The Dead Never Call
Yesterday, while driving from Kansas City to Kim’s home town of Wabash, Indiana, I got an email from an old business school pal, Bob. To be fair, Bob has actually been more than a B-school pal, but that is where I first encountered him. I went to business school directly from undergraduate. I took several courses in the last semester of my senior year and then managed to get enough courses crammed into my one full year in the school to graduate shortly after a year later. In other words, I stuffed a two-year program into three semesters by taking a course overload and rushing to get through the program. I certainly did so at some expense to how much I learned in business school since it was sort of a crash course from knowing nothing at all about business to being one of the newly minted MBA’s heading off towards Wall Street. Along the way, I had only so much time for socializing and getting to know my fellow business school students, but Bob really stuck out. His nickname in my class was Gross Bob or GB and it was a bit of a misnomer. It just so happened that GB was a larger-than-life personality who was unabashed about many things. He had spent a few years as an enlisted man in the Navy and had seen the world. He is ten years older than me and had the ability to not take himself or anything around him too seriously. Most guys in B-school were very serious about their careers, but not so much, Bob.
Bob is by no means dumb, he is just quite casual about everything and that made him more than a little unorthodox. I have told many stories about Bob over the years, but I would never say he is anything less than the genuine article and there are much worse things that can be said about people. Strangely enough, my relationship with Bob did not end with our graduation from business school. Bob and I were two of the three graduates of our class to go to Bankers Trust Company in 1976. At the time, BT was the sixth largest bank in the United States and what was considered a “white shoe” firm of very solid standing, with its historic headquarters at 16 Wall Street, catty-cornered at Broad and Wall from J.P. Morgan and opposite the New York Stock Exchange on one side and Federal Hall on the other. By the time I joined, the main offices were on Park Avenue in Midtown (something all of the historic banks except J.P. Morgan had done to be closer to the posh suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut).
Bob and I reported for duty on Park Avenue in that summer of 1976, while our classmate, John, went to work on the trading desk, which was still downtown at 16 Wall Street because physical securities movement was still the norm and proximity was of value to a trading operation. While John began learning the Eurodollar markets (he was clearly most savvy of the three of us thanks to his closeness to a Professor, David Ahlers, who was an ex-Bankers Trust officer and very plugged into the hot trends in banking), Bob and I did a pre-training assignment and then toddled off to the commercial banking training program. That was a 6-12 month classroom training program to teach us about the intricacies of credit risk and lending, something people on the trading floor presumably did not need so much. Bob and I joined a training class that late summer and they became our cohort and we all bonded over the next six months.
There were about thirty members of our class, and they were a mix of MBAs like us and undergraduates who had gone through a preparatory six-months of business fundamentals like finance and accounting. What we were being told, effectively, was that an MBA was worth six months of schooling. Having spent only one versus two years getting my MBA made me feel less awkward about this differential than others, but it did throw the whole MBA concept into a cocked-hat. As with most class cohorts, cliques form and our clique was made up of a handful of people who spent more rather than less of their time together. There was Sharon, the flinty-eyed go-getter. There was Michael, the Michigan MBA that was a bit of a clothes horse. There was another Bob, who had gone to Columbia and was a classic Mr. Wall Street who wore three-piece suits and read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover daily. There was Jonathan, a somewhat quiet, but pleasant guy. And then there was Steve, who I met on my first day and got particularly close with. Steve has a Northwestern MBA and had spent two years as a credit analyst at a Detroit Bank, which meant he knew this credit stuff cold. He was a good man for a business crash-course guy like me to stay close to. Then, besides me and GB, there was Dick, who had been a Navy helicopter pilot in Vietnam before going to business school. That was our gang and while some of us have stayed closer over the years than others, we all remember each others as members of our gang from the training program.
Bob had emailed me to get Steve’s email for an unspecified reason. I had Kim send it to him while I drove across Missouri. By the time I was in Illinois, I got an email addressed to a subgroup of our training program gang telling us that Dick had died somewhere in Oklahoma. I hadn’t spoken to or seen Dick in more than forty years or so, but I was sad to hear that a nice guy who had served his country and was a good colleague had passed away. He was quite a bit older than me, so I did not feel that hot breath of death on my neck as sometimes happens, but he was the second of our gang to pass away. The first had been Michael, who had sadly killed himself thirty years ago due to high career stress caused by a decided lack of business success (what I think of as perhaps the worst reason to take your own life). Bob had asked me for Steve’s email because while the two of them had become quite close in the years after being at BT, they had had a falling out that still lingers as a sore point, and yet he wanted Steve to know about Dick’s death since they had been particularly close.
I ended up speaking to both Bob and Steve yesterday and it was clear that while they were both saddened by Dick’s passing, they were both equally resolved in their mutual grudge towards one another. I have stayed friendly with both as their feud had nothing to do with me. Of all of the gang, I stayed at BT the longest (23 years) and rose to the Management Committee level before we sold the bank to Deutsche Bank in 1999. Everyone else had long since migrated their careers to other places and other disciplines. But Bankers Trust was a somewhat unique culture and it remains a tie that binds me with many people, not the least of which were these people with whom I started it all back in 1976.
Bob’s email gave us all cause to exchange emails and to promise one another that we needed to gather sometime soon for a reunion. These bonds may not be strong enough to justify an inconvenient reunion, but it is nice to think we might gather to remember our good times and our fallen. My B-school pal, John, who had joined BT with us, lives in Ithaca, where I head to today. He also reads this blog once in a while. He and Bob are as close as he and I are and Bob and I talked about him when we spoke yesterday. John did not know Dick since he was across town trading Eurodollars while we were learning why Toy’R Us had yet again failed as a company. Nonetheless, when a person from a certain era dies, it causes one to remember all the others from that same time, so John was on my mind yesterday. I will see him in a few weeks at a Barbecue at my house. In attendance will be Joe Thomas, the ex-Dean of the business school and the guy who I took my first business course with back in my senior year.
It is good to remember and it is good to reunion, whether in person or by email or phone as happened yesterday. One must always remember that when you or someone else checks out for the last exit, there is no more opportunity for a last call or visit. So, since the dead never call, it is important to pick up that phone while you are both alive and reconnect, because, as my old friend Boyo likes to say, you are a long time dead.