CHAPTER ONE

The Making of an Entrepreneur

From Queens to Cambridge

1940–1963

ARE PEOPLE really captains of their own fate? Or does fate cast a mold for us, one that we can modify a bit, add color and polish to, but never completely reshape?

I suspect that who I am, the essence of myself, was at least partially formed by forces beyond my control. And I suspect that my journey into the business of starting and acquiring airlines was at least partially determined by the road map that heredity and my parents inadvertently created for me.

Both of my parents arrived on American shores from Spain, after taking separate voyages one month apart. They traveled across the Atlantic in steerage, over rough seas, eating little, sleeping in dorm-style bunks, and using a hole in the floor as a toilet.

My mother, Anita Trinidad Paulina Mateos Gandara, arrived at Ellis Island in June 1920. She was eight years old and made the crossing with her mother and six-year-old brother, hoping to reunite with her father, who had settled in West Orange, New Jersey, two years earlier.

My father, Olegario Manuel Lorenzo y Nuñez, was seventeen years old when he crossed over. He had made the trip a month earlier, in May, accompanied by an uncle and a cousin, and soon the three of them found an apartment in Manhattan. Coincidentally, my father’s passage was sponsored by my mother’s family. Despite this early connection, because of the age difference, my parents never met until after they had both arrived in the new country.

Their journeys—uncomfortable, uncertain, yet hopeful and not a little daring—began in the rural northwestern Spanish province of Galicia. Life was hard in Galicia in 1920; it is still a rugged life today. The wet and cool climate, combined with the mountainous terrain, has always made farming very difficult—nothing like the sunny south of Spain. Perhaps as a result, the locals developed a hardy temperament. Galicians, known as gallegos, are considered very stubborn, very committed, and very loyal. Gallego means “dragon” in Spanish, and inside every Galician, it is said, there beats the heart of a dragon. People who know me, and who know the region and the language, have often said I have a lot of gallego in me. If this is true, then maybe I have Galicia to thank—or blame.

My parents grew up in the impoverished village of Caldelas de Tuy, right on the Portuguese border and the Minho River. In the early 1900s, Caldelas was known for its hot springs and baths, and its hotels catered to out-of-towners seeking mineral treatments prescribed by their doctors. My mother’s father first came to Caldelas for such treatments from the similarly impoverished Estremadura region; he never left. He had had some early entrepreneurial success in the chocolate business and later studied accounting. But after the voyage to America, he never managed to transfer those skills to comparable employment in the new country and worked as a laborer. Nevertheless, he began his adult life as an entrepreneur.

My father came from a rural peasant family of fisherman and farmers, and they all struggled from catch to crop. They were never hungry, but they were never quite full, either, and nothing was easy. As a young man, my father was no stranger to hard work, but he dreamed of a land where all his hard work might be rewarded. He was a very dashing guy, a conqueror with an entrepreneurial soul that was destined to find its home in America.

My father made a clean break when he left Spain. By changing his birth date in the local church record, he made himself just short of military age and was therefore allowed to leave the country. He rarely talked about his past or his homeland once he arrived in America. As a child, I don’t remember my father or mother ever trying to instill a sense of family history or cultural pride in any of their children. And so I grew up thinking that Spain was a poverty-stricken place, lacking in economic security and comforts—although of course those were the difficult Franco years after the revolution, and I’m sure that colored my parents’ thinking. Over time, I’ve replaced those images of Spain with a more up-to-date, certainly truer picture and have developed a tremendous respect for the country and its people. I return at every opportunity, and I am continually charmed by the sensitivities and ambitions of the people there and embrace the culture of the region with the pride of a native.

In the early 1920s, my father began calling himself Larry. He found work waiting tables at places like the Williams Club and the Princeton Club. At night, he played saxophone in the speakeasies and clubs that thrived during the Prohibition years. He was good-looking, with a thick head of hair he would keep throughout his life, and he was always careful about his appearance. He was not tall or otherwise imposing, but he cut a memorable figure. Despite his fearless sense of adventure and sometimes swashbuckling demeanor, he was somewhat shy.

