I first met Carl Sherman outside a diner In Old Saybrook, Ct. He was a friendly and likeable character who had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He asked questions concerning my treatment, and at the time, he was considering an autologous transplant. A transplant seemed right for him, after all, it seemed that Sherman has been transplanted many times to many places. His office was his cell phone, and he had always gone far and wide to seek a fortune, and why not do the same when it comes to staying ahead of a deadly disease? He has always been the man on the move. Actually, in an 11-year period he moved 17 times.

Although he was born and raised in Connecticut, he was anxious to find his own path to success in the West. He was a child of the Great Depression, and his father ran an automobile repair and used car shop in Norwich, Ct. The family’s hope was that he would go into his father’s business along with his brothers, but at the time, he had other plans. He lived in a trailer during the early part of his marriage, and he wanted to make money, and a lot of it. He was in a special program that would have led to a law degree at the University of Arizona, but when he was in his early 20s, he dropped out of the program because he saw that “Everything you touched in Arizona during those ‘50s turned to triple-plated gold.” One professor was so upset that he was leaving school, she even called his parents. The professor said that Carl was the best student she ever had. He was bright, and not everybody could unmask that triple-plated gold, but he did through real estate. He said he could throw darts on a map, and no matter where they would land, there was land waiting for development and a fortune to be made.

His friendly personality had to be part of his success. He is always ready for a smile, equipped with a phenomenal number of jokes for every occasion, and more. Whenever I see him, he says, “Hey, Mel did you hear this one.” Most of the jokes could be rated PG-13, but they are always there, even when he goes through those low points with this disease.  I visited him in early 2007 when he was in ICU with a lung infection. He could barely talk, but he was still coming along with his standup-routine. The staff gave him only a 30 percent chance of pulling through this latest battle with myeloma, but even during this crisis, the now 73-year old millionaire kept that old humor and spunk. In a couple of weeks he left the hospital.

Talk about spunk! When he and his ex-wife, Shirley, were to marry, he was just 22. They were both put off by the details and bickering between the families about the marriage plans. So, one day they went to a play in NYC. That night they decided to drive across the George Washington Bridge and find the first temple and rabbi that would quickly marry them. They found their chapel in Raleigh-Durham NC. Following the elopement, they went off to the West, where Carl continued to find gold in those sands. In fact, he even made some money from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas by helping the famous Las Vegas spot purchase adjacent land. It seems that the management had trouble with the original owner of the property that the hotel wanted to turn into a parking lot. But Carl came into the deal, presented himself as a nice young man in his 20s, and he was able to purchase it, and then later flip it to the Sands with a sizeable profit. He even had to deal with Frank Sinatra on this one. According to Sherman, one of the greatest performers of the 20^th century was amazed that this young fellow was able to do all this, and while grateful, was not as generous as Sherman felt was due to him. Sherman said he told Sinatra that he was going to keep the land if he didn’t get his price. He got his price.

Through all of this, Shirley was not the happiest camper. The money was nice, but she wanted to be closer to home. Some of that desire was related to ailing parents, and she didn’t think that the she wanted to bring up her children in the environment where Carl was finding success. The clincher which sent Carl back to Connecticut was when he looked into purchasing a motel on the Strip. He said that it seemed respectable, but when he examined the books something didn’t exactly add up. It was an 80-unit motel, but they listed 740 rentals each week. He wondered, “How could that be true?” Even if each room were rented everyday, there could only be 560 rentals. As Carl inquired, he was told, “Well, this is the Strip, and some of those rooms rent for two or three times each day. You know what we mean.” That was all Shirley had to hear. She said, “I’m not raising my kids there!” They came back home.

Carl kept his interest in real estate, but also went into the automobile dealerships. After being with his father and working in his shop, he had plenty of familiarity with the car business, but he wanted to get into luxury cars. At the time, Cadillac was about the only luxury car on the market. So, he was looking for an opportunity which brought him to Barre, Vt. He bought the dealership, and commuted to Barre from Ledyard, Ct – a full five hour drive on rutted old roads. The new highways were yet to be built. So, he would leave his wife and growing family of two daughters, Joy and Arlene, and make the trip Sunday night, returning Friday night. The weekly trip was too much, and when Shirley looked around Barre, she wasn’t happy with the idea of living there. After just 11 months, Carl sold the dealership, and later, opened up a Volvo dealership in New London. Later he opened another in Milford which eventually Paul Newman, the actor,  purchased from him. Carl explained by then it wasn’t easy to sell dealerships. Numerous stipulations are made on potential buyers, among which that they could need a $10 million line of credit.

