Chapter 7

FAMILY ORIGINS

“A man cannot discover new oceans unless
he has courage to lose sight of the shore.”

—Andre Gide

Apple, the first company to hit $1 trillion valuation in the S&P 500 Index, was founded by Steve Jobs, the son of Syrian immigrant Abdul Fattah Jandali. The second-ranked company, Amazon, was founded by Jeff Bezos, who got his name from Miguel Bezos, the Cuban immigrant Jeff’s mother married when he was four. A Russian Jewish refugee, Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, founded the third-ranked company, Google.

In fact, more than 40 percent of the US Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the UK, immigrants are twice as likely to be entrepreneurs than those who simply stay put wherever they were born.1

Immigration requires a willingness to start over by launching into the unknown, an ability to put aside anxiety while adjusting to new languages and customs, and sufficient tenacity to surmount a steep learning curve. In most cases, the boldness and confidence to take high-stakes risks are prerequisites. When their children hear the stories and adopt the traits and values of their courageous parents, they are primed to be extraordinarily successful risk takers.

Since both of my parents were immigrants, my own inherent love of taking risks found fertile soil in their stories.

COURAGEOUS ROOTS

The bravest risks require you to set out on your own, leaving everything you know behind.

My dad, Reuben, arrived on the shores of America at sixteen years of age. I can’t help but admire his nerve. In those days, you couldn’t read about your destination on the internet and browse hundreds of photos before you went. In fact, he would’ve had very little idea what to expect. What an incredible risk he took!

After crossing a continent then an ocean all alone, he must have felt small and exhausted as he stood in the enormous registry room of Ellis Island. Behind him, a never-ending line of immigrants snaked back and forth through the room, tired and frightened, as they nudged and pushed their way toward the clerks with the power to approve their entry. Behind a giant desk on a high platform, the immigrant inspector presided over the process beneath a portrait of George Washington and a big red, white, and blue American flag. It was an intimidating sight, as it was meant to be.2

As they entered the building, immigrants were marched up a massive staircase in groups of thirty. Each of them wrangled with what little they had salvaged of home: a wicker basket, a feather bed, a trunk. Medical inspectors stood at the railing, evaluating the immigrants from above. If they limped or showed any signs of heart trouble, a chalk designation was marked on their shirts: L or H. Those marked X were taken aside for closer examination.3

Beleaguered clerks were only allowed to spend two minutes on each interview. There were so many immigrants to process that the staff often worked nine hours a day, seven days a week. Some days as many as twenty thousand people sat on ships in the harbor, waiting to be seen.

Most often than not, the clerks couldn’t understand what people said. There were never enough interpreters. As a result, the names they wrote on the manifests were often misspelled or changed arbitrarily to sound more American. Portnovsky became Porter. Schmidt became Smith.4

When my young father left the Russian Republic of Belarus, his parents had given him stern advice. “Whatever they ask you, you say yes!” they’d warned him in no uncertain terms. So when the clerk misspelled his name as Tennenbaum instead of the correct Tannenbaum, Reuben nodded gratefully and didn’t say a word.

What did it matter? After all, Tennenbaum was an Ashkenazi name. In the Ashkenazi tradition, there had originally been no such last names. People’s names had changed with every generation. Moses, the son of Mendel, became Moyshe ben Mendel. His son, Samuel, became Shmuel ben Moyshe.

In Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi Jews had been among the last to adopt family names. They’d done it only when the Austro-Hungarian Empire forced them to. Not considering the names truly valid, most Ashkenazi Jews chose arbitrary words based on professions, personal traits, places, parentage, or even animals. A select few decided to make the best of it by choosing names associated with the beauty of nature. Applebaum (apple tree), Kestenbaum (chestnut tree), Mandelbaum (almond tree), and Tannenbaum (fir tree) were among them.5

In 1880, not long before my dad arrived, there were already nine families living in America with their names misspelled as Tennenbaum. They were dressmakers living in New York, who had no doubt nodded and stayed silent, just as Reuben did.6

He never talked much about the experience, but I’ve since learned more about what the journey must’ve been like. The biggest transatlantic liners came to Ellis Island with nineteen hundred people onboard—five hundred staff, eleven hundred steerage passengers, and three hundred first-class passengers.

For those in first class, it was an opulent voyage. For twenty-five pounds they were free to enjoy the finest dining, the grand saloons, and the elegant ballrooms. Most of the staff were hired to cater to their whims. Steerage, by contrast, was a dark, smelly deck crammed with dormitory bunks and little to no privacy.

Fifty years earlier, the crossing from Europe had taken three months, but by 1911, the passage had been reduced to only five days in summer or nine days in winter. Conditions in steerage were not comfortable, but the transatlantic crossing was no longer regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal.7

Millions of hopeful immigrants passed through the doors of Ellis Island between its opening in 1892 until its closure in 1954. It’s said that nearly 40 percent of all US citizens trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island.8

The terminal itself became an emblem of the American melting pot. While they waited to be approved, the immigrants setting their feet on the soil of a new continent for the first time were exposed to an explosion of cultures, languages, traditions, and sensations that they could never have anticipated.

Clashes regularly took place in the mess, as hungry people from sixty different nationalities were confronted with new tastes. Kosher meat, ice cream, and Italian bread were gratefully accepted, but the Italians were disgusted by the oatmeal, the Scandinavians wouldn’t touch the spaghetti, and the Muslims would only eat boiled eggs. Corn on the cob was particularly offensive to Europeans, who had been using it as slop to feed pigs for hundreds of years. Never having seen a tropical banana, most newcomers didn’t know to peel them, so they ate them whole.9

To get into the country, you had not only to be healthy but also have a sponsor. My dad had an uncle in Savannah, Georgia, who took him in. For a few years, my dad worked at odd jobs, until he was old enough to demonstrate his patriotic fervor for his new country by enlisting in the army for the Border War against Mexico.

Pancho Villa and other rebels in the Mexican Revolution were threatening to cross the southern border to the United States. The Bandit War along the border of Texas was part of the larger Border War on the boundary extending from Baja to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States Army deployed soldiers to the border towns to protect American lives and property, and to keep the Mexican Revolution on the other side of the border.

My dad joined the fight. In the context of our daily family life, courage was not the first word I would have associated with my dad, but now, as an adult, I can see that it took courage to leave Eastern Europe for a foreign culture on his own, while he was still a boy, then sign up to fight side by side with his new countrymen. When the Great War started, he was transferred from Mexico to Europe—ironically, ending up right back in the place he’d gone to such lengths to leave years before. When World War II came around, he was ready to go again, but by then he was in his late thirties and was rejected due to age. These are not the choices of a timid or reluctant man.

By the time he met my mother in Florida, he was seasoned by battle. My mother’s family had come from Latvia. My mother’s mother, Sulameth, had married a Polish Catholic man in Russia in 1900. They lived in St. Petersburg until 1905. That year was a turning point for the entire country.

My maternal grandmother, Dr. Sulameth Friedman (left), my mother, Frieda Tennenbaum (middle), and my father, Reuben Tennenbaum (right).

In January 1905, one hundred and fifty thousand unarmed demonstrators marched to the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II for eight-hour working days, universal suffrage, and the right to strike. To their horror, the Imperial Guard responded by firing into the crowd, killing or wounding a thousand people. At the Troitsky Bridge, the Cossack cavalry charged the demonstrators, brutally slashing them with sabers and firing cannons at them.10

Outrage spread through the industrial centers of the Russian Empire. Profoundly disillusioned, the people called it “ ” (Bloody Sunday). Historians consider it to be the day when the Russian Revolution began. Nine months pregnant with my mother at the time, my grandmother summarily left her husband, changed her name to Sascha, and moved to America.