My mother, who went by the name Ana once she arrived in America, settled with her family in New Jersey near her father’s job at the Edison laboratory. When the laboratory closed in 1923, the family moved to an apartment on East 43rd Street, the same building where my father and his family had an apartment, two flights up. The closure of that Edison laboratory is probably the reason that I grew up in New York. Had it remained open, my mother’s family certainly would never have moved to the city.

By the time my mother was sixteen, she was waiting tables at the Biltmore Hotel and had become a beautiful young woman. She had long brown hair and fine features; in the photos I’ve seen of her in her youth, she seemed to favor the smart fashions of the day. She was also ambitious and was going to school to become a beautician. After she passed away, we found paperwork from a manicurists’ school she had enrolled in when she was fourteen and a certificate from that same school when she graduated at the age of sixteen. People started really young then and displayed their entrepreneurial leaning early.

My father, nine years her senior, began to take notice. He was very proper in his pursuit but also very persistent. He wrote my mother a note, dated January 25, 1928, in which he stated his intentions in formal English: “I have always been very interested in you and would like to speak with you,” he declared in his finest handwriting. A week later, he wrote again to state that he was “waiting patiently” for a reply.

My mother, who kept both letters, showed the correspondence to her father, who wasn’t pleased. The nine-year age difference troubled him, even though he and his wife, my grandmother, were also separated by a nine-year age gap. But Mom was taken by Dad’s dashing appearance and kind manner. She was hopeful that her father would soon give in, but she was not willing to go against his wishes.

My father’s gallego resolve ultimately wore my grandfather down, and my parents were allowed to pursue their courtship. They were married in the spring of 1929 at the Church of Saint Agnes, around the corner from their apartment building. Two days before their first Christmas together, my mother gave birth to a baby boy named Olegario. He was named after my father, and like his father, he became known as Larry. Six years later, she gave birth to another boy, Valentin, who, like his uncle and grandfather before him, went by the name Val.

Around the time of Val’s birth, during the Depression, my parents took their first step as American entrepreneurs and opened a beauty shop in midtown Manhattan. They had each completed their separate stints in beauty school and had saved enough money by 1937 to lease a storefront on East 34th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues. They called their shop the Larian Beauty Salon, after Larry and Ana, and with the shop’s opening the two of them began a stretch of long days and six-day weeks that would last for nearly forty years.

For immigrants who had arrived nearly penniless, they did well. At its busiest, the shop had eight people on its payroll. My father commanded the front, concentrating on the business end but also doing haircuts and permanent waves. My mother was the hands-on beautician, tending personally to her loyal customers. Both my parents worked hard and took tremendous pride in their business. They provided a service, contributed to the community, and called their own shots. Eighteen years after their uncertain voyages over the sea, they were living their American dream. And perhaps, in ways that I hadn’t given much thought to until now, their move from wage earners to business builders had, by example, cleared a path for me to follow.

My arrival in this world, on Sunday morning, May 19, 1940, was a difficult and precarious one. My mother battled through sixteen hours of labor in our apartment on East 33rd Street, with my father and a very competent midwife named Stella Tofani at her bedside. My mother’s suffering was so severe that Mrs. Tofani was ready to summon a doctor when I finally emerged with the umbilical cord twisted around my neck and the amniotic sac still clinging to my tiny body. This last detail, Mrs. Tofani declared, was a sign that I would always be shielded from bad luck. I was born at home rather than in a hospital because my mother was concerned about a couple of widely publicized cases of misidentified children at hospitals.

I was baptized Francisco Anthony Lorenzo, but everyone called me Paquito. Paco is a fairly common Spanish nickname for Francisco. The added diminutive translated to “little Paco.” Eventually, it was shortened to Quito until I finally outgrew that in my teens and settled into Francisco and later Frank.

Within a year of my birth, my parents gave up their crowded two-bedroom, $45-a-month apartment and moved with their three boys to a new two-story brick house they had built on a double lot on Dieterle Crescent in the Queens neighborhood of Rego Park. The house cost $16,000 ($338,000 in 2024 dollars), which was a lot of money in 1941, and they took out a mortgage for $4,000 (equivalent to roughly $84,000 in 2024). My parents were not comfortable living in debt, so they rushed to pay off their loan as quickly as possible. “At that time,” my mother recalled, “until we had paid off our mortgage, we couldn’t sleep well.” They paid off the loan in two years. My mother continued to live in that house until she suffered a bad stroke and passed away in 2008. Maybe my parents’ feelings rubbed off on me, since I hold a similar attitude toward personal debt.

