BERNARD A. GOLDHIRSH, 1940-2003

Bernie Goldhirsh was born on March 1940, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the eldest son of Leonard and Sylvia Goldhirsh. His father recalls that although their circumstances were modest, Bernie never complained about having to share a bedroom with his two brothers, for example, or doing without a weekly allowance. Instead, he earned his own spending money by hustling for jobs.

Bernie was eventually offered a scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he accepted. He had two experiences at MIT that turned out to be life-changing. The first was his introduction to sailing through a community boating program on the Charles River. The second was his introduction to entrepreneurship through a semester spent working with Dr. Edwin Land at Polaroid. "Dr. Land is a hero to me," he later recalled in an interview with Family Business Quarterly. ".I thought, 'This is so fantastic, that one person can do so much in terms of creating a business, creating an enterprise, creating jobs, increasing the tax base.' So much good comes out of this one person and his idea and his willingness to go ahead and start a business."

Following his graduation from MIT in 1961, Bernie did some teaching in Cambridge and knocked around the Caribbean for a while. Subsequently he ran a school for 12 student-sailors on a 98-foot ketch that they sailed to South America. After returning to Boston, he began producing educational booklets on sailing, which-by 1970-had evolved into a magazine called Sail. After Sail came Motor Boat and Marine Business, and Bernie suddenly found himself with a real company to run. As sales grew to $12 million, he was confronted with management issues he'd never thought about before. In vain he scoured the business press for articles that would help him deal with them. Figuring that other entrepreneurs must be searching for the same type of information, he decided to start Inc. magazine. The first issue appeared in April, 1979.

At the time, Inc. seemed like a long shot. Prior to the launch, Bernie had hired a couple of industry veterans as consultants, and they'd assured him there was no market for a publication for growing businesses. Besides, they asked, who would want to advertise to people in small-to-midsize companies? But Bernie's own market research told him otherwise, as did his personal experience, and his instincts were soon vindicated. The launch of Inc. turned out to be one of the most successful in magazine history.

By then, Bernie had a family as well. He'd married Wendy Martz and they'd had two children, Elizabeth and Benjamin. As the children grew, Inc. continued to prosper. In 1995, the Magazine Publishers of America honored him with the industry's highest award, the Henry Johnson Fisher Award for lifetime achievement.

Then came tragedy. First, Wendy was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died in January 1999. Less than a year later, Bernie himself was diagnosed with brain cancer and given between six and eighteen months to live.

Bernie sold Inc., though not without mixed feelings. Out of the proceeds of the sale, he gave $20 million to his employees and put another $50 million into the Goldhirsh Foundation. Meanwhile, he focused his attention on his battle with cancer, which he approached the same way he'd dealt with every other challenge in his life-as an adventure. He learned all he could about the disease and its treatment, even going so far as to watch one of his brain operations on a television monitor as it was being performed. He later said that he thought his positive attitude had helped him beat the odds and survive more than twice as long as anyone had predicted.

In the end, though, he couldn't beat the disease itself. He died on June 29, 2003. His desire throughout his life had been to leave the world a better place than he'd found it. In that, he succeeded brilliantly.