Unlikely Bedfellows
I arrived at Cornell University in 1971 with an army jacket and a duffle bag. I had not led a conventional suburban life, and I was not entering college in a traditional middle class American manner. I had hitchhiked from Cleveland, where I had spent the summer learning about sociological research studies at Case Western Reserve University and learning that rivers in the United States were so polluted that they could, indeed, catch fire as the Cuyuhoga River had yet again done that very summer. That burning river created such an environmental outcry that it is said to have spurred the environmental movement in the United States. More on that later.
As a freshman engineer at Cornell I was one of many housed in what was called the West Campus University Halls (U-Halls) that were built after WWII (1953 to be exact) and served as the main repository of incoming freshmen (male and female, separated at the time by floor, but with loose “free love” rules governing visitation and co-habitation). Freshmen who knew what’s what at Cornell were smart enough to request lodging in the gothic Baker dorms or the North Campus prime locations of Donlon Hall or Dickson Hall. The rest of us as part of the great unwashed hordes just bunked in U-Halls as we were directed.
The way the system at Cornell worked was that there was woefully insufficient dorm space in Ithaca for upperclassmen, so anyone not a freshman could take their chances in a lottery to get a dorm room, but was otherwise required to secure living arrangements at market as available. Fraternities and sororities filled a big part of the gap and there were 54 fraternities at the time. If you assumed an average incoming pledge class of 25 per fraternity, they could absorb approximately 50% of the sophomore class and give them a room or at least a bed in one of the chapter houses. At Cornell, these arrangements and the apartment market got contracted in the October/November timeframe for the next school year. That meant that if you didn’t arrange an apartment during your first semester you were probably inclined to join a fraternity just to have a bed.
Fraternities had their own financial dynamic going on as you can imagine. A bunch of college kids with some advice from graduated alumni were supposed to know how to finance and fill-up what was effectively a socialized boarding house. The budgeting dynamics alone were a challenge and luckily Cornell had the leading School for Hotel Management so there were presumably some people there who knew the flush and gush or property management. But off a bunch of us went from my U-Halls floor to a fraternity of Midwestern origins (mostly known to folks from areas like Missouri and Arkansas). While it was a big decision in the moment, even those of us committing to a year of living until we knew better, were simply not feeling the high-risk issue for the most part.
The spring semester freshman year was the orientation time when we got to know the other fraternity members and the workings of the house. I became friendly with the guys who ran the kitchen (Hotel students naturally) and actually worked as kitchen boy since I needed to earn spare money. Others got friendly with other upperclassmen, usually for rooming opportunities (there was a complex priority system for auctioning off the room assignments for the next year). I free-rode to a decent room by rooming with a sophomore Hotelie who was not particularly cool or well-liked, but was the physical house manager responsible for repairs and bill collecting. His arch-rival was a classmate of his who was a History major who took sport out of not paying his bills on a timely basis. He came from a well-to-do legal family, but he thought it was high-value fun to toy with this plodding, unimaginative house manager. The dynamic was never-ending. That History major’s name was Peter and he roomed with two of my friends from the U-Halls.
Strangely enough, I never kept in touch with my hotelie roommate over the years, but Peter became part of our class gang on an impromptu basis. Every member of our gang has a story I can easily spin into an interesting tale, but Peter was somehow even more interesting. His parents were lawyers and he was a member of what I would call the NYC Metro Jewish elite. He had attended the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale and was very smart in a truly intellectual manner. He was decidedly pre-law though he never spoke of that, but spoke of History and Political Science. Peter was a fun guy in a strangely passive way. He was a serious student and prone to being laid-back, but he considered himself a good athlete on the ballfield and basketball court. Since his involvement in sports was only occasional, I couldn’t tell if he was or wasn’t a good athlete, like some of the jocks who were on the court every day.
Peter went on to Law School at Columbia where he met his wife. To me, an outsider to the Metro NYC world, this was a case of one moneyed scion meeting landed Jewish gentry (her father was a Congressman), a match made in heaven (or at least Shamayim). Peter and Elizabeth started a family and both worked in the law until Peter moved to London and got hooked up with one of the early leveraged buyout financiers in London. He shifted naturally to that space and we next saw each other one day in my offices on Park Avenue. I was running a large Merchant Banking Division of a “white shoe” bank and he was doing a deal with our bank to buy a chemical company. I think we were both amused that our paths had crossed in ways that many from Cornell who we had stayed friendly with had not.
Over the years since then, we have regularly connected and have always been surprised to find that we knew people in common and our business circles were never far apart. A few years ago he had gone off on his own after a very successful set of private equity partnerships and I was running a big property company. He needed space, we had space to let and so he rented a luxurious (one might say opulent) suite of offices from us, so we actually worked close by each other for a year or so.
The other day Peter called me (we are both 45 years from Cornell graduation now). Now Peter was never like that house manger he used to torment, screwing in a light bulb would be a big effort for him. So it’s funny that he has ended up owning a small facility in the business of anaerobic digestion of food waste. To those not familiar with the biogas arena, Peter is processing garbage and turning garbage into salable products. Not what one would have expected of a Cornell History major. The even funnier thing is that he is making a byproduct of ammonia and he called me because he remembered that I was doing something in ammonia. Low and behold, our circles may have moved into the ecologically-oriented arena (who could have guessed), and there is a specific need he has for the expertise that my company has. We have an interest in the biogas arena so it’s interesting to us as well. There’s no burning river here, but life has thrust us both onto the garbage heap and told us that while we didn’t room together back then, we might be bedfellows again now. Very strange.