Bill Price's Story

Bill Price’s Story 

In 2013, Bill wrote an article for the 50th reunion of his 1963 class at Dartmouth.  It responded to the question, “What lessons did you learn before, during, and after your years at Dartmouth?”  When Bill searched his mind for a grand, comprehensive, lesson, it occurred to him that, with few exceptions, the stages of his life had comprised distinct stories, with no unifying theme, but with several life lessons learned. 

Life’s Changes

Our family spent my childhood years in the U.S. Foreign Service.   Like the military, the Foreign Service entails postings for several years at a time in different countries.  Those changes made it difficult for Bill to keep much continuity in his life and in his elationships with others.  They made it necessary for him, at each move, to close one chapter of his life and open another and often to sever earlier relationships.  While he adapted more readily as each move occurred, he often felt that he lacked the unity and coherence that he observed in the lives of those around him.  

Most of Bill’s life lessons, he found, dated from his adult years, when he had steered the direction that life was taking him himself. But the earlier changes, those that resulted from choices our parents made, set a pattern in his life that continued into his adult years.  Those early changes forced him to confront each new environment and culture in ways he might not otherwise have done, or felt able to do, and set the stage for lessons he later learned.   

The first major change in Bill’s life was in 1942, as the United States entered World War II.  That year, our family moved from Baltimore Maryland, where they (Our parents and Pat and Bill) had spent the first two years of Bill’s life, to Santiago, Chile.  Our father, who worked for the U.S. State Department at the time, was assigned during the War to the Board of Economic Warfare at the U.S. Embassy in Santiago.  Our mother, who was born in Toronto and was a British citizen when she married our father, became a U.S. citizen so that she could accompany our father to Chile.

The next major change in Bill’s life was in 1945, when the War ended and our family returned to the United States.  Bill was then five years old.  Our family moved to our father’s parents’ home in Falls Church, Virginia, where they had moved in 1942, after my grandfather retired in from his position as Assistant Superintendent of the Rail Mail service in the Post Office Department.  Our father was reinstated to the U.S. State Department and over the next ten years, we lived in Falls Church.

Ten years later, in 1955, when Bill was in junior high school, we moved from Falls Church to Havana Cuba, where our father had been assigned to work as a Commercial Attaché at the U.S. Embassy.  Four years after that, in 1959, Bill graduated from high school in Havana and began undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.  

After graduating from Dartmouth in 1963, and spending a year travelling in Europe, Bill worked in Washington D.C. for a year as a U.S. State Department guide for student groups touring the United States.  He then enrolled at Brooklyn College in New York for graduate studies in political science.  The next summer, he worked as an intern on Wall Street and then, after a six-month interlude in Brazil, he returned to Wall Street to work for a firm that later took him to San Francisco.  He remained in San Francisco until 2002, when he began to divide his time between Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay area, Oregon, and Maui.  In his story as he recounted it to me, Bill described his memories of these stages of his life, and then he returned to the lessons he had learned along the way. 

Bethesda, Maryland, 1940 to 1942

Bill was born in Washington D.C. on July 24, 1940. At that time, our family was living with our father’s parents in a large Victorian house in Bethesda. Maryland, where our parents lived from 1936, when they married in Toronto, until 1942, when World War II began. In 1942, our grandfather retired from his position as Assistant Superintendent of the Rail Mail Service of the Post Office Department in Washington.

Santiago, Chile, 1942 to 1945

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered World War II, our father, who was working at the U.S. State Department at the time, was assigned to work for the Board of Economic Warfare at the U.S. Embassy in Santiago Chile.  We moved to Chile in early 1942, when Bill was two years old and our eldest sister Pat was four. 

Below is a photo of Pat and Bill with our mother on their arrival in Santiago.  Bill had only fragmentary memories of the three years we spent in Chile.  I remember that we travelled to Chile in a Pan American World Airlines Clipper plane.  

The Clipper was a Boeing 314 “flying boat”, with the engines mounted on the wings above the fuselage.  It was one of the first planes to fly from California to Hawaii. 

Below is a photo of the Clipper, taken in the Philippines during Pan American’s first around-the-world flight from December 1941 to January 1942.  

On January 30, 1942, the Clipper transported Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles 4,350 miles from Miami to the Pan-American emergency defence conference at Rio de Janeiro.  At that conference, all of Latin America except Argentina and Chile broke ties with the Axis powers, an event that led to my father’s work in Chile later that year.  His work involved helping governments in south and central America draft treaties restricting the export of strategic materials to the Axis powers.  

Our flight to Chile in 1942 took us first from the U.S. to Mexico, and then from country to country in Central and South America, finally flying over the Andes mountains to Santiago.  My parents gave me the Pan Am certificate from the flight, which I treasured for many years, until it was lost when my home in Oakland California was destroyed by fire in 1991.

We spent the duration of the War in Chile.  My father’s younger brother, William Fredrick Price, enlisted and served with the U.S. Army in Europe.  My father tried three times to enlist in the Navy, but was turned down each time because his work in Santiago was considered necessary for the War effort.

While in Chile, my family lived in a Tudor style home that my parents rented in Santiago, pictured below. I don’t know who owned the house.

In the photograph below, Pat and I are seated with our parents on our front lawn in Santiago.

Pat and I spent most of our days inside the enclosed yard of our home, looking out through the front gates.  There was no pool or playground, only a teeter-totter, shown below, and a swing hanging from a tree.

There was a feeling of security inside, but it was not very stimulating.    The photos above and at left are of Pat and me in our yard.

An organ grinder and street vendors passed by outside, but I don’t remember much else of the world outside the gates.

Our mother would play the piano in our living room.  She would sit down, close her eyes, andplay pieces she had learned as a child, like Debussy’s Claire de Lune.  I think it brought back fond memories for her, in spite of her later talk of the trauma she felt as a child, when she and other students gave recitals.  She wouldn’t play in front of guests; only by herself, although Pat and I were sometimes in the room when she played.        

I spent more time with Pat and my mother than with my father, who spent long hours at the Embassy.  I don’t remember much interaction between our parents.  I remember the double-breasted suits my father wore to the office, as shown in the photo below.  

My dad would throw a ball to me to teach me to catch.      None of our extended family visited us in Chile, as the War was in progress and austerity measures were in place.  

Relative to my own children’s later education, Pat’s and mine was isolated.  As we got older, we attended classes in the same pre-kindergarten school in Santiago.  We wore uniforms, but I don’t remember whether our school-mates spoke English or Spanish. 

Our Chilean maid, Juana, pictured with me at left, was our au pére.  Though not formally educated, she imparted a life-time of wisdom to us, and I have felt her influence, at times, ever since.  Pat later remembered Juana coming into our kitchen once and stabbing a knife into the table-top because her boyfriend had been unfaithful.  Juana didn’t stay over, and I don’t remember her often taking us outside our property. 

We sometimes went out with our mother but, generally, were taught that there was alien environment outside, from which we needed to be protected.  

My dad once took us on a vacation to Valparaiso Chile, 75 miles northwest of Santiago, on Chile’s Pacific coast.  The photo at left was taken there. 

At left is a photo of me during our vacation in Valparaiso.

I have some memories of our house in Chile.  There were suits of Spanish armor in the foyer, by the front staircase.  There was a land-line telephone in the house, but no radio, television, or record player.  My mom read stories to us.  Pat started to read earlier than I did.  By the time I was five, when we returned to the United States, she was going off and doing her reading on her own.

I remember Pat having her tonsils out in Chile.  The flies in the hospital made a lasting impression on me.  When Sandra was born on January 10, 1945, it was a welcome arrival, but I have no recollection of the hospital.  

Falls Church, Virginia, 1945 to 1955

When Germany surrendered to the allies on May 7, 1945, we returned from Chile to the United States.  Our return was on another Clipper plane, similar to the one that had brought us to Chile.  Again, I remember the spectacular views on our flight over the Andes Mountains.  

I don’t remember much of our move to Virginia.  When we settled in Falls Church, the War had just ended, and housing in the D.C. area was scarce.  My paternal grandparents had had sold their home in Bethesda, and bought a house at 2215 North Tuckahoe Street in Falls Church.  We moved in with them my there when we returned from Chile. 

My parents bought a Chevrolet station wagon from a dealership in Arlington.  Their ad, below, appeared in our high school year book in 1954. 

When we arrived in Falls Church, Sandra was still an infant and Pat and I were socially out of touch.  We became re-acquainted with our cousins, Barbara and Betty-Anne McNulty, who were our dad’s older sister Zola’s two daughters, and Fred’s son, Barry Hunt Price, who is in the center in the photo at left.  We mostly played with them or with each other.    

In the photo at left, taken in March 1946, the Spring after we returned, Pat and I are sitting on our front porch in Falls Church with our cousins, Barbara, Betty-Anne, and Barry.

Later, I made friends with a neighbor, Robbie Johnson.  He lived on Lee Highway, just around the corner from our home.  In the photo at left, I am with Robbie in his back yard. Sandra became friends with Robbie’s younger sister, Mitzi.

In the summer, we sometimes went to Bethany Beach in Delaware.  The photo at left was taken of Pat, Sandra, and me at Bethany in December 1946.

My younger brother, David, was born on February 16, 1948, a big occasion.  We had settled in to our grandparents’ home by then, and our grandmother, “Nana”, was able to help our mom with parenting.  I liked the fact that she could be affectionate toward David, which she hadn’t always had permission to be when Pat and I were his age in Bethesda.  She could now be more open and expressive.  My memory of that was very touching.  I compare it to the way Joan’s Aunt Nell responds to our grandchildren.

In the photo abovwe, taken in the Fall of 1950, I am with Pat, Sandra, and David, in our yard in Falls Church.

Pat and I attended Charles A. Stewart Elementary School, at 2400 North Underwood Street in Falls Church.  It was an easy walk from our home, up the hill of North Tuckahoe Street, which curved to the left and intersected with Underwood Street.  Pat and I felt like foreigners there, as we hadn’t grown up in the neighborhood and were not immediately accepted by our school mates after our return from Chile.

The photos below were taken of me in the fall of 1946, in Falls Church, when I was six years old and beginning grade 2.  

I attended Stewart School from the Spring of 1946, when I was five, and in kindergarten, until I was fifteen, and in junior high school.  I don’t remember my teachers from that period, but I have generally positive memories of school.  The teachers seemed fond of me, but chided me for being unfocused; smart, but easily distracted.  They said that I could do well if I put my mind to it.

Rheumatic Fever - 1952

When I was about 12 years old, I contracted Rheumatic Fever.  It was prevalent after World War II, when troops who had been stationed in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East brought it to America.  I spent several months recovering.  I stayed in the large bedroom at the back of the second floor of our house, where there was the most sunlight.  

The disease was traumatic for me.  It is an inflammatory infection that affects the joints and sometimes the heart, skin, and brain.  It especially affected children from ages 5 to 14, and at first, it couldn’t be treated with antibiotics.  Although penicillin had been discovered in the mid-40’s, it only began to be widely used in the late 1950’s.  The disease affected 250,000 Americans each year and until 1960, was a leading cause of death among children.  

In many cases, the disease affected valves in the heart.  Because doctors were not yet able to replace a heart valve, they recommended prolonged rest to avoid later damage to the heart.  I had a strain of the disease that settled in the limbs and went from joint to joint.  It was accompanied by excruciating pain, but did not often lead to death.  Topical oil of wintergreen and heat were applied to the affected joints. 

After weeks of being quarantined in our smallish home, I was prescribed strict bed rest with very limited physical activity. I wasn’t even allowed to walk downstairs.  I couldn’t sleep, and remember listening to country music on the radio in the sunroom, day and night, to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. 

My sleeplessness was compounded by the distress of not just the physical pain but the treatment I needed for it.  My mom would come in and rub my back, which would ease my pain and enable me to get to sleep.  I felt that she did this out of a sense of duty, and not necessarily love.  She wasn’t resentful, but was probably conflicted because my dad was jealous of the time she spent with me, and angry that he had to compete with me for her attention.  After that experience, it took me years to get over the discomfort of having someone minister to me.  It wasn’t until my relationship with Joan that I was finally able to accept such attention without a lot of anxiety. 

Every week, my mom took me to Arlington Memorial Hospital, pictured below.  My father’s cousin, Weldon Price, was a doctor there, and his nurse drew blood for a “blood sed (sedimentation) rate test” that measured the amount of inflammation still present in my body.  She had me look out the window to get my eyes and mind off the needle.  I came to accept the needle, which was held in my arm for prolonged periods, but I developed a lasting association of any blood draws with that ordeal.

On the way through the hospital, I would pass patients whose joints were inflamed or atrophied from lack of use.  I was shown bed-ridden patients whose hearts had been damaged, or who had atrophied legs and looked like prisoners at Auschwitz.  I had a profound dread that I would end up like them.

I became aware that death was a real possibility.  In my childhood imagination, I had a confrontation with God, in which I came up with a proposal that I had really thought out.  I thought, “I’ll make a deal with you.  I don’t want favoritism; just an even playing field.  I don’t want anything but to get back to being healthy and not to die.”  That was a really big deal for me.  In return, I agreed to commit the rest of my life to being deserving; to being humble, because I had gotten a break and others hadn’t.  I would lead a worthy life that would validate the gift, by the good I would do.  It was really serious, and I thought about it every single day.  I have always remembered it, and have genuinely tried to live up to my side of the bargain.

Recovery, and Junior High School - 1953 

By 1953, I was thirteen and was developing more independence.  In the photo above and at right, I am with Pat and friends of ours in Falls Church.

During those years, at recess, I had my first experience of intramural sports at school.  I felt that I wasn’t good at sports, as I had not had anyone to teach me how to play baseball.  My dad had taught me to catch and throw, but no one had taught me technique.  I remember the humiliation, when teams were chosen, of being the last to be chosen.  Later, when we lived in Cuba, I played baseball again and, by then, I had become more skilled.  By the time I had my own children, Andrew and Jonathan, I felt adequate in teaching them baseball.  

I was better at football.  I was bigger, and had begun to have some body-consciousness.  I was a fairly decent passer, but wasn’t fast enough to be a runner.  By the time I entered Stratford Junior High School, I was left halfback, the player who got the handoff from the quarterback and passed.  We never had equipment, and I was lucky I wasn’t seriously injured.  I never felt that I was one of the leaders, or the one who would choose the other players for a team.  I was one of those who waited, hoping to be chosen.  

Junior High School – 1954 to 1955

At Stratford, I met older girls.  I found them to be cliquish, catty, adolescent.  “I bet you won’t go and kiss him.”  That sort of thing.

Pat was older and had her own friends.  By the time we left Falls Church, she had graduated from elementary school and junior high school and was attending Washington and Lee (W & L) High School, pictured below.

Pat is shown at the lower left of the class photo below, from the yearbook for 1955-56, the year we left for Cuba.

While Pat was at W & L, Warren Beatty, later a well-known movie star, was captain of the football team, and once dated Pat.  He is on the right in the team photo from the 1955 W & L year book.

While in junior high school, my mom or dad would take me to the shooting range on Saturday.  The range didn’t allow anyone to shoot a gun until he had training, so I took the training.  I used the money I had earned on my paper route and bought a 22 caliber rifle, which I took to the range.  It was a kids’ class, and they treated gun safety very seriously.  Everyone had to follow the procedures and begin and cease firing on command.  I can still remember the smell of gunpowder at the range. 

The rifle practices took a fairly long time, and after them, my mom or dad, or sometimes both, took me from the gun range to the nearby White Castle restaurant, which served big hamburgers and pickles.  I was taken there alone, which was a real treat.  It wasn’t so much that it was intended to be a bonding experience as it was a matter of logistics, as the While Castle was on our way home.   

I later became a junior member of the National Rifle Association, where I earned all of my badges, including sharpshooter level, shown at left.    

Tensions at Home

There were tensions at our home in Falls Church, which I carried with me during the day.  When I was fourteen and fifteen, my siblings and I travelled in the back seat of our car in the afternoon, when my mom drove to pick up my dad at the Executive Building, pictured below.  I remember the sound of our crossing the bridge each afternoon from Falls Church, the smells of the oil tanks from the old Navy Yard, the occasional smell of sulfur, and the yeasty, bready smell from the old H & S Bakery.   

The State Department was then located on 17th Street N.W., across from the White House. We drove there, picked my dad up, and then followed 17th Street back to M Street, where it turned left and went through Georgetown to the (Francis Scott) Key Bridge.

