(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you inherited as much as John T. Dorrance Jr., you'd probably head to Aruba and spend the rest of your days basking in the sun, pina colada in hand. ''That never once crossed my mind,'' insists the crusty 68-year-old Campbell Soup heir. ''I always knew I'd work for the company. It was never discussed. It was just accepted.'' Dorrance toiled for 38 years at Campbell, the giant New Jersey food processor, in jobs ranging from shop foreman to chairman. The salary didn't matter much. Dorrance's 32% stake in Campbell, recently worth $1.3 billion, ladles out dividends of $73,644 a day. Mmm, mmm, good. Add to that a couple hundred million in stocks, bonds, and real estate, and Dorrance, with a net worth of $1.5 billion, is among the world's wealthiest people. Like most of the billionaires who were handed great wealth, Dorrance has devoted considerable energy to increasing his legacy. Some inheritors have been careful shepherds, others aggressive builders. Nearly all have taken a patrician pride in the business passed down. Dorrance once stopped his car to phone a radio station when he heard the announcer mispronounce ''croissant'' in one of his commercials. Like Dorrance, wealthy heirs Lester Crown and David and Laurance Rockefeller have multiplied vast inheritances through careful stewardship. The Rockefeller brothers (David is 72, Laurance 77), grandsons of John D. and heirs to a piece of his Standard Oil fortune, have boosted a joint $200-million legacy to $1.5 billion over the past 30 years with early investments in Eastern Air Lines, McDonnell Douglas, and Apple Computer. Chicago's Crown, 62, is worth $5.7 billion, thanks to shrewd management of his father Henry's gravel company, real estate empire, and 23% ownership of General Dynamics, one of the largest U.S. defense contractors. Such wealthy heirs as Henry Ford II, Michel Fribourg, and Roger and Gerrish Milliken took charge of Dad's business and created vastly bigger empires. Ford, 70, with some help from his brother William, 62, turned around an ailing Ford Motor Co., and now the duo and their sister, Josephine, 64, are together worth $1.3 billion. Continental Grain heir Fribourg, 74, worth $1.2 billion, took the helm of his father's grain trading company and has skillfully built it into one of the world's largest commodities trading operations. The Milliken brothers, who transformed their father's textile wholesaling empire into Milliken & Co., the nation's No. 2 textile manufacturer (after Burlington Mills), have likewise woven a fortune of $1 billion. These inheritors value their privacy almost as much as their wealth. Says Crown: ''My family can fly on a commercial jet or walk down the street and not be recognized. And I want to keep it that way.'' Whitney MacMillan, 58, and his brother Cargill, 60, together worth $2.9 billion, mostly through their share of Cargill Inc., the privately held grain trading firm, are obsessed with secrecy: They hid the company's headquarters, a 63-room replica of a French chateau, behind acres of trees on an estate in rural Minnesota. Pittsburgh billionaire Henry Lea Hillman, 68, who turned his father's coal and chemical business into a thriving high-tech venture capital operation, is so intensely private that he thinks any publicity brings bad luck. As he says: ''It's the spouting whale that gets harpooned.'' Perhaps more than any other of America's great heirs, Dorrance felt the burden of being his father's son. In the late 19th century the Dorrance family bought into the Campbell family's soup and preserves business. John Dorrance, Jack's father and a Ph.D. in chemistry, used his recipe for condensed soup to build the company into one of America's great marketing behemoths. He died when Jack was 11, leaving his only son eventual responsibility for preserving the family fortune: $128 million, including all of Campbell Soup, considered at the time the third-largest patrimony in U.S. history. During the 1930s young Jack endured a bitter and complex inheritance dispute in which both New Jersey and Pennsylvania ended up collecting huge taxes. The experience made Jack protective of the family wealth and wary of wasting money. Dorrance over the years has invested conservatively in stocks and bonds and claims that he can now live ''very comfortably'' even without his Campbell dividends. Before devoting his life to the company, Jack spent some happy years at the ritzy St. George's School, among the ''cottages'' of Newport, and at Princeton. After graduation in 1940 the Army drafted him as a $21-a-month buck private. At the time he was collecting an allowance of $20,000 a month. By the end of the war he was a lieutenant with the Office of Strategic Services in China, and in 1946 he joined Campbell. Dorrance made the smartest move of his career in 1954, when he persuaded his sisters to go along with him in selling 42% of their Campbell stock to the public and reserving some for executive stock options. Result: Campbell management gained an incentive to make the company strong and a chance to participate in its success. The stock Dorrance and his sisters retained increased enormously in value. Dorrance never ran the company; others were CEO when he was chairman. Instead, he served as a sounding board for management. He came to the office | every day, took a paternal interest in the employees, and worked to uphold the quality of the products and what he calls the ethical standards of Campbell management. Today Dorrance is chairman of the board's executive committee, which he says meets only in emergencies -- and he can't recall the last time Campbell faced one. A genteel-looking man with black hair, blue eyes, and a taste for conservative gray suits, Dorrance lives a fairly reclusive life in the rarefied atmosphere of Philadelphia's Main Line. In a talk with FORTUNE, the first lengthy interview he has given in over a decade, he emerges as a private, surprisingly bashful man, haunted by the ghost of a father whom he rarely saw but who, he says, ''is the hero of my life.'' He says his father passed on to him, among other things, a sense of noblesse oblige; Dorrance has given millions to charity. He is also chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dorrance's art collection is small but impressive, with a smattering of Monets and Matisses. The paintings hang at his Gladwyne estate, a French-style house built in 1930 on 40 acres of prime riding country outside Philadelphia. He spends most evenings with his wife, Diana, and likes to pass the time reading a wide range of books. His latest kick: thrillers, especially Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. He hasn't gone out to a movie in 40 years -- ''They're all too long these days,'' he says -- and has little interest in concerts and plays. The blueblood hates to borrow money and always votes Republican. Says he: ''I know some politicians, but I don't socialize with them because they are politicians.'' Few matters haunt Dorrance and other wealthy inheritors more than the question of the wealth they will pass along. Some fear that their heirs will sell out and break up the empire. Dorrance's Campbell shares are in trust and will pass tax-free to his three children when he dies. They can sell if they want, and they will surely have the chance -- Dorrance says his phone rings almost every day from investors interested in gaining control of the company. Inheritors know all about another potential problem of the super-rich: corrupting the next generation with wealth. Dorrance's conclusion: ''The best we can do is teach our children a sense of responsibility by example.'' Passing up the tempting Aruba option, all three of his kids work, though none at Campbell.