Sascha was ahead of her time. She had grown up in a nice home in Riga, Latvia, with her father, Rudolph Friedman, a successful merchant, and her mother, Ernestine. They encouraged all their children to be well educated. Sascha studied medicine.

When she came to America, she practiced some form of medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, where she briefly married another incidental man. Curiously enough, I’ve found no records showing a divorce from the husband she left in Russia nor from the husband she left in St. Louis when she moved to Florida with my mother, Frieda, many years later. It’s hard to say whether this was indifferent filing on the part of the local authorities or an indifference to process on the part of my risk-taking grandmother.

In my search for records, I also stumbled across an extra marriage by my mom. She must have forgotten to mention it to me. It appears that the authorities are unaware that the marriage ever ended. There is no sign of divorce papers for this early marriage. This oversight seems to run in the family.

When my mom met my dad in Florida, my mom was a real looker. They were soon married, but it was never a good match. My mom loved the arts and classical music. She considered my dad and his family to be crude and not up to her standards. My dad cared about working hard, creating security, and participating in community service. Their values were probably too different to make it work.

In retrospect, I can see that, because my mother’s life experience had been much more sophisticated than my father’s, it colored her advice to me. She strongly encouraged me to get an education and, in making life choices—like choosing a career and taking a wife—to make choices that made me happy. Most of my life, I have thought of my mother as a saint, who protected and encouraged me more than my father, who worked a lot and seemed remote when he was around. But, as I look back, I can see that my father, my mother, and her mother set my course in certain directions.

My father and grandmother took enormous risks on some of the biggest decisions of their lives. Both of them emigrated to America alone. Surviving the Great Depression together, they chose uncertain paths throughout their lives, in business and in love.

Although I didn’t always get it right, I have followed much of their guidance, and my life has been better for it.

A seldom seen side of my father. Performing at a charity event in Brunswick, Georgia.

THE LITTLE SHOP

You can do your best to minimize your risks, but the vagaries of life will always be beyond your control.

When my dad returned home after World War I ended in 1918, he had to compete for jobs with millions of soldiers coming into the labor force. No longer producing materials for the war effort, many companies had to lay off workers or go bankrupt. The American economy was slow to adjust to peacetime.

Recession loomed for the first two years, until steadily improving technology and electricity led to unexpected growth in industry. Before the war, electricity was being used in only 30 percent of factories. By 1929 more than 70 percent were powered by electricity.

As the economy rallied, American buying power increased. Prices went down. A refrigerator that cost $600 in 1920 cost only $300 in 1929.11

The introduction of payment installments ushered Americans into the Age of Credit. Consumerism exploded. Car sales in the 1920s nearly tripled. For the upwardly mobile middle class shaking off the long years of war, sunny Florida became the ideal destination.12

Eager to seize the opportunity, my dad and mom moved to Kissimmee, Florida, and opened a little shop. It must’ve done well in the early years. The American economy was growing in those prosperous years that came to be known as the Roaring Twenties and doubled the nation’s wealth.13

Women bobbed their hair and raised their hemlines. Capitalizing on the strictures of Prohibition, speakeasies selling bootleg liquor thrived. With entertainment, horse racing, and beaches, Florida became the nation’s “winter playground.” When it was snowing in New York, developer Carl G. Fisher of Miami famously bought an ad on an enormous billboard in Times Square that said simply: “It’s June in Miami.”14

Citrus farming was proving to be so lucrative that inexperienced farmers and property investors got caught up in “orange fever,” hoping to make a fortune while basking in the Florida sunshine.15

Once it became possible to buy options on land, called binders, the profits rose to dizzying heights. After purchasing a binder for 10 percent of the property’s price, buyers had thirty days to sell. Otherwise, they were obliged to produce a down payment. The gambit was to sell at a profit as quickly as possible.16

When it all came to a halt in 1925, it was a brutal wake-up call for a lot of investors. What had looked like a significantly profitable land boom turned out to be Florida’s first real estate bubble. Whole new cities and failed development projects were abandoned.17

In The Nation, Henry Villard described his drive down the Dixie Highway to Miami in those days: “Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely, whiteway lights stand guard over miles of cement sidewalks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be… Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses.” It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of the people who invested in the Florida land boom lost money. Paper millionaires went broke overnight.18

Echoes of the collapse lingered for years. For all its promise as an idyllic tropical paradise, Florida had become a disaster area. Its economy would not bounce back until World War II.19

Just when people must’ve been thinking it couldn’t get any worse, disaster struck. In 1926 the Miami hurricane drove many of the remaining developers into bankruptcy. The aftermath was surreal. Almost fifty thousand people were left homeless—four thousand homes were destroyed and nine thousand more severely damaged. A gigantic steel ship was left in the middle of a street in downtown Miami. In the weeks that followed, the exodus was so great that the needless southbound lanes on the highway were closed to traffic to make way for the endless stream of cars leaving town.20

That hurricane was followed by the Okeechobee hurricane in 1928. The Wall Street crash in 1929 initiated ten more years of grueling hardship with the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world.21

Now my parents’ little shop had no means to survive. In the twenties, even as their customers dwindled, they had found a way to keep the doors open and eke out a living, but the Depression was the final blow.

In the middle of this series of catastrophes, my father’s father, Abe, came to America. An attorney from the little town of Pruzhany in Belarus, he was smart enough to anticipate that the rising popularity of the Nazi Party would lead to dark developments. He sent all of his kids to America before the remainder of the people in the ghetto were slaughtered. Only afterward did Abe make his way to New York to join his kids, but he never adjusted. Always nervous and uptight, he never attempted to learn the language or make a life for himself in his new country.

Like his father, my dad was haunted by the memories of his youth in that little shtetl, where his family had lived in fear of a knock on the door at night. Now the anti-Semitism of 1940s Florida kept him in a constant state of anxiety. When things were bad, he bewailed our circumstances. When things were good, he feared that they soon would go bad. And, for him, they did.

My father had reached his limits. One catastrophe after another—poisoned by intermittent glimpses of false hope—was more than he was could bear. It broke his entrepreneurial spirit.

My first memory is of my father taking me to the hospital when I was three years old. I was born in 1935 in the heart of the Depression.

“You’re going to get a sister or a brother today,” my dad said, smiling.

“I’d rather have a billy goat,” I said frankly.

My sister, Ann, was born that day. Though I always teased her about it, she turned out to be so much better than a billy goat.

Our grandmother, Sascha, looked after us when we were young while both my parents worked. I suspect that my grandmother owned the nice house we all lived in. She was the most influential force in my early life.

By the time I was six, my parents’ marriage was disintegrating. When they separated, I was sent away to military school. It happened more than once, and I always hated it. I didn’t fit in with the military school mentality, and the needlessly rigid structure gave me a loathing for rules and restrictions that has lasted a lifetime.

A year later, my grandmother died. I was devastated. How I wish I’d had more time with her. She was remarkable in so many ways. Recently I compared photos of her tombstone to her birth records, and I discovered that she’d lied about her age by several years. What a woman!

