Bill O’Neill ’51

With the crowd roaring around him, his horse’s hooves thundering beneath him, and a knight’s lance reaching out eight feet in front of him, Bill O’Neill ’51 charged onto the Gilmour Academy football field clad in a suit of chainmail and a helmet as the first authentic Lancer in the school’s history. The only problem was he couldn’t really see where he was going.

 

“As you can imagine, I’d never really worn a suit of armor before,” Bill says, “and my horse had never seen a lance before. So when I lowered the lance, it spooked the horse. When he reared up, the visor on my helmet slammed shut and I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to ruin the effect by dropping the lance or stopping the horse, so I just went with it, riding blindly onto the field with the hope that I wouldn’t accidentally spear someone. When I felt like it was the right time, I halted the horse. Everything turned out okay, and it was definitely memorable.”

Bill says much of his sense of the world developed alongside horses, a passion of his grandfather’s. “My grandfather had no education, but he knew horses. Many of his most important lessons to me were conveyed using the horse as the modality. The first time I ever saw a horse, my grandfather told me to get on and ride. It didn’t matter to him that I had never done it before or that I was afraid I might fall off. He said to me that you have to fall off and get back on nine times before you can be a good rider. It was clear that he believed the key to success was perseverance, and my life has borne out the truth of that message.”

 

Starting at Gilmour in its second year of operation, Bill and his classmates found that they would experience both adversity and hardship as the school came into its own. “There were so few of us here that we couldn’t even field a whole football team, but we did get to plow a lot of fresh ground. We started so many traditions and ideas that weren’t there before, and it helped me to realize that, just like the school, I could be whatever I wanted to be. There are lots of things in life that shape you, but those high school years shape our mindsets so powerfully.”

 

One of the most impactful shapers of Bill’s mindset was Br. Ivo Regan, whose courses exposed Bill and his classmates to outside-the-box thinking. “Ivo would challenge us to feel an experience, and then write it. Put your hands on the cold glass windows of Tudor House; now write that feeling.” Those exercises allowed Bill and his classmates to attach language and thought to their experience of the world, helping them to develop flexible and agile minds, to see the possibilities their lives could unfold.

 

It was that spirit of possibility that drove Bill through Georgetown and through Harvard Law, that led him to become a JAG Captain in the US Air Force in Dayton, and that led him back to his family in the form of his cousin’s company, Leaseway Transportation Corporation, where he eventually served as the GOO. When the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout, it was the spirit of possibility that led Bill to create the wealth management company that would eventually become CM Wealth Advisors. “At the time, I knew nothing about leading that sort of company, but I learned how to do it by asking for advice from professionals. Great mentors are what lead you to success.”

 

Since attempting to retire at the age of 70, (“Well, I built a home office over the garage to run our foundation, which is great,” Bill says, “but I find it makes me work even more!”), Bill has devoted time to finding ways

 

to be that mentor to his grandchildren, much like his grandfather was to him. “One of my own grandfather’s best lessons was that you always feed your horse before yourself—that it is those who rely on you that you need to prioritize. So, I’ve started writing a series of letters to my grandchildren that they will each receive on their 18^th birthday. I want to find some way of crystallizing and passing down some of my experience in a way they might find useful.”

 

So, at the age of 91, Bill O’Neill keeps working, keeps writing and keeps charging ahead into that unseen future, secure in the knowledge that resourcefulness, creativity and perseverance can overcome any obstacles in the way.