My mother with midwife Mrs. Tofani, and me as infant at our Rego Park home (1940).

Our house was directly beneath an approach pattern to LaGuardia Airport, which had opened in 1938. The planes never bothered me. They were just there, like the furniture. My father used to stand outside, and when a plane flew overhead, he would smile and shout, “What noise?” I still have childhood memories of being in our backyard, watching the planes pass overhead, and imagining long flights to exotic destinations.

We lived comfortably, and my parents were careful with their money, so there was always enough for piano lessons, baseball gloves, decent clothes, and family vacations. Looking back, though, I realize that my parents were stricter with money than was probably necessary, but that was just the way things were back then, particularly among immigrant families and through the Depression. Business was good at the beauty parlor. The war economy meant that women were joining the workforce in droves, and they wanted to look good for their job interviews and for nights on the town after work—all trends that my parents foresaw.

The high volume of customers led to a continual debate between my parents about prices: my mother wanted to raise them in order to increase the business’s modest profits and modernize the shop, while my father was concerned about scaring off their loyal patrons. Over time, they settled on a middle ground, raising prices a little and modernizing a little. There were many times in my airline days when I was seated across a conference table debating fares with my colleagues and my thoughts would wander back to these kitchen-table discussions between Mom and Dad.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have an after-school, weekend, or summer job. I liked putting in a full day’s work and doing my job well. Really. I also liked making money, saving it, and watching it grow. My mother remembered that when I was a small boy, around ten or eleven years old, I would loan money from my piggy bank to my older brothers, who never seemed to have enough.

Often, entrepreneurs not only have role models like my parents but also start young. In fact, I hit on one of my first entrepreneurial schemes in the summer of 1952 with my brother Val. There was a wave of postwar home building in our neighborhood, and we quickly noticed that there were a lot of thirsty construction workers toiling in the hot sun. We loaded up my little red wagon with ten-cent sodas at the Woodhaven Boulevard A&P and carted our inventory to home-building sites in the area, selling those sodas for a quarter apiece. Never again in my business career would I enjoy such substantial profit margins!

As I grew up, my interests expanded to include baseball, photography, and collecting trading cards. Many nice-weather Sunday mornings were spent ditching Mass with my brothers and picking up a game of baseball in the schoolyard with some of the other neighborhood kids. We made a funny picture, I’m sure, all of us dressed in starched white shirts and pressed pants, careful not to slide or dive for a ball in our good clothes. Of course, with everyone dressed for church, no one was at a significant disadvantage.

It didn’t take much to keep me out of church, despite my parents’ best efforts to keep me in the fold. I was raised a Roman Catholic, but beyond the benchmark rituals of baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation, my church attendance fell off after I went to high school. I also was never a great fan of the formality of my religion or its constraints. However, my parentally instilled work ethic took hold early and, I like to think, never left.

My interest in photography began when I was very young, and it remains a hobby today. It also helped me launch another of my youthful enterprises. When I was around thirteen, I used some of my savings to buy a secondhand Argus C3 camera, one of the first 35mm cameras with a coupled range finder. Before long, I even set up a darkroom under the basement stairs in our house. One time I persuaded my friend Albert Wertheim and his parents to let me take pictures of his bar mitzvah. I did the job on spec, and after learning that everyone was pleased with the results, I presented the Wertheims with a bill for around $60, which wasn’t peanuts. I sweated over whether Albert’s parents would agree to pay a kid so much money for the photos. But they paid, although I heard a comment or two about the fact that I was not very shy about billing.

Like my brothers before me, I pitched in at the beauty parlor on occasional Saturdays. Initially, my job was to use a special magnet to remove pins from the hair of ladies who had had a finger wave, which was very popular in those days. But I soon talked myself into a promotion and wound up working at the cash register and running the front desk. I was never crazy about working at the shop and remember marveling at my father’s patience with the women he occasionally described as “squawking hens.”