The Key Bridge leads from Washington D.C. to Arlington and to Lee Highway, which took us back to our home in Falls Church.  At M Street in Georgetown, near the entrance to the bridge, we always stopped at the Dixie Liquor Store, pictured below, where my dad would go in and return with a pint of Scotch in a paper bag.  He would wrap the bag around the bottle and drink from it as he drove while he continued across the bridge and to our home.  The experiences of the ride to D.C. with my mom and the ride back with her and my dad were very different.  

I remember frequent confrontations on the way home about how much we spent for liquor, and on whether my dad didn’t think he had had enough, and on his need to rid himself of stress at work.  Later, when we arrived home, my dad would always have another drink before we had dinner and was sometimes intoxicated by then.  

My most pervasive memory of our ten years in Falls Church is that I was very lonely.  It was a distinct contrast to our later life in Havana, which was a much more social environment for us.  

My father’s brother, my Uncle Fred, had become an alcoholic after returning home from the War.  When we lived in Falls Church, my dad would often drive somewhere at night to rescue him.  Fred eventually committed suicide by a gunshot in 1974.    

My parents often argued with my Grampa and Nana.  My dad’s father had been a severe disciplinarian when my father was growing up.  He had sometimes held my father’s head under water in the sink as a form of punishment.   Eventually, when my dad was sixteen and returned home late one day one time from playing baseball with his friends, his father told him to get a belt that he would use as a strap to punish my dad.  My dad refused and left home, went to live with a friend of his, and thus began several years when he worked during the day and attended school in the evening. 

Years later, then, when my family was living in Falls Church with my grandparents, pictured at left, my grandfather again tried to impose his rules and his views on my father’s young family.  He was retired by then, and in the morning, he would pour two eggs into glass of bourbon, pepper and Worcester Sauce, and whip it into a solution which he then chugged.  I remember him then reading the newspaper and his Bible, and smoking his cigar or pipe.  Later, in the afternoon, he would pace back and forth until 5 p.m. when it was time for him to start drinking again. 

Grampa Price was the grandson of a Virginia slave owner, and his racist views were abhorrent to my mom, who was raised in a more liberal household in Toronto.  I remember when we lived in Falls Church, accompanying Grampa in his black two-seater Plymouth car, as he drove up Lee Highway to Hall’s Hill, where he would point out where “the niggers” lived.  

There were many arguments in our home about race, and about child-rearing, and about the fact that it was my grandparents’ home.  My parents were tenants, paying rent, which limited their ability to complain.  Eventually, my parents bought the house from my grandparents, who down-sized to an apartment.  

Years later, when I returned with Sandra and David for a visit to Falls Church and went North Tuckahoe Street, we saw Mrs. Shirley, our neighbor from across the street those many years earlier.  She told us that she had been very fond of my grandparents, and thought, at the time, that my mom had pressured my dad to have his parents move out of the house.

My grandfather was nice enough to me in the year or two after I had Rheumatic Fever until 1955, when we left Falls Church for Cuba.  I could go out the door of our house and from my waist, shoot a Daisy bb rifle at the light shade over the light across the street from our house.  When the bb hit the metal reflector, it would make a very satisfying clanging sound.  

Grampa, like my dad, would drink and, when he had been drinking, would sometimes get mean.  He had certain hot buttons, like disobedience, that set him off.  There was one memorable incident, when my mom and dad were out, and I did something I wasn’t supposed to.  Instead of remaining there for punishment, I ran outside, and Grampa ran after me.  

I ran fast, and crossed the street to our neighbor Mrs. Shirley’s yard, and into her back yard. Grampa had come out of our home with a baseball bat and was so angry that he swung it at a telephone pole, and broke it.

When my parents eventually bought my grandparents’ house on North Tuckahoe Street, my grandparents moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 220 N. Piedmont Street, in the newly built Buckingham Village.  

Newspaper Route – 1954 to 1955

For our last few years in Falls Church, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I delivered the daily newspaper, the Washington Star, which later became the Daily News.  I began deliveries at 6 a.m. every weekday morning, and again in the afternoon after school, and then again at 6 a.m. every Sunday.  If I was lucky, my mom or dad would drive me but most of the time, I had to do it on my own.  My parents insisted on it as a discipline for later life.

I looked on my newspaper clients as sort of a substitute family.  I felt like the paper boy in the classic Norman Rockwell illustration on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.  There was a diversity of temperament among my customers.  My friendly interaction with them was a contrast to my internal thoughts, which were not altogether positive.  Unlike my classmates at Stewart School, my customers didn’t differentiate between someone who had grown up in the neighborhood and someone who hadn’t.

All of my customers got to know me because I had to collect their payments at the end of each month.  To make change, I used a coin changer that I wore around my waist.    If I was lucky, I was given an extra dollar at the end of the year.

I would make the deliveries on my bike when the weather permitted.  When it snowed, I walked.  

I picked up my bundle of papers at a stand next to the drug store, at the “four corners” a small commercial intersection on Lee Highway.  I would put them in my delivery bag, sling them over my shoulder, and begin walking my route or riding my bike down Underwood Street, past Stuart School, and ending up on our street. 

After picking up the papers, I always faced the temptation of going into the drug store.  I was terrorized by one of the other paper boys, whose older brother, a tough kid in the neighborhood, played cards and was an archetypal bully. He would steal candies from the drug store, but I was too afraid to.  

I struggled internally over whether to confront him.  I didn’t feel that there was anyone with whom I could really discuss the problem, and I didn’t have much modelling as to what the best response was.  When I eventually summoned the courage to fight (if necessary), he followed the pattern of most bullies, and backed down.  The experience was an important lesson to me on the value of confronting bullies.

I had many formative experiences on that paper route.  For much of the time, solitude prevailed.  Depending on the season, it was sometimes pitch black, and quite cold.  It was the beginning of a life-long separation of my interior life and my outward, social life.

I remember talking to myself on my paper route about my family, my school, everything. I processed a lot of sadness, and reflected on tensions at home; about my father’s drinking, and the trouble his brother, Uncle Fred, got into after drinking.  

Later, at Dartmouth, Robert Frost visited our class.  He gave me an autographed copy of one of one of his books of poetry, which I still have.  I remember him reading his poem “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening,” and how it resonated with my memory of my paper route.

Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year…. The only other sounds the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

In general, I don’t remember my ten years in Falls Church as happy ones.  My memories are mostly of the conversations I had with myself on my paper route, and of the conflicts that seemed to exist at home and at school. 

Good Times

Not all of my memories of my years in Falls Church are bad.

The person who seemed to have the most insight into what I was feeling at that time was our next-door neighbor to the north, Mana Goodchild.  Her husband was a math professor at Princeton.  They were Ashkenazi Jews, and very intelligent.  Mrs. Goodchild was a warm, special person.  The photo below is of their house on North Tuckahoe Street, almost hidden among the trees in their front yard.

Mrs. Goodchild had a room in the attic of her home, where there was a spinning wheel that she used.  I spent hours there, holding the yarn for her as she spun.  Many years later, I searched and found a reproduction of the same style of spinning wheel that she used.  I bought for the home my then wife Jane and I had in Oakland, California.  It was later lost in the Oakland fire.  Mrs. Goodchild once comment to my mom that I was “a melancholy child”, and very much alone.  It didn’t seem to register with my mom, who had a lot of other things on her mind.

Our next-door neighbors to the south were the Priors.  Earl Prior was an architectural draftsman whose son, David, was a Navy pilot.  At Christmas, Mr. Prior would hand-draw ink sketches of their home or of other scenes for Christmas cards that he and Mrs. Prior would send to their neighbors.  The Priors were kind people, and always welcomed me into their home.  

In the summers, our family continued to take vacations at Bethany Beach, where we stayed in a small beach cottage, sometimes for a few weeks or a month.  My dad would drive back and forth from work in Washington D.C.  We sometimes visited sites of civil war battles and every year, in the fall, we drove to Chesapeake Bay, where my grandfather had taken my father as a child to shuck oysters on my great grandfather’s farm, and bought oysters.  When we got them home, we shucked them.  The macho thing to do then was to eat them, but that sometimes caused me to throw up.  

Also in the fall, my parents would buy a Smithfield ham, and we would drive to a nearby orchard to get the very best apples.  One of our favorite orchards was in McLean Virginia, near Langley, Virginia, where the C.I.A. later had its headquarters.  

At left is a photo of Pat, Sandra, David and me at our home in Falls Church in about 1954.  A short time later, Secretary of State Dulles asked Henry M. Wriston, the president of Brown University, to undertake a study of the State Department’s personnel practices.  In his report, Wriston recommended that the State Department be merged with the Foreign Service.  My father, who was then the Caribbean desk officer at the State Department, was told that he was going to be assigned to a U.S. Embassy abroad.  I remember, in 1955, my dad coming home and setting out files on Stuttgart Germany, Heidelberg Germany, and Havana Cuba, and asking us what we thought would be the best choice of a place to spend five years.  Cuba was the choice we made.  

Havana, Cuba - 1955 to 1959

My family moved to Havana Cuba in October 1955, not long after I had started grade 10 at W & L.   Pat had just begun her sophomore year there. 

Below is my passport photo for entry into Cuba in 1955. 

On our arrival in Havana, we lived for a short time at an apartment building off 5th Avenue called Ochenta y Ocho (Spanish for Eighty-Eight), near the Comodoro Hotel in the Miramar District of Havana. 

My parents soon learned that a private school, Ruston Academy, run by an American Harvard educated headmaster, had recently moved from the Vedado district in downtown Havana to the Biltmore/Country Club suburb west of Havana.  My parents enrolled Pat and me at Ruston.  At that time, when Ruston had just opened at its new location, there wasn’t enough space yet for Sandra and David, so they were enrolled for that first year at another private school, Lafayette, in downtown Havana, and transferred to Ruston the following year. 

Ruston Academy had been established in 1920 by Hiram Hall Ruston, a retired English teacher from Princeton, Indiana, and his sister Martha Ruston.  When the school first opened at the Rustons’ home in Vedado, it had an enrollment of three students.  Forty years later, before it was confiscated by the Castro government in 1961, its enrollment had grown to 750 students.  Time Magazine ranked it as the best bilingual school in Latin America.  

Pat and I were required to write examinations at Ruston to determine our proper grade level.  I had begun grade 10 at W & L in Falls Church before we left for Cuba, but the teachers at Ruston determined that W & L was not at the standard of Ruston and that I had to “repeat” grade 9 at Ruston before moving on.  This didn’t bother me and, in fact, it gave me greater confidence to have covered some of the material before

Soon after Pat and I began our classes at Ruston, our family moved to a large four-bedroom Spanish colonial house at 19401 7th Avenue at 194th Street in Biltmore that we rented from a well-known Cuban dermatologist, Dr. Vicente Pardo-Castello.  Dr. Pardo was the father of Betty Harper, pictured below, an English teacher at Ruston Academy.

Mrs. Harper later taught David English, and was the mother of one of Sandra’s class-mates, Rocky Harper.

Below is a photo of our family at our new home in Biltmore.

Pat and I brought some skills dancing Rock and Roll when we arrived in Cuba.  This helped us make friends quickly.

I received an excellent education at Ruston.  After the founder died in 1946, the administration of the school had passed to James Baker, whom Mr. Ruston had recruited in 1940, on completing his graduate studies in education at Harvard.  When Mr. Baker, pictured at left, and his wife Sibyl, inherited the school from Mr. Ruston, they gifted it to an educational non-profit foundation that they formed, the first ever in Cuba.  

Ruston was a unique school, and I owe much to the values it imparted to me.  In a book that Mr. Baker later wrote, called, “Ruston, Dream to Reality”, he wrote, “Its recognized excellence was the result of committed and dedicated educators, who worked to create the environment and stimulus needed to foster and nurture self-discipline, analytical and independent thinking, cultural sensitivity and the inculcation of strong individual values.”

I remember the first paper I wrote for my English teacher, Hal Newendorf.  It was Mr. Newendorf’s practice to give one mark for content and another for “mechanics”, meaning grammar, punctuation, syntax, and structure.  My grade for mechanics on the paper was minus 140!  It was humiliating, but a challenge to do better.  I later tried the same approach with my own son, Jonathan, with positive results.  I red-lined his papers to identify any grammatical or syntactical errors I could find.  I didn’t do the same for my older son, Andrew, and I think, in retrospect, that he would have developed better writing skills had I done so.  

Another member of the Ruston faculty, Boris Goldenberg, was an outstanding history teacher. He enlivened his lessons with salacious stories about popes having children, etc.  He was a great story-teller, which made it challenging to take careful notes in his class.

The quality of education I received at Ruston was brought home to me many years later, when I was working on Wall Street and attended a dinner function at the K Club in Washington D.C.  I was seated next to Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, a Canadian-born English professor who was President of San Francisco State University before serving as a U.S. Senator from California from 1977 to 1983.  He had written many books on semantics, the best-known being “Language in Thought and Action,” in 1939.  

Mr. Baker used that book in a course in semantics, which he taught to a special English class at Ruston, restricted to senior year High School and Bachillerato students.  

Senator Hayakawa was drowsy at the dinner, and appeared disinterested in the speeches or dinner-table conversation, until I asked him if many people he met had read his book on semantics.  He asked me what I thought semantics was.  I immediately replied that it was “the study of human interaction through the mechanics of linguistic communication.”  He was astonished that I could recite the definition from memory.  Mr. Baker’s lectures had ingrained the definition so firmly in my mind that I could remember it two decades later. 

At Ruston, Pat was able to continue in grade 11, or her junior year, which she had begun at Washington & Lee High School in Arlington.  She was already a year ahead of me in Virginia, and was enrolled as a junior in grade 11 at Ruston.  I was back in grade 9 that year, or in High School I, as it was called at Ruston.  The photo above is of my class that year, from the 1955-56 Ruston yearbook.  I am at the far left in the second row.

The following year, 1956-57, Pat was a senior, and was voted prettiest in her class.  The photo below is from the Ruston yearbook for that year.

 That year, I was in in grade 10, or High School II.  In the photo below, from the Ruston year book, I am the second from the left, in the back row.

In June 1957, Pat graduated from Ruston.  That September, she began her studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.  

I began my Junior year at Ruston that month.  Below is my junior photo from the Ruston yearbook.

When Bill was a junior, he played on the Ruston basketball team.  In the photo below, I am kneeling at far right, in the front row.

The first girl Bill dated seriously at Ruston was Maria Teresa Calvo.  She was Cuban and had been at Ruston for twelve years by the time she graduated in 1958.  She was a year ahead of me at Ruston.  We were chaperoned whenever we were together, which may account for why our relationship didn’t last long.

At home, our family life was again complicated.  Our home was beautiful, and a pleasure to live in.  My room was on the north side, pictured below.  My window, on the second floor, looked out on palm trees as well as a large mango tree from which we could pick fresh mangoes that were delicious to eat.

We felt a certain privilege owing to my dad’s position in the U.S. Embassy and the lifestyle that it made possible.  

Bill remembered that when a U.S. naval destroyer, pictured at left, visited Havana harbor, Pat and I were included in a tour of the ship that our parents were given.  

In the photo below, taken on the deck of the ship, Pa and Bill are the third and fourth from the left.

Across the street from our front yard was the British High Commissioner’s residence.  That property backed onto the golf course of the Havana Biltmore Yacht Club.  We could walk across the golf course to the Biltmore Club, shown in the picture below, where we were members and could use the beach and clubhouse facilities.  The facilities included an outdoor café that served sandwiches and soft drinks and where we could play “cubiletes”, a popular Cuban dice game.

There were still tensions at our home.  My dad worked hard and at times, was under a lot of stress.  He was expected to learn Spanish quickly, master the work of a Commercial Attaché and Foreign Service Officer, all of which was new to him, and make social connections and entertain, which did not come easily to him.  

At first, Pat occupied one of the four upstairs bedrooms of our house, I occupied another, Sandra and David occupied a third, and our mom and dad the other.  Before Pat graduated, she had seniority over me and, it seemed to me, came and went pretty much as she pleased.  David was the youngest and for that reason, also seemed to get a pass.  He was seldom the object of criticism or discipline.  I remember once when I was 18, and took David for a ride on a motor scooter I had bought from my summer earnings.  The scooter slid on some gravel on the street outside our house and the scooter fell over on me.  David also landed on me and, although not hurt, he yelled from fright, whereupon I was yelled at for my effort!  

Sandra was somewhat of a loner.  She was three years behind me at Ruston, and had a different group of friends.  She was often occupied with our family dog, Tippy, and her pony, Bruce, shown in the photo at left.  She spent much of her time on her own and, like David, seldom drew criticism from our parents.  

