It’s been nearly 100 years since capitalist Andrew Carnegie passed away; yet he was brought to life in Morris this week.

Actor Terry Lynch performed in front of a crowd at the Wesley Center Tuesday evening, portraying Carnegie’s eccentricities and outright criminal behavior that led to him becoming the richest man in the world.

Lynch explained that the name is pronounced car-nay-gee, not car-nuh-gee: Carnegie was born in Scotland and the pronunciation got altered on the way over and over time.

Carnegie was born in 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland, moving to America at the age of 12 thanks to a cousin who helped finance his family moving overseas.

Carnegie did not start out wealthy. Instead, he started out memorizing what the beeps and boops of Morse Code meant on the telegram so he could share messages without having to write it down.

“I’m hearing it and I’m transcribing it in my head,” Lynch, as Carnegie, said. “You’re wasting time. Well, I don’t really say that to [Mr. Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad] because that would be disrespectful, but I’m thinking it. You’re wasting your time. This is time not well spent.”

The conclusion would be, at this point, that Carnegie worked his way up through the Pennsylvania Railroad because of his hard work and ability to memorize things without writing them down. That is partially correct. Because he could remember things, Lynch said Carnegie was used at a young age for an insider trading plot.

Lynch, as Carnegie, said the secret to doing well in the stock market is “buy low and sell high,” but it probably helped Carnegie along that he was getting tips on when to buy and sell during his teenage years.

“Mr. Scott comes to me and he says, ‘Andrew, you have been a very reliable young man here. I’m going to give you a piece of advice. I want you to buy stock in this company. Now what you need is about $700 but lad, if you invest, before you know it, you’ll have that money back and tenfold. It’s going to be a very good success,’” Lynch said as Carnegie.

Carnegie followed the advice, going to the local bank and talking to the president to get a $700 loan. After paying off his family’s mortgage and some debts, he had $5,000 left.

However, there was another account in his name holding $125,000 that was then signed over after the Federal Trade Commission cleared the transaction.

“Nobody had thought to look at a teenager’s bank account,” Lynch said, as Carnegie.

This money gave Carnegie a head start, and it was years later that he grew his steel empire.

Lynch, as Carnegie, said he believed in surrounding himself with experts. He might not know much about law or history or steel, but he could afford to surround himself with people that did. In this case, he found Henry Bessemer, who invented the Bessemer process to more efficiently mass-produce steel.

Lynch went into detail on the events of Carnegie’s life, like the dam breaking in Johnstown and killing thousands, how he met his wife, the Homestead Mill riot, and more, but he spent the most time on the founding of public libraries. Carnegie planned to give all of his money away to worthy causes before the end of his life, and one of those causes was libraries.

“Because if you put a library up, people can, like I did with Colonel Anderson, learn all the things they need to make themselves a better person, and in so, a better society,” Lynch, as Carnegie, said.

Carnegie built 2,811 libraries, including the old Morris Library that used to sit where the current one does. Carnegie also built libraries in Marseilles and Streator. The Carnegie libraries in Marseilles and Streator are both still standing, and are in use to this very day.

In the end, Carnegie died at the age of 83 in 1919. He was buried at Sleepy Hollow in New York, and right across the road from him is the grave of a union organizer.

Lynch broke character at the end of his presentation.

“Later on in his life, he does actually publish the Gospel of Wealth in a series of articles, and doesn’t hide the fact that if you have to break the law, as long as at the end, you’re giving it all back, you’re helping out the community in the end run,” Lynch said. “Talk about a rationalization.”