Remembering Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot Co-Founder and Business Icon [Video]

Americans everywhere know the brand he created. But not enough people know the man behind the brand that revolutionized how Americans buy almost everything we need to remodel, repair or take care of our most precious physical asset and a fundamental part of what constitutes the American dream: our homes.

Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, died Monday at the age of 95. But it’s how he lived that’s worth celebrating. Marcus wasn’t just one of America’s great entrepreneurs and philanthropists. He was a fierce advocate for free enterprise and the American dream because his life story embodied both.

His mother and father were born in Russia but fled to America because of an outbreak of organized massacres of Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and Russia, not much different from the one the world witnessed in Israel’s Negev Desert last October. Like millions of immigrants before and after, …