Bill felt as though I was the one who bore the brunt of our father’s anger.  He thought that I was overweight and didn’t study hard enough.  He called me soft, and said that if I didn’t work harder, I would end up becoming a garage mechanic.  I felt angry and hurt.

When my dad was at work, my mom was in charge, but lacked my dad’s authority.  Her threats to “wait until your father gets home” carried little weight, and she often looked to me to be her enforcer.  One time, about a year after we moved to our house in Biltmore, my mom was outside the front door doing some gardening.  I was sixteen and David was eight.  David was outside on the steps, reading a comic book, and read the exclamation “Faugh!”, which one of the comic characters uttered when he ate something awful, but pronounced it “Fuck”, pretending that he didn’t know the difference. 

Mom didn’t buy David’s lame explanation.   I grabbed David, and twisted his arm behind his back until he apologized and promised that he wouldn’t say the word again.  When I let him go and David entered the house, far enough from me that he thought he could stay safely out of my reach, he called me a “son of a bitch” and ran.  I tore after him, chased him up the hall stairs to the second floor, shown in the photo below, and along the corridor that ran the perimeter of the hallway’s second floor.  When I eventually caught him, I picked him up by the legs and hung him over the balcony, then let go of one of his legs, and held him by one ankle.  He was terrified and apologized, and I pulled him back up.  He still reminds me of the incident. 

Most days, when our dad returned home from work, he and my mom would sit on the porch where they would have a drink while my dad told my mom about his day at work.  He often had several drinks, and by dinnertime, was sometimes intoxicated.  It was our custom to have dinner together in the dining room of our home, pictured above, at right.  When my father had been drinking, he didn’t tolerate disagreement, and the dinner table discussions often turned into ugly arguments. 

I become an adult – Summer of 1958

I turned 18 on July 24, 1958.  I spent that summer, before my senior year at Ruston, in northern Ontario in Canada, working as a labourer at Stanrock Mines, in Elliot Lake where my mother’s brother-in-law, Dick King, was the mine manager.  He and my Aunt Betty and their two young children, Rick and Susan, lived in a nearby mobile home.  I lived at the mine, and worked, with the other laborers, helping to build a uranium processing plant there.

Nearly all the workers at the mine were from Portugal.  We lived in small huts each equipped with four bunk beds.  The only bathrooms were down the road, past other huts.  There were occasional fights among the Portuguese labourers, which quickly forced us to develop social skills.  

The work wasn’t easy.  In the middle of the night, they would wake everybody up and say a cement truck had arrived and everyone had to unload the cement.  One day, they had to clean out a sceptic tank.  This required us to navigate parallel two-by-twelve-foot boards over the open sceptic tank.  We crossed the boards over the stench, pulled each bucket up, and carried it back to the other side, emptying it into another tank.  

A friend of Pat’s, Mike Williamson, also worked at Stanrock that summer.  Betty’s letters to mom suggested that he was less willing to do the work.  

That year, Europe was being popularized in music and films.  Many students my age, after graduating from college, spent a year travelling there.  I was especially inspired by the film, Roman Holiday, released in 1957, in which Audrey Hepburn played the role of a touring European princess who takes off for a night while in Rome.  She falls asleep on a park bench and is found by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who takes her back to his apartment for safety.  At work the next morning, he discovers the princess’ identity and bets his editor he can get exclusive interview with her, but romance soon gets in the way.  In the film, Peck rode a scooter with Audrey Hepburn as his passenger.  

Senior at Ruston – 1958 to 1959

When I returned to Havana at the end of that summer of 1958, I bought a used World War II vintage Lambretta motor scooter from an American boy who was a year ahead of Pat in school.  By then, he was in prep school in the U.S., and wanted to date Pat.  When he returned to Havana at the end of the summer, he was getting ready to leave Cuba permanently and was selling his scooter.  I paid for it with money I had earned at the mine in Stanrock.  

That fall, when Pat was a sophomore at Wellesley and I was a senior at Ruston, Pat would return home for holidays.  At our family dinners, she would express opinions about the ideas she had learned in philosophy or psychology, which would sometimes infuriate our dad.  He would lapse into ad hominem attacks on her, calling her “sophomoric” and telling her that she was using our house as a hotel.  Our mom would rise to Pat’s defence and tell my dad that he had had too much to drink, which added fuel to the fire.  Sometimes, our dad would become physical and go to slap Pat on the face.  If our mom tried to intervene, he would turn on her.  Although I don’t remember him striking her, he threatened, and was unpredictable enough to cause us all to be afraid of what he might do.  At one such dinner, when I was eighteen, I stood up between him and my mother and told him that if he went any further, he would have to fight me.  He backed down, but I think that he never forgave me for challenging his authority. 

That September of 1958, as I began my senior year at Ruston, I met Lynn Wood, whose family had arrived in Havana that August.  Lynn was born in Washington D.C. on December 26, 1942, and was fifteen when her father, Bob Wood Sr., was posted to Havana for two years as a Vice-President of Sylvania Electric, handling the company’s marketing and merchandising in Latin America.  

Lynn turned sixteen that December.  Her family lived on the same street we did, but closer to Ruston.  I would ride her on my scooter, picking her up from Ruston, and taking her to her home, or to the Biltmore Club, near our home.

 

 

 

 

 

That year, Lynn was voted the prettiest girl in the upper school and I was voted the most handsome.  We dated throughout that year and talked about marrying after we both had finished college.  

In my senior year, my best friends at Ruston were Armando del Llano, pictured below at left, who was a Junior, and Al Kline, below and right, who was in my class.

 

 

 

 

 

In the photo below, taken from the Ruston documentary film, Ruston, Dream to Reality, I am with my senior class, including Chris Baker, two to my right, and Al Klein.  Chris later remembered that the two of us were once brought into his father’s office and lectured about the need to be more serious about our studies if we hoped to be admitted into a good university.

I was actively involved in activities in my senior year.  I was in the debate club, shown below with our faculty advisor.

I was also the lead in the annual Shakespeare play, Much Ado about Nothing.  The photo below was taken of one of our dress rehearsals, where I’m wearing a long white cape.

In January 1959, Fidel Castro and his rebel army marched into Havana after defeating the Cuban army.  The Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista, fled the country the previous day.  One night later that month, soldiers arrived in a caravan of cars on our street and detained the staff of one of Batista’s cabinet secretaries, whose home was across 194th Street from our home, and who also had fled.  The rebel soldiers walked up and down the street, holding their machine guns and shining flashlights up at the balcony of my parents’ bedroom, from which we were watching the events unfold below.

Tensions were running high in Havana, and Castro soon began stirring up anger against American companies.  Precautions were taken against mob violence, and soldiers from Castro’s militia were stationed to protect the Dominican Embassy Residence, across 7thAvenue and two houses down the street from our home.  My dad bought a 20-gage shotgun and kept it ready, with his handgun, in case a mob might attack our home. 

Over the next six months, relations between the U.S. and Cuba worsened quickly, as Castro’s new government became more openly communist and expropriated the properties of U.S. citizens and nationalized U.S. corporations.  Cuban informants would climb through the window of the library in our home and report to my dad on the number of barrels of oil that were being unloaded from Russian tankers docked in Havana harbor.

In June 1959, I graduated from Ruston.  Below is my senior photo in the Ruston yearbook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That September of 1959, I began undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.  I had been accepted at Harvard, but Pat advised me against going there, as she thought it would result in my becoming a nerd.  Dartmouth was an all-male college, with a reputation for athletics and outdoor activities (outing club, etc.) as well as academic rigor. 

Below is a photo of me at Dartmouth the year I began my studies there.

 

 

 

 

 

In the photo at left, I am with my room-mates, Tige (Lawrence William) Harris, Kirk Vernon, and Jim Cogswel, outside our dormitory, Russel Sage Hall.  I lived in the SAE fraternity in my senior year but kept my connection with my former room-mates.  

 

My roommates and I had a friend, Bob Philips, who was a member of the Bahai faith. Bob’s family lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and on Spring vacation of our sophomore year, we all drove to Phoenix, where the photo at left was taken.  I’m on the far right.  Next to me is Kirk, then Jim Cogswell, and on the far left, Bob.    

Lynn graduated from Ruston in June 1960, as I finished my freshman year at Dartmouth.  In September, she began her undergraduate studies at Connecticut College for Women in New Haven, Connecticut.  Lynn and I continued to travel back and forth between Hanover and New Haven until that fall of 1960, when Lynn left Connecticut College to take her junior year abroad at the University of Madrid.  We then corresponded until the following June, when I would graduate from Dartmouth.

Although my dad’s posting in Havana was already drawing to a close by the Fall of 1961, our departure was accelerated that September when my dad’s secretary, Marjorie Lennox, was detained by the DGI, or Cuban Intelligence Service.  Cuban agents, who I believe had Ms. Lennox under surveillance in the hope of obtaining evidence of espionage against my dad, discovered three CIA technicians in Ms. Lennox’s apartment building installing surveillance equipment in the ceiling above the news agency of the People’s Republic of China.  China had just entered into a trade treaty with Cuba and the U.S. wanted to discover what its intentions were.  

One of the CIA technicians was found to be in possession of a key to Ms. Lennox’s apartment.  All three of the technicians were arrested and eventually tried and convicted of espionage.  They were later traded back to the U.S. in a prisoner exchange with prisoners from the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion that occurred in April 1962.

Because Ms. Lennox was an Embassy employee, she was ordered to leave the country, as was my dad and, soon afterward, my family.  My mother left Havana with Sandra and David in October 1960.  They rejoined my father in Virginia, where they lived for the next six months while my dad was debriefed at the State Department in Washington.  

In November, John Kennedy was elected President.  On January 3, 1961, the U.S. severed relations with Cuba and reduced its Embassy staff in Havana to eleven.  President Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, and in March, my father was assigned to his next diplomatic post, in Ottawa.

My family moved to Ottawa in March, shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba took place on April 17, 1961.  A few of my Ruston school mates, including Ricki Sanchez, who was on my Ruston basketball team, participated in the invasion and were later imprisoned until the U.S. negotiated their release between December 1962 and July 1965.

My family arrived in Ottawa in March, 1962.  Soon after, I visited my family in Ottawa on my Spring break from Dartmouth.  The photo below were taken on that visit. 

 

Sandra and David were enrolled in school in Ottawa, where David completed his grade seven and Sandra her grade ten in May.  They were present when J.F.K. made his first international visit there on May 17, 1961.  Soon after, my family drove down to Hanover to attend my graduation from Dartmouth in June.  Below is my graduation photo from Dartmouth.

Parting from Lynn Wood - 1963

Lynn Wood and I had agreed that when I graduated from Dartmouth, I would travel to Madrid where we would meet up.  I travelled there in late June, and That June, and Lynn and I spent a week together.

Lynn had told me that she had been dating a Spaniard, Ricardo Dávila-Iciar, who was studying at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, and whose father owned a chemical-pharmaceutical company in Spain.  It wasn’t clear to me whether she would end her relationship with Ricardo in order to wait for me to be in a position where we could marry. 

Lynn was to think about it and we made arrangements to meet a week later in Pamplona, where the annual running of the bulls was to begin at noon on July 7.  The running of the bulls marks the beginning of the Festival of St. Fermin, honoring the City’s first bishop and patron saint, St. Fermin.  The Festival continued daily from noon on July 7 until midnight on July 14.  

 

 

I arrived in Pamplona on July 7, and ran with the bulls at noon, when the festival opened. After the event, I went to the train station in Pamplona and waited for Lynn’s train to arrive.  

When I had waited for two hours and no train had arrived, I concluded that Lynn had decided not to come, and I left.  It didn’t occur to me at the time, but no trains from Madrid had arrived at the station during the two hours I had waited.  Lynn later told me that her train had been delayed.  She had arrived 20 minutes after I had left.

After leaving Pamplona, I travelled through Europe, including Scandinavia and Greece, for the next five months.  Lynn soon became pregnant with Ricardo’s child and in August 1963, she returned to the United States.  She stayed at her parents’ home in Rye New York until December 23, 1963, when she and Ricardo were married in Boston.  In February 1964, she and Ricardo returned to Spain, where Ricardo continued his studies at the University of Zaragoza, supported by his father.  Their son, Ricardo Dávila Wood, born on April 26, 1964, grew up to become a well-known photographer.  

While I was travelling in Europe that summer of 1963, I considered applying to the U.S. Foreign Service for employment.  I arranged to sit for the Foreign Service examination in Amsterdam but while waiting for the exam, I travelled to Norway.  While there, I swam in one of the fiords to impress a girl I had met.  I caught a cold that later turned into pneumonia, and my illness prevented me from taking the examination.

I returned to Madrid in November 1963, just as news of President Kennedy’s assassination arrived, shocking me and the rest of the world.  I travelled for two more months, this time to southern Spain and Morocco, and then returned to Madrid.

Working in Madrid – 1964

In Madrid, an acquaintance I had met on my journey to Southern Spain and Morocco, a lay member of the Roman Catholic lay society, Opus Dei, helped me secure employment at an import export company, ExIm Trade.  As the only non-Spaniard in the company, my role was to travel to various port cities in Spain to clear grain cargo through customs.  While there, I acquired some knowledge that later helped me better understand investment in grain futures.

After working at ExIm Trade for about six months, from January to June, 1964, I began to worry that I would either run out of money or be called up for the military draft.  America was escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War at that time and while I was prepared to serve in the military, I wanted to avoid being drafted as a private in the infantry. 

 Note:  Of the nearly 16 million eligible men not engaged in active military service, 57% were exempted (typically because of jobs including other military service), deferred (usually for educational reasons), or disqualified (usually for physical and mental deficiencies but also for criminal records including draft violations).   

With these concerns in mind, I returned to the U.S. in June 1964, closing another chapter of my life. 

Working for the State Department – 1964 to 1965

Five years earlier, when I was attending Ruston Academy in Havana, the Assistant Headmaster was Mariada Arensburg, pictured at left.  During my stay in Madrid in Spring of 1964, I learned from Mariada’s son, Walter Arensburg, that the State Department was hiring graduates who spoke Spanish to escort students from Latin America as they toured the U.S. as guests of the Government.  

On my return to the United States in June, I travelled to Washington D.C., where I underwent a Spanish Proficiency test.  I qualified for sequential translation, (the level below simultaneous translation, which qualified bilingual persons to perform translation at the United Nations). Sequential translation proficiency was sufficient for employment as a State Department escort/interpreter, and I managed to pass several interviews to test my knowledge of American government, culture, and economic history was examined.  I was then hired by the Cultural Affairs Division of the U.S. State Department to escort students from Latin America.  This delayed my draft by six months, which gave me time to speak with someone at Dartmouth about my future.    

My work touring Latin American students was an education for me in many ways.  The students I was touring were often those who showed promise to become leaders in their countries in the future.  They were most interested in visiting sites made controversial by the Civil Rights demonstrations that had taken place recently, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s March in Birmingham Alabama that Spring (on April 12, 1963), which was followed by his March on Washington D.C. that August (on August 28, 1963).  

The tour of each group of students lasted about six weeks, during which we became well acquainted.  At the end of each tour, I was required to submit a report to the State Department, detailing my observations of each of the students and how they reacted to what they had seen on the tour.  I continued in this employment full time for more than a year and later, on summer breaks, during my time at graduate school (1966 and 1967). 

As the summer of 1965 approached, the State Department asked me to escort a group of young leaders from Africa.  Between tours, I worked out of the offices of the African American Institute on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and resided nearby.  I had initially registered with the Selective Service Commission in Foreign Board 100, which included military personnel.  That Board normally filled its allotment with volunteers.  However, the Selective Service rules at that time required that if a person moved, he was required to inform the local Selective Service Commission.  As my first year of employment with the State Department was drawing to a close, I had to decide whether to enlist or to continue my education.

My father had always considered the Navy to be a good service to enter.   When he was working for the Board of Economic Warfare in Chile, he had sought permission several times to enlist in the Navy but had been turned down each time as his employment was considered to be essential to the War effort.  

If I had been admitted to Naval Officers Candidates School (N.O.C.S.), I would have been commissioned as an officer, and would later have served in that capacity on active duty and in the reserves.  This seemed like a viable option, so I began the process of applying to the N.O.C.S.  To get a different perspective, though, I contacted a former professor of mine at Dartmouth, Kalman Silvert, who had been an important influence on my study of Latin American political systems.  Silvert strongly recommended against my enlisting until I had completed a Masters degree in political science.