I was actually a pretty good student, even if I sometimes joined a few friends in skipping school to spend the day in Times Square. At Stephen A. Halsey Junior High School, I was placed in a so-called special progress group, which compressed the seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade curricula into two years and put me a full school year ahead of my peers. I went on to Forest Hills High School, where I managed to make the honor society, then called Arista, nearly every term—and still found time for baseball, after-school jobs, and my share of goofing off.

Perhaps my most abiding interest in those years was airlines. I was fascinated by them. Maybe it had to do with the proximity of our house to LaGuardia. I followed news of the airline industry the way other kids looked at box scores (although I kept up with those, too). I sent away for the annual reports of some of the commercial aviation giants and even used some of the savings from my after-school jobs to purchase stock in Trans World Airlines, better known as TWA—destined to be my first employer out of business school.

Despite my intense interest in commercial flight, I never actually flew in an airplane until I was fifteen. During the summer of 1955, my parents decided we would all fly to Europe to visit my brother Val, who was stationed in Germany with the army. After persuading my parents to let me make the travel plans, I completed several after-school treks to LaGuardia, where I could discuss the details of the trip with the ticket agents there. I had very definite opinions about the various airlines when I was a kid. I had decided that TWA was my favorite (largely, I suspect, because I had heard so much about Howard Hughes, who controlled TWA then), so I planned the entire trip around TWA schedules. I could have used the phone, but it was more exciting to go out to the airport, and ticket agents were one of the main ways you purchased passage in those days.

That first flight from LaGuardia, on August 7, 1955, remains a vivid memory. I can still picture the long walk we made out of the terminal, stepping past a fence and onto the tarmac, climbing the stairs, and boarding one of TWA’s Lockheed L-049 Constellation propeller airplanes. I was struck by its splendor. My heart raced.

I sat on the aisle, snapped pictures of everything, and even took notes. I wanted to remember it all. I was also amazed at the incredibly short interval between sunset and sunrise: when you’re traveling east, especially in the summer, the sun sets on one side of the plane and quickly rises on the other. I hopped back and forth between windows, astonished at the spectacle. The engine noise, which didn’t bother me at all when we were up in the air, buzzed in my ears for hours after landing. One thing I thought was very curious was the fire coming out the sides of the piston engines. I found it a bit scary until it was explained to me.

The first leg of our trip took us to Gander, Newfoundland, for a fuel stop. In those days, aircraft usually couldn’t make it across the Atlantic without refueling. Then it was on to London for a few days. Our next flight was to Frankfurt, where we stayed a day and then took the train to Idar-Oberstein, near the French border, where Val was stationed. After we got there, Val went on leave and accompanied us to Amsterdam, which I found a most interesting city. One evening when our parents were briefly not with us, my brother showed me a bar where women were sitting in the front—on display, so to speak—a very new concept for a fifteen-year-old. After my brother went back to his base, we traveled on to Zurich, Rome, Capri, Madrid, and Galicia before flying home out of Lisbon.

I had booked us into first-class hotels at each stop on our itinerary: the Frankfurter Hof in Frankfurt, the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the Excelsior in Rome, and the Castellana Hilton in Madrid. We also ate in all the best restaurants. Prices were reasonable in those days: business and tourist travel was still so light in postwar Europe that even the most elegant accommodations were affordable.

In Galicia, however, in my parents’ hometown, we stayed for free at the Universal Hotel, a small run-down place my parents had purchased years earlier from my mother’s aunt, who was retiring without an heir. It had been a popular resort at the turn of the century, but now it was losing money (and would continue to do so until my parents sold it, for very little, in the 1970s). There was some sadness to this homecoming. My parents enjoyed seeing old friends and family, but I think my father finally recognized that this was a world he had left for good. I enjoyed meeting a few relatives—aunts, uncles, and cousins— and in the process I got a feel for the life and rugged culture of Galicia. I have returned many times since.

When we got back, I framed the commemorative certificate that TWA issued to overseas travelers at the time, which proclaimed that “Francisco Lorenzo hath flown the Aerial Course by TWA Skyliner over Oceanus Atlanticus.” The framed certificate remained on my old bedroom wall in our house in Rego Park for fifty-three years, until my mother’s passing.

