Marshaling an Effort
In 1991 I bought my first ski condo in Park City. Technically it was in Deer Valley, actually, an out of the way corner of Deer Valley, not near any of the ski runs. The houses and condos adjacent to the ski runs cost about $1 million more since the ability to ski-in and ski-out is so desirable. I seem to recall that I paid something like $230,000 for this three-bedroom, three-bath unit with underground parking for two cars. It was part of a twelve-unit complex called Ontario Lodge and it was set in an aspen forrest in the main approach canyon from Park City to Deer Valley, and was about ¾ of the way up the mountain to the Silver Lake mid-mountain enclave of Deer Valley. While it was a nice alpine setting, it had neither lots of sun nor lots of views from where it was set, but it was good value in my opinion. I had bought the #2 unit and the guy who owned the #1 unit was named Frank. Frank was no ordinary resident of Ontario Lodge. After the tax law changes enacted in 1986, lots of in-process vacation home condo construction fell on hard times and went into rigor mortis. Ontario Lodge was one of them and Frank, being an astute financial professional who loved to ski, swooped in and saw even more value than I saw five years later. He bought the whole development for a song and recruited a bunch of savvy ski friends to lay claim to eleven of the units and kept what he thought was the best unit, the #1 unit, for himself. His cost basis for his efforts brought his purchase price of Unit #1 of Ontario Lodge to pretty close to $0. Such is the shrewdness of Frank.
I met Frank shortly after buying my unit since Frank and his wife spent more time in Deer Valley than most of the other residents of Ontario Lodge. We both entered our units through the shared garage where his unit door was painted with a graphic of a colorful coyote and cactus. The door stuck out in the otherwise grey basement garage. It made me decide to paint my door as well, and I chose to paint an aspen forrest on the door because it seemed emblematic of Ontario Lodge and it seemed easy enough for an amateur artist like me. Technically, the door painting was a summer project for my children and me, but like so many kids’ projects, after a few brush strokes by them, it became my project to finish and I spent several days sitting on a chair in the garage, finishing the job. That’s when I met Frank, when he gave a chuckle at my expense about what was obviously a case of a beleaguered father who got stuck with a silly chore on his vacation.
I have forgotten exactly how we began socializing with Frank and his wife, but he and I hit it off almost immediately. I was a global banker at a noteworthy firm who had two Ivy League degrees in economics and finance. Frank was a very experienced venture capitalist who had a graduate degree from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. I’m sure I had heard of the Marshall Scholarship program before then, but Frank taught me a lot more about the program, and more importantly, he taught me about just how amazingly intelligent Marshall Scholars can be. I remember one discussion that took place in the the hot tub of Ontario Lodge where Frank explained the formation of the internet to me. He captivated me with both his knowledge of the subject and his ability to explain it to a layman like me. One of Frank’s jokes is that the Marshall Scholarship is like the more familiar and better-known Rhodes Scholarship, except for smart people. Frank is nothing if not the smartest person I have ever known.
In the past thirty-two years, Frank and I have become good friends. We have skied together a good deal, we have toured National Parks together, we have played golf together, we have travelled the world together, we have served on boards together and made investments together, and we have spent time at one another’s primary homes and gotten to know each others families. I can’t speak for Frank with 100% assurance, but I think its safe to say that neither of us have other friends who we are closer to that we are with one another. And while all friendships are usually based on many characteristics that create the closeness that makes a friendship, the most dominant force in our relationship is a blend of our mutual work in finance and our shared interest in global economics. Nothing highlights this more than when Frank gave my oldest son his copy of Paul Samuelson’s ubiquitous Macroeconomics Textbook when my son was admitted to Cornell University, presumably to study economics. My son chose not to pursue his study of economics, which is not unlike what Frank’s own son decided to do along the way, so that was a shared disappointment to us both.
Frank is 17 years my senior, which means that this year he turns 86 years old. I know a few people his age, but none who is more intellectually sharp than Frank. I know enough about Frank to say that he, like all of us human beings, falls short of being perfect. His life story growing up as an only child of two professional and accomplished parents, father of four who have lived their lives more in the rural southern path of his dearly departed wife than the global intelligencia of his life path, somewhat absentee father, but much more present grandfather to eight granddaughters, and now husband to another long-time friend of mine that I introduced him to in his widowership, all has plenty of bumps along the road to make it a colorful and bountiful, but never quite idyllic, life story. But through all of that normal life turbulence that has gyrated like the ups and downs of the marketplace, Frank’s life of the mind has persevered and accumulated more wisdom than most people can imagine. Frank has always been more a buddy to me than the father-figure that our age difference could have implied. I suspect he appeals to the older soul in me since while we do have our fun moments, our serious moments stand out more in my memory.
On the fun side, I recall a Utah golf game we had once when Frank had gotten something white and sticky on his pants and spent the round pissing and moaning about what he had inadvertently sat in. It didn’t take a lot to throw Frank’s golf game into duck hook disarray, but sticky white stuff certainly didn’t help. Frank was one of those golfers who never treated the sport like a pleasant walk in the country and he did less so that day. As I dropped him off after the round and he got out of my car, I realized that I had left a packet of cinnamon bun frosting on the front seat from my breakfast and that had been the source of the white stickiness mess. The vision of him walking back into his condo with the packet stuck to the seat of his pants will always stay with me as one of the fun Frank moments for me. There was also a moment in the Jemaa-el-Fnaa in Marrakesh that involved Frank in a pork pie hat getting faux-pickpocketed by my youngest son, Thomas, that will also never leave me.
But the moments with Frank that will always resonate the most with me are the ones like the other night when Frank was a guest lecturer (by Zoom) in my Law, Policy and Ethics course. His topic was globalization and how students needed to contextualize the value of globalization in a world that was simultaneously expanding to eight billion souls and contracting through nationalistic sentiment at every turn. I am a teacher of the practicum and a pseudo-academic at best, but I have heard and learned a lot over the years about global economic theory. Never before have I heard such a cogent and comprehensive description of our world economic order as Frank gave my class for ah hour. Like his description of the internet that warm summer day in Deer Valley, Frank showed the knowledge imbued in him by LSE all those years ago, but mostly he showed why the Marshall Scholarship is given to people like Frank who can marshal an effort to explain and make better this crazy world in which we are all forced to live. Thank you, my good friend, Frank, for being one of the brightest lights in an otherwise dim world.