Bernard Cornfeld - Early Life

Early Life

Bernard Cornfeld was born in Turkey. His father was a Romanian-Jewish actor; his mother was from a Russian-Jewish family. They moved to America when Bernard was four years old – his father dying two years later. The young Brooklyn-raised Cornfeld worked after school each day in fruit stores and as a delivery boy. Although he suffered from a stammer, he had a natural gift for selling and when a schoolfriend's father died, the two of them used the US$3,000 insurance money to purchase and run an age and weight guessing stand at the Coney Island funfair. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College.

During the Second World War he joined the U.S. Maritime Service. Afterwards he went to Brooklyn College, graduating with a degree in psychology, and then did an MA in social work at the School of Social Work at Columbia University. He initially worked as a social worker, but then switched to selling mutual funds for an investment house. In 1955, he left New York for Paris and started his own company selling mutual funds, using his savings of a mere few hundred dollars. The company was named Investors Overseas Services (IOS). By selling the mutual funds, mostly to American servicemen in Europe, Cornfeld was able to avoid both American and European tax regulations. As a US citizen he did not avoid US taxes, and the funds sold to US servicemen were US registered and based funds. In the early years the fund sold was mostly the Dreyfus Fund, which was small then, with assets of less than US$2 million. He had a close and friendly relationship with Jack Dreyfus, the founder, and when the management company of the Dreyfus Fund went public, IOS bought an almost 10% ownership in it. Cornfield and IOS fueled the early growth of the Dreyfus Fund from very small to several hundred million dollars, due to his marketing acumen, with brilliant advertising of a lion strolling down Broadway, and deft management of the fund.