A young attorney's gift for his son turns into a hot-selling book.

1. From Oceana Magazine, April, 2006. (Originally an InDesign document.)
Chuck Acquisto admits he went a little overboard getting ready for his son’s first birthday.
An attorney out in Alameda County, California, (and a former Oceana Magazine staff writer),
Acquisto was a typically proud papa who had come up with a decidedly atypical idea.
It was an atypical idea that quickly took on a life of its own and, today, has turned into nothing
less than the second printing of a book called “Wisdom to Grow On: Incredible Letters and Inspiring
Advice for Getting the Most Out of Life.”
That wasn’t what he originally had in mind, but it’s where this labor of love led him.
One month after Acquisto’s wife, Terri, gave birth to the couple’s first child, the young attorney
secretly started writing letters. A lot of letters. Every day Acquisto wrote at least one letter to at least
one successful person, asking for advice on achieving success in life.
Acquisto’s plan was to paste any responses he got into a scrapbook and pass that scrapbook along
to his son, Nicholas, on the boy’s first birthday.
Living in California and being familiar with the entertainment industry as a whole, Acquisto did
not have (with apologies to Charles Dickens), “Great Expectations,” when he started mailing his
letters. He was keenly aware that they were more likely to end up in the hands of a publicist or a
personal assistant than the celebrity to whom he’d actually written and, accordingly, he really
wasn’t expecting an overwhelming response.
Much to his considerable shock and amazement, however, scores of (mostly handwritten)
responses to his requests began arriving almost immediately.
Former President George H. W. Bush was the first to reply, followed by Oprah Winfrey, Charlton
Heston and Robin Williams.
As days turned into weeks, more mail kept coming.
Nine members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, eight Academy Award winners, seven golfing
legends, six Heisman Trophy winners, five best-selling authors, four Top-40 singers, three famous
attorneys, two more former U.S. Presidents and a partridge in a pear tree all responded to letters like
that.
(Well, maybe not a partridge in a pear tree, but a member of the cast of the “Partridge Family” TV
show did respond.)
Internationally syndicated cartoonists including Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker and B.C.’s Johnny
Hart were among those who sent their advice to young Nicholas in the form of personalized
drawings.
All told, Acquisto’s mailman ended up delivering more than 350 letters of advice for Nick along
with a huge assortment of autographed photographs. Indeed, letters kept arriving well past Nick’s
first birthday.
Green Bay Packers legend, Bart Starr, wrote back two years late because, it seems, Acquisto’s
letter had (literally) fallen through the cracks and had slipped behind the desk of the former
quarterback’s home office.
Three years after Acquisto first began his letter writing campaign, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher,
Bob Feller, wrote to say he’d found Acqusito’s envelope but had lost the letter and asked the young
attorney to write once more. Once Feller received the second request, he replied immediately with
a letter that was “for Nicholas and Nicholas only.”
With all these 350-some letters in hand, Acquisto’s atypical idea got its next nudge from a note to

2. Nick by Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Music record label and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
“What a wonderful idea of your father’s,” Branson wrote in his letter, “for a wonderful book.”
That, according to Acquisto, was the first time the thought of publishing these letters of advice and
encouragement had occurred to him.
Still, the idea had a certain appeal. After all, the people Acquisto had written to were those he,
himself, admired.
“I wanted to pick people who were representative of my life,” Acquisto explained by phone from
California. “My heroes. People I respected from all kinds of backgrounds.”
Not surprisingly, the young man who graduated from Laurel, Maryland’s St. Vincent Pallotti High
School and Baltimore’s Loyola College and spent his summers in Ocean City working at Frontier
Town and on the staff of Oceana Magazine, chose to contact a large number of Marylanders.
Former Baltimore Colts Johnny Unitas, John Mackey, Bert Jones, Artie Donovan, Lenny Moore
and Raymond Berry all contributed notes to Nick as did Oriole greats Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer
and Cal Ripken, Jr.
And, while Acquisto now resides on the “Left Coast,” he lives ironically close to the exact
opposite end of U.S. Route 50, some 3073 miles west of Ocean City’s Harry W. Kelley Bridge.
Indeed, Acquisto’s mother, Rosemary, lives here in the resort where she was the store manager at
Rafters/Reynolds in the Montego Bay shopping center for the past 15 years.
His father, meanwhile, had been living and practicing law at the other end of Route 50 near
Sacremento, California since 1988.
After graduating college, the younger Acquisto spent four years of working as a journalist, sports
writer and editor on this coast before earning his law degree at the University of Baltimore. He then
headed west to join his Dad at the law firm of Stephenson, Acquisto and Colman in Pleasanton,
California.
“It was the winter of 1996,” Acquisto recalled with a laugh, “and it seemed like it snowed just
about every weekend. All of a sudden, the idea of living in California started looking better and
better to me.”
It turned out to be a fortuitous move since a scant two years after moving to the Golden State,
Acquisto met his future wife, Terri, on a blind date. A year later, on September 30, 2000, the two
were married and Nicholas was born June 13 the following year.
(Nicholas’s younger sister, Gabrielle and Terri’s son, Matt, from a previous marriage, complete the
Acquisto clan.)
Still, Acquisto kept thinking about Richard Branson’s comment about combining all these letters
into a book and eventually sought out literary agent Ted Weinstein. The first thing Weinstein told
him was that he would have to go back and re-contact every one who had replied and get a signed
release from each and every one of them.
“He told me, there wasn’t a publisher in the world who’d touch this without releases,” recalled
Acquisto.
It was then that Acquisto’s atypical idea took yet another atypical turn.
Since Acquisto he hadn’t planned to do anything more than cut and paste a few letters into a
scrapbook in the first place, and he certainly hadn’t planned on making a profit from doing that, he
decided that he would donate any monies the book might generate to the San Francisco-based
Good Tidings Foundation.

3. Founded by Acquisto’s friend, Larry Harper, Good Tidings works with professional sports
franchises, businesses and agencies in the Bay area to assist underprivileged children there.
Armed with that charitable motivation, Acquisto was able to garner releases from upwards of 156
of the 350 people who had originally responded and with that, the first edition of “Wisdom to Grow
On” was released. It promptly sold out and a second printing is now underway.
With a supporting cast that included the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tom Watson,
Arnold Palmer, Robert Duvall, Pierce Brosnan, Tim Conway, Shirley MacLain, Chris Berman, Dave
Brubeck, Henry Kissinger and Mike Krzyzewski, it’s easy to see how Chuck Acquisto’s atypical idea
and labor of love might have caused him to go a little overboard.
In the end, he divided the book into three sections with commentaries and advice from (political)
leaders, entertainers and athletes and was able to give his son, Nick, a good deal more than just a
scrapbook.