For a while, my mother moved to Miami Beach, where a boyfriend visited her, while my father took a horrible job in the small town of Brunswick, Georgia. Six days a week, he sold shoes on credit to people so poor they could only afford installments of a dollar a week, then on Sundays he went door to door to try to collect the dollar. It was awful. I didn’t get to spend much time with him.

Growing up Jewish in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s added more pressure. On Friday nights when the other kids were going to school dances or making out on Lover’s Lane, I was stuck with my family at temple.

World War II had given Americans concern for the fate of the Jews in Europe, but the Roosevelt administration simultaneously sent another message when it strictly limited the immigration of Jewish refugees. As late as the 1950s, Rabbi Julius Toback of Temple Beth El wrote, “The Jew in the South is… unemployed and unemployable, as far as the general community is concerned. There are no clerks, salesgirls, mechanics, civil servants, or white-collar workers among us.”22 Open anti-Semitism was frowned on in public, but in private, people hewed to a different standard.

Despite local prejudice, my father got a break when a Jewish investor hired him to run a store. The man had driven through Brunswick on his way to Florida. He liked the town so much, he bought a well-established women’s clothing store on Main Street. In those days, if a Jewish businessman came to town, he would go to the temple and ask the leaders of the community for advice and references. When he said he needed a reliable manager to run his new store, they recommended my dad. It was a big step up for him.

The wisdom of leaving Europe was confirmed by increasing disappearances of Jewish people. This document from 1942 confirms the execution of my mother’s aunt (number 30).

With his prospects improving, he even managed to talk my mother into coming back. After a few years, she insisted that he spend the family savings on a house near the beach at St. Simons Island, a suburb of Brunswick.

The house wasn’t even on a paved road. My bedroom was a converted porch, so when anyone came through the back door, they traipsed through my bedroom. But I loved this house. In the city, I’d had to share a bedroom with my sister, so this was much better. And we were two blocks from the beach!

Looking back, I see now that living near the water has been an enduring theme throughout my life. The ocean resonates with some deep instinct in me. During my first seven years, we lived in St. Petersburg and went often to the beach. When I was in high school, we lived on St. Simons near the beach. And today I have two homes on the beach—one in Malibu and the other in Puerto Rico. When I’m not living near the water, I’m skiing on frozen water.

In our little town of Brunswick, my dad was very popular. Although he felt self-conscious all his life about never mastering the English language, which had such a different grammar and alphabet than the Yiddish he’d spoken in the old country, his native courage must have allowed him to override that deficit. At home with us, he was fairly reserved. Out in the community, he found a way to shine. It’s clear that he excelled at socializing and networking, because he was often elected to leadership roles. He was the president of the merchants’ association and an active member of the Elks Club, one of the biggest social clubs in town. To this day I can vividly recall seeing him riding a big white horse through town on the Fourth of July as parade marshal.

In the early 1950s, my mom goaded him into moving to Marietta, Georgia, a suburb just north of Atlanta, where he could take a bigger job in a bigger city. Although he didn’t want to leave the vibrant community life he’d built in Brunswick, he agreed to the move to make my mom happy. The woman who owned the department store on the central square in town hired him as the manager. It was a challenging job, but he was up to the task and soon improved profits. By all accounts, he was an excellent manager who was very good with numbers. As a result, the company was able to open a second branch, and my mom was hired to run it.

For the first time in their marriage, my parents were making money. With both of them working hard in gratifying careers, we were able to move into a nice house in Marietta. By 1956, my sister had started college at Emory. Life seemed to be taking an upward trend, and then, in 1957, my dad had a massive heart attack. He was rushed to urgent care, where the doctor (whom I always suspected of exaggerating) miraculously managed to save his life.

Unfortunately, calcification of the aortic valve runs in our family. My father’s sisters and brothers died young as a result. Today it can be monitored and prevented, thanks to sonograms and other medical advances, but at that time, it struck without warning. There were no symptoms, and the first attack was often fatal.

Because of the limitations of their medical knowledge at the time, my dad’s doctors did little more than recommend that he cut back on his workload to reduce stress. When he explained the situation to the owner of the department store that he had worked so tirelessly to improve and expand for years, she let him go.

Demoralized, my parents moved back to Brunswick. The humiliation of being summarily dismissed, compounded by the anxiety of unemployment and my mother’s disappointment, was no doubt far more stressful than working long hours at a store that was thriving because of his efforts.

To make matters worse, he was forced to tell my sister she could not continue at Emory because there was no money for it. By that time, she had fallen in love with one of my classmates, Louis Young. When she dropped out, they got married, moved to South Carolina, and are still together to this day.

In a life with dramatic ups and downs, my dad moved into a slump that would last the rest of his life. He took a series of demeaning jobs working as a retail salesman at small clothing stores far below the caliber of stores he had run in Marietta. My mom, who had successfully managed one of those stores as well, accepted a job as an office manager for a real estate developer. Their brief taste of success in Marietta must have made this sudden drop in status in their midfifties even harder to bear.

My dad had always been more comfortable among the men at the Elks Club and the community than he was at home, where his love for my mother allowed her to gain the upper hand. It seemed that, no matter what he did, he couldn’t please her. She was always critical and unhappy. My dad, by contrast, was anxious and unwilling to get into a fight.

He wasn’t timid. After all, he’d left the only world he’d known to cross the ocean and build a new life in America. Something deep inside him had given him the desire and the ability to tackle these major risks and adventures on his own when he was just a boy. He’d been so undaunted in battle that he was ready to fight to the end. But part of the trade-off for being a Jewish immigrant in the early 1900s was that he couldn’t make waves. He was trying so hard to fit in and become “a typical American” that he couldn’t afford to get into any kind of trouble. It allowed people to take advantage of him and left him feeling scared and different all his life.

Once, in 1971, when I had finished college and was unhappily married myself, I heard her berate him in an argument. With her stronger personality and confidence, he didn’t stand a chance. Instead of holding his ground, he retreated into his room and locked the door. I was appalled to such a degree that it actually became a tipping point in my own marriage. “Is this how I want to end up?” I asked myself. It was in that moment that I realized I should end my marriage.

Sadly, my dad never took that option himself. After several strokes that left him weak and debilitated, he died at seventy-five years old.

What I remember about those early years was domestic tension and financial constraints. My father’s response to that was to emphasize the importance of working for a big company, so I wouldn’t end up like him. The lesson he seared into my psyche was that financial security must be my primary career goal.

CARVING MY OWN PATH

A bent twig shapes the tree’s growth.

On Saturdays and holidays, my high school classmates would hang around at the popular joints while I worked in a store. The kids from the good families were going to parties or spending weekends waterskiing on the rivers.

My experiences were more limited—and I knew it. Working behind the drugstore food counter while I heard the other kids my age laughing and having fun left me out of the action. All these years later, thinking of it puts a knot in my stomach. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.

Until it gave him a heart attack, my father worked every day. Both of my parents worked during the Depression and again when he got sick. That’s what people did, come hell or high water: they worked.

If some part of me yearned for a bigger life, the restricted world I grew up in inevitably gave me a fairly narrow idea of the possibilities. In the early 1950s, my dream was to be a teacher and researcher in electronics. As far back as grade school, I’d started taking radios apart, buying electronic parts to build amplifiers, and making a little spending money by fixing people’s radios in the neighborhood. I seemed to have a knack for it.

It never would’ve occurred to me to think of building my own business, much less making a million dollars one day. Success is relative. My father was working around the clock to bring home $5,000 a year. He was just glad to have the job. It meant his family would survive.