Coincidentally, the State Department had several challenging assignments that they wanted me to undertake at that time.  If I accepted them, I would be able to postpone my decision between the Navy and continuing my education until the following year.  I did so, and spent another six months on the road.

Professor Silvert made a call to a colleague of his, Benjamin Rivlin, and secured a place for me at Brooklyn College, one of the five colleges of the City University of New York.  Brooklyn College was expanding at that time, and Professor Rivlin, who was the head of the Political Science Department there, arranged for me to begin my studies there in September.  

Those starting graduate studies in the fall of 1967 were given two one- semester draft deferments before becoming eligible for the draft again in June 1968.  Those further along in their studies, who entered graduate school before the summer of 1967, could continue to receive deferments until they completed their studies. 

Fortunately for me, the State Department had told me that they needed me to accompany another group of students from Africa on a tour of the U.S.  The group included the nephew of the founder and first President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyata.  The State Department concluded that, owing to my experience, especially in areas of the deep South of the U.S. that the students most wanted to visit, I had the right skill set to escort this group.  I wasn’t sure whether it was to be a single assignment, or multiple assignments.

I don’t remember the name of the person who wanted me to take the assignment, but he told me that he would get me a letter that I could use to get a deferment for three months, until September.  That took me until I enrolled as a full-time student in the graduate program at Brooklyn College.

Brooklyn College – Fall of 1965 to Spring of 1966  

For the 1965-66 academic year, I studied political science and economics at Brooklyn College. I was then granted a teaching fellowship to teach political science the following academic year (Fall of 1966 to Spring 1967).

While at Brooklyn College, I became a close friend of another graduate student, Israel Singer.  Singer was two years younger than I was, but had a brilliant mind and loved debating U.S. Middle East policy.  He was raised in Brooklyn, the child of refugees from Vienna who became refugees in Switzerland and Germany before ending up in a detention camp in France.  They came to the United States in 1942.  

Israel’s father had a doctorate in economics but went into the costume jewelry business. Israel’s background was a mixture of right-wing religious views and Zionism.  He had become a rabbi in 1964, while secretly studying political science at night at Brooklyn College, despite the fact that this was not permitted in the yeshivah where he did his rabbinical studies, as Jewish education and secular education were considered to be in conflict with one another.  

When I returned to Brooklyn College in the Fall of 1965, Israel was teaching political science and Middle Eastern Studies there.  Several years later, in the late 1960’s, while an adjunct professor of political science, he led a sit-in of Jewish students lobbying for a Judaic Studies department, which eventually became a leading department, and pioneered that Department’s Holocaust Studies program.  Later still, he led efforts to recover the property of Holocaust survivors and their heirs and in 1985, he was named secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, a post he held for two decades.

While attending classes at Brooklyn College, I lived in a flat on Remson Street, in Brooklyn Heights, pictured below.

   

Christmas in Florida - 1966

My dad retired from the Foreign Service in June 1966, after serving thirty-five years with the U.S. Government, the last five at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.  My parents then moved to Florida, where my mother’s half sister, Ruth Donaldson, and her husband, Grant, had settled in Ponte Vedra, south of Jacksonville, after Grant had retired from his position as a Vice-President of General Motors.  

Sandra had finished high school in June 1964 and that Fall, had enrolled at Catherine Gibbs School for executive secretaries in Boston.  In the Fall of 1965, she was admitted as a sophomore to St. Lawrence University in Canton New York and the following Fall of 1966, she left to take her junior year abroad in Madrid.  David, who had completed his grade 12 in Ottawa that summer, enrolled as a Freshman at St. Lawrence that Fall.  That semester, he dated Stephanie Polowe, who had been Sandra’s best friend the previous year.

On December 12, 1966, Sandra returned from Madrid to New York, where we had arranged to drive with David to Florida to spend Christmas with our parents.  During Sandra’s visit, I learned that she had left the University of Madrid with a roommate and travelled to the Island of Ibiza, off the east coast of Spain, where she had fallen in love with a young German artist and sculptor, Peter Kubina, who was living and working in Ibiza.  

I drove Sandra in my VW car the seven hours north to Canton, picked David and Stephanie up, and drove them back to my apartment on Remson Street.  Stephanie and David had had a falling out, although they re-connected many years later, and finally married in 2014.  That December, I drove Stephanie to the bus station in New York, where she boarded a bus to Rochester, where she planned to spend Christmas with her parents.

After Stephanie’s departure, Sandra, David, and I drove to Ponte Vedra, where our parents were visiting Ruth and Grant Donaldson.   

The photo at left, taken in  Ponte Vedra, shows Sandra and David with our parents and my mother’s half-sisters, Ruth Donaldson (on the sofa) and Fran Warner, at the far right.

 

After our return to New York, David returned to St. Lawrence and Sandra stayed briefly at my apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  While there, she met my girlfriend at the time, Lucy Barker.  Lucy had graduated in 1964 from Barnard College, in New York City, with a major in Government.  While at Barnard, she had lived with a French-speaking family, who were working in New York, as lucy wanted to learn French.  After graduating, Lucy had secured a job at the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), in Manhattan, and lived in Brooklyn Heights, where we met and later dated.  

By that Christmas of 1966, my relationship with Lucy was ending, and Lucy had secured employment with a dairy company in Paris, where she was going to be living.  She told Sandra that the family she had lived with while at Barnard were from Sion, Switzerland, and had asked Lucy to drive their car in April from Paris to their home in Sion.  Lucy didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, and didn’t want to travel alone, so Sandra volunteered to accompany her and to teach her how to drive the family’s car.  Sandra eventually returned to Ibiza, where she re-joined Peter Kubina.

Introduction to Wall Street – 1967 to 1969

At the end of my second year at Brooklyn College, in May 1967, after I had taught there the previous academic year (1966 to 1967), and when I had only my thesis left to complete to earn my M.A., I planned to return for a second year of teaching that fall of 1967.  The College and I both expected that after receiving my M.A., I would continue on for a Ph.D. in political science.  That summer, though, I had the opportunity to work on Wall Street as an intern in the research department at Wood Struthers & Winthrop.

Wood Struthers, as it was known, was a venerable Wall Street investment banking firm.  Robert Winthrop, born in 1833, was descended from colonial governors of New York.  Beginning his career in the cotton and sugar business, he had turned to banking in 1859, with the firm of Read & Drexel.  Admitted to the New York Stock Exchange in 1862, he became a founding member, in 1871, of Robert Winthrop and Company, which later became Wood Struthers & Winthrop until it was sold in 1977 to Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), which went on to become part of Credit Suisse.  

At Wood Struthers, I ran ratios and did basic financial analysis, and it introduced me to a whole new world.  In graduate school, everything had been very abstract and theoretical.  Now, I was introduced to the very tangible world of finance.  

To meet the firm’s expectations of financial knowledge, I began auditing classes at N.Y.U. School of Business at night.  By the end of the summer, I decided to take a year’s leave of absence from my graduate studies and continue working in finance.  I ended up remaining at Wood Struthers for two years, from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1969.

David’s hospitalization – October 1968

At the end of the 1966-67 academic year, David had transferred from St. Lawrence University to the University of Toronto, which our mother and maternal grandfather had attended.  He began his studies there in September 1967, but at the end of October, while I was living on Remson Street and working at Wood Struthers, I received a telephone call from Bill Carden, one of David’s former class-mates at St. Lawrence.  He told me that the previous year, while at St. Lawrence, David had taken a very large dose of L.S.D.  He had recently taken the drug again while at his residence at U. of T., and had suffered a breakdown in which he was continuing to hallucinate.

Bill Carden and two of David’s other friends from St. Lawrence drove to Toronto, picked David up, and  drove him to Manhattan, where Bill’s parents owned an apartment on the upper East Side.  Bill’s father, Dr. George A. Carden Jr., was an internist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and recommended that David be seen by Dr. Ed Kaufman, a young psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of youth and drug addiction.  

Bill Carden drove David to my apartment, where it soon became evident to me that David really was disoriented.  His speech was coherent, but his thinking was irrational and he described “theories” which explained events by unseen cosmic forces.  He attributed his breakdown to a cosmic plan designed to reconcile me and our dad by causing me to ask our dad for advice as to how to get help for David.

After consulting our parents, I took David to St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, across the street from Columbia University.  Dr. Kaufman practiced was on the staff of St. Luke’s, where he could treat David.  David was admitted to the closed psychiatric ward on the eighth floor, known as Clarke 8.  He was medicated with the anti-psychotic drug, Thorazine, and received daily therapy from Dr. Kaufman.

David remained at St. Luke’s for two months.  I visited him there and, when he had recovered sufficiently, I took him out on day-passes.  He continued to entertain his theories and wasn’t well enough to be discharged until after Christmas.  After consulting Dr. Kaufman, my parents decided that David would stay with them at the home they had bought in Ft. Lauderdale, where they now lived, until he was ready to return to university. 

In late December 1967, Sandra’s German fiancée, Peter Kubina, arrived in New York, where his entry had been arranged by our dad.  I met Peter at the airport, and after arranging David’s discharge from St. Luke’s, I took David and Peter to the airport for their flight to Ft. Lauderdale.  Sandra had arrived in Ft. Lauderdale earlier.

For the next few months, David and Peter were employed in Ft. Lauderdale loading vegetables into trucks and later, at the Chris Craft boat factory, until Peter and Sandra found an apartment in Miami.  After David had completed his convalescence,  he travelled to Houston Texas, where he visited Karl Kiralis, a professor from St. Lawrence, and worked several months as an X-ray clerk in a hospital in the city.  Later, he travelled to Cambridge, where he spent a month visiting Pat and Bob and their two young children, Chris and Eric, before returning to Toronto in the fall of 1968 to resume his studies.    

At Christmas in 1968, I joined Sandra and Peter, who were by then married, David, who was home for Christmas from U. of T., and Pat, who had divorced her husband, Bob Thompson, and was visiting with her sons, Chris and Eric and her boyfriend, Walter, at our parents’ home in Ft. Lauderdale.  In the photo below, which Walter took that Christmas, Peter Kubina is in the center, between David and me.

The market crash and my sojourn in Brazil - 1970 

In 1970, there was a major recession in the United States, and the Dow Jones Average fell from 906 points to 753.19.  Most brokerage firms and related businesses on Wall Street either closed or contracted.  

By that time, I had become disillusioned with New York, which seemed chaotic and dangerous.  I believed that my landlady on Remson Street was mentally unstable.  She kept all of her furniture encased in plastic sheeting.  She had symptoms of paranoia, and often carried a pair of scissors in a basket while walking on the street, looking around her and making cutting movements, while talking to herself.  One night, her neighbor, who lived in the apartment below mine on Remson Street, suddenly collapsed.  My landlady was frantic, and summoned me from my apartment.  I gave the neighbor mouth to mouth resuscitation until the Emergency Medical Technicians arrived and advised me that she was already dead.  

Street parking in Brooklyn Heights had been scarce and often non-existent.  Several years earlier, while I was still at Brooklyn College, and after I had incurred about three thousand dollars in parking fines, my car was stolen.  

One night after that, when I was walking along Henry Street on my way to my apartment on Remson Street.  I heard a woman screaming, “He got my purse”.  A big African American guy ran from her and I could see the woman’s purse in his hand.  I tackled him, by hitting him in the knees.  He got up and took off running, leaving the purse behind on the sidewalk.  I retrieved the purse and took it to the lady, who was at the corner nearby, crying hysterically.  As luck would have it, she had just come from a fundraising event at a synagogue raising money for the 1967 War in Israel, and her purse still contained all the cash from the fundraiser.  

Later, in December 1967, I had had another experience when riding the subway with Lucy, when we were attacked by three thugs who were trying to steal Lucy’s purse.  A few years later, on my return to New York, I saw the film “Death Wish” (1974), starring Charles Bronson.  It seemed to capture what life in New York had been like for me in 1970.  Bronson played a vigilante who takes revenge against muggers in New York for killing his wife and raping his daughter at his home.  The film seemed to resonate with the others in the theater, as it did with me, as we all applauded Bronson at the end of the film.

After the kind of experiences I had had in New York, I decided after the 1970 recession to leave the City and travel to Brazil.  I went to Il Lagoa (English for Lagoon), an affluent residential neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, one of the few in Rio that did not have a favela (slum).  There, I stayed with a couple I had met while there.  The woman managed the Rio Office of Sotheby’s Park Benet auction house.  The couple lived in an attached house near the Lagoa district.  The woman’s husband later came and stayed with me at my apartment in New York City while he obtained treatment in New York for his phlebitis.

My hostess, the woman who managed the Sotheby’s office, introduced me to an English woman friend of hers who smoked very potent drugs.  My hostess and her husband and their circle of friends were heavily involved in spiritualism and introduced me to Lourival de Freitas, then one of the foremost spiritualists in Brazil.  

De Freitas, a Brazilian who had once worked as a taxi driver, had become a healer of some repute.  He performed his healing as a charity, at no charge, and turned away publicity.  He claimed to have three spirit guides helping him to perform surgery, one being the Roman emperor, Nero, another being a woman of Nero’s court, and the third being a Japanese man named Sheka, who he said specialized in lung and bronchial problems.  

According to my hostess’ account, she, her husband, a Belgian chemist friend of theirs, and several engineers, supported de Freitas’s work.  They would gather around de Freitas, while he and an assistant attended to poor people who lined up to see him.  One after another, he would speak to the patient, not in Portuguese, but in the patient’s own language.

The group assisting de Freitas played Beatles music on a speaker while de Freitas drank a litre of what he said was Ethyl Alcohol.  At one point before beginning to operate, which involved cutting out a cancerous growth from a woman with a pair of scissors, de Freitas said that they were not all on the same page and that he was experiencing resistance from my hostess, who was skeptical of his abilities.  He asked her whether, when she very young, she had broken her parents’ rules and taken the family’s canoe and tipped it over, almost drowning her 8-year-old brother.  This pronouncement, which the woman said was true but had been unknown to any other person, convinced those present.  DeFreitas then proceeded to cut the patient’s breast, removed something, and reconnected her tissue.  I later met the woman, who showed me her scar, attested to the events described above, and said that she was now cancer free.  

According to my hostess, a friend of hers, an English journalist and psychic researcher, Anne Dooley, had also had de Freitas work on her for a bronchial condition that her own doctors in England had pronounced incurable.  After a brief operation in which de Freitas made a small incision in her back, from which he withdrew a large clot of blood, Dooley returned to England.  She was x-rayed there and her doctors pronounced her to be cured.  

The group took de Freitas to London, where he would look at a patient, feel his organs, and diagnose him, with about a 9 out of 10 success rate.  The doctors were apparently amazed at his abilities.

Many years later, when Pat was looking for information on “John of God”, a fraudulent healer in Brazil, I searched for information on him and found references to de Freitas, which seemed to indicate that he had been a genuine healer.

I spent several months in Rio, living upstairs from the Sotheby offices.  I then began wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  I still had some money left, and wanted to return to the U.S. before I ran out so that I could get re-settled in New York and find employment there.    

Return to Wall Street and DLJ – 1971 to 1972

By the time I returned to New York in late 1970, 65% of all stockbrokers in the City had quit or been fired.  Many were driving taxis or working in other low paid jobs.  I interviewed as an analyst at one of the best Wall Street firms, Oppenheimer, which appeared to be interested in hiring me.  Before pursuing it, though, a headhunter suggested Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ).  

DLJ was a U.S. investment bank founded in 1959 by William H. Donaldson, Richard Jenrette, and Dan Lufkin.  They had founded the firm reasoning that no one else on Wall Street was doing high quality independent corporate research.  DLJ, resolved to fill this gap, and grew substantially, especially through the 1980s and 1990s, as research became more of a commodity.  DLJ’s business eventually included securities underwriting, sales and trading, investment and merchant banking, financial advisory services, investment research, venture capital, correspondent brokerage services, online interactive brokerage services, and asset management.

DLJ was known as an Ivy League firm.  When I went there, I didn’t know anyone, but a couple of their best portfolio managers needed analysts to work with them and the firm hired me to work for them.  I was principally assigned to a portfolio manager, Edward R. Hintz Jr., who later became the founder and president of Hintz, Holman & Hecksher, an investment management firm in New York and one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.  He was later the Vice Chairman of the Board of Pennsylvania State University and his wife, an adjunct professor of food service management at New York University (NYU).