His business ventures in Connecticut were very successful. By the time Carl was in his 30s, he had three yachts – one in Connecticut, one near his other home in Florida, and another in the Virgin Islands. They all had crews. He even had a DC-3 airplane. But at the same time, his marriage with Shirley was strained, and that led to a divorce. But it was not just any divorce. It was a Mexican divorce which wasn’t ratified in Connecticut until nearly 30 years later. He thought he was divorced originally in the late 1960s, but then in 1992, he learned that the divorce was never put through the proper steps to be legal in Connecticut. So, he was divorced a second time.

For most of his life, Carl was in good health, but he noticed that in the 1990s, he was losing some of his energy, and his desire to deal with the problems of running his many ventures. He especially had trouble working with his employees. He loved his customers who he said you always could make happy. If they found something wrong with a car, he could always make good on it, and they would walk away with a smile. But according to Sherman, “Dealing with 118 employees at one dealership was getting more difficult all the time. For example, a mechanic comes up to you and asks for a $2 per hour raise and says that he has received that offer down the street. He is a good mechanic, and I don’t want to lose him, so I give him the raise. But then, all the mechanics want the same raise, and suddenly that raise is multiplied over and over, through the entire shop. Then, the original mechanic comes by to say that the place down the street has offered him $3 per hour, and he wants the same from me. I can’t do that, I have to let him go. Meantime, I am stuck giving everyone else their $2 raise!”

After 50 years in the car business, including the years with his father, Sherman decided to sell. His health was beginning to show the normal wear of someone in his 60s, and he had a heart attack in the mid-1990s. Also, his fiancé and companion for over 20 years, Judy, was having her own, but successful battle with lymphoma. Soon, after, in 1999, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Like most of us, he had no idea about this disease. He was growing weaker, but the original blood work didn’t show much indication of disease. Yet, deeper probing showed that he had light chain problems, and a bone marrow biopsy was all that was needed to diagnose his disease. His doctor called him while he was driving home from Milford to Westbrook, his home at that time. The doctor said, “I have good news and some bad news. The good news is that you have multiple myeloma which is treatable, and more and more treatments are becoming available, but the bad news is that the disease is terminal, there is no cure. Still people are living beyond the old average of two to three years.” Carl’s reaction: “Three years? I have customers with car loans out longer than that!” He pulled over to a local library on the way home and did not like what he saw, but he was determined to put his own business plan together to stay alive. “Look, life isn’t a dress rehearsal, it is the real thing.”

He researched which hospitals had the best myeloma treatment, and he traveled far and wide to find the one which he thought would be best for him. Florida, Arkansas, Boston, Connecticut, New York and Minnesota were just a few of the locations he considered. He had his cell phone, and bag ready to travel. He was never content with any particular course of treatment unless it made sense to him and he felt comfortable with the facility. His comfort and care were the top priorities and traveling for him was not an issue. But this was Carl. Someone with an engaging personality who knew how to start from very little, and when barely out of his youth put together enough wealth to have a number of large yachts and his own commercial-sized private airplane. He was going to find the best treatment for himself and live as long as he could.

Part of his treatment took him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he tried to enroll in an experimental vaccine program. But his creatinine level was too high. “It was above two, and they said if I could get in down below two, they would accept me. I was too much of a risk.” He went back to Connecticut, and told our mutual doctor at Yale, Dennis Cooper, that he needed the kidney function to improve so that his creatinine would go below two. Cooper said, “We can do that.” He had a stem cell transplant, and the number did lower to 1.9. Then, he returned to Minnesota with the good news, but even then, they were reluctant to accept him in the trial because of his advancing age. But he applied his people-skills and soon was enrolled.

The procedure involved filtering out the good stem cells, treating them, and reinfusing them back into the body. He traveled to Minnesota for the procedure once each month. It was expensive. The out-of -pocket travel, alone, cost more than $80,000 in the two years that he was part of the trial, and this expense would put restrictions upon most of us, but he had the resources, and certainly the will to stay alive. He would have remained on the program, but it was cancelled after two years. He isn’t sure if the treatment really helped, but during the time, he did have two years of relatively event-free disease which still could have occurred from the original stem cell procedure at Yale.

Since 2004, Carl has had his setbacks, but he always bounces back. He might have sold his last dealership to Paul Newman, but he still is involved with real estate ventures including the development of a tract of land which once contained an open-air theatre that he ran for years. The land has been approved for an 80-unit condominium development. Now that he is back from his latest battle with infection, and the ICU, he is back on his cell phone, trying to work his deals. This person never stops – never stops living, never stops looking for ways to help himself, and never stops looking for a way to smile and share some humor with others, regardless of his own, or their condition. This disease might have picked the wrong guy.