Knowing how my father struggled to make ends meet, I decided that I would need to earn twice as much money if I hoped to live well. It seemed grandiose at the time, but I resolved that one day I’d be making $10,000 a year.

People around town spoke in hushed tones about the $12,000 salary of the president of the bank. When a district judge got rich from his investment in a company that delivered propane tanks, we were all in awe of his business acumen.

“It’s a fine business to invest in,” I heard one of my neighbors say. “Very stable. The company regularly delivers propane tanks along their routes.”

“Hard to compete with that!” another one remarked. “You’ve automatically got all the people on the block, so you can charge a nice markup.” The two men shook their heads in admiration, as if to say, “That judge made a smart choice.” I had to agree. But none of us knew how to do it ourselves. I didn’t even understand how you got to that point. The idea that there might be criteria for evaluating businesses to invest in was as far from me as having the money to invest in the first place. I couldn’t envision myself doing it.

I was still amazed by what other people could afford to buy when they came into the shop where I worked. If they picked out a pair of blue slacks that they liked, I’d say, “We also have them in red,” and they’d buy the red ones, too! Meanwhile, I was wearing my dad’s old clothes.

It was not just their spending power that made an impression. It was their nonchalance. The decision, it seemed, was of no concern to them at all. Maybe they’d never even wear the red ones. What difference would it make? To a young man like me, straining to imagine owning nice suits one day, it was foreign as if an Ottoman Turk had showed up in a s¸alvar and turban.

After living month to month with no security his whole life, my father finally suffered a heart attack from the burden of relentless work. As a result, he was summarily fired, cast off when he desperately needed a safety net. His fondest dream for me was the kind of job that would’ve saved him.

When I told the career adviser in the guidance office at my high school about my desire to work in electronics, he showed me which courses to take to prepare me for admission to the cooperative program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In this program, he explained, students could attend Tech for a quarter, then work for a quarter. Some of the largest companies in the industry, such as Lockheed, General Electric, and Georgia Power, had happily partnered with Tech for this program. They got bargain-priced talent, a close look at potential future hires, and great PR. It took five years to graduate instead of four, but co-op students graduated with experience and connections in the industry that made it much easier to find work.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. What I didn’t know was that the career adviser had failed to tell me that I might qualify for a scholarship somewhere else—maybe even MIT.

The Electrical Engineering Department at Georgia Tech offered two general study options: a power major for energy industry careers and an electronics major for communications industry careers. Since it was considered to be a hot new field, I chose electronics. No electronics jobs existed near my little hometown, but the Georgia Power Company had an office in Brunswick, and they generously agreed to take me on as a Tech co-op student.

Georgia Power wanted its student engineers to understand how the systems they designed actually got installed, so we had to work in the field during our first quarter on a line crew. Line crews were groups of about five men who rode around in big trucks full of tools, wire, and electrical power equipment, often pulling a trailer to carry the long wooden poles.

The driver and supervisor rode in the cab, while we grunts rode in the back. When we reached our destination, we dug a series of holes for the big poles. If the ground was too hard to dig a narrow six-foot hole, we set charges of dynamite to speed the process. Since the poles were maybe forty feet tall, we used long pikes as lances to push the poles upright and install them deep in the holes.

After installation, we climbed the poles and fitted them with cross-arms, transformers, and insulators. Wires were pulled up the poles, and then the power was turned on. Most people are unaware that such a grueling process is required to get them the electricity they take for granted in their daily lives.

Experiencing that labor firsthand was illuminating in more ways than one. The stakes were high. When mistakes are made with dynamite, the consequences are far more grave than the irritating snafus my fellow students were having with the copy machines in their office internships. Spending the day manhandling heavy poles coated with sticky, nasty-smelling creosote, which we later learned is carcinogenic, is hard work. After a long day, it was not uncommon for climbing irons to slip, leaving a man dangling up in the air. More than once, a five-thousand-volt power line would fall, sending flares of electricity into the air like ballistic missiles as it violently writhed on the ground. It was a stressful introduction to reality, and I never forgot it.

The next quarter, when my parents moved to the suburbs of Atlanta to run department stores, I took a room in a boarding house for my Brunswick work quarter. I’d lived there contently for a while when the owner learned I was Jewish. As luck would have it, he was a bigot. He stopped me in the hallway and announced, “You’re moving out. Today!”

“But I’ve paid for the whole month!” I objected.

“I’m charging you the daily rate instead, you dirty Jew. I want you out!” he snarled.

When I told my dad, he contacted a Jewish friend who was an attorney. He sent the landlord a letter threatening to take him to court if he didn’t honor his agreement. They negotiated a deal that allowed me to stay the week while I looked for another place to live, without paying the higher daily rate.

One of the guys I worked with at the power company arranged for me to rent a room at the Methodist resort on St. Simons Island for the rest of my work quarter. Fortunately, Georgia Power transferred me to Atlanta in the next work quarter, so I was able to move back in with my family and commute to work on the bus.

But I did learn from the experience. If nothing else, it made it clear to me that I wasn’t well suited to a work environment with a lot of rules and restrictions. That fact would be confirmed throughout my career. I started at Georgia Power at forty-eight dollars per week and finished the program at sixty dollars per week! It spurred my curiosity about other careers.

Meanwhile, Georgia Tech was struggling to pay high enough salaries to keep its electrical engineering faculty. Corporations were luring away teachers with offers of multiples of their Georgia Tech pay. At the same time, students were flooding into this new field. The electronics industry was entering a phase of explosive growth that would permanently change the country.

For over a decade, the world had struggled to survive the Great Depression. No sooner had it ended than World War II began, amplifying that misery with death and bloodshed for another five years. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that American optimism finally started to return.

When it did, a boom took place in every business that contributed to growth and renewal—none more than the electronics industry. As people began to realize that they could rebuild their lives, they welcomed the opportunity with vigor. A million new homes were being built every year. The electrical work alone amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Air-conditioning sales soared. Christmas light decorations were all the rage, creating another lucrative market for electrical contractors.23

For the first time, Electrical Construction & Maintenance issued an economic trends report. The prospects had never been better. “Frontiers in power, heat, and light are moving forward under the pressures of prosperous times, industry ingenuity, and an evidently insatiable public demand for the benefits of modern electrification…”24

The phenomenal growth in the industry resulted in an alarming shortage of technically trained candidates. In 1941, $900 million had been spent on engineering and scientific research. By 1953, the investment had risen to $5 billion.25 The Engineers’ Joint Council and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that forty thousand new engineers were needed in 1955, and the universities were graduating only twenty-three thousand engineers every year.26 The number of graduates had not decreased, but the demand had nearly doubled.

Georgia Tech was required to accept almost any state of Georgia high school graduate, but it couldn’t afford to keep them! With the best and brightest of the faculty leaving to take advantage of exciting new opportunities in the private sector, the electrical engineering department was woefully understaffed.

Two-thirds of my freshman class didn’t go on to become sophomores. Those who did faced off against the Engineering Department in a battle for their academic lives. The average grade for first electrical engineering class was set at an F. So, only half of those students were allowed to make it to the second class, Electronic Field Analysis. The average grade for that class was also set at an F. By the third year, no more than a fourth of the second-year electrical engineering students were on schedule. I was in that group, and it seemed fair to me. Going to a tough school and taking a course with a notoriously high failure rate is a big risk. Those who succeed are forced to thrive inside an “ecosystem of risk” where super-achievement is the norm. Talk about survival of the fittest!

