About — Letters to Our Grandchildren

The story of the letters

Letters to Our Grandchildren was created by Jack Benton as a series of letters to his kids — and their kids. What started as one grandfather writing to the people he loves grew into something he wanted to share: wisdom earned over decades, written slowly and on purpose, offered freely to anyone who would listen.

Over the years, Jack has curated letters from other wisdom holders — men and women in the fourth quarter of their lives with something hard-won to say. Every letter is signed and dated. Every one is real. The house is bigger than any single voice: 4thQtr is the house, and these are its letters.

We share, you decide. No outrage. No algorithm.

Jack Benton spent fifty years at the intersection of technology, finance, and public policy — from the RAND Corporation and a USC doctorate, to pioneering the first online ATMs at TRW, to a Senate-confirmed presidential appointment shaping America’s electronic payments laws, to founding the company that built Interlink, the nation’s first multi-bank debit network. He has consulted in fourteen countries and published in the Harvard Business Review.

Since 2002, through Fourth Quarter, Inc., Jack has turned his attention to something simpler and rarer: harvesting the wisdom of people in the fourth quarter of their lives — and passing it on. These letters began as real letters, mailed in envelopes to real grandchildren. Now he writes them for yours, too.

In his own words: “I have a lifelong interest in interdisciplinary research and problem solving.” That curiosity — spanning government, enterprise, and academia — is why no partisan label sticks, and why the letters can be offered the way they are: clear, warm, and non-ideological.