Pam Bronk

While at DLJ, I was assigned an intern, Pam Bronk, who later became a close friend when I moved to San Francisco.   Pam’s daughter from her first marriage, Tammy, had attended Choate but had left during a big cocaine scandal there and moved to New York.  Pam dropped out of drama school at U.C. San Diego to move to New York and live with Tammy.  

While in New York, Pam was accepted at Yale Business School.  Bill Donaldson, one of the name partners of DLJ, had become the first dean of the Business School, and Pam was one of the students in his first class there.  Donaldson was impressed with Pam and hired her to work as an intern at DLJ, where she was assigned to work for me.  I became Tammy’s “proxy father”.  

The students at Yale Business School all fought over where they would apprentice, but Pam was able to land a job at McKenzie, a world-wide financial consultant firm and one of the most prestigious firms on Wall Street, and was offered a job there upon her graduation.  After Donaldson’s death in April 1994, Pam married Chuck Farr, a partner at McKinsey.  When Farr died in 2006, Pam continued to work at McKinsey.  While attending a retirement party there, she met Buford Alexander, another partner at McKinsey, and later married him.

Pam later moved to San Francisco, where she secured employment at Rosenberg Capital Management.  Her daughter from her first marriage, Tammy, lived with her, and attended Sacred Heart School in San Francisco.

Striking out on my own - I join Alliance Capital – 1972

I began working for DLJ soon after my return from Brazil in late 1970.  Frank Carey, an analyst specializing in the energy sector, including oil and gas, became my mentor at the firm.  Another colleague at DLJ, Frank Veneroso, and I made a series of presentations in which I discussed capital goods and macro-economics and Frank followed, talking about technology in very sophisticated terms.  

Pat introduced me to Frank Veneroso, whom she had met through Walter Arenberg, who was a class-mate of Pat’s at Ruston Academy in Havana and the son of Mariada Arensberg, who had been the Assistant to Jim Baker, the Headmaster.  Frank was a class-mate of Walter’s at Harvard and after I met him, I ran into him at the presentations each of us was giving for the DLJ firm.  I learned that he lived around the corner from me in Brooklyn Heights.

Frank Veneroso, his room-mate William, and I bought a 28 foot sailboat that we used to sail up the east coast from New York to Maine.

In about 1971, Frank Veneroso and I were offered an opportunity to join Nesbitt Thompson, a Canadian investment firm, at their headquarters in Montreal.  In 1968, The firm had bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but when the crash came in 1970, and the value of seats on the Exchange declined, it sold its seat to Reynolds and Company, the aluminum manufacturer, and shut down its U.S. operations.  It offered Frank Veneroso and me jobs if we would move to Montreal, but the stock market was still falling and I already had lost my shirt investing my own money on margin, so I declined their offer.  

In 1971, Frank Carey organized a group of analysts, including me, to leave and start Alliance Capital to sell analyst services to Wall Street firms:  The group included Carey, the energy specialist, myself, specializing in mobile homes and the construction industry, and Frank Veneroso, a technology expert, and his wife, a software specialist.  Frank Carey wanted to establish the expertise of our group in a range of industries, so that we could earn commission income by selling our information to brokers.  

Within two years of my beginning there, DLJ offered me the opportunity to head its money management division in San Francisco, at a time when that division was spinning off as a separate firm called Alliance Capital.   

Alliance Capital was founded in 1971, when the investment-management department of DLJ merged with the investment-advisory business of Moody’s Investors Service. Their shared belief was that distinctive research and innovative solutions could produce better outcomes.

In the meantime, I audited night classes in micro-economics at NYU, as I had no background in that field, whereas most of my contemporaries on Wall Street had a background in micro-economics and business administration.

In 1972, I moved to DLJ’s San Francisco office and in 1973, began working for the five member Office of Alliance Capital.

In 1972, I met up again with Pam Bronk, who had come to San Francisco to work for Rosenberg Capital Management (RCM).  Pam leased an apartment three blocks from my apartment on Pacific Heights Blvd.  We were friends, but I wasn’t ready for her to live with me.  Then there was a fire at Pam’s place, and she asked if she and Tammy could come and live with me until they got re-settled.

In 1973, I met Claude Rosenberg, the founder of RCM, at analysts’ meetings. Carl had grown up in San Francisco’s Jordan Park neighborhood.  He had attended Lowell High School and later, Stanford University, where he received his master’s degree in business administration.  In the late 1950’s, he began his business career at San Francisco brokerage firm, J. Barth & Co., building its research department.

In 1970, Barth was sold to Dean Witter & Co., and Claude struck out on his own, forming RCM to manage money for pension funds and other institutions.  He became dissatisfied with the quality of most Wall Street research and moved to build up his firm’s capabilities.  In the early 1980s, he hired a college professor, Craig Gordon, to direct research on how companies he was considering as investments were faring in the marketplace, an initiative dubbed Grassroots Research.  Gordon later recalled,

He came to me when he lost money on Warner Communications. Eleven analysts were following Warner (which lost money when sales of its video game Pong tumbled). He wanted to know why didn’t one analyst go into a store.

Claude didn’t have expensive tastes. His passion was fly fishing, which he pursued at a cabin he maintained in Montana.  Claude and three partners founded Rosenberg Capital Management.  One of the four original partners of got into a dispute with the others and soon after, died.  The remaining partners had to replace him, and Claude called me and invited me to lunch.  He asked if I had ever thought of moving and I said no.  He suggested that I come and meet his partners.  

I spent several hours meeting with Claude and his partners, and afterward, didn’t hear from them for over a year.  Then, all of a sudden, Claude called and asked if I would get together with them again.  He said he’d like me to come in as a replacement for one of the four founders.  They were very successful but said they had never made anyone a partner until after living with them for 4 years.  

I joined RCM in 1974 and, notwithstanding their former practice, I was made a partner after a year, in 1975.  Thereafter, each time I moved up and was given a larger share of the partnership, someone else had to give up a share.  

1975 – I marry Jane Smith

When I arrived in San Francisco, I rented an apartment in Pacific Heights.  One day, in 1974, while playing tennis, I met Jane Smith, who was a special education teacher, living in the Marina.  Jane was born in Columbus Junction, Iowa.  She was five years younger than I was (born July 25, 1945).  She had a lovely smile and a quick wit.  We quickly became friends and eventually began living together about a year after we met.  

From 1972 to 1974, when I met Jane, Pam Bronk and Tammy were there, and I was acting as proxy for Tammy’s father.  Jane was ok with that.  

In 1975, Jane’s uncle and aunt, who were like parents, planned to visit her in San Francisco. We decided that, in order to present our relationship in a way that would not create disapproval, we would become engaged.  Once engaged, we decided that there was no reason not to go ahead and get married.  

Jane and I were married in July 1975.  Jane’s mother and sister, and my parents and Pat, Sandra, and David all attended.  I rented a sail boat that took us all on a trip through the Bay, and under the Golden Gate Bridge, with mulled wine, and later took everyone on a tour of the Mondavi winery in the Napa Valley.  The wedding took place at the Swedenborgian Church, one of California’s earliest pure Arts and Crafts buildings, built in 1895 and in 2004 declared a national historic landmark.  The Church was situated at the northwest corner of Lyon and Washington Streets in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, where I lived at the time. 

 

 

 

 

In my work, Claude and I made a series of presentations and acquired more and more accounts.  The firm grew and, because I was bringing in a lot of business, I acquired a bigger and bigger share of the firm.  First, I was given charge of portfolios, and owned a larger share than the partner in charge of research.  Eventually, I became the third largest owner, and eventually In my work, Claude and I made a series of became the managing partner in the late 1970’s.  

Pam Bronk - 1977

Pam invited us once when we were at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills (Queens).  Tammy had had kids by then.  She said she would send her driver.  Joan said, “I don’t know about this.”  The driver brought Jane and me.  Joan in an hour knows everyone.  The driver then drove us back to NYC.  The driver then sent a bill.  He was a limo driver, but was a regular of hers.  I paid the bill.

Sandra’s move to California

In 1971, Baba Hari Das, a renunciate Indian monk, came to the United States at the invitation of his American students.  By February 1971, he was teaching in the U.S. and in 1972, as interest in yoga grew, his students organized several events, including demonstrations of yoga asanas, shatkarma, and mudras (Lama Foundation in New Mexico, Coconut Grove in Florida, and Santa Cruz in California).  Peter Kubina attended one of the demonstrations in Coconut Grove, where he and Sandra were then living, and became interested in his teaching.  At about the same time, Peter and Sandra were separating after their four-year marriage, and in 1973, she married Michael Maura, a Bahamian businessman and joined him at his home on Paradise Island, across the harbour from Nasau, where Michael operated a paint and hardware business.

In 1975, Hari Das started his weekly Yoga Sutras of Patanjali classes at the University of California, at Santa Cruz, CA., and in 1978, his students established a community at Mt. Madonna in Watsonville, near Santa Cruz, to support his teaching.  At about that time, Peter introduced Sandra to Hari Das’ teaching and moved from Florida to Santa Cruz in order to participate in the Mt. Madonna community.  

In 1978, Sandra and Michael separated and in August of that year, Sandra moved to California.  She sublet an apartment on Western Drive in Santa Cruz for two months, and from September 1978 until September 1982, she lived at 104 Castillion Terrace in Santa Cruz.

Article in COMTEN – November 1978

In November, 1978, I was to be a director of COMTEN magazine, then a popular publication on Wall Street.  I was interviewed by Barie Carmichael for an article that later appeared in COMTEN magazine.  I had been a partner at RCM for three years, was managing corporate pension funds there, and was serving as a member of the firm’s equity portfolio team and as coordinator of equity investment strategy.  Barie wrote, “His perspective as a member of the investment community and his background in economics forecasting should contribute greatly to his role as a COMTEN director.”  The photo below was taken for the article. 

Jane and I settle in – 1979

In 1979, Jane and I bought a house in Oakland Hills.  It was our home for the next twelve years, until the Oakland fires of 1991.

  

 

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 1979, Frank invited me and my family to an island he had just bought in Maine.  In an article in the 2025 issue of Portland Monthly, Patricia Howe and Anne Stevens wrote:

Sheephead Island $7,975,000.  East Penobscot Bay, Deer Isle, 65 Acres.

When Frank Veneroso drove up from Harvard in his “Battlestar Galactica” (1959 Chrysler Imperial) seeking “a saltwater farm with a lot of privacy on the Maine coast,” he hit the jackpot with an island he could drive to at low tide that “was a farm from 1794 to 1884.” Veneroso purchased Sheephead Island in 1979 from Stanton Garfield, President James A. Garfield’s grandson, and restored it to look like a 19th-century farm, adding two main houses, a guest house, and an artist’s studio. “We wanted a house with lots of light and views, but that looked like it had been there for two hundred years.” Irresistible when in bloom with rugosa roses, two-hundred-year-old lilacs, and enough lupines to send Miss Rumphius into a swoon, Sheephead “is all of Maine by the sea.” Taxes are $10,701.

 

 

 

We had two children, Andrew Byron Price, born September 8, 1979, and Jonathan Price, born June 13, 1982. 

 

As my work made greater demands on me, Jane and I agreed that I would retire when I reached the age of 55 and that we would buy a villa in Portugal where we could live comfortably on our savings.  As time went on, though, developments at the firm, and my responsibilities to my partners and associates, caused me to postpone my retirement.  This caused much tension in Jane’s and my marriage.

Dad dies and Sandra buys Land for her Home - 1983 

Sandra’s and Michael’s final divorce decree was issued in Nasau on June 18, 1980.  From August 18, 1982, to September 18, 1983, Sandra rented an apartment at 660 Nobel Drive, Unit 2-D, in Santa Cruz.  In about 1982, I told Sandra that if she found a suitable house in Santa Cruz, I would buy it and she could rent from me until she received her share of the proceeds of sale of the lease/purchase contract that she and Michael owned, representing their interest in the home where they had lived in the Bahamas during their marriage.  With that commitment, Sandra began searching for the best value for the money I had said I would make available to her.    For two years, she searched, always losing out to higher bids.

On November 23, 1983, Sandra bought an empty lot at what eventually became 103 Wavecrest Avenue in Santa Cruz.  By that time, she was able to pay the $52,000.00 purchase price herself from her share of the proceeds of sale of the home in the Bahamas.  I loaned her the additional amount that she needed to hire a contractor to build a house on the lot, with building plans that were drawn by her ex-husband, Peter Kubina, who was then living in Hayward.  I did this by means of an intra-family loan, secured by an interest in her house.  I oversaw the terms of Sandra’s contract with the builder, and when the house was built, I, in effect, owned the house and rented it back to Sandra, applying the rent as re-payments of her loan.  

Dad dies – November 1983

On November 24, 1983, our dad, who had suffered for years from atherosclerosis, the result of heavy smoking all his life, suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the age of 77 at our parents’ home in Ft. Lauderdale Florida.   According to his wishes, he was cremated, and a few weeks later, Pat, Sandra, David and I gathered with our mom for a memorial service in Ft. Lauderdale.  The photo below was taken after the service.

Our dad’s Will, which he had signed earlier that year, left his entire estate to our mother.  Our mother was named as executor, with me and David as alternates if she was unable to act.  I had managed our parents’ investments up to that point, and our mom asked me to continue doing so.  

Sandra Moves into her New Home - 1985

In 1985, Sandra completed the building of her house at 103 Wavecrest Avenue in Santa Cruz. Sandra had paid $52,000 for the land (all she had from Michael’s and her lease/purchase proceeds of the Nassau house) and I had put up $95,999 for construction of the house, with the understanding that she would rent from me, which she did for a number of years at market value.

The construction ended up being slightly more because of her contractor leaving, etc. when Leif broke his neck and Sandra was in Canada, but she managed to get a couple thousand back from the contractor’s $5,000 bond, after the lawyer’s fees.  Jane and I “gifted” Sandra what would have been our allowed tax-free donations over the next years, based on the appraised value of the house at the time ($200,000).  We could each donate $10,000 tax-free per year to recipients.  

Sandra valued the home, in part, because it had her “blood, sweat and tears” in it.  It was a joint effort of mine, Jane’s Peter’s and Sandra’s.  It was, she noted, a huge risk because no one in our family had ever built a house, Sandra was a single working mom with two young kids, but Babaji told her “Do it”, so she did.

In 1985, Sandra moved into her new home, shown below.  

 

 

 

 

RCM is acquired by the Travelers Group – Late 1980’s

In the late 1980s, Claude sold RCM to an investment company later acquired by the Travelers Group, but remained the firm’s top executive. 

Oakland fire - 1991

In October 1991, there was a large fire in Oakland, which became known as the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991.  The fire killed 25 people and injured 150 others. The 1,520 acres destroyed included 2,843 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units.  Our home was one of those destroyed and we lost almost all of our belongings in the fire.

With the insurance proceeds from the fire, Jane and I bought a property in Belvedere, an incorporated city in Marin County, on San Francisco Bay.  Belvedere consists of two islands and a lagoon, and is connected to the Tiburon Peninsula by two causeways.  When we moved there, the population was under 2,000.  We hired a contractor, who built a house to our specifications.  The house was beautiful, with windows overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and the Bay Bridge on the other. 

David’s eldest two children, John David and Caroline, visit – 1992

By 1992, we had found temporary accommodation in Oakland.  We also owned a house at Black Butte Ranch in Oregon.  That summer of 1992, David and Maureen sent John David and Caroline to visit us there for two weeks.

Sandra Graduates earns her B.A. degree - 1993

On June 18, 1993, Sandra graduated with honors in her major, psychology, and received her B.A. (Psych) at U.C.S.C.  

Mom Moves to California - 1993

From July to October 1993, Sandra packed up our mother’s belongings in Ft. Lauderdale and moved it to California.  The sale of our mother’s house closed on October 8, 1993, for $135,000.00, after which our mother moved to California.

When she arrived in Santa Cruz, Mom moved to Dominican Oaks, a retirement home across the street from the Catholic Hospital.  She lived there for two years until she became very unhappy, whereupon she moved to Sandra’s home in Santa Cruz, with nursing staff that Sandra paid for from our dad’s annuity and long-term care insurance.  There was a clause in the contract that provided for a six-week hiatus after discharge from hospital.  Sandra retained a lawyer in Santa Cruz who got our mom’s Florida insurer to honor the payments for in-house help from a non-licensed nursing service in California.   

