Shuffle Off to Buffalo In 2000 I had a problem to solve. For four years I had owned a vacation home in Ithaca. I was coming up on my 25th Reunion and I wanted to use the house for exactly what I had bought it for. I wanted to use the house to gather all my friends and have a nice place to party and make the reunion special for everyone. The problem I had…
Captain Bob It was in 1989 when I was running the Global Derivatives business of Bankers Trust. I was in London, one of our three big offices in the Derivatives business, in addition to New York and Tokyo. Suddenly I had an E.F. Hutton moment when the entire trading room goes quiet for a moment as someone from the derivatives desk yells over to me across the floor the Robert Maxwell is on the phone…
Tearing Up In the Spring of 1972, during my second semester of Freshman year at Cornell, a group of us who had joined the same fraternity (Phi Sigma Epsilon) and some of the brothers, who we were getting to know, went into Collegetown for a Sunday night pizza dinner at Johnies’ Big Red Grill on Dryden Road. I was an engineering student as were a number of us and the topic of the evening was…
The Time of Monsters This expression sings so very true today as our cities are under siege and the army, in the form of the mobilization of the National Guard, is being brought to bear first in the heartland of Minneapolis. “This is the time of monsters” is attributed to a a little-know Italian founder of the Communist Party there and it dates to that turbulent era of the post World War I to 1930’s…
Home Ownership They say that pride of ownership means everything and I sometimes understand that and at other times ponder its wisdom. It has always appealed to me to think that this life is all about dust to dust and that in the long run, none of us own anything other than the love we give and the love we take with us. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam. I know that some families like…
What Goes Around In November 1985, I was sitting in my corner office on the third floor of 280 Park Avenue. I used to call that the “cafe” office because it was close enough to the street to feel a part of the hub-bub out on Park Avenue and yet it was above it all. To be clear, I was thirty-one years old at the time, which is almost hard for me to imagine in…
The Pain of the Number Last summer, when I knew I would be moving out to San Diego, I reached out to several schools in the area that had graduate business programs to see if there was any interest in my credentials as a ten-year-member of the faculty at Cornell’s business school and a forty-five year Wall Street business manager. The folks at the University of San Diego showed interest and I went at the…
What Are We Fighting For In August, 1969 I was fifteen and living in Rome, Italy getting ready to enter my junior year at Notre Dame International Prep. As we all know, junior year is the critical transcript year for a kid wanting to go to college. For a kid living overseas and wanting to finally go back to the states to do what he had always expected to do, it was not lost on…
Cactus Flowers Many years ago (almost thirty) I was a banker with an office on Park Avenue. In fact, I had a corner office facing in the preferred Southeastern direction so that I had a lovely view down towards the Beaux-Arts Helmsley Building (what used to called the New York Central Building) that frames the visual end of midtown as Park Avenue traffic goes through regal archways in the building’s base to circumnavigate the old…
The Mystery of San Pasqual This morning I got sucked into a debate that I would rationally generally avoid. I have joined Next Door, which is an app for local communities allowing people in the same neighborhood who might not know each other to share important information and, presumably, operate more like a real community. I mostly ignore or only lightly notice the neighborhood postings on Next Door since they are mostly about lost dogs…