Just as my disillusionment with electrical engineering was starting to take hold, I was given a handout for the Electronic Field Analysis exam that was so poorly copied that I couldn’t make out the words. When the proctor giving the exam was unable to tell me what it said, I wrote, “I quit” on the exam and walked out.

My decision may have helped the school manage its ratios, but it left me at a crossroads. If I wasn’t going to major in electrical engineering, what would I major in? My most interesting ideas for majors were architecture, at one extreme, and physics, at the other.

Upon reflection, I realized that getting a job in either one might not be for me, but since I was working three jobs—running a dormitory, grading calculus tests, and teaching a physics lab in significant digits—I thought the demanding curriculum of physics might be overwhelming. So I settled on a pragmatic compromise: industrial engineering. I reasoned that it would provide me with a good understanding of engineering, along with knowledge of an emerging discipline some were calling efficiency engineering. It would be a useful education that would offer me a career, if necessary, and a good education in science regardless. It was a new career field at the time and one that I grew to love.

Just before my graduation with an engineering degree, the counselors in the guidance office took it upon themselves to give me a belated career aptitude test. The results were shocking! The test revealed that I was actually best suited to a career in advertising, law, accounting, or personnel. One table quantified my aptitude with percentage points. Apparently, I demonstrated only a 16 percent aptitude as an engineer, but a promising 29 percent aptitude as a mortician! All the science careers were far outranked by my untapped potential to be a YMCA physical director—a tragic case of missed opportunity!

During that last year at Tech, I almost considered a career change to the theater. I had been very active in the drama club, working behind the scenes in productions and onstage in performances.

The DramaTech stage was a theater in the round, a central stage surrounded by seats. The arrangement presents unusual challenges for the actors, who have to find the best ways to portray their characters from every angle, and for the stage crew, who have to do their work without the benefit of wings hidden from view on either side of the stage. Many actors welcome the freedom to roam the round stage with four times the scope of a traditional proscenium arch. Creative stage managers often savor the opportunity to invent clever new ways to change the set in the quasi-darkness between scenes. The overall result is a very intimate experience for the audience.

We were the best amateur theater group in Atlanta and one of the best in the United States. I played a general in Robert Sherwood’s play The Road to Rome. MGM had adapted the play in 1955 as a star vehicle for Esther Williams, the popular competitive swimmer turned actress. The newly dubbed Jupiter’s Darling was transformed into a romantic musical set in ancient Rome—with a lot of swimming.

At our dress rehearsal, one of the other generals spoke his lines with an elaborate flourish of his Roman military cape. It caught the hilt of a large steel sword lying on the table beside me and spun the sword my way. Alarmed by its proximity to my pelvis, I recoiled in horror. Everyone burst out laughing.

While I was there, DramaTech’s director was Mary Nell Ivey. To her great credit, she courageously broke segregation laws to invite the drama club from the all-black Atlanta University to watch the dress rehearsal for our plays. Although a racially integrated audience was illegal at the time, the whole cast stood by her decision and welcomed the other club. In another play, I had the part of a black servant named Mose, who seemed like a stereotype by today’s standards. Our intentions may have been good, but I shudder to think how my part must’ve gone over with that audience.

In summer stock in Chastain Park in my last year at Georgia Tech, I was in the chorus in South Pacific and played a small role in Kismet. The producer invited me back for the next season. It would have meant abandoning my plans to look for work in engineering and pursuing a career in the theater instead. I loved it enough to make that a very tempting offer.

When I asked the advice of one of the professional actors (“Recruited from the New York stage!”) appearing in our production, his advice was chilling: “Don’t go into the theater unless you can’t help yourself.”

I was broke and ambitious. My best way ahead was to pursue the promise of money and success. Theater was clearly not a good fit! It was one of the few times I walked away from the riskiest path. But, as with any lost love, I’ll always wonder what might have been.

As it turned out, my extracurricular activities—in theater and writing—would prove to be extremely helpful in my future business activities, especially investment banking. I had no thought of graduate school at the time, but in retrospect, my writing activities were probably appealing to the Harvard MBA admissions staff.

Using my student publication credentials to meet Marian McKnight, Miss America 1957, and to give her copies of The Rambler. What I really wanted was to date her!

Initially, I honed my writing skills by crafting a winning petition to receive academic credit for my quarters in DramaTech instead of machine shop and welding lab—an early sign of good salesmanship.

Like DramaTech, student publications were an important part of my college experience. I enjoyed the work and needed the money. I wrote for the humor magazine, The Yellow Jacket (which later was banned from campus for bawdy humor) and for the engineering magazine (which paid well for articles). Then I became the managing editor of The Rambler, a magazine I helped found (which immediately was ranked as one of the best in the country).

I had blundered into the Georgia Tech Industrial Engineering School, and although I’d gotten off to a bad start in electrical engineering, the change turned out to be a great choice. I was on the dean’s list for my last two years. The intensity and the breadth of my studies made my five years at Georgia Tech a transformative experience.

Almost forty years later, when I was the executive in residency for the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, they asked me to give a speech about my experience and this is what I said. I still believe every word of it:

Engineers are different from average people. Their mental capacity is greater. And their educational experience trains their minds to a higher level. We are not all geniuses. And we are not all honor students. But we have a much more than average ability to analyze and to complete projects.

How did we rise to this level? Certainly, hard work was required. But also, we were lucky. Some kids are born with limited mental potential; genetic factors or accidents limit their capabilities. Many kids are born into settings that do not foster their intellectual development. Perhaps their parents are preoccupied with other matters; perhaps there are only limited perspectives and goals in the domestic environment.

So it’s good luck to be born with strong mental potential. And to be raised in a domestic setting that engenders confidence, stimulates ambition, sets high standards, and values education. We should explicitly recognize our good luck by allocating some of our time and some of our assets in community service.

Such service could include assisting the disadvantaged, nonprofit research, educational activities, government service, supporting the arts, and supporting progressive political initiatives. The range of activities is great. And so is the need for talent. Engineers have much to bring to community service organizations (many of which lack “hard-nosed” staff).

Applying basic engineering skills to the needs of such organizations almost always will yield strong favorable results. Your time spent in such service can be much more valuable to the organization than any gifts that you could afford. The benefits to your community will be enduring. And they will be enjoyed by your family now and by your heirs in the future. You will have made the world just a little bit better. And most of you will feel a satisfaction that cannot be duplicated—not from career success, or social pleasure, or the accumulation of power. The gratification that comes from community service is special. It is potent.

An important recipient of your efforts and your gifts should be educational institutions—especially the ones utilized by you. Most college tuition fees pay less than half of the variable costs of the educational experience. Fixed costs such as buildings, land, and major equipment are big additional costs. Therefore, college students never pay even 50 percent of the costs of their schooling.

In addition, the accumulation of knowledge, skills, and processes—all of which are vital to a high-quality education—is the legacy of those who made contributions before our time. All the way back to the ancients. How do we repay these debts? Only by keeping the process going. By devoting time and resources to our educational institutions.

Of course, engineers are not the only ones who owe community obligation. Society needs help from all of its members. But engineers have more to give than most. That added capacity—to my way of thinking—heightens our duty.