As a graduation gift to Sandra when she earned her B.A. in June 1993, I gave Sandra a ticket for a return flight to India so that she could visit Sri Ram Ashram in northern India.  Sri Ashram was the children’s orphanage, school, and medical clinic in a rural area of the northern state of Uttaranchal that followers of Baba Hari Dass, the Hindu monk in whose community at Mt. Madonna in Santa Cruz Sandra participated, had established several years earlier.  On January 18, 1994, a few weeks after her 49th birthday, Sandra used the ticket I had given her to fly to India, where she spent the next few months (until April 2, 1994) at the ashram.  

RCM Merges with Dresdner Bank; Claude retires as Chairman - 1995

In 1995, RCM’s parent corporation, Travelers Group Inc. in New York, began selling its money-management subsidiaries so it could focus on its core businesses of insurance and consumer lending. With its large portfolio of investments, amounting to $26 Billion assets under management, RCM became an attractive object for a buy-out.

In the Summer of 1995, one of RCM’s partners, who was in charge of bonds, approached Goldman Sachs, with a view to merging the two firms.  If Goldman Sachs had acquired RCM, it would have more than doubled Goldman Sachs’ assets under management to $72 billion.  Goldman’s culture at that time was to hire the top performing partners only, and to fire all the rest.  The proposed agreement, if consummated, would have resulted in the 3 or 4 principal partners of RCM who were retained by Goldman receiving compensation packages worth approximately $100 million each.  

I had the highest performance results at RCM and had brought the most clients to the firm, and was managing partner, so our partnership agreement at RCM gave me a veto over such mergers.  When I was privately informed by one of the partners of Goldman Sachs of the secret negotiation, I vetoed Goldman’s bid, as the proposed merger would have been good for three or four of our partners, but not for the rest.  I decided instead to accept a merger with Dresdner Bank, one of Germany’s largest banks, centered in Frankfurt.  Dresdner Bank offered a hands-off management style that let RCM executives keep control of our company.  

The completion of Dresdner’s acquisition of RCM was delayed for some time while RCM and Travelers Group negotiated to resolve RCM’s position that the proceeds of sale should be split 70-30 between it and Travelers Group.  RCM managers flew to Europe for a long stay in August 1995 and Dresdner executives spent two weeks in San Francisco after that, poring through our financial and legal papers with our executives.

In September 1995, Vanity Fair published an article in which Goldman Sachs prematurely announced that it was acquiring an Investment Banking firm.  The story was repeated in the Wall Street Journal on September 19. 

Because of these articles, Goldman Sachs was embarrassed when I vetoed the deal.  The outcome caused some consternation in the investment community, but I was unable to disclose the Goldman partner who had informed me of the proposed deal and what it would have entailed.

On December 15, 1995, after much speculation on Wall Street, Dresdner Bank AG of Germany announced an agreement to acquire RCM Capital Management, which was by then a money-management unit of Travellers Group Inc., for $300 million.  At the time of the acquisition, RCM managed $25 billion in stocks and bonds for institutional clients and wealthy individuals, and owned Yahoo shares.   

Four years later, on December 1, 1999, Eric T. Miller, a Dartmouth graduate (1950) who had served as Chief Strategist for DLJ since 1979, interviewed me for a series he called “The Wise Investors” that he published in a monthly newsletter, “Random Gleanings”, in which he commented on a wide variety of financial, economic, and political topics.  At the time, the newsletter was a popular periodical on Wall Street.  The series focused on investors who had had an above-average investment record spanning 30 years or more, indicating that they had experience with both bull and bear markets.

Miller’s article examined RCM’s successful transition from an investment boutique to a global organization.  Miller noted that RCM had been one of the best-known investment boutiques of the past three decades and had now made the transition to become a global entity.  He wrote:

Headquartered in San Francisco, Dresdner RCM Global Investors is now the global platform for Dresdner Bank’s worldwide institutional asset-management business outside Germany.  Capabilities include U.S. and international stocks and bonds, large and small, and global asset allocation.  It is the evolution and transformation of the U.S. firm founded by Claude Rosenberg and Bob Sutton in 1970.  

Claude had been the research director of J. Barth in San Francisco, and Bob Sutton was a portfolio manager with Wells Fargo.  Starting with investment assets of $20 million, they were joined by other analysts sharing the same investment philosophy.  From the outset, growth was rapid with the development of a fixed-income capability in 1974 and a real estate operation in 1975.  The first mutual fund for institutional clients was launched in 1979, and research was globalized in the late 1980’s.  

Emphasis was on teamwork and collegiality.  “Stars” were not encouraged, and management structure was a flat partnership…. In 1986, the equity ownership was sold to American Can, which was then under the leadership of Gerry Tsai.  That entity became Primerica, and then Travelers Corporation, run by Sandy Weill.  RCM was treated as a separate autonomous unit.  It had been granted a wall of protection in order to preserve its culture, one result of which was that the organizations never really married.

In the meantime, other new investment products were introduced.  An international equity fund was introduced in 1988, followed by a small-cap fund in 1992.   

Miller explained that when it became evident to the firm’s management that to be effective, its research analysts had to be familiar with the world market, and that the value it added to clients would be limited by remaining a domestic-only manager, the firm spent more than a year with an investment banker studying the experiences of other firms with global expertise and in 1996, decided to merge with the Dresdner Bank because of their overlapping business and shared vision.  The new entity, named Dresdner RCM Global Investors, had a staff of 170 investment professionals supervising about $70 billion from primarily institutional and high-net-worth accounts.

After reviewing my background in Cuba, Spain, and the U.S., Miller wrote:

RCM’s emphasis on teamwork, together with Bill’s appreciation of cultural differences, derived in part from his personal background in foreign service, have been important factors in achieving the mesh sought.  In effect, a five-year program of transition was initiated in 1996.  Bill relates that it did not derive from any precise blueprint or model, but evolved with the broad participation of most of the senior investment professionals.  A broad sharing of corporate goals was sought by including al in the reinvention process. The concentration the first two years was on the integration of the different investment centers into a virtual investment platform functioning 24 hours a day.  The third-year focus was on reorganizing the management structures of RCM and the other investment centers.  At RCM this entailed replacing the traditional partnership with a more streamlined corporate governance.  The priority this year has been to combine Dresdner RCM Global platform and the investment groups in Germany to create an even deeper, self-sufficient, multi-product and multi-style organization.    

When Dresdner Bank AG acquired RCM from Travelers Group, it was the second largest Bank in Germany, after Deutsche Bank AG.  It operated over 1,100 branch offices in 60 countries, and provided an array of products and services to private and corporate customers, including lending and deposit activities, corporate financing, equity sales, and asset management.  

Dresdner Bank insisted that I be part of the merger contract with a mandate to establish a world-wide platform for best practices.  I insisted to Dresdner that it retain 30 members of RCM’s firm, with compensation to each of a substantial amount, although much less than would have resulted to the few partners who would have been retained had RCM merged with Goldman Sachs.

When RCM merged with Dresdner Bank In 1995, Claude retired as chairman.  While continuing to be a partner, he devoted an increasing amount of his time to philanthropy.  In doing so, he became an example to me in my later efforts to manage my own charitable and family foundations. Claude outlined his ideas on philanthropy in a 1994 book, “Wealthy and Wise: How You and America Can Get the Most Out of Your Giving” (Little, Brown, 1994).

In his writings and interviews, Claude noted that donations of appreciated assets, such as stock that have increased in value, earn a philanthropist a larger tax break than a simple cash donation.  He noted that if the $12.4 billion in charitable cash gifts given by America’s wealthiest residents in the year 2000 had been delivered in appreciated stock, these philanthropists could have saved $693.5 million in taxes.

Beyond informing people of how to maximize giving and tax benefits, Claude wrote about the psychological reasons that people don’t give as much as they can.  He noted that when people base their donations on their income alone, without taking account of the tax deductibility of their donations, their donations tended to be systematically lower than what they actually could give.

Based on analyzing Internal Revenue Service data, Claude found that most people make donations according to a percentage of their income, often on the advice of their accountants. Poor and middle-class people, he found, give more, relative to what they can afford, than do the wealthy, especially the very wealthy: those with incomes of more than $10 million and assets averaging $125 million. Based on extensive research on charitable giving in the U.S., Claude’s model estimated that if people gave what they could really afford, we would increase charitable giving in the United States by $100 billion a year.

In 1998, Claude founded, and financed, the New Tithing Group, a non-profit organization that analyzed U.S. philanthropic trends.  Among other things, the firm created a Web site with an online calculator that enabled users at any income level and with any amount of assets to calculate how much they might prudently donate.

In the Jewish community, Claude served as chairman of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation’s investment committee for 17 years.  When he died in 2008, it was noted that at the time when an investor had to invest at least $10 million to invest with RCM, Claude managed the JCF’s assets for free.  He was heavily involved with Jewish Family and Children’s Services and was one of the major forces behind the founding of Rhoda Goldman Plaza, where he spent his last years. He was also a major benefactor of the Junior Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco.

Claude and his wife also founded a family foundation, the Louise and Claude Rosenberg Jr. Foundation, which established a preschool in San Francisco, endowed a professorship in the Stanford English department, and built a massive new library at City College of San Francisco. In 2001, Claude told The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper that the couple’s shared goal was to “empty it out before we die.”

At RCM, Claude and I committed to maintaining annual charitable donations equal to 2% of our share of the firm’s assets.  Each of the directors did research and recommended which recipients they thought should receive our most significant donations.  Additionally, each director had a discretionary fund, which they could use to make donations in their sole discretion.

After Dresdner Bank acquired control of RCM, it was not as committed to maintaining the 2% per year donations that Claude and I had committed to up until then.

Pat Moves to California - 1995

In 1995, Pat, who was then 55 years old, moved from Lexington, Massachusetts to California. Pat had earned her Master of Social Work from the Boston University School of Social Work in 1976, several years after divorcing Bob Thompson, whom she had met when Bob was at Harvard Law School.  From 1980 to 1981, she had become a member of the Academy of Certified Social Workers and a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in Massachusetts.  

When Pat moved to California 15 years later, she secured employment as a social worker at Rossmoor Retirement Community.  She hated that job, so she left to become a therapist at Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest private health care services in the U.S.  

On June 6, 1995, Pat bought a home at 426 Pine Street in Sausalito for $400,000.00.  She wasn’t able to pay that entire amount herself from the proceeds of her home in Lexington, and was going to get a reverse mortgage.  Instead, I made an intra-family loan to her.  On July 2, 2003, she signed over half the property to me for $224,000.00.  

Luke Maura Launches his Career - 1995

Sandra’s youngest son, Luke Maura, completed his B.A. degree in Economics at U.C.S.C. in 1995.  Upon his graduation, I arranged for RCM, which I then managed, to employ Luke for the summer.  Later, I told Luke about a training program in Europe, which he underwent before securing permanent employment at Deutsche Bank in New York City.  Eventually, he was able to transfer to the Bank’s San Francisco office.

Sandra Completes Her Graduate Studies - 1996

By the time Mom sold her home in Ft. Lauderdale in October 1993, Sandra had completed her Bachelor of Social Work degree.  With the flight I had given her as a graduation gift, Sandra travelled to India from January 21 to March 2, 1994, while Mom stayed with David and Maureen in Mississauga.  After Sandra returned, she accompanied Mom back to Santa Cruz in early April.

From April 1994 to May 1996, Sandra was enrolled in the Master of Social Work program at San Jose State University.  She received her Master of Social Work degree on May 24, 1996.  

Upon receiving her degree, Sandra was required to work for two years at Child Protective Services to fulfil the conditions for her scholarship in the Masters program.  Mom therefore entered Dominican Oaks retirement home in Santa Cruz, a three-tiered facility with rooms in independent living, assisted living, and full care areas.

Mom Develops Dementia - 1998        

From early June to early September 1998, Mom visited David and Maureen in Mississauga.  In the weeks preceding her trip, Mom began showing early signs of dementia.  Sandra reported to David that Mom had telephoned her from Dominican Oaks in the middle of the night, confused as to what time it was, and agitated and confused as to where everyone had gone.  She reported that Mom claimed that a man was using her shower and that a child was crying in the hallway at Dominican Oaks.  When Sandra took Mom for a trip to the Hearst Estate, she said that Mom mistakenly identified tourists at the estate as residents of Dominican Oaks.

When Mom arrived at the airport in Mississauga, she was confused as to whether she was in San Francisco or Toronto, and as to how she had gotten to Mississauga, and as to how long she was staying.  Her confusion worsened when her stay was extended from early July to early September when Sandra was to attend a retreat in Toronto with Haridas before accompanying Mom back to Santa Cruz.  

David noted that during Mom’s stay, she was often lucid, but often did not remember visits people had made, and when Maureen’s sister Margaret visited from Parry Sound, and told Mom that she had recently visited Cuba on a holiday, Mom began associating Parry Sound with Cuba.  She also was unable at times to recognize people, including David’s and Maureen’s children, or to distinguish them from their cousins or friends who visited.

When Mom returned to Dominican Oaks in September, the management concluded that they were no longer able to care properly for her, as they were not equipped with a closed wing where they could ensure that she did not wander off.  Sandra consulted a psychiatrist, Dr. Gillette, who tested Mom and concluded that she was roughly in the moderate, or mid-phase, of Alzheimer’s, showing mixed features of depression and confusion.  Dr. Gillette expressed the opinion that she could be better cared for at Sandra’s home, provided resources were available, than at a facility.  She therefore moved back to Sandra’s, and I again agreed to pay Sandra $20,000 per year to care for her, with the help of personal care workers from El Salvador. 

Mom had signed a Power of Attorney for Health Care naming Sandra as her proxy and Sandra was willing to make room for Mom in her home in Santa Cruz, provided personal care workers could be found who could help her care for Mom. I offered to Sandra that if she undertook the care of Mom full time, with the help of personal care workers, I would pay her $20,000.00 per year, more than the amount she was earning at that time from her employment.  Sandra agreed, and took charge of Mom’s care until Mom’s death from complications associated with Alzheimers in January 2002.

Dresdner RCM Merges with Allianz AG - 2001

After Dresdner Bank acquired RCM, 20% of Dresdner Bank was bought by Allianz AG, one of the largest insurance companies in the world.  In April 2001, Allianz agreed to acquire the remaining 80% for U.S. $20 billion.  By that time, RCM, which had 30 partners at the time of the Dresdner merger only four years earlier, now had about 80 partners.  Allianz saw the takeover as a way of bolstering its financial management arm.  By April 2003, RCM would grow to 112 partners.

Claude Rosenberg, the founder of RCM, had become a close friend of mine since I had joined the firm.  I lived along the route that Claude took to work each morning.  Claude would pick me up and drive me to work and we would discuss developments in the firm and the strategy to be adopted.  When Allianz made its bid to buy RCM/Dresdner, Claude disagreed with Allianz’s insistence on performance reporting, etc.  He believed that it would undermine the firm’s culture of informality and collegiality.  

When Allianz insisted on maintaining the performance reporting, Claude quit the firm.  Some of the members of the Board who believed that the $15 million compensation I was insisting on for the partners of RCM who would be retained in the deal was too high and was motivated by personal self-interest.  In order to diffuse this perception, I agreed to put my signing bonus, which amounted to over $10 million, into a charitable trust.  

Allianz insisted that I remain as Managing Partner of the RCM firm for two years, until April 2003.  To her credit, Jane agreed to my making this agreement.  It was the origin of the charitable foundation that Joan and I have managed since my eventual retirement.  I agreed and the merger was signed.

Mom dies and I separate from Jane - 2002

In early 2000, Mom fell and broke her hip while Sandra was outside walking her dog.  She was transported by ambulance to a hospital where she was operated on, and after a brief post-operative stay, she was transferred to a convalescent facility on Frederick Street in Santa Cruz for about a month, and from June 21 to September 2000, she stayed at Driftwood Health Care Centre in Santa Cruz.  She did not adjust well, and returned to Sandra’s home in October 2000.  I arranged for her to have home care there from two personal care workers from El Salvador.

Mom died at Sandra’s home in Santa Cruz, California on January 27, 2002, at the age of 87.  The cause of her death was listed as Alzheimer’s Dementia, and resulted from her being unable to continue eating and sleeping normally.  

Pat, David, and Jane and I gathered at Sandra’s home afterward for a funeral ritual that was conducted, as Sandra requested, in accordance with the Hindu rites practiced at Mount Madonna.

