Returning to the Scene
Life is short and memories are long. It’s been three years now since I had my big altercation with Cornell University over the house at 313 Warren Road. I long since moved my belongings out and handed over the property to the University. One of the things I took with me was the brass sign I had placed on a large rock at the entry. It had the address and the name I had given to the house, which was Homeward Bound. That brass plaque now adorns a large igneous granite boulder on the patio side of my hilltop here in San Diego. People touring my gardens sometimes ask about the plaque and I say it is my memorial to my good times in Ithaca. And they were, indeed, good times, whether I am thinking about my 25 years with the house or my five years spent in Ithaca learning about the ways of the world. I have a small wall mounting that hangs in my office here that has a map of New York State done in small stainless steel nail heads. From each of those nail heads is a thread that connects to a small heart made of similar nail heads in the approximate center of the state map in a place that approximates where Ithaca is positioned in the state. The effect of this small piece of artwork is to show that the strings of my heart still run towards Ithaca. Whoever at Etsy or wherever it was purchased from created a marvelous depiction of home that I’m sure has been replicated for many different states and home towns based on who might have seen and ordered this artifact from the unknown artist.
You see, Ithaca really is the scene of whatever crimes of my heart there are in my life. It is where my Grandfather emigrated to when he and his brother came to this country 125 years ago from Slovakia. It is where he ran bootlegged liquor to from Canada during Prohibition, allowing him to get out from under the salt mines on the shores of Lake Cayuga and to buy a small farm just up from the lake in Myers. It is where he and his wife settled and sired six children including my mother, who are all gone now. It is where my mother went to school and somehow sparked a thirst for life and learning that led her to enroll in nearby Cornell University at the age of sixteen. It is where my grandfather gave my mother and her three children, wantonly abandoned by their ambitious father, a home for six months while she figured out her next moves and eventually moved the brood down to the tropics of Costa Rica before heading back north for graduate school in Wisconsin. It where I returned at age seventeen to matriculate in my mother’s footsteps at Cornell in 1971 to pursue what became five years and two degrees that formed the foundation of my work life for years to come. And it is where I came full circle and reestablished a foothold on my heritage in 1996 by taking possession of a home on East Hill adjacent to the grounds of the Cornell University Robert Trent Jones Golf Course and built it into a symbol of my homecoming for the enjoyment of my family for the next 25 years.
It is perhaps hard to admit, but in the same way that America seems to have lost some of its love affair with high prestige Universities in the past few years, it was the events of my separation from that home at 313 Warren Road that symbolized my hardest separation in life. That is actually saying a lot since I managed along the way to get myself separated from two prior wives, both mothers to my children, and yet neither of those separations was as traumatic as my separation from Cornell on account of their repossession of 313 Warren Road. The whys and wherefore of that situation are best left in the shadows of the past since I have done a decent job of forgetting and forgiving, but as much as the wounds have healed by now, I have yet to return to the scene of that crime. I now have an occasion worthy of returning and have plans to do so in several months.
Back in 1975, when I was a senior at Cornell and trying to determine my next moves, my best friend at the time, a guy named Paul Joseph, convinced me to take a business school course since he thought it would be a grand idea for me to join him for a post graduate year at the business school to get my MBA along side of him. I enrolled in a general quantitative methods course taught by a young and dashing professor named Joe Thomas. Joe had a big handlebar mustache and that with his lanky and friendly manner was my introduction to business education. I often have said that it was what Joe showed me about business that captivated me enough to think that I would enjoy the prospect of getting involved in it because there was plenty of room to exploit creativity in something that otherwise seemed from the outside to be so mundane. But Joe ended up showing me so much more than that.
For the next twenty years after graduating from Cornell with my MBA, I stayed in loose touch with Joe as he worked his way through the tenure track at the business school. Joe was a manufacturing guy and I was a finance guy so there was only so much commonality in our chosen fields, but there was something about Joe and his avuncular ways that made me want to stay close to him, so I did. As he moved up into more administrative posts at the school, I had more reasons as a major recruiter of talent from the school to stay close to him and when he became Dean of the school I was one of the people who cheered the loudest about his rise to that post. In 2007 when I hit the proverbial career wall on Wall Street, it was Joe who called me up and told me that I should take some time and come up to Ithaca to teach. He offered me a psychological lifeline that may have been the most meaningful outreach of my career. There are certain gestures in life that hold more meaning than others because they come at moments of great vulnerability. In 2007 I was forced to reexamine everything I had done in my life and the moral fiber that stood at the foundation of it all. I spent six long months taking sleeping pills while the powers that be, goaded on by the relentless financial news media, thought long and hard about indicting me for financial crimes having to do with the collapse of two hedge funds under my purview. And it was Joe and his belief in my value to the school and my holistic underlying values that gave me the confidence to carry on and not sink into some place of oblivion.
I taught at Cornell for ten years, gladly making the trek to Ithaca to do so, less for the money than for the psychic boost to my sense of self worth, and Joe stood at the center of that. He had lost his mustache by then, but he was still the strong stalwart Marlboro Man of integrity to me. When the University factotums descended on me about the house at 313 Warren Road, it was Joe that I turned to for advice and it was that strength of character that I secretly derived from him that allowed me to give up the fight and move on. When the dust settled and the new Dean of the College of Business called to tell me that I was being given a significant gift credit for the house by the University to allocate as I wished, I immediately jumped on the opportunity to contribute it to what was being established as the Joe Thomas Room in Sage Hall. My name is affixed to perhaps five other rooms in Sage Hall, including one large atrium reading room that I dedicated to my mother and step-father. But no gift to the University means more to me than to be a part of the donor pool for Joe Thomas Room. So, in early June, I will return to the scene, less because there was a crime committed there and more because Ithaca, Cornell and Joe Thomas are still very much a place where my heart strings run to back in the Finger Lakes of New York State.