While I was a student in the 1950s, I had not yet experienced the forty intervening years that allowed me to make that speech, nor had I had the time to cultivate the strong sense of community obligation I feel to this day.

Instead, I was engaged in a robust world of student activities that forever changed my life. Most notably, as my physique filled out and my social skills developed, I discovered girls. I may have been a late bloomer, but I made up for lost time with considerable dedication.

The cast parties at DramaTech were ideal places to meet girls. They also introduced me to my very first kegs of beer—but certainly not my last!

Since Tech had few female students at the time, DramaTech recruited girls from elsewhere. At first, Dean Naramore’s daughter, Nonna, seemed like a good match for me. Each time we talked, there was a palpable feeling of electricity in the air. I thought it was the magic of our connection until she was voted homecoming queen and I realized how popular she was. Apparently, her vivacious style made every conversation brimful with possibilities. Coach Ivey’s daughter, Dana, who went on to become a noted actress, was my other crush at the time. Both went unrequited.

My dad persistently advised me to “marry a nice Jewish girl.” My mother was more ambivalent, since her mother was Jewish and her father was Catholic. It was too early for me to tell what I wanted. Despite my uncertainty, in July of 1957, I met a nice Jewish girl.

Just before my last year of college, my fraternity sent me on a bus to Milwaukee to be their delegate at the annual convention. At the first event, I was talking to the delegate from Emory when a beautiful girl named Judy Weller walked in. We both saw her at the same time and scrambled over each other to ask her out. I got to her before he did and, knowing he was going to try to weasel his way in, I booked her for every event that weekend.

Though I had no idea what my criteria for a wife might be, we were soon engaged. All I knew was that you were supposed to get out of college, get a job, get married, and have a family. It was like a checklist. If you didn’t tick off the boxes in time, you were a loser. That wasn’t for me. I was sure I was a winner, and I was determined to prove it. As soon as I got married, I ticked off that box and moved onto the next one. The fact that young people around the world are still doing exactly the same thing every day doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

When Judy came to my sister’s wedding in December with her parents, a refined, well-established couple from Wisconsin, my mother pulled me aside.

“You’re making a mistake,” my mother warned me. “I don’t know why you want to marry her. Do you? Does she really mean more to you than anyone else?”

Clearly, my mother didn’t understand the situation. As I saw it, I was ahead of the game! My plan was exceptionally efficient. I’d scheduled the wedding for the day after my graduation. That allowed me to check off “get out of college” and “get married” in less than twenty-four hours. It was like hitting two birds with one stone! With both those items behind me, I could turn my attention to the really important stuff, like building my career.

Judy and I were both too young and had no clue what we were doing. After dating only a handful of times, we met only twice more before we got married. On those few dates, I realized that, although she was intelligent and refined, she did not have the emotional style that was compatible with mine. By that time, it would’ve been embarrassing to cancel the wedding. Besides, when you’re young and your parents say, “Don’t do it!” you do it anyway.

So I graduated one day and got married the next. A month later, I was a second lieutenant in the US Army Signal Corps, attending the basic officers’ course at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

Back then, the United States had obligatory military service, which meant I had to spend the next two years in the army. The system has been much criticized, but the major problem was that the rules for serving were unfair. Defending America is a noble task. If all men and women were obliged to serve in some way, as it used to be, there would certainly be a better general appreciation for our country’s good qualities and the cost of defending them. And a lot fewer irresponsible wars.

Even though I was marked as a career candidate for the regular army, they granted my request to join the Photographic Corps. After graduating from officer candidate school, I was stationed at the Army Pictorial Center in Long Island City, New York. This gave me the incredible opportunity to fulfill my service obligations while writing and producing films for training and information.

I still didn’t fit into a system with a lot of rules and restrictions, but I did my best to perform well. And it was in the army that I learned about the all-important CYA memo. If, on any occasion, you find yourself involved in an activity that might later be criticized, it is vital to produce a preemptive cover-your-ass memo justifying your actions or inactions. I found the CYA memo to be invaluable in the army and in every stage of my life since.

The Army Pictorial Center offered to sponsor me for a graduate degree in cinematography, but the prospect of a lifetime in the military didn’t feel right. Just as I was becoming uneasy about my lack of career prospects, a fateful phone call arrived.

David Milton, a classmate from Georgia Tech, invited me to his wedding at the Harvard Chapel. “I’m getting an MBA at the business school here,” David said. “Why don’t you check it out? I think you’d like it.”

“Harvard Business School?” I said. “Never heard of it.”

“It’s the toughest business graduate school in the country,” he explained. “But if you’re accepted, your tuition and living expenses will be fully covered.” That suited my budget perfectly.

The toughest task was completing the infamous Harvard Business School admissions application form, but my previous writing experience held me in good stead. After doing well in the interview with the dean of admissions and on the Graduate Management Admission Test, I was accepted.

When I called Dad to give him the wonderful news, he didn’t understand it. “But you already have a college degree!” he said. I couldn’t help but feel deflated. Here I’d been accepted to one of the most difficult, prestigious graduate programs in the world, and he was still thinking I’d be better off getting a job with a big company. It was the only way he knew to find economic security. Our frames of reference weren’t in sync. Dad had had such disappointing life experiences. After traveling to a strange country alone as a teenaged boy, he’d struggled all his life to find his way. All he wanted for his son, all he knew to hope for, was the security he’d never had.

My immediate problem was that I was leaving the army at the end of June, but my financial aid wouldn’t start until September. In the meantime, I needed to relocate my young family to Boston. I urgently needed a job to cover those two months, but with so many colleges in the Boston area, all the summer jobs disappeared quickly.

Thinking that a straightforward manufacturing job might be open, I applied to the Gillette Razor Company and got lucky. Its chief engineer, William S. Gale, had just designed a complex machine to assemble the adjustable razor and wanted to make an industrial film about it. It was a plum job that just happened to be a perfect match for my résumé!

I got right to work, filming the production process for the new Gillette adjustable razor. When I showed him the finished product I had written, directed, and edited, my boss was so happy that he wanted me to stay on permanently.

“Why waste your time getting an MBA?” William asked me. “If you go back to school, you’re looking at two more years of penury, followed by an uncertain career path. I can offer you so much more—right here, right now.” Then he made me the best job offer I’d ever had.

My dad would’ve loved it. Gillette was a powerhouse company with great products that had been around since 1901. We didn’t know it then, but by 2005, Gillette would dominate the global razor market and sell to Proctor & Gamble for $57 billion.27 I would’ve been hard-pressed to find better security than that.

Continuing to work with William, who had turned out to be a really interesting guy, was appealing, too. We’d already had a great time together debating the economic effects of automating industrial jobs and were sure to have more stimulating conversations if I stayed.

Above all else, I could’ve ended my financial worries on the spot. It was truly tempting. But I took the much riskier course and elected penury.

My first days at Harvard Business School were a blur. We all did endless exercises in critical thinking. Those of us who hadn’t been Ivy League classics majors were given speed reading classes to help with the reams of reading material we took home every night. After proudly earning our college degrees, we were now being taught how to think and read.

In class, gamesmanship was immediately evident. The eager beavers waved their hands very early on, while the cleverer strategists waited to summarize the lesson. Classes were deliberately packed with students from diverse backgrounds in the hope of generating discussions from many perspectives.

The social spectrum was very wide and visible at a glance. The third of us who were on financial assistance showed up in our frayed corduroy jackets and scuffed penny loafers. The rest of the students were classic Harvard, many of them of legacies. They appeared in hand-tailored suits and cap-toe oxfords, driving Jaguars, Mercedes, and Porsches—none of which I had ever seen before!

