morning for calisthenics and wore our uniforms to class. During the next two years, I took three years’ worth of civil engineering. When we were discharged in June of ’46, I went back east to New Haven and finished my degree at Yale.

S-R: What was your focus?

Fix: Industrial engineering. But I also took investment classes.

S-R: Any noteworthy classmates?

Fix: One guy who was well known was Bill Buckley (who founded National Review magazine in 1955). He was head of the conservative party at the meetings we had, and I was on the liberal side. Another classmate was George Herbert Walker Bush. He was captain of the baseball team, and I was head of the Yale mountaineering club, but we didn’t have much contact.

S-R: What did you do after graduation?

Fix: For a few weeks I sold encyclopedias door to door. My first full-time job was selling windows for a company in Ballard.

S-R: When did you and Harriet meet?

Fix: During Christmas vacation our senior year. She’d grown up in Spokane and was attending Smith College, where she got a degree in economics. My family had gathered here for the holiday because the Fix family has five generations here. Harriet and I were married in 1950.

S-R: Then what?

Fix: I was drafted later that year because I hadn’t had active duty. I was stationed at Fort Ord, near Monterey, California, teaching soldiers how to defend themselves against chemical, biological and radiological warfare. After my discharge in ’52, Harriet and I came back to Spokane, and I went to work for Columbia Electric, her father’s lighting company. I was there 20 years.

S-R: Was there a moment that changed the direction of your life?

Fix: Yes. When I was 44, I took a Dale Carnegie class and won the prize for having a promising future by changing jobs. That’s when I chose to take a broker’s license. But I only had to keep it for two years, because I worked with institutions and had other brokers execute the sales.

S-R: Had you been personally investing during your 20 years at Columbia Lighting?

Fix: No, not much. My first serious investing came when I served on a committee of the Whitworth Foundation and got their permission to do all the stock picking for them. The same with Fairmount Cemetery. I started out as a member of the association’s board and gradually took over managing their endowment. I stayed with that for 33 years, and during that time grew the endowment from $2 million to $32 million.

S-R: When you were starting out, how did you attract clients?

Fix: By offering good advice, and working cheap. (laugh)

S-R: How were you compensated?

Fix: My custodial fee was small – just two-tenths of 1 percent, which on $2 million is only $4,000. But once an endowment got up to $10 million or more, I started making a good living. And they did very well.

S-R: For instance?

Fix: When I took over St. John’s endowment, they had $1 million. Two decades later, I turned that over to a bank at $12 million. I helped grow the Whitworth Foundation endowment from $900,000 to $10 million.

S-R: Along with your successes, did you have setbacks?

Fix: Sure. The worst happened in October of ’87 – “Black Monday” – when the market dropped 500 points in one day. A group at Whitworth said, “Sell everything,” but I said, “No, stay with it.” By 1989, we were ahead of where we were in ’87, and they said, “We won’t second-guess you anymore.”

S-R: What lesson did you draw from others’ panic selling?

Fix: In general, if you buy highly rated, dividend-paying stocks, you don’t get hurt as bad when the market drops. For instance, when oil went from $100 a barrel to below $50 a barrel, I didn’t sell anything. We suffered somewhat, but the stocks we own – Chevron, ExxonMobil and Conoco – are leaders, so they only went down maybe 20 percent when oil dropped 50 percent.

S-R: Do you have a favorite stock right now?

Fix: Amazon is great, but I don’t have it yet.

S-R: Did anything you learned in your other jobs – whether the military, door-to-door sales or the lighting industry – transfer to this career?

Fix: Those other careers helped me communicate better. In the Army, I taught classes of 200 recruits in a big room with no mic, so I had to develop a good-carrying voice.

S-R: So much of today’s financial activity is driven by technology. Did you embrace tech early on?

Fix: I didn’t make much use of it. I didn’t use the Wall Street Journal, either. I preferred Barron’s, a weekly publication. Someone joked that I could make all my financial decisions on the back of an envelope. It also helped that I ended up owning the top three or four stocks in ETF’s (exchange-traded funds), so as the funds grew, they bought more of my stocks, driving up the price.

S-R: When choosing among stocks, what do you consider?

Fix: I look for consistency – stocks that perform well in good times and don’t get beat up too badly when the market drops. I also look for consistent dividends. If I like their products, that’s a plus. That’s why I bought Apple back in 1990, against the advice of my friend Joel Ream, the longtime business editor of The Spokesman-Review.

S-R: Over the years, your Johnston-Fix Foundation has distributed millions of dollars locally and beyond. What got you involved with philanthropy?

Fix: Soon after leaving Columbia Lighting in 1974, I got interested in the Salk Institute, and joined an advisory group that included the prince of Liechtenstein, the head of Volkswagen and other people from around the world. Through that, I started attending classes on philanthropy and continued to do that for 15 years.

S-R: Where have you steered most of your donations?

Fix: Three local private colleges – Gonzaga, Whitworth and Whitman – Smith College in Massachusetts, where Harriet graduated, and Yale, where I graduated. Also Lakeside School in Seattle. In the last seven years alone, we’ve given $2.5 million to our foundation recipients.

S-R: What’s your secret for successful investing?

Fix: I love numbers, I do a lot of reading, and I’m not easily discouraged.

S-R: What has your career taught you about yourself?

Fix: That I have a lot of patience.

S-R: What have you learned lately?

Fix: I’m studying the history of U.S. presidents through their biographers and their autobiographies. I’m up to about 20, and it’s very instructive.

S-R: How would you assess the current administration as it relates to the market?

Fix: Under Trump, the market has done fine. But if he’s impeached, or feels he’s had enough and quits, I think the market will take a pretty deep dip. It’s too high.

S-R: If someone with $100,000 asked you for investment advice today, what would you suggest?

Fix: Put half of it in the market, and keep the other half out, because inevitably there’s going to be a drop.

S-R: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

Fix: I would have traveled more. The reason I didn’t was because I wanted to watch my clients’ investments.

S-R: A recent survey found that 28 percent of Americans over 55 have no retirement savings, while another 26 percent have less than $50,000. What advice would you offer someone who hasn’t set enough aside for retirement?

Fix: Be very conservative. Don’t buy things that only increase your enjoyment in the short term, like a boat or a bigger TV. Discover the rewards of living frugally.

S-R: Do you consider yourself frugal?

Fix: Yes. In fact, a lot of my friends would call me cheap.

Writer Michael Guilfoil can be contacted at mguilfoil@comcast.net.