February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Still, the view of New York Harbor is magnificent and the optical instrument more than adequate to pick out some of the finer details of, well, New Jersey.
Right now, however, it’s pointing straight at Ellis Island, a most appropriate place given that Kelleher, grand marshal of this year’s New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, is an immigrant.
Kelleher’s life story has been the American dream writ large. He can’t be president because he wasn’t born here. But he can be a Wall Street chief executive, and he can be grand marshal of the nation’s largest celebration of Irish American heritage.
And that will do just fine for a man who says that you should never be afraid to dream big, and then reach out boldly to realize your dream.
“Being grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City really does stand for something very significant, especially when you think in terms of over 40 million Irish Americans,” Kelleher said in an interview as the days counted down to March 17.
Two days before the parade, on the Ides of March, Kelleher will celebrate his 66th birthday. It’s no surprise then that Kelleher, a lover of poetry and literature, reached for Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” when eulogizing recently deceased parade executive secretary Jim Barker.
Like Caesar, Kelleher is readying himself to lead legions on a march.
“Serendipity,” Kelleher said, reaching for a single word to sum up his life thus far, and the most singular honor lately bestowed upon him.
“You can dream, but you have to dream big, work hard and learn constantly. But this is beyond even my wildest dreams,” Kelleher said of his parade-leading assignment.
Kelleher’s company, Wall Street Access, is the practical edge to the life of a man who is a husband, father, grandfather, and keen golfer when he gets the time.
He founded what describes itself as a “diversified financial services company” in 1980 and he remains its chief executive officer. He has no plans for his own retirement even as his companies prepares clients for it.
Wall Street Access conducts research for clients and manages large private portfolios and 401Ks. In the rough and tumble of the financial world it has notched up a quarter of a century of steady and expanding business.
A good proportion of that business focuses on pharmaceutical stocks.
“We would have a list of about 20,000 doctors who might be working with particular drugs,” Kelleher said. “A client might ask who’s testing out a certain drug. We’ll check out the key doctors around the country and put them in touch with the client.”
Kelleher’s success story is classic immigrant-makes-good tale, right down to its start in the tiny Kerry village with a name that even some Irish have a hard time pronouncing, Gneeveguilla.
But in the local national school, and later in St. Brendan’s secondary school in Killarney, Kelleher hungrily absorbed knowledge and developed a thirst for learning that lasts to this day.
“I had a mathematics teacher in St. Brendan’s named MacCurtain. He brought great enthusiasm to the class and he loved to talk to us about stocks and bonds, yields and compound interest.
“He would talk about Wall Street and I was fascinated. And here I am,” he said.
The talk of a world light years from Killarney fired the imagination of the young Kelleher who in later years would find new mentors in his adopted land, not least Warren Buffett.
“I was a dreamer yes, but also an ideas person. I believe in getting the best people and leaving them to do the best they can do,” said the U.S. army veteran, graduate of St. John’s University, and member of the U.S.-based economic advisory board to the Irish government.
“I have people working here who are 10 times smarter than me; my kids are smarter than me. I believe in leaving the ego to someone else,” Kelleher said.
Ego is one thing, the embrace of learning is quite something else.
“You never stop learning, you can learn new things every day of your life,” said Kelleher, who reads newspapers and magazines by the dozen and imparts lines of poetry like employees of Wall Street Access might offer a stock quote.
Denis Kelleher has no doubt that he has been a fortunate man. His move to the U.S., however, was tinged with sadness. He was just 18 and his father had died not long before. The young man with the big dreams boarded a plane for New York.
It landed along the way at Gander in Newfoundland. The next time Kelleher would set foot on that Canadian isle would be Sept. 11, 2001.
He had been at a wedding in Europe and was late in getting back. As a result a meeting he was supposed to attend that day in Seven World Trade Center was postponed.
“It was a day that changed the world,” Kelleher said. His own family, as so many did, lost friends in the World Trade Center.
Now, just three and a half years on, Kelleher is preparing to lead a parade dedicated to a United States at war, and which will be without the greater part of its traditional marching spearhead, the 69th Infantry Regiment, now serving in Iraq.
“The parade is dedicated to the United States and, of course, the immigrants who made it what it is,” Kelleher said.
“The mission of my alma mater, St. John’s, has been to aid immigrants and the poor. It would be a shame if we kept immigrants out of our country.
“There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. I continually ask myself how can I play a part in helping to educate people. If we don’t educate our people, we’re going to have a big problem.”