Mom’s Will, like our father’s, named David and me as executors.  Because mom was living in California when she died, I took responsibility for dealing with mom’s cremation and the execution of her Will.  Her Will, which was signed at the same time as our father’s in early 1983, provided, as his Will had, that if the other pre-deceased them, her estate would be divided equally among Pat, me, Sandra, and David.  Because our parents had loaned David $100,000 when he and Maureen had bought their home on Avonbridge Drive in Mississauga, his share was satisfied by the forgiveness of that debt.  Pat’s share was satisfied by the forgiveness of mom’s loan to her when she had bought her home in Sausalito.  Because Jane and I were financially secure, I forwent my share of mom’s estate, so the balance was divided between Pat and Sandra.

Jane was angry that I had twice entered into agreements that postponed my planned retirement at age 55.  I had also told her that I was forming an attachment to Joan Frost, who was in charge of human resources at RCM and accompanied me to my meetings with the branch offices.  In 2001, Joan announced that she was separating from me.

When Jane and I separated, I telephoned David and told him about it.  Over the course of several telephone conversations, David questioned me at length about what had cause the separation, and about my feelings toward Jane and toward Joan, whom I was then in a relationship with.  Although I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the questions, which I regarded as somewhat intrusive, I knew that my separation had come as a shock to David, and suspected that his need to understand my situation might reflect a frustration that he felt in his own marriage, so I tried to answer his questions as openly and honestly as I could.

I told David that I was painfully aware of the optics of my leaving my marriage for a relationship with a younger woman, as I was then 61 and Joan was 40.  In response to his question, I told him, truthfully, that there was nothing in my physical relationship with Jane or Joan that had led to my wanting to separate from Jane.  Apart from the amount of time that my work had demanded, especially on flights overseas, when our work required Joan and me to travel together, and the distrust that this engendered in Jane, the main cause of our separation, from my point of view, had been the level of communication Joan and I shared, and the honesty it allowed me in our relationship.

When David pressed me for more information, I said that the best analogy I could offer was being in love with someone who is blind and who thinks you are extremely handsome.  An operation would cure your partner of her blindness, but this would dispel the illusions she holds about your appearance.  Do you facilitate the operation?  I said that my relationship with Joan was one of such honesty that I felt known to a much greater extent than I had ever experienced.  For all the imperfections that this revealed in me, I felt that the rewards of a relationship where each person truly knows the other to the core, far exceeded the cost.

David also questioned me about Joan’s health issues which, at the time, appeared to be life-threatening.  Joan has osteomyelitis, a bone disease mainly affecting one of her legs, and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a generalized disease which affect the myelin.  I said that even if Joan were to die, the time we spent together felt worth any sacrifice.

David also asked about Jane’s and Joan’s values, and their qualities, and what each brought to the philanthropic work that I envisaged might occupy more of my time in the future.  I explained that while Jane and Joan both had strong altruistic motivations, Jane expressed hers in a more hands-on way, such as in her work as a “candy-stripe” volunteer at the hospital in Tiburon, whereas Joan expressed hers at a more “macro” level, which was especially helpful to me in the administration of the charitable trust I had created.  I was confident, I said, that Joan and I would be an effective team.

Jane and I divorce - 2003

Later in 2002, Jane and I had marriage counselling.  The counselling was unsuccessful and Jane and I were divorced in 2003.  We divided our assets equally, leaving us each with approximately $25 million, apart from the trust funds we had created for Andrew and Jonathan.  

Jane and I also divided the charitable trust, by dissolving the joint charitable foundation, which we had named the William L. and Carol J. Price Charitable Foundation, and creating new, separate foundations.  Jane named hers the Hilltop Charitable Foundation, which had assets of between $5 and $9,999.99 million, and I named mine the William L. Price Charitable Foundation.  so that each of us could manage our respective halves separately.

I retire from Allianz Dresdner RCM – April 1, 2003

Allianz asked me to become a member of their Board of Directors, in order to become their delegate in giving directions to the Branch offices.  I declined, and instead proposed that Allianz appoint Joaquim Maedler.  Allianz accepted this recommendation.

Later, Claude returned and said that he had reconsidered his decision to resign.  However, Allianz would not agree to his reinstatement.  Claude blamed his decision to quit, and Allianz’s refusal to reinstate him, on me.

The problems I was having in 2002 with my marriage and the travel that I was then required to do as the Investment Chair of Allianz Dresdner RCM left me exhausted and without the energy or bandwidth to meet with Claude and try to effect a reconciliation. 

After Allianz acquired Dresdner Bank, the two organizations combined their asset management activities by forming Allianz Global Investors.  In 2002, Michael Diekmann succeeded Henning Schulte-Noelle as CEO of Allianz AG.   

In 2002, a person at the Boston office reported to the Allianz Board of Directors that I had told him to report to me personally.  He was later convicted of misfeasance, including lying, but at the time, the Board called on me to give “my side of the story,” and appeared to be suspicious of me.  I was furious and announced that I would leave the firm on April 1, 2003, the date to which the merger contract required me to remain.  The Board did not believe that I would leave, and tried, through Joaquim Maedler, to persuade me to remain in my position, but I followed through on my statement, and resigned on April 1, 2003.

Reflections on my career at RCM

I’m not sure how to account for the success I enjoyed at RCM.  I once attended a conference with between 700 and 1,000 analysts and investment portfolio managers.  The speaker discussed the writing of J.E. Bogen, author of “The Other Side of the Brain: An Appositional Mind,” in R. Ornstein (ed.)’s The Nature of Human Consciousness (Viking, 1973).

The speaker performed an experiment in which he distributed questionnaires that the attendees completed and the speaker then analyzed.  He gave the results, from which the attendees could identify, by an identifier code, their own without their identity being known.  The results disclosed which attendee appeared to be left brain dominant in decision-making that was based on numerical analysis, and which were right brain dominant in decision-making based more on intuitive assessments.  Mine was almost perfectly balanced between the two.  I concluded that this might explain my success, added to the fact that I did not come to my work from a background in business, but rather from one in political science and macro-economics, which pre-disposed me to more strategic, top-down, analysis, in addition to analysis of individual, pre-selected, companies.  I also tended to be more tolerant of ambiguity, which was helpful when interpreting performance of companies in a fluid and changing economic environment.    

Part of my duties in the merged Allianz Dresdner RCM firm entailed travelling from one branch office to another, promoting the “best practices” that we had developed at RCM.  In order to maintain the integrity of the firms acquired in the merger, they were not obliged to follow RCM’s direction.  I was therefore given the mandate of trying to achieve uniformity through ongoing negotiations and efforts to achieve consensus with each of the branch offices.

Jonathan graduates from Hamilton College – May 2006

On May 20, 2006, I attended Jonathan’s graduation from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.  I had flown to New York City and rented a car, and drove four and a half hours to Clinton.  David drove the five hours from Toronto to Clinton and met up with me there.

The graduation ceremonies included a “baccalaureate ceremony” on May 20 and the graduation ceremony on May 21st.  On the day of the baccalaureate ceremony, it was raining, and I was driving from the Bed and Breakfast where I was staying to the ceremony.  I picked David up at the hotel where he was staying, and drove to the venue where the baccalaureate ceremony was to be held.  Along the way, we saw Jane walking in the rain and stopped to offer her a ride.  She got in the front seat next to me but a short distance along the road, she realized that it was I who was driving and demanded to be let out. 

When we arrived at the arena where the ceremony was held, I sat in one row, with David, and Jane sat in another row, with Jonathan and others.  The speaker at the ceremony was Bill Moyers, the journalist and documentarian.  His speech was somber, as he commented on the economic recession, brought on by corporate greed, the polarized politics in the U.S. and the crises of climate change and opiate addiction. He said, in part:

So I have been thinking seriously about what I might say to you in this Baccalaureate service. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything to your generation except, “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry for the mess you’re inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We’re sorry for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our imperiled democracy. We’re sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck cleaning it up.” 

….

If the world confuses you a little, it confuses me a lot. When I graduated fifty years ago, I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers questioned, and the odds are that you can look forward to being even more perplexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment.  If your parents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I suspect they would tell you life confuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would. I find alternatively afraid, cantankerous, bewildered, often hostile, sometimes gracious, and battered by a hundred new sensations every day. I can be filled with a pessimism as gloomy as the depth of the middle-ages, yet deep within me I’m possessed of a hope that simply won’t quit. A friend on Wall Street said one day that he was optimistic about the market, and I asked him, “Then why do you look so worried?” He replied, “Because I’m not sure my optimism is justified.” Neither am I. So I vacillate between the determination to act, to change things, and the desire to retreat into the snuggeries of self, family and friends.

Moyers concluded:

The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life’s polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet, how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many? I don’t know what they taught you here at Hamilton about all this, but I trust you are not leaving here without thinking about how you will respond to the dissonance in our culture, the rivalry between beauty and bestiality in the world, and the conflicts in your own soul. 

All of us have to choose sides on this journey. But the question is not so much who we are going to fight against as it is which side of our own nature will we nurture: The side that can grow weary and even cynical, and believe that everything is futile, or the side that for all the vulgarity, brutality, and cruelty, yearns to affirm, connect and signify.  Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humiliation, “And we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful…in the presence of one or the other.

That’s really what brings me here this afternoon. I did put myself in your place, and asked what I’d want a stranger from another generation to tell me if I had to sit through his speech. Well, I’d want to hear the truth: The truth is, life’s a tough act, the world’s a hard place, and along the way you will meet a fair share of fools, knaves and clowns—even act the fool yourself from time to time when your guard is down or you’ve had too much wine. I’d like to be told that I will experience separation, loss and betrayal, that I’ll wonder at times where have all the flowers gone. I would want to be told that while life includes a lot of luck, life is more than luck. It is sacrifice, study, and work; appointments kept, deadlines met, promises honored. I’d like to be told that it’s okay to love your country right or wrong, but it’s not right to be silent when your country is wrong. And I would like to be encouraged not to give up on the American experience.

To remember that the same culture which produced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King, and Hamilton College. And I would like to be told that there is more to this life than I can see, earn, or learn in my time.  That, beyond the day-to-day spectacle are cosmic mysteries we don’t understand.  That, in the meantime—and the meantime is where we live—we infinitesimal particles of creation carry on the miracle of loving, laughing and being here now, by giving, sharing and growing now. Let me tell you one of my favorite stories. I read it a long time ago and it’s stayed with me. 

There was a man named Shalom Aleicheim. He was one of the accursed of the Earth. Every misfortune imaginable befell him. He lost his wife, his children neglected him, his house burned down, his job disappeared—everything he touched turned to dust. Yet through all this Shalom kept returning good for evil everywhere he could until he died. When the angels heard he was arriving at Heaven’s gate, they hurried down to greet him. Even the Lord was there, so great was this man’s fame for goodness. It was the custom in Heaven that every newcomer was interrogated by the prosecuting angel, to assure that all trespasses on Earth had been atoned. But when Shalom reached those gates, the prosecuting angel arose, and for the first time in the memory of Heaven, said, “There are no charges.” Then the angel for the defense arose and rehearsed all the hardships this man had endured and recounted how in all the difficult circumstances of his life he had remained true to himself and returned good for evil. When the angel was finished, the Lord said, “Not since Job himself have we heard of a life such as this one.” And then, turning to Shalom, he said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you.” The old man raised his eyes and said, “Well, if I could start every day with a hot buttered roll…” And, at that, the Lord and all the angels wept, at the preciousness of what he was asking for, at the beauty of simple things: a buttered roll, a clean bed, a beautiful summer day, someone to love and be loved by. These supply joy and meaning on this earthly journey. ….The reality is physical: I need this bread to live. But the reality is also social: I need others to provide the bread. I depend for bread on hundreds of people I don’t know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hungry. If I offer them nothing of value in exchange for their loaf, I betray them. The people who grow the wheat, process and store the grain, and transport it from farm to city; who bake it, package it, and market it—these people and I are bound together in an intricate reciprocal bargain. We exchange value. 

This reciprocity sustains us. If you doubt it, look around you. Hamilton College was raised here by people before your time, people you’ll never know, who were nonetheless thinking of you before you were born. You have received what they built and bequeathed, and in your time, you will give something back. That’s the deal. On and on it goes, from generation to generation. Civilization sustains and supports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and I’ve never prayed, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It is always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the difference between a horse thief and a horse trader, the distinction is ethical. Without it, a society becomes a war against all, and a market for the wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs. My generation hasn’t done the best job at honoring this ethical bargain, and our failure explains the mess we’re handing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, Godspeed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don’t forget to pass the bread.

Claude’s illness and death – 2006 to 2008

In 2006, Claude Rosenberg developed Alzheimer’s and closed his charitable foundation.  Claude died on May 5, 2008, thirteen years after retiring from his position as Chairman of RCM in 1995 and seven years after the Allianz acquisition in 2001.  Sadly, we had never reconciled since the dispute over his return after the Allianz acquisition.

2008 – I marry Joan Frost

I continued to date Joan, and we were married on August 8, 2008. Joaquim Maedler attended Joan’s and my wedding, and we remained good friends until his death in 2013.

 

 

 

David is appointed to the Bench – June 30 to Sept 10, 2008

In 1987, Cassels Brock and Blackwell, the law firm in Toronto where David was a partner, underwent a major change, and many of the partners David had worked most closely with left to form a new firm.  Although invited to join them, David decided to leave and establish his own law office as a sole practitioner in Mississauga, where he and his wife Maureen and their children had lived since 1978.  

From 95 to 2008, David operated his practice, employing Maureen as his Office Manager, and the two of them worked to put their children through university.  David was spending some of his time doing volunteer work in victim-offender mediation and organizing activities for the Thomas More Lawyers Guild in Toronto, of which he served as president.  He explained to me that he had applied for appointment to the bench, and he thought that his volunteer service could be a factor in the consideration of his application.  On occasions when David asked, I helped him financially to ensure that money would not be an impediment either to his children’s education or his own career advancement.  I was gratified when, on June 30, 2008, David was appointed as a judge of the Superior Court in Ontario.  I attended his swearing in ceremony on what would have been Mom’s 94th  birthday, September 10, 2008, with Pat and Sandra.

Pam Bronk’s Re-Appearance – September 2008

Pam Bronk remained a friend.  She attended my wedding to Jane and later, my wedding to Joan.  Pam was one of the national heads of the Red Cross.  She had to go to a charity Ball with the Red Cross and asked me to escort her.  I was married to Joan by then.  I had known Pam for even longer than I had known Joan, so I agreed.  Joan said, What the fuck?  How would you feel?  So I declined, as gracefully as I could! 

Pat’s 70th birthday – November 28, 2008

In November 2003, to celebrate Pat’s 70th birthday, Joan and I arranged for Pat, Sandra, David, and Maureen, to travel to Puerto Vallarta and spend a week at a resort called Casa Velas, where I owned a time share.

The week was very pleasant, but Maureen was clearly uncomfortable spending time in Joan’s presence, as she regarded her as having broken up my marriage to Jane, and, I suspect that she viewed my divorce from Jane as a threat to her own marriage.  She and David both had attended Joan’s and my wedding, and a close friend of mine later told me that Maureen had compared me to John Edwards, the Virginia Governor who had admitted earlier that month to an extramarital affair.

One evening, at Casa Velas after we had had dinner at an outdoor patio at the resort, she complained to David that Joan had not extinguished her cigarette to avoid smoke plowing her way.  David mentioned it to me, but Maureen apparently complained to him that he had not confronted Joan directly.  Joan and I both observed that David was silent during much of the trip, and wondered if he was unhappy in his own marriage.

August 22, 2009

In August 2009, Joan and I, as well as Andrew and Jonathan, attended the wedding of David’s son, John David, and Eleanor Leacy, in Gatineau Quebec, just across the MacDonald Cartier bridge from Ottawa, where John and Eleanor were then living.

December 2012 – Christmas in Atherton

In 2012, Joan and I hosted a Christmas gathering at our home in Atherton.  The photo below was taken at that time.  By then, David had separated from Maureen, who did not attend.

David’s and Stephanie’s wedding – July 5, 2014

In July 2014, David married Stephanie Polowe, whom he had dated at St. Lawrence in 1966 and whom he had re-connected with in 2008.  David invited me to be his best man at the wedding, which Joan and I attended in Rochester.

Heather’s Occupational Therapy Program

In July 2016, David told me that Heather had been accepted into the Masters Program in Occupational Therapy at Cleveland State University in Ohio.  Heather had secured employment several years earlier at a fitness centre in Cleveland, associated with one where she had worked in Mississauga for several years.  She had moved to Cleveland in the hope of meeting the requirements for admission into a graduate program in the U.S., where the grade point average reqired for admission was slightly lower than in Ontario.  She had since been taking online courses in such subjects as anatomy and had successfully completed her academic pre-requsites.  