I received very little guidance from my parents when it came time for college, but my father assured me that cost would not be a factor in my choice of where to go. He was a proud man, and he’d worked hard to make sure his sons had the educational opportunities that had been unavailable to him. My father also had some very firm ideas about scholarships and financial aid. I might well have qualified for some scholarships, but I never applied for any of them. In Dad’s proud mind, scholarships were like welfare. I guess times have changed.

Letters from TWA on employment when sixteen and eighteen (1956 and 1958).

If I had any career plans at all, I suppose I thought about becoming an engineer. But I also realized that I wanted a broad liberal arts education, whereas most undergraduate engineering schools demanded very narrow courses of study. So I applied to an eclectic batch of schools and finally settled on Columbia College, part of Columbia University, in New York. I still remember vividly my interview at Columbia, where I was told that the school focused on building the “whole man” (women wouldn’t be admitted until 1983) and offered a broad array of courses, including its “core” curriculum, which impressed a sixteen-year-old immigrant’s son.

But my hopes for living away from home for the first time were dashed by an on-campus housing shortage at Columbia. Entering freshmen from the New York area were required to live at home for the first year. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I found a way around this problem. A new friend from Philadelphia, Charlie Blessing, offered me the spare bed in his Hartley Hall dorm room, left vacant by a no-show student. I started camping out there informally several nights a week and finally was given the room by the dean’s office.

Gradually, as I officially settled into my room at Hartley Hall, I also settled into a routine. In addition to my studies, I busied myself with crew, although I was never better than a mediocre oarsman and was never thrilled with the long hours of training—or with training in the cold. I gave up crew after my sophomore year because I had so much else going on. I’d gotten involved in the campus radio station, WKCR, first as publicity director and later as host of my own nightly rock-and-roll show. I was also secretary and later president of the undergraduate dormitory council, the student disciplinary committee. I pledged the Sigma Chi fraternity during freshman year and eventually became vice president of our chapter.

I also found some time to attend classes and to study. Not a lot, but some. My grades were just okay. I was nowhere near the top of my class, as I had been in high school. Granted, I didn’t devote as much time to my coursework as I might have, but school had always come easily to me, and I figured I’d squeak by. There was too much else to do. I pulled mostly Bs and C pluses, with an occasional A. There were a couple of Ds in there, too, and an F in calculus—it wasn’t for me.

Chatting it up with Columbia Dean John Palfrey at a rowing team reception (1958).

The most memorable incident of my undergraduate career, however, is one I would just as soon forget. During the second half of my sophomore year, several of us became active in student government and were all helping our friends in the annual cycle of student elections. One of my closest Sigma Chi buddies, Vin Chiarello, was on the ballot for president of the student council, and a bunch of us worked on his campaign. As the election approached, we heard whispers that Vin’s opponent was involved with the guys in the computer room, who counted the ballots, in “swaying” the election. As head of the disciplinary committee, I should have been committed to blowing the whistle on them. But we foolishly chose the low road right along with them. We set up our own scheme, enabling Vin’s friends to vote twice on his behalf—and got caught.

To make it worse, because I was the ranking member of the dorm council, my behavior should have been above reproach. I was publicly embarrassed and forced to resign. I felt like I’d let down everyone at the school, even the institution itself. There was no disciplinary action taken against any of us, but the barrage of negative publicity was punishment enough. News of the election cheating even reached my parents through the New York Times.

The double-voting scandal had a profound effect on me. I vowed to never again be dishonest. While I have since suffered more than my share of difficult press, I have never again lost sleep over my own integrity. It took a teenager’s misstep to set me on a very clear path.

It may seem ironic, but during my time in college I became a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. For several summers and over a number of winter breaks, I worked as an assistant truck driver and later as a truck driver and deliveryman for Coca-Cola, operating out of the bottling plant in Astoria, Queens. I began by helping offload the trucks and making deliveries to local supermarkets, delicatessens, and bars. I started at $125 a week plus a modest commission. Later, as a driver on my own, I worked almost entirely on commission, which I enjoyed much more.

This job gave me my first taste of unions, which made an impression that lasted throughout my business career. Teamster membership was a condition of my employment, although I rapidly discovered that my best interests didn’t always coincide with the union’s. There were many ridiculous, almost arbitrary restrictions placed on our jobs, and most of them seemed to keep me from making as much money as I might have. For example, I was only allowed to handle the bottles when I was out on my route. Inside the plant, only loaders could touch the soda bottles. Some mornings, when I saw broken or empty bottles in the cases already loaded on my truck, I’d have to wait as long as fifteen minutes for a loader to replace them, delaying my departure— much to my annoyance. Naturally, the union rules were there to ensure the security of the loaders’ work.