My point of reference for wealth was still the judge from my hometown who elicited envious whispers for raking in $12,000 a year. Some of my brilliant young classmates would be worth $1 billion before they were forty. Their parents had long since made their fortunes, some of them many times over. They all knew successful people and understood what it took to create wealth. It was daunting to me, but it turned up the heat on my ambition.

At Harvard, most of the professors were theatrical stars. Pacing the room, scrawling on blackboards that slid dramatically up and down on tracks, and elucidating the course material with a flourish were de rigueur. The teaching method centered on case studies like those in the Harvard Business Journal. Each case was a story about a complex business situation, a slice of real life. By the time we came to class, we were expected to have analyzed the cases and be prepared to offer viable solutions.

The key to it all was the great professors. Not all of them were great; some of them were mediocre. But the great ones stayed with me for life: Sy Tilles in strategy, Wickham Skinner in manufacturing, Ted Levitt in marketing, John Lintner in economics, Walter Frese in financial accounting, and Jim Bright in innovation.

It was my great good fortune to study strategy under the brilliant professor Seymour “Sy” Tilles.

Unlike many Harvard Business School professors, Sy, a really dedicated teacher, kept long office hours, during which students could enjoy relaxed visits with him.

One of our class assignments was to formulate a personal career strategy. He had taught us to assess businesses and then to propose strategies for them. Now, we were to use the same tools on ourselves. By that time I had been exposed to Wall Street through case studies and by reading securities offering documents. It had become clear to me that it was possible to become rich quickly on Wall Street.

In my assignment, I baldly pointed to the vast sums that passed through the securities markets each day, the clear advantages of paying capital gains tax rates as compared to ordinary income tax rates, and the modest intellectual capacity of the then-average Wall Street executive. This seemed to me to be the fastest path to getting “enough” personal wealth.

“Why is getting rich so important to you, Michael?” Sy asked in one of our leisurely office visits. “Look how happy I am on a professor’s salary!”

“The only security in life is having your own money,” I told him with the absolute confidence of youth. “It’s the safest thing.” In my own way, I was adhering to my father’s philosophy of seeking security above all else. I just didn’t think that working for a corporation was the best way to create that security—not when you could do it with money alone.

Sy shook his head. “Once you get the taste of being rich, it’s never enough.”

As usual, he was right. He wisely knew that money isn’t everything. The best rewards come from doing what you love. Had I not grown to love the investment business, it would have been a disastrous choice of careers for me. Shuffling paper and money around day and night is not a fulfilling activity for discerning people. Luckily, I found ways to make my field more stimulating and useful—and I got rich, too.

Ironically, Sy ran afoul of faculty politics the following year, and his contract to teach was not renewed. Along with friends, he built the very successful Boston Consulting Group, which allowed him to retire early and teach business courses for executives at Northeastern University at night. Sy proved that passion and talent can succeed along a variety of paths. To me, he did it all.

Unfortunately, the later students at Harvard Business School didn’t have the benefit of his wisdom, but for those who sought wisdom, there were always enough stars on the faculty to illuminate the way.

Both Theodore Levitt and C. Wickham Skinner were great influences on my development in those years.

Ted’s colorful presentations and original thinking made his marketing classes riveting. His instruction about product quality, customer acceptance, and product differentiation became central to my investment analyses. After I became a stockbroker, he became my client and sent many referrals my way. Even today, sixty years later, his business articles are in demand.

A pioneer in manufacturing strategies, Wick Skinner is a dear friend to this day. His ideas about planning for facilities that complement each other and work collectively toward business objectives were cutting-edge. Yet as a person, he is very warm and low-key. Like Sy, Wick too retired early. From his beautiful home in Maine, he woodworks, sails, and mounts public assaults on the inadequacy of certain current manufacturing experts.

John Lintner was great at questioning conventional economics doctrine. He often gleefully proclaimed, “Let’s peel back the abdomen and examine the viscera.” I came to learn economics through the forces driving the numbers, rather than from academic theories about how the numbers varied. It was a lasting lesson.

John’s teachings greatly complemented those of Walter Frese, who was a great force in financial accounting policy. His favorite proclamation was “financial reporting must be useful.” It’s a lesson still not learned by today’s experts.

The skills I learned from Frese led me to imagine the folly of capitalizing future lease payments as expenses, when they might be under market, and thus, valuable assets, or charging stock options as compensation expense when they represent a potential dilution of per share earnings and not viewing rents as financial leverage when retailers’ earnings can be very volatile due to the high proportion of fixed rents to earnings.

What John and Walt taught us forever changed the way I assessed economic and financial data. No longer was the data mere numbers, but it was an indication of decisions and actions made by real people.

For the first time, I began to seek out data that reflected the underlying actions and the effects of those actions—in both economics and in financial reporting. For my term paper in their courses, I submitted a combination report, which was well received by both professors. Rereading it now, I can see the basis for the framework I have used to good effect for sixty years.

Jim Bright taught a small class in technological innovation. It was amazing. Thanks to Jim, we had the opportunity to meet such pioneers as Edwin Land, who was the inventor of Polaroid photography and an expert in light theory. We got an early look at the coming revolution in manufacturing, which was then starting in Japan.

Innovation, Jim taught us, is a function of time. “Think about how travel speeds have accelerated over time—from walking, to horses, to cars, to planes, to rockets, to power pulses,” Jim said. “Such patterns exist in most activities. Look for the inflection point where change accelerates and becomes disruptive to the establishment order.” It was a lesson to keep for all time.

Trying to absorb all the great lessons from the great teachers was like drinking from a fire hose. The thrill rekindled my thoughts of becoming a teacher. Harvard had offered me the option of staying to teach after graduation, along with a fellowship that would finance my doctorate.

On my way home one night, thinking about inflection points for change, I pictured a future where I would be scrawling on the blackboard for a class full of students who listened with the same rapt attention that I’d just given Jim. How fulfilling it must be to share knowledge with eager minds in that way!

Judy and I were invited to cocktails and dinner with our neighbor, a teacher in the Harvard College English Department, and one of his colleagues. I expected a scholarly debate about education, research, the quest for Truth, but all I heard was grumbling about faculty politics and the constant, grueling search for grant money. This raised doubts in my mind about the prospect of a teaching career.

At about the same time, John Bloomberg, one of my classmates, asked if I was interested in a part-time job writing stock research reports for a small Boston brokerage firm, since my part-time job writing technical manuals for machine manufacturers didn’t pay very well. John recommended me as his replacement while he took another job. The pay was an improvement and I’m still proud of my first report on Alterman Foods, but my research soon confirmed for me that the “big money” lay in the sales commissions one could earn as a stockbroker, not in the hourly wage of a research analyst.

Goodbye, academia! Hello, Wall Street!

I decided to gamble on becoming a commissioned stockbroker for the summer of 1961—no matter that I had neither experience nor clients.

In June 1961, I joined Burbank & Co., which proudly advertised itself as a member of the Boston Stock Exchange. Basically, they sold mutual funds, a fairly new product at the time. As additional payment for their fund sales, they received brokerage business from the mutual fund management companies, which had been growing rapidly since the 1950s. They were a proud part of Boston’s grand heritage in finance, which began with the joint venturing of merchant ship cargos emanating from its busy port. This same phenomenon had led to big investment industries in Amsterdam and London.

