Clubbing
I know what you are thinking, no matter how much I do or don’t know about this guy, he is definitely not the clubbing sort. But wait a minute, things change and people change. Clubbing takes many forms, but all have much in common as well. He skipped the Reb Blazer and The Loft in the 70’s, he avoided Studio 54 in the 80’s, never went to Elaine’s in the 90’s, and the Blue Note was not his scene in the naughty Oughties. He did get snared by the New York Athletic Club for a year, The Westchester Country Club for five years and Cornell Club to this day. Along the way he got dissed by The Greenwich Country Club and The Rockaway Hunt Club. The former deemed him geographically undesirable due to living on Long Island and the latter deemed him undeserving for trying to join under a Junior Program for which he was age-appropriate but too senior in his career to justify the reduced fee offering. At one weak moment he considered joining the Union League Club, but once seeing the disapproving eyes of all the dead Republican presidents on the walls, he withdrew.
Rich is a complicated social animal. He went to the perfect school for this scenario. Cornell enjoys a position in the prestigious Ivy League, the pinnacle of academic excellence, but is considered the “farm” school of the league, carrying the moniker, Corn-Hill. It is at once both in the clouds with the gods and in the dirt with the peasants. His origins are humble from the hardscrabble farm in Upstate New York and the tropical dirt-poor valley of Turrialba in Costa Rica, but he adds the grandeur of The Poland Springs Resort and Hebron Academy in Maine and Notre Dame International Prep in Rome to his early resume. He went to work in Banking in New York, but Morgan, Chase and even Citibank were too good for him while lowly Bankers Trust found a spot. He helped it become less lowly and gaining in Wall Street prowess. He plied the correspondent banking markets of swamp Yankee New England while others worked the Park Avenue corporates. He chased Latin American and African defaulted loans while others traded Government Bonds and sold Corporate Commercial Paper. The capital markets and strangely convoluted derivatives games were only based on what you knew not who you knew, so he was in and out of those places. When institutional money was king, he was asked to walk the dog of high net worth families in Private Banking. There was a clear pattern here.
Don’t bother aiming for the stars, life on the ground is both more fun and generally more rewarding since the stars are inhabited by those who invariably know more people and wield more influence than you can muster. Your soul will also benefit by avoiding elitist ways and embracing the view that all men are created equal enough to belong to any club.
Clubs haunt Rich for all the reasons that flow from this strange interaction over the years. His NYAC membership with the incumbent denial of the “conventions of the club” are a constant reminder that we are none of us immune to the songs from the mountain. WCC was about golf, but not attending events and cotillions left one on the outside with the golf starter so the social graces were unavoidable. The two perfect clubs were the Cornell Club and the Ithaca Country Club. Both are 100% diverse and egalitarian. If you have the modest membership dollars you are by all rights equal in the eyes of the club. Play or don’t play. Party of don’t party. It is all the same to them. They are collective businesses for the convenience of the members. All clubs should be like that.
Every holiday season, Rich is invited to The Metropolitan Club, one of the nicest and most exclusive clubs in the City. If he was dogmatic in his beliefs he would decline, but his middle-world sensibilities cause him to attend. The marvel of attending a Metropolitan Club event thrown by a Jewish member and then crossing the street to the Harmony Club, where a non-Jewish member throws his annual gathering is interesting. The one restricted Jews and the other was set up for Jews across the street to restrict non-Jews. Now both work hard to ignore their heritage.
Equally interesting is that the Metropolitan Club was founded by many members of the Uber-wealthy set of landed Staten Island families that included the Vanderbilts and others. In today’s world, Staten Island is unrighteously scorned by New Yorkers and the outer-most of the outer-boroughs. Go figure.
Last evening Rich and Kim were asked by Bill and Bonnie Fritz to dine with them at the University Club on Fifth Avenue. The University Club is the oldest and most regal club in New York. At its founding, only people in possession of a Baccalaureate degree were eligible to apply. In those days, those were few and far between. What it reminds us is that education is the surest path to social and economic rise. Strangely enough, the University Club gives bargain membership rights to college presidents. Bill is the President of the College of Staten Island, the Staten Island wing of the City University of New York system. That is poignant for several reasons. It costs $6,800 per year to attend CSI and that makes it one of the cheapest accredited colleges around. CSI is also rated very highly as a school focused on the elevation of socio/economic class standing of its matriculants. That makes it a pump-primer of social and economic change and part of the great-leveling initiatives of America. How appropriate that it stares out towards the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in that regard. Bill is the last one that should gain admittance to a Club founded on the principle of exclusion, but there he was. And there we were for dinner.
The marble columned lobby and the wood-paneled dining room screamed privilege. The wait staff were mostly minorities and the diners were mostly not. Rich and Kim enjoy Bill and Bonnie’s company, but they found themselves talking of great immigrant monuments of New York, from the Tenement Museum to the Potato Famine Monument. What a strange juxtaposition in this castle of elegance on Fifth Avenue.
There is no answer to this quandary. We live in America, not Bolshevik Russia. People are allowed to join and enjoy clubs like The University Club. They are allowed to strive for economic and social prosperity. Take solace that the club encourages academics like Bill to join because unlike at its founding, education is now more about equality and less about privilege and that’s the way it should be.