Any NON-entertainment, non-lotto rags to riches stories?

[Annie-Xmas]

Bill Clinton had a very poor start in life. If you don’t cnsider authors to be “entertainers” Stephen King started out life about as bad as it gets.

[romansperson]

There’s Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa - he started off as a migrant farm worker and became a brain surgeon.

[Annie-Xmas]

Well, my siblings and I grew up in abject poverty and abuse. But one of my brothers went from being a major drug pusher to corporate lawyer in four years.

[friedo]

Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine. Grew up in crushing poverty (though was never a criminal AFAIK) and became extremely wealthy.

[HeyHomie]

I’m not sure how wealthy he is (how wealthy does one get from a one-off autiobiographical book deal, a development project on basic cable, and selling the rights to your story for a movie deal), but Chef Jeff Henderson grew up in the 'hood, sold crack (and made a fortune), then went to prison. While in prison, he turned his life around and eventually became executive chef at Café Bellagio.

Similarly, Gordon Ramsay has done pretty well, and his early childhood was far from comfortable.

[Missy2U]

Judge Mathis didn’t do too bad either.

[Kalhoun]

@Omega_Glory

Liz Murray?

Liz Murray - Wikipedia

I think that’s it. Thank you! That’s one helluva story.

[Zsofia]

@Rigamarole

Zsofia, that’s great. What sort of work did he do?

He started at Georgia Tech but although he kind of presents himself as a college graduate I’m 99% sure he didn’t finish. Went into the Navy as an engineer’s mate in Korea. Came out and got a job in boiler maintenance and worked his way up the hard way to management in a maintenance company that at the time was quite small and mostly in the South. Instrumental in expanding them nationally, went in with the other vice presidents when the owner sold out, retired as an owner several years ago. The place has gone to hell without him.

[GIGObuster]

This tale almost does not qualify because of the OP’s restriction, but it involves the kitchen industry: One of my favorite tales is the one from George Foreman:

Was born poor and turned from a tug on the streets of Houston to the Heavy weight boxing champion, but that was only his** first** rags to riches history.

After retiring there was a time when his charity was lacking funds and decided to make a boxing comeback that attracted the attention of a producer of kitchen appliances:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/06/09/343949/index.htm

On the strength of his improbable comeback, Foreman got endorsement deals for Meineke, KFC, and Doritos, among others, but he wanted something bigger. His advisors put an idea in his head–why not put the George Foreman name on a product and keep more of the money for himself? Perhaps something connected to his well-known love for hamburgers?

Around the same time, Salton was introducing a product called the Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. It made its debut, sans Foreman, at the housewares industry’s Gourmet Products Show in 1994. (Dreimann, a movie buff, named it after a football team called “the Mean Machine” in the 1974 Burt Reynolds movie The Longest Yard.) Developed and brought to Salton by an Asian manufacturer, the grill was one of about 100 products Salton was offering to retailers that year, reasonably sure that most of them would never make it to shelves but hoping that two or three might become hits. The grill did not appear likely to be one of them. At the show nobody looked at it twice. But unbeknownst to Salton, an industry legend named Mike Srednick was aware of George Foreman’s interest in finding a product to endorse. He saw the grill and, with Dreimann’s blessing, took a sample to show a “mystery customer.” Because the grill had gotten such little notice at the trade show, Dreimann waived all rights to it and put Srednick directly in touch with the manufacturer.

Srednick had connections to Foreman through an attorney named Sam Perlmutter, who had experience in the infomercial industry. Perlmutter got the grill in front of Foreman, but a few months later the champ hadn’t so much as turned it on. Perlmutter nudged him a little. Finally Foreman’s wife cooked a hamburger on it, and she got him to give the grill a try. When Perlmutter checked back, Foreman had an answer: “I like it. I tried it, and it works. Let’s do it.” Perlmutter considered trying to market the grill on his own but quickly realized he was in over his head, so he went back to Salton. Dreimann, the Australian, wasn’t all that familiar with George Foreman, but he thought that having the heavyweight champ of the world behind his product couldn’t hurt.

In a way that initial passivity was another reason the arrangement worked so well. All too often, experts say, a company or its ad agency decides to use a celebrity first, then tries to find one who’ll agree do the ads. Such an approach can lead to bad matches. “The higher up you are in the decision-making process–CEO, president–the more you dictate down who you want, and usually those are the worst choices of all,” says Steven Levitt, president of Marketing Evaluations/TvQ, the company that makes Q Scores, the ratings that determine how recognizable a given athlete or movie star is to different demographics. “Usually it’s someone you played golf with, or someone you shared a dais with, or someone involved in a charity you support. Those choices aren’t consumer-based. They’re not about the connection with a product.”

A better approach–and this sounds self-evident, but FORTUNE 500 companies violate it all the time–is to make sure there’s some obvious connection between your product and the star. Michael Kamins, marketing professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, points to actor John Houseman’s ads for investment bank Smith Barney in the 1980s. Known to the public as professor Kingsfield, a stern Harvard Law School professor, in the film and TV show The Paper Chase, he had a gravitas that was perfect for Smith Barney’s earnest slogan: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” In 1983, however, Houseman filmed an ad for McDonald’s, which was a bust. “It didn’t fit his image,” Kamins says. “You didn’t expect professor Kingsfield to be eating fast food. It wasn’t credible.”

Under the original Foreman agreement, Salton would manufacture, market, and distribute the grill, and after expenses the profits would be split as follows: 40% to Salton, 45% to Foreman, and 15% split between Srednick and Perlmutter. The deal was almost unheard-of in that Foreman received a percentage of the profits down the road but nothing up-front. Typically, endorsement deals are structured the other way around: The athletes get a single payment in advance for a certain number of days of work, a certain number of public appearances, and a set amount of advertising. But Dreimann was willing to give up 60% because the risk was minimal–Foreman wouldn’t get a dime until Salton’s expenses were covered, and expectations were fairly low. (A statement made by an analyst at the time showed equal enthusiasm for the I Love Bagels bagel maker.) Perlmutter felt the same. “If I sold 150,000 units, I would be dancing up and down Hollywood Boulevard,” he says now. They were in for a surprise.

As another doper mentioned when I posted that on a thread on celebrity endorsements, it is rare to read a business report that gives one the “warm and fuzzies”

[Dinsdale]

Cornelius Vanderbilt?

I’m not sure he was “dirt poor,” but I remember reading a bio that his “empire” began when he bought a rowboat (after realizing he would make more money if he owned the boat instead of just rowing it." Next step, bought a second rowboat. . .

Perhaps as impressive as the $167 billion empire he amassed is how quickley his succeeding generations pissed it away!

[Shirley_Ujest]

There was a woman on either CNN or Fox News last week who had been on welfare in the crap side of whatever town she was from and now she was a graduate of some big college, off of welfare and VIP in whatever she does.

I have no idea who she is or what she does. But, she better than average pretty, maybe mid 30’s and I think with cornrows.
Vague, I know.
There was a very successful African American woman about 100 years ago that started her own cosmetic company. I thought her name was Madame CJ or something similar.
Edmund Hillary might be along the lines you are looking for.

[Sigmagirl]

Shirley, you mean Madam C. J. Walker.