Bill Crosby credits General Electric Co. with powering his family into the middle class starting with his grandmother, Vera Baskin. 

Baskin was born in 1888 on a farm in Mississippi, where she grew up with seven brothers. She lived through the Great Depression, moved to Atlanta and worked as a bank teller her whole life. She learned the value of buying stocks, particularly stocks in big, stable American blue-chip companies. So she loaded up on General Electric – symbol GE – amassing nearly $500,000 worth of shares and making it a third of her portfolio. It functioned beautifully as a consistent growth stock (it grew to more than $2 million for Crosby’s family) and one that paid a healthy dividend each quarter. 

In a country where Americans always appear to be on the go, some question whether they have the time left to invest in the traditional dining experience at a brick-and-mortar restaurant. That’s the nearly $3 billion dollar question facing the food service industry and, on this sunny August day just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, James Meeks was preparing a pitch for one his company’s $65,000 food trucks.

The 39-year-old Meeks is the CEO of MOVE Systems LLC, a start-up business looking to revolutionize the food industry with environmentally-friendly food trucks equipped with solar panels. 

In his office, there were one-page sheets stacked on a table. Meeks pulled them out and reviewed each one – all a different concept for a food truck business. The sheets showed a smorgasbord of food trucks including offerings for avocado toast, pasta, tacos, pizza, espresso, hamburger and hot dogs. And brand names such as Dunkin Donuts.

And what is Meeks’ response to the brick-and-mortar restaurants that claim food trucks are robbing them of customers? Start your own. His vision is to have food trucks tethered to a brick-and-mortar restaurants as street-side extensions. He calls it creating a mini-business or “mobile cafes” that are an expansion of...

The protesters were mostly high school and university students. They carried black balloons, dozens of them – one for each teenaged orphaned girl who died while in police custody in a March 2017 schoolroom fire. Walking in solidarity with the hundreds of other protesters down Guatemala City’s 6A Calle was a small group of Serbian Orthodox Christian nuns. The abbess of the monastery, Madre Inés, told me that she and the nuns of Holy Trinity Orthodox Monastery in Villa Nueva, Guatemala came to the crowded Constitution Square in front of Palacio Nacional de la Cultura to demand those in the Guatemalan government responsible for the girls’ death actually be held responsible. 

Advocating for the well-being of Guatemala’s orphans comes naturally to the nuns. For many years they operated the Hogar Rafael Ayau.  Named in honor of Madre Inés’s great, great grandfather Don Rafael Ayau, who in the 1850’s founded the first orphanage in Guatemala City ("The Home of Mercy"), the Hogar Rafael Ayau is less than a 30-minute drive away from the peace and quiet of the nuns’ rural monastery. But the Hogar is located in the noise of Guatemala City’s crime-infested Zone 1. Changes in Guatemalan law led to the...

A little over thirty years ago, a group of southern women dedicated to preserving the memories of their small Louisiana town of St. Francisville formed an organization called The Julius Freyhan Foundation, named after a Jewish immigrant who had helped build the town’s first public school.

Julius Freyhan migrated to St. Francisville in the mid-1800s to find freedom from religious persecution in Germany. He quickly rose to success as a businessman and opened the main dry goods store in the area, Freyhan and Company, selling everything from horse-drawn buggies to pinewood coffins.  Both southeast Louisiana and southwest Mississippi owed thanks to Freyhan for supplies. In a post-Civil War society, Freyhan helped keep southern farmers financially afloat, and as Freyhan succeeded, he poured money back into his community, helping to fund the Julius Freyhan High School and a local Synagogue, Temple Sinai.  

A beautiful three-story building, the Freyhan School now stands in disrepair, overlooking the Mississippi River. Yellowed wainscoting, rusty, patterned tin ceilings and an overgrown football field are now the only testaments to a once vibrant school and its generous namesake. The Julius Freyhan Foundation, however, is working to change that through unlikely means -- the memory...

OMAHA – Wandering exhibit halls at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Linda Bi fixed her gaze on a row of red Tony Lama cowboy boots. She tried on three pair before buying a $130 set of knee-high boots.

Bi, president of Chicago Expert Importers, took over her family’s auto parts import business when her husband died of a stroke in 2000. She says she has since grown revenues from $6 million to $35 million per year, importing parts made of steel and aluminum from China, and selling them to U.S. auto suppliers. “Mostly, we grew our business through a good reputation with clients,” she said.

She acknowledges the tariffs President Trump has proposed directly affect her products. “It makes me nervous,” she said, posing next to a cardboard cutout of Warren Buffett at the Precision Castparts booth during the lunch break of the Saturday Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. She came to Omaha to get away from politics, to hear from “big, deep thinkers,” she said. Bi and thousands of other Chinese visitors are increasingly showing up at the Berkshire annual meeting, which is sometimes called the “Woodstock of Capitalism” or the “Church of Warren Buffett.”