However, I didn’t always follow the work rules to the letter. I used to spend my lunch hour visiting the stores on my route, inspecting the Coke displays, making sure they were neat and the prices clearly marked, which would help sales and me. Every now and then, someone would spot me and file a grievance, since we were not allowed to work during the lunch hour. On occasional Sundays, I’d check some of our large accounts to see how their inventory was holding up over the weekend and who might need a bigger delivery on Monday morning. This, too, was against the rules, but I kept at it because it made my job easier and more lucrative during the regular workweek. As time went on, I began to realize that these rules had been instituted for the benefit of the older, year-round driver-salesmen who were eager to see their relaxed standards of productivity maintained by seasonal hands, usually college guys hired during summer months or around Christmas, the company’s two busiest seasons.

There was continual tension between labor and management, so much so that some of the full-time guys took pleasure in effectively stealing Coke from our customers. They worked out these little schemes over the years, and they’d show them off with great pride to the temporary college kids whom they trusted, as if they were hard-earned tricks of the trade. One of their favorite scams, I learned, was to walk in the front door of a supermarket with several cases of soda on a hand truck, then wheel the merchandise right on out the back door and around again to the front. The store manager monitoring the delivery counted the cases twice, and the drivers double-billed and pocketed the extra.

I tried to empathize with the guys on my shift. I really did. They were just doing their jobs the way they were told to and looking to get away with whatever they could. I realized that the union wasn’t there to protect us seasonal kids, although we paid the same dues; it was there for the lifers, the older guys who had to lift cases all year. They didn’t need a bunch of enterprising college kids showing them up each summer and Christmas. To them, the restrictive work rules made sense. They made the job more human, more bearable.

One of my professors at Columbia was the well-respected Richard Neustadt, who went on after my college days to become dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. In my junior year, he split his time between New York and Washington, DC, where he served as an adviser to president-elect John F. Kennedy as he prepared for assuming the presidency. It was during this period that I took his fascinating course in political science and enjoyed it a great deal, despite his occasional absences. One evening, he happened to be dining with his family at the men’s faculty club, where I was waiting tables. Around the same time, there had been some new unpleasant publicity surrounding the then year-old student election scandal. This second splash of attention had caught me by surprise, and my professor assumed I was taking it hard.

“Mr. Lorenzo,” he said as I approached his table, “I see they’re still giving you a tough time. You look depressed.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “although I’m getting used to it by now.” What was really bothering me, and what I wasn’t used to, was my lack of direction beyond Columbia, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask the professor his opinion of my plans. “Actually, sir,” I allowed, “it’s more than just the campus newspaper stuff. The truth is I’m worried that this student election business will keep me out of a good graduate school.”

Neustadt assured me that this was nonsense and invited me to his office later in the week to discuss the matter further. When I took him up on his offer and restated the case against myself during our meeting, he boosted my spirits by saying, “I think you’ll do great.”

“I was wondering about Harvard Business School,” I then told him, half expecting him to take me down a notch. He asked me about my interest in Columbia’s own business school, but I explained that I had lived in New York City all my life and that in addition to its being a great school, Harvard’s location in Boston would be a good change for me.

Neustadt understood and offered to write a recommendation on my behalf. I was delighted and left his office with my heart set on Harvard, despite my mediocre grades, and buried myself in preparation for the Graduate Record Exams. Ultimately, I scored well above average on the math portion of the exams and well below average on the verbal portion, so I feared that my only strength would be Professor Neustadt’s recommendation.

However, I didn’t want to rely solely on a recommendation, even a great one, so I requested an interview at the school. But the Harvard admissions people were very reluctant to grant me one because personal interviews weren’t part of the admissions process in those days. Still, I believed that the only way I could get the university to look past my lackluster academic record was to have a face-to-face meeting. Fortunately, the admissions people agreed, and, although I had made numerous fallback plans, including joining the Marines, I was accepted to the class of 1963.