Burbank gave me marketing materials, business cards, and the right to call on anyone who might do business with me. I studied the materials carefully, selecting the funds that had the best investment records, the more balanced portfolios, and the most prestigious boards of directors. I then drove my car to all the industrial parks in Boston, stopping at nice-looking manufacturing businesses where the owner’s parking place held an expensive car. Usually, his name (it was never hers) was on his parking place, which always was near the front door. Full of feigned but impeccable confidence, I would announce myself to the receptionist as having some investment ideas for the owner, and I usually got in to see him.

The initial commissions on mutual funds were so generous, it wasn’t necessary to make a sale on the majority of sales calls in order to make good money.

I started doing so well that I expanded my efforts by using the Yellow Pages. My strategy was to start with the Zs in the “Physician” section. I figured that the best salesmen probably didn’t need to make calls up to Z, and the other salesmen probably quit long before getting there.

Soon I was prospering, taking home $1,000 per month—a distinct improvement over my Georgia Power paycheck of sixty dollars a week!

During the school year, I kept some of my clients and supplemented that income by reviewing movies for the HBS student newspaper and editing a new student publication I founded called Career Guide. My movie reviews kept us in free movie passes, and Career Guide generated a nice side income once advertising revenue started rolling in. I even sent out invitations to guest authors whose firms were good ad prospects—just like a real publisher!

While I was holding down three jobs and supporting my family, my second year at Harvard Business School flew by. Surprisingly enough, somewhere along the way, my career strategy—which had seemed so uncertain back at Gillette—had taken shape. By the time I graduated, I knew exactly what I wanted and where to find it. I was going to go to Wall Street to make my fortune.

Unfortunately, time had done nothing to improve my marriage to Judy. Within three months, we both knew it wasn’t going to work and had started talking about divorce. In the fifties, divorce was a scandal and a sign of failure. A lot of miserable couples soldiered on as if there were some virtue in refusing to correct a mistake and even compounding it by raising the next generation of children in an unhappy home.

Our only chance, as I saw it, was to quietly get an annulment. Eventually the news would leak out, but maybe it wouldn’t damage my prospects and we could both remarry without the stigma of divorce. It seemed like our best hope of a solution—until she got pregnant and I felt trapped. Cutting your losses a few months into a marriage was one thing, but abandoning a wife and child was out of the question.

Our son Mark was born a year after our marriage, while we were scraping by in New York City on army pay. Neither of us had received any training or advice about parenting, so we were relatively inept at helping Mark cope with asthma and ADHD. I cringe to remember spanking him as an infant, but somehow his excellent qualities prevailed.

In a few years, after his brother, Andrew, was born, I was able to send Mark to excellent private schools. Gradually less plagued by asthma and hyperactivity, he was better able to demonstrate his intelligence. We started doing math problems in our heads together for fun, and we threw a lot of baseballs. As he grew older, I took him on skiing vacations. Soon he was passing me on the slopes.

All in all I was married to Judy for thirteen years, but I was home very little and fooled around a lot. It was never much of a marriage, and our sons were the worse for it. This is the situation I most regret.

To my great delight, after I left New York City for Malibu, my sons ended up moving to the West Coast, too! I’m pleased to say we got to know and enjoy each other much better as adults.

When Mark joined me in California, he attended Pitzer College, then earned an MBA from UCLA. With a mutual interest in finance, we enjoyed many years of close interaction. This was in stark contrast to his high school years, during which time we were estranged.

One of my regrets was that Mark had the bad luck of being born during the worst moments of my marriage to his mother. I always wished I could’ve made his early life more pleasant. We were living in New York City at the time, not getting along and trying to survive on army pay that didn’t even cover the cost of food for the entire month. It created an enormous amount of stress. For the first four years of Mark’s life, we were living lean and barely coping.

Following his lead, his sons, Christopher and Ric, became avid skiers and snowboarders, as well as all-star Little League baseball players. When Mark’s marriage to their mother ended, he and his sons stayed in Los Angeles. It has given me a second opportunity to be the parent I would’ve wanted to be.

After some experience in big companies, Mark demonstrated his entrepreneurial savvy by joining two very promising internet start-up companies. When both of them were sold, Mark became a multimillionaire.

Mark has been successful in athleticism and business, as well as in parenting his sons. They are bright and charming. Their ambition is tempered by good personal values. He works now partnering with small businesses while he pursues a mellow lifestyle.

Andrew came into this world just as our family fortunes and domestic tranquility were on the rise. Although we were dead broke when he arrived, we owned a nice home within the year. In three years, we lived in a big house with domestic staff. Andrew was riding in the back seat of our limousine before his legs were long enough to reach the floor! Our beautiful ski house in Killington, Vermont, was built when he was just five years old—about the time most children start forming the memories they’ll retain as adults. Andrew’s early life included winter and summer vacations in Vermont and then in Snowbird, Utah. I’m glad to say that he lived a charmed life.

But then, he was only seven years old when I left.

Happily, his mother remarried and made a very good home for the boys with her new husband in New York City, just a few blocks from where I lived. Andrew enrolled in the prestigious Dalton School, where he mingled with kids from elite families. Dalton paved the way for him to attend Skidmore College, where he got a liberal education and took on a high-society demeanor.

After college, Andrew made a name for himself in advertising on Madison Avenue. Soon he was all over town in his blue blazer, attending disco openings, fund-raisers, and high-profile events. Andrew began accompanying us on ski trips as well, and soon became comfortable on the high-speed slopes himself. He summered in St. Moritz. From my point of view, it seemed as if Andrew had found his niche in life. And then he shocked me!

Out of the blue one day, he announced, “I want to move to LA and go into the movie business.”

A friend introduced him to an executive at 20th Century Fox, which had just begun to build a new TV network to challenge NBC, CBS, and ABC. Andrew was hired in production and did well. This led to increasingly more responsible jobs at other studios. Then he got caught in a layoff, which led him to start his own business, Flashpoint Entertainment. His partner, Andy Peltz, had been a close friend since high school. When Andy Peltz decided to work more closely with his dad, the legendary investor Nelson Peltz, Flashpoint became 100 percent Andrew’s. Then another of Andrew’s high school friends, Doug Liman, partnered with him on a really cool project that would make his name in Hollywood and around the world.

Andrew had always enjoyed the spy novels of Robert Ludlum. The Bourne Identity had been made into a four-hour television movie in 1988, but Andrew knew it would make an exciting film. He and Doug initiated the process with the Ludlum estate, and they remain coproducers of all the films. Five films in the series have been completed, four starring Matt Damon and one starring Jeremy Renner. Every one of the films has been a box office winner.

This success helped Andrew buy the film rights for Sara Gruen’s beloved book Water for Elephants. The film he produced was nominated for thirteen awards, winning the People’s Choice Award, Satellite Award, and Teen Choice Award. Today Andrew spends most of his time managing talented scriptwriters who have written and produced excellent TV and film projects.

His wife, Ali, is a noted pediatric ear surgeon, as well as a strong athlete. When the four of us vacation in the spectacular Dolomites, Ali snowshoes up the mountain with our dogs to join us for lunch. No easy feat! We share unforgettable memories of the time there together, eating delicious pasta and enjoying what a hit the dogs always are with the other lunch diners. The birth of their adorable daughter, Lucy, is already bringing us wonderful new memories to share.