Indian Giving
One of my favorite possessions is a stone and copper outdoor statue of a reclining Socrates. This is a life-sized Socrates, who’s draped toga is a rough field stone that is shaped just so, to look like a reclined flowing robe. Nature crafted it thus and caught the eye of the artist. The artist attached a head, arms and feet made of copper and adding the element of realism to the subtle and evocative image of the stone. The artist was an old Polish man named Thomashevsky and I found the statue in a catalogue of his works. I had bought several of his smaller works but wanted something special twenty-three years ago when I was renovating my Ithaca house. When I saw the picture of Socrates, I knew it was the perfect statue for an academic setting like my Ithaca house. Thomashevsky rubbed his chin as he told me the price of the piece and then said, “It has sat in front of the Guttman Library at Harvard for twenty-five years, but you know, they have never bought it…”
He sold me the piece and moved it to Ithaca for me, much to the chagrin of the property people at Harvard. I always imagined that Harvard must be livid to have lost Socrates to Cornell. I found the perfect flat pedestal stone with a slight incline to use as a base for the statue. It has sat in a prominent spot in the nicely landscaped back yard. The business school holds often and regular gatherings in a large backyard tent at my house. Having everyone welcomed by Socrates with his rather Socratic gaze and gesture has always seemed a perfect setting for these parties. Whenever I go to Ithaca, I always stand at the kitchen Palladian window and gaze out the back towards the twin weeping willows that border the 9th Hole of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University, and stare at Socrates.
I acquired my Ithaca house through a 99-year leasehold from the University. The property was in dire disrepair, so I had to do a great deal of renovating. I also hit on a tax concept to take a 25/life use of the property and gift it and the renovations to the business school. I thought it a shrewd tax play on my part, but now it is year twenty-three so, while I doubt the school will want to take over the maintenance burden (I let them use the place whenever they want, so why buy the cow, so to speak), I am preparing myself to hand it over.
I had the idea to gift Socrates to the College of Arts and Sciences (my undergraduate college and that of my kids) to use in their Temple of Zeus coffee house. They were conceptually interested, but I guess it was too complicated for anyone to bother with, so it fell by the wayside. When you try and give away something you value (and in this case, something others had also highly valued), and people can’t be bothered to follow-up, it causes you to rethink the situation. That’s what I did. I rethought the gift and decided Socrates is safe and sound right where he sits. Some may think of that as “Indian-giving”, but I had wanted others to enjoy Socrates as I had, but I guess he will just have to entertain me, my family and my guests in my back yard, at least for a while longer.
Remembering this Socrates story caused me to remember another gift with a very different ending. It involved another statue I bought thirty years ago in Utah. I was always enamored with the art of the Remington Bronzes. These western scenes cast in bronze are wonderfully detailed and very evocative. I knew I couldn’t afford a Remington, but I found a Jerry Anderson bronze. Jerry was a student of Remington and his bronzes had the same attention to detail and more than their share of artistic beauty. The bronze I liked most and bought was called Quicksand. It is perhaps two feet wide and eighteen inches deep and high. It depicts a cowboy on his horse getting caught in a quicksand pit. He looks to be on the verge of falling off his failing horse. On a ledge above there is an Indian on his horse. He is reaching to the cowboy to help him escape his plight. The Indian is oblivious to the heritage of the rape and pillage of the native American people at the hands of the white man. He is in the here and now of man-to-man compassion. His hand is cast just millimeters away from the cowboy’s outreached hand. The cowboy is asking for help silently and the Indian is quietly offering his help. The moment is frozen in time and gives the feeling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel with the hand of God reaching to Adam to give life to mankind. It is a powerful piece with a spiritual air to it.
Several years ago, for reasons of security, I got the idea that such an important and “mobile” piece as Quicksand needed to be kept somewhere safer. Lots of people use and have access to my house. I decided to give it to the Dean of the business school, Joe Thomas, for safekeeping in the Dean’s suite. Joe has the personal distinction of having been my first business school Professor back in 1975. He taught quantitative methods and his Economic Order Quantity lecture was enough to convince me I should go to business school. Joe cut a dashing figure with a big Marlboro Man handlebar mustache. I befriended him years later when I started doing more as an alumnus and member of the Advisory Council. Joe became the Dean about fifteen years ago, so I worked with him even more.
Then, one day, my horse stumbled into some quicksand. Quicksand abounds on Wall Street and I had seen and avoided it many times. Then one day in 2007, I hit the wall and in I went. The struggle in the quicksand pit is the worst part. As I was flailing and trying to decide what to do next, I got a call from Joe. He had long since lost the mustache, but he retained the heart and soul of Marlboro Man, or perhaps the noble savage. He reached over and offered me a hand by asking me to come up to Ithaca to teach. This was less an economic hand than a spiritual hand. I was valued by somebody now that Wall Street and the ill-informed public found little or no value in me.
Several years later I went into the new Dean’s office and noticed that there was no Jerry Anderson statue. I wondered if it had been put into storage or had taken a walk as things do in institutional settings. I pondered asking Joe what had become of it but decided better of it. I hoped that Joe had found the beauty of the piece and decided to keep it. He was my helping hand when I was in the quicksand. But wherever it is, and whoever prizes it, that statue belongs to the world and the more people who see it and ponder it, the better place this world will be.