At first, I was very intimidated by Harvard and the environment at the business school. I was only twenty-one, young for any graduate school but especially for HBS. Almost all my classmates had two or three years of full-time career-oriented work experience under their belts. Quite a few still had silver spoons in their mouths, and many had gone to boarding school. They all seemed older, smarter, more sophisticated—particularly, I suppose, to a son of immigrants.

Right away, I knew that staying in the program would be one of the toughest challenges I would ever face. Professors at HBS teach by example, through the case method. Each night, we were given two or three cases to study, each detailing a particular crisis or dilemma facing the management team at a real corporation. These cases were prepared with the cooperation of the companies under review, whose executives would often visit our classes and offer analysis and insight from an insider’s perspective. Our nightly reading usually ran between thirty and fifty pages, complete with facts and statistics. We were expected to arrive in class prepared to discuss the material from all angles, although we examined most cases from the president’s viewpoint. We learned by second-guessing some of the country’s most respected economists and business leaders and used to joke that Harvard didn’t train too many middle managers, which was essentially true. It was a school for “big bosses,” and the case discussions almost always focused on what the top executive should do in a given situation.

My first class was a required course in production management, and our inaugural case was an analysis of the way in which a company called Dominion Engineering had managed a specific crisis. Dominion Engineering was a well-known example at Harvard at the time, and its lead-off spot in the first-term curriculum no doubt contributed to its legendary status. I had worked through most of the material the night before. Sort of. Truth is, I didn’t quite follow it and thought I could wing it through a brief discussion in the unlikely event I was called on. With ninety or so people in the class, I thought my chances of escaping the professor’s notice were pretty good.

My production professor was a young guy named Jim McKenney, and he must have had a sixth sense for students like me. Jim went on to become Harvard’s guru on information and data processing and one of the country’s leading experts on computer systems, but at the time he was just starting out. (Years later, I asked him to join the board of Texas Air Corporation’s data processing subsidiary.) He must have seen me nervously shifting in my seat and recognized it as a sign of unpreparedness. Of course, he called on me immediately. They do that at Harvard, I quickly learned.

“Mr. Lorenzo,” the professor said, “what do you think about the way the president attacked this problem?”

I stammered something incoherent, certain the room was about to erupt in derisive laughter. Of course, as the term wore on, a great many of my colleagues uttered similarly incoherent responses to comparable questions, but I was the first guy in our section to suffer such indignity. Although I wouldn’t be the last, I didn’t appreciate it.

It was an unnerving experience, to be caught unprepared like that in my very first class, and I left the room feeling shaken. How could I compete with these whiz kids? Who was I trying to fool? By the second day of classes, I decided Harvard wasn’t for me. I didn’t think I could hack it, and it made perfect sense to cut my losses while they were still short.

I went to see the dean of students and told him that I wanted to drop out and likely enlist in the Marines. I told him that I was in over my head. He listened with patience and compassion and then laid out my options, just as he must have done for hundreds of overwhelmed students before me. I could pick up and go immediately, he said, or I could request a leave of absence. The leave was the only way to secure a space for me at the school in the future should I elect to return. The only requirement in granting a leave, the dean said, was that I visit the school’s psychological counselor.

I hadn’t thought things through that far. I just wanted out. But I figured it was silly to have struggled as I had to gain admission to an MBA program like Harvard’s, only to run away from it after a single day. I decided to keep my options open and visit the school’s resident counselor, who told me that to be satisfactorily discharged by him for a leave of absence, I would have to remain for two weeks of classes in order to get a full picture of the school.

So I stayed, and the psychologist held my hand through the intimidating first couple of weeks. By the second week, I was more comfortable in my classes and decided to stay. I have been forever grateful to the school for cleverly protracting my leave-taking and getting me to give the program and myself a second chance.

Harvard Business School divided its students into seven sections, each with around ninety students. All my first-year classes were with the same group of men, in section G. (Women gained entrance to HBS in my second year.) We studied together, ate together, and roomed together. In the second year, we all went our separate ways in a variety of elective courses. Once I got to know my classmates, I realized that my initial doubts and fears were epidemic: these guys shared the same worries, and none of them was as perfect as I’d thought. Still, many went on to significant accomplishments—Reuben Mark as the head of Colgate-Palmolive, Vernon Loucks as the head of Baxter Travenol, Bill Agee as the head of Bendix, and so on.