While working for the fitness center, Heather had met someone from the Cleveland Clinic who had helped her secure employment in the Marketing Department of the Clinic, which promoted employee wellness programs the Clinic offered to companies.  Although she had worked there for a few years with positive performance reviews, Heather said that she had heard from reliable sources that the Cleveland Clinic would be reducing its involvement in employee wellness programs and that she thought her future there was at risk. 

Heather told David that taking the two year Master’s program at Cleveland State University, which entailed 81 credit hours and tuition of $45,000 U.S. ($547.70 per credit hour), would result, when her living expenses and reduced income were taken into account, in her having to incur debt of $60,000 U.S., which she didn’t think she could manage.  Maureeen had told her that she was unable to help, and David said that he was unable by himself to cover the cost of Heather attending the program.

After discussing the importance of the program to Heather, I agreed to help David cover the cost of the program.  David asked me to cover one third of the cost, being $20,000, as he wanted to cover the majority of the cost and believed that he would be able to cover the remaining two thirds ($40,000).  I was able to pay the $20,000 by way of gifts to Heather without exceeding the maximum allowed by the Internal Revenue Service.

Pat dies - 2017

In 2016, Pat shared with us that she had been diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.  After entering hospice, she died on February 17, 2017, by a doctor assisted suicide.  David and I were the executors for her Will, but because of my proximity, it fell to me to manage the sale of her home and the distribution of her estate in accordance with the terms of her Will, which were disclosed in advance to her beneficiaries at meetings with the lawyer, Gemma O’Keeffe, who was a nun and a friend of Joan’s family.

Sadly, Pat’s son Chris was disappointed that Pat had not left him a greater share of her estate, in recognition of carpentry work he had done on her house in Sausalito soon after she had bought it.  I knew that Pat’s view was that Chris had been well compensated for the work at the time, and that she had given an additional amount to him in her Will, at David’s recommendation, to further acknowledge his work and to avoid resentment on his part, but that she felt that even that additional amount resulted in an unfairly unequal treatment of Eric, and that raising this concern in the car on our way home after seeing Gemma, she had directed that her car be given to Eric to offset the additional amount that she had left to Chris.

Pat did everything she could to repair the damage that her separation and divorce from Bob, and Bob’s later disagreements with Chris over Chris’ choice of college program had had on Chris, and it disappointed me to see that her efforts to raise the boys under in difficult circumstances weren’t more fully acknowledged and appreciated. 

Heather’s graduation and wedding – 2018 to 2019

Heather graduated successfully from her Master’s of Occupational Therapy Program in December 2018.  She and David expressed their gratitude, which they both said made a substantial difference in Heather’s self-esteem and occupational security.  Heather kept her position in the Marketing Department of the Cleveland Clinic, notwithstanding the downsizing of the deparetment, and Heather was able to secure a part-time position at the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, part of the University Hospitals network in Cleveland, which enabled her to maintain her skills and credentials in occupational therapy.

Soon after Heather graduated, she and her friend, Salar Khalili, whom she had met through her work at the fitness center several years earlier.  She and Salar’s wedding took place on August 1, 2019, with David performing the ceremony.  Joan and I were unable to attend because of Joan’s recurring health problems at the time.

John David’s legal difficulties – January 2020

In January 2020, David shared with me the news that John David had separated from Eleanor after an altercation which had resulted in Eleanor making a complaint to the R.C.M.P. and the police charging John David with domestic assault.  The police had forwarded a report to the Child and Family Services division of the Department of Community Services of the Province of Nova Scotia, who had began a proceeding to determine whether John’s younger two children, Saoirse and Lachtna, were in need of protection, as they had been in the home when the altercation had occurred.  John’s defence to both the criminal charge and the Child and Family Services proceeding put a heavy financial strain on David, and I advanced funds to him to help him with these costs, some of which David later repaid from the amount that would normally have been distributed to him from the Price sibling family trust, which I established for the benefit of Pat, Sandra and David.  Happily, the court proceedings were resolved in John’s favor, with a Certificate of Acquittal being issued for him in the criminal proceeding, and the Government and Eleanor consenting to a final order that restored John David’s equal parenting responsibility and equal parenting time.

The Charitable Foundation – 2003 to the present

I have continued the manage investments for Joan’s and the William L. Price Charitable Foundation, which I began in 2004 and from which we make donations of about $150,000 each year, and investments for about 40 family and friends. 

The Charitable Foundation originally contained approximately $5 million (as the previous William L. Price and Jane Price, containing approximately $10 million, was divided equally between us in our divorce settlement). That amount gradually diminished, as the law required charities to donate annually 5% of the total value their assets had the previous year, regardless of earnings.  In the period beginning in the recession of 2008, when the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates to combat inflation, the earnings of the Charitable Foundation were negligible, but the required donations remained the same.  Additionally, the Charitable Foundation invested some of its assets into a property in Black Butte Oregon whose value declined by 50% the following year.

Since the division of the Charitable Foundation, Joan and I have done our best to select appropriate recipients of the Foundation’s donations each year.  David asked me to explain a little about the Foundation’s work, so the information that follows is in response to his questions.  David chose 2019, at random, as a point of reference to use in my examples of amounts donated.  The Foundation made total donations of $175,423 that year.

We try to divide the recipients into local charities, like Meals on Wheels, to national and international charities, like nature conservancies, Amnesty International, and Doctors without Borders.  The charities we support fall into several general categories, including medical, food and homeless programs, climate and nature conservation, and human rights.

We have a series of questions that we ask that we designed to help us determine the long-term viability of the recipient, and what proportion of the amount it receives actually benefits those whom the charity was created to help.

If we are considering making a sizeable donation, we can usually persuade the charity to give us the records we need to answer our questions, such as their financial statements, or profit and loss statements, for the previous three years.  We can determine from them how much of their budget goes for administration and how much reaches the intended beneficiaries.  We sometimes ask how much is being paid to the top three executives in the charity, since in larger charities, their larger revenue allows large amounts of a few executives’ salaries to be masked as percentages of their overall budget.  We could tell, for example, in the case of the Wounded Warriors charity, that the man who had started it travelled by private jet and was drawing an annual salary of $300,000, and decided against making a donation to them.

The financial statements can also reveal whether the charity was spending more, annually, than their earnings and were depending on annual donations to finance their cash flow, meaning that the charity was not investing its assets in a sustainable way.  

We would also ask the potential recipient’s Board or point person the size of the charity’s donor base and, in particular, who made up the top 20% of their received donations (as we know that usually, 80% of a charity’s revenue comes from 20% of its donors).  We also ask how the charity created a hierarchy of values, and what its objectives that can be measured by its performance in three years’ time and we sometimes follow up three years later to find out how many of their objectives were achieved.  

We try to determine to what extent the charity leverages its donations, in order to maximize the benefit that flows to its intended beneficiaries.  For example, a charity that focuses on a certain type of medical research can sometimes achieve a benefit to a larger number of beneficiaries than a charity that delivers medical services.  Sometimes, the relationship of donations to benefit can sometimes be inferred from the nature of the charity’s objectives and its accomplishments such as, in the case of medical research, the number of its patents and whether it has made its products available at cost to doctors or pharmacies.

The number and time commitments from its volunteers can be another indication of the extent the beneficiaries derive benefit from the donations made to a charity.  We can sometimes negotiate the particular use that will be made of our donation.  For example, we learned from news accounts that the San Francisco Chronicle used small amounts of the donations made at its annual Christmas party to make a big difference in the lives of some of the City’s poorer residents.  We proposed that the donation we made to the Chronicle be used for “micro-grants”, to have them purchase products, such as an appliance, that Meals on Wheels had identified as a particular need of someone to whom it delivered meals, since those making the deliveries were sometimes one of the few contacts the elderly had with potential service providers.  Upon closer examination, though, it emerged that the selection of who would receive the benefit of such micro-grants was made by only three people, who were operating the grants as a private fiefdom.

We are interested to find out how the selection of recipients is made.  One of the areas we’ve tried to focus on is medical services.  One of the charities the Foundation has donated to is Orbis International, to which it donated $5,000 in 2019.  Since it was founded in 1974, Orbis has used its specially equipped airplane, beginning with a DC-8 and continuing with a DC-10 wide-body aircraft that FedEx donated to it in 1992, which Orbis converted to become a fully accredited ophthalmic teaching hospital, to bring medical volunteers and partners together to care for over 5 million patients, performing over 650,000 eye surgeries for conditions including removal of cataracts and correcting refractive errors, in which its teams have worked with 650 volunteer ophthalmologists, including host doctors it has helped to train, from hospitals and clinics in 44 countries in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia to improve access to high-quality eyecare and surgery.  

On October 12, 2022, during David’s and Stephanie’s visit to our home in California in Joan and I took David aboard Orbis’ aircraft, which was parked at a nearby airfield.  We received a tour of the aircraft, shown below, and were able to ask questions about the sources of their funding, which include 64% gifts-in-kind and 31% grants and donations, and how they select the countries where the charity visits.  The staff explained that they fly to designated airports near major hospitals, where patients who have been brought from the surrounding areas have been hospitalized in preparation for their surgeries, and are transported to the aircraft by ambulance.  

For medical work, we donated $17,000 in 2019 to Doctors Without Borders, $17,000 to Remote Area Medical Foundation in Knoxville, which supports programs providing health clinics in rural parts of the U.S., $7,000 to Mercy Corps, which spends 80% of its donations directly on ships that operate as sea-going hospitals delivering medical care in crisis areas of the world, and $5,000 to Smile Train, which provides cleft lip and cleft palate surgery to children.  We’ve also focused on some illnesses that have affected us or our families, such as $5,000 to Stanford University Orthopedics, $12,000 to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, $3,000 to Stanford University Blood Marrow Clinic, $4,000 to the Prostate Cancer Foundation in Santa Monica, $5,000 to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, $3,000 to the Alzheimer’s Association, $2,000 to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, $2,000 to the Donor Network West for organ and tissue donations, $2,000 to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for research into Parkinson’s Disease, $1,300 to Hospice of Redmond Sisters in Redmond, Oregon, which treated Jodi Sibert, and $250 to the Leukemia Society.

We’ve made it a point not to donate to hospitals or clinics that we can expect to receive treatment from, but have donated to hospitals that have provided treatment to us in the past.  

We’ve directed some of the donations, especially to local charities, that  we’ve become aware of through friends or local solicitations, such as $!4,000 to Meals on Wheels in San Francisco, $3,000 to the Salvation Army in San Francisco, $4,000 to the Second Harvest Food Bank in San Carlos and $4,000 to the Second Harvest Food Bank in Watsonville, which supports programs to supply local food banks, $2,000 to St. Anthony’s Dining Room in San Francisco and $2,000 to St. Anthony’s Dining Room in Menlo Park, which support similar programs there, and $3,000 to the Maui Food Bank, which provides those services in Maui, and $2,000 to the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz.

Another area we’ve tried to focus on is the environment, so the Foundation in 2019, for example, donated $5,000 to the National ‘Resource Defence Council for the protection of wildlife, $3,000 to the Ocean Conservancy, $3,000 to the National Wildlife Federation, $2,000 to the California State Parks Foundation, $2,000 to the Point Reyes National Seashore Association in Point Reyes Station, California, and $500 to the Conservation Council of Hawaii.

Another area we’ve directed some donations to is human rights protection.  The Foundation in 2019 donated $3,000 to Amnesty International, $3,000 to the Terry Russell Anderson Memorial for the support of child abuse prevention, recovery and treatment, $2,000 to Human Rights Watch, $2,000 to Southern Poverty Law Center, $2,000 to the United Irish Societies, to protect the democratic principles of the Irish people, and $1,000 to Legal Assistance to the Elderly.  

Because Joan and I have a special affection for dogs, the Foundation has donated $3,000 to Canine Companions in Santa Rosa, $500 to Assistance Dogs of Hawaii, and $500 to the Maui Humane Society. 

The Foundation has made relatively minor donations to Dartmouth, togv which it gave $1,000 in 2019 to support educational scholarships, and $500 to the Pacific Cultural Center in Santa Cruz, to support the Yoga programs there, which have more of a purely personal connection to us. 

Apart from the time we have spent overseeing the mining operations of two gold mining companies and another rare earth mining company in Africa, much of our time has been spent managing our home in Maui, shown in the photos below, which we placed in a trust so that it could be used to host family and friends, and building a new home in Atherton that we can use to do the same there, in close proximity to Joan’s children and to Stanford Medical Center.

 

 

 

The Seven Life Lessons

At the beginning of this memoir, I referred to the article I was asked to write for the 2003 Dartmouth Reunion.  I will close with the ten lessons that I said life had taught me before, during, and after my studies at Dartmouth.

1.            Live in the present.  The future is unknowable and the past only relevant as a learning experience.  The most positive trait that I have developed is the ability to avoid dwelling in the past (regrets, lost opportunities, etc.) or obsess about the future.  My greatest shortcoming was not working harder to maintain meaningful/special relationships from one stage of my life to the next.  

From High School in Cuba to Dartmouth, travelling throughout Europe and North Africa, working in Spain, Washington D.C., teaching in Brooklyn New York, landing on Wall Street, and my brief sojourn in Rio de Janeiro and ultimately settling permanently in the San Francisco Bay area, I have had the good fortune of having had generous mentors, countless opportunities, meaningful friendships, and a wonderful family that keeps me grounded in reality.

2.            Life should never be taken for granted.  The older I get, the larger the circle of people I know who are faced with seriously debilitating or terminal illnesses.  Only when we actually are faced with these existential issues do we seem to truly learn to savor each day.  Regrettably, it is difficult to simulate either adversity or mortality.

3.            Be willing to make your voyage through life without the benefit of clear maps or charts.  I mostly knew the general direction I was travelling, but rarely the precise path.  Changing careers from government and academia to finance was almost serendipitous and I lacked a clear game plan or specific destination.  Many, if not most, of the subsequent changes in course involved challenging the boundaries of comfort zones and having to learn new skills to meet new challenges.

4.            Define life’s success by relationships and experiences, not rewards.  Lack of attachment to objects was something I learned early by being forced to leave Cuba in 1960, and later watching our home in the Oakland Hills burn to the ground, with the loss of our possessions.  

My career choices were based on pursuing the opportunities for growth versus near term rewards.  For me, becoming a Managing Partner or CEO was not a goal in itself.  Instead, each advancement represented a new opportunity, a layer of self-discovery, and ultimately, a chance to effect change and pursue a vision of the business. 

I thought of the roles of CEO and Chairman as transitional experiences.  I inherited the legacy of the founder and the culture of the firm.  My challenge was to improve on both, not to build my own, and then pass the baton to a successor who would continue the process.  Leadership is an opportunity, not the reward.

Whatever financial support I have given my children (all four), the purpose has been to encourage them to pursue careers of long-term psychic reward (as in Joseph Campbell’s “Follow Your Bliss”) rather than near term monetary rewards.

My decision to retire was made despite generous enticements to remain and proposals to start a new hedge fund.  Passing on the offers in 2004 was definitely measurable in terms of rewards, but I have not regretted the decision for a moment.  Taking up golf that same year, however, has resulted in regrets, followed by reward, followed by anxiety, followed by bliss.  The game, for me, is the ultimate metaphor of life.

5.   Karma is real.  All of life’s actions, whether noticed or not, have ultimate consequences.  It is a choice to strive daily to lvie a life of principles and adhere to certain universal values rather than pursuing ephemeral attachments of the ego.  My three siblings were Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu, and they all agree.

6.   Giving back is a gift as well as an obligation.  The creation of a family charitable foundation in 2001 was a way to institutionalize the process.  Creative philanthropy has become a family endeavor and a great way to teach the next generation that, with effort, we have the ability to make a difference.

7.   Learning never stops.  Each stage of my life was and is a gift of discovery.  The most valuable legacy of a Dartmouth education was the excitement of learning, developing a better understanding of the process of learning and the imperative to think independently and critically.  During the course of my career and of over 15 years as a guest lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, I encountered too many people with brilliant academic resumes who somehow never learned to think creatively.  Dartmouth managed to teach us how to think.

The College also gave us a value compass or gyroscope.  Our preparation for the voyage to come was not only in the content off our courses but in an intellectual and cultural framework of values.  This set of values would ultimately define us as citizens of a larger community.  The Men of Dartmouth of old have evolved from a Robert Bly style mythopoetic men’s movement (drums and all) to more contemporary men and women (thank God) of the World.