There was also my very good friend Jack Heinz, who went into politics and became a US senator from Pennsylvania. He died, very sadly, in an aviation accident in 1991. Jack and I spent a lot of time together and remained friends for nearly thirty years. We even had plans to build houses on neighboring lots in Sun Valley, Idaho, a project that was organized by Jack.

Between my first and second years at HBS, I took a summer job as a financial analyst for Kaiser Aluminum in Oakland, California. My first assignment was to evaluate whether Kaiser should lease or buy its company cars. I was also asked to study whether it made economic sense for it to continue in the production of certain types of aluminum.

It was a terrific summer and the beginning of a long love affair with the Bay Area. It was also my first sweet taste of the white-collar lifestyle and its attendant perks: a good salary, a modest expense account, and shared use of a company car. These, I learned, were all things I could get used to.

The most valuable lesson I learned that summer, however, was that I was bored by aluminum. I enjoyed my job, but the appeal of the company’s product quickly wore thin, and I promised myself that the first real job I took after graduate school would be with a company whose products I could get excited about. I wasn’t totally sure what that would be, but I knew that aluminum just didn’t turn me on—except when it became part of a plane.

The only major airline to recruit on campus in 1963 was TWA. The company was looking for a couple of business-school graduates to help swell the ranks in finance and marketing. Unfortunately, the recruiters weren’t looking for me. Or if they were, they didn’t recognize it at first. I had an apparently successful initial interview on campus, then a round of follow-up interviews at TWA headquarters in New York, after which I thought I had a good shot at the job.

TWA was going through an unusual period at the time. Control had been wrested from Howard Hughes after a protracted legal battle, and the new president, Charles Tillinghast, and most of the senior management were still fairly new to the company. Many of them had never worked in the airline industry prior to their appointments. I made the rounds of these freshly minted airline executives, and I took every opportunity to impress them with my working knowledge of the company and its problems. I also volunteered a few suggestions while I was at it. I think I knew more about TWA than some of these executives, and I learned later that I probably rubbed a few of them the wrong way—enough, anyway, to turn me down.

My style in those days was to say whatever was on my mind. I usually never thought about the consequences. If I had an opinion, I gave voice to it, even if I was a little abrupt. My style hasn’t changed all that much over the years, although now I think I can better anticipate the fallout.

A few weeks after my New York interviews, I received a letter from the controller, Pat O’Crowley, stating that TWA had no suitable openings for me at that time. He thanked me for my interest and wished me luck in my job search. I couldn’t understand the rejection and wouldn’t accept it. I was clearly qualified for TWA’s rookie-level analyst job, and I knew that the starting salary wasn’t competitive enough to attract more than a handful of other applicants from Harvard. So I sent a letter back, politely expressing my disappointment and asking that my application be reconsidered. In the letter, I told O’Crowley that the company was making a mistake by not hiring me and that I would make a great addition to the staff. I had nothing to lose—after all, I had already been turned down.

Looking back, I realize I had a lot of chutzpah for a twenty-two-year-old kid. But a few weeks later, O’Crowley sent me a letter and offered me a job. I was thrilled, but I didn’t move too quickly to accept the position. I had some other leads to explore—or at least that’s the way I played it. Mostly, I wanted time to take a closer look at TWA, to accurately assess the company’s outlook for success and mine along with it. I was so bent on making a reasonable review of the TWA operation that I even made an unannounced visit to the company’s Kansas City hub on a return stopover from a West Coast job interview with Boeing. I walked into TWA’s main offices and asked to be shown around. Of course, no one in Kansas City had any idea who I was, but I asked them to call New York and clear it with O’Crowley’s office.

While a bit brassy, my impromptu Kansas City visit turned out to be a sound move. It helped me understand the company and supported my decision to take the job. It also gave me great respect for Kansas City’s function as an operational center and pulsebeat—a far cry from the executive offices in New York, where my job would be based. Still, the New York offices were pleasant and informal, and everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs. Despite the fact that it was a big company, with operating revenues of more than $400 million, it seemed like a small-company environment I could grow in. And it was in airlines.