Comments:
After graduating from CHS, I attended Colorado College my freshman year, and my roommate was the late Bill Bentley. He was a very good friend and a great guy. You could always count on him to do the right thing at the right time in the right way. I miss his presence when I visit Claremont today.
I transferred to Pomona College following my freshman year and graduated without distinction with a degree in economics in 1963. I played football (terrible teams) and rugby (great teams; we played all the big schools, USC, Stanford, UCLA; in those days before the big NFL contracts, their big name football players played).
After graduation from Pomona, I served in the Army as a First Lieutenant, first at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, then nearly 3 years in an armored battalion in the Third Armored Division in Germany. As one of the first major combat units up on the border, our mission was to fill the Fulda Gap, and our life expectancy would have been about 20 minutes if the balloon had gone up. Although duty as a junior officer in an armored unit in the Cold War was filled with field maneuvers and live fire exercises, off duty, I lived in the BOQ with a great group of guys. We drank a lot of beer in the local gasthauses, I learned conversational German in an Army language school, I could sing the beer drinking songs along with the Germans and I shared experiences, both good and bad, with people you'd never meet in Claremont. Awarded the the Army Commendation Medal.
I took a European discharge in 1966, and travelled throughout Europe for about 6 months, stopping first at a beach in Spain for a couple of months to thaw out. I was single, owned a brand new car, had strong dollars in my pocket, and I wasn't looking forward to returning to a country racked with race riots, antiwar protests and a budding drug culture, all of which surfaced while I was gone. I was in "culture shock" when I eventually returned.
Back in Claremont in the fall of 1966, I was surprised to find Brian Wilcox living over his garage on 10th Street following his divorce from Kathy Pyle, CHS '61, and John Shelton living across the alley after his return from the Peace Corps in Peru (where he taught baseball!). John left shortly thereafter for remote parts of the world, returning infrequently over the next 40 years, and Brian and I moved to Hermosa/Manhattan Beach. Brian's life was about to change for the better, big time.
I won't take credit for introducing Brian to Alison directly, but I will take credit for "setting the table". Alison lived up the street at the Beach with two other Pomona College ladies, and we used to visit them frequently. It wasn't long after they met when Brian and Alison were married. I know Brian wouldn't disagree with me if I say she was the best thing that ever happened to him. She's a great lady in all respects.
A job transfer took me to San Francisco in 1967, and it was shortly thereafter I started my career in commercial mortgage banking. I had planned to return to school to get my MBA, but I kept getting promoted. I was running the San Francisco office for an east coast company, and was hiring MBA's to work for me. Needless to say, I stuck with it.
In 1978 a business partner and I started our own commercial mortgage banking company headquartered in the Bank of America Bulding in downtown San Francisco. Together over the next 20+ years, we grew the company to a $3.5 billion servicing company that completed $1 billion in financing transactions in most years. If any of you have a TIAA/CREF pension plan, you probably have a few billion dollars of our deals working for you.
We sold the company in 2000, and I fully retired at that time. I'm proud to say that we shared significant proceeds from the sale with our long term employees, the company is virtually intact today, and the employees remain good friends.
I also married my wife, Colleen, in 1978. We have one daughter, Madeline, a senior at Pitzer College, and a Hungarian Vizsla, Riley. We have always lived in San Francisco, and presently reside in a 100+ year old house in Cow Hollow/Pacific Heights, up the hill from the Marina. We split our time between the City and a home on the north shore of Lake Tahoe.
Activities/former activities include one design sailboat racing for 20+ years (member St. Francis Yacht Club), remote, wilderness fly fishing for both fresh and salt water game fish (barbless hooks, catch and release unless eaten), upland bird hunting over our Vizsla, Riley (Maddy and I helped train him), semi-serious mountain biking, especially for on old geezer on single track trails at 8,000 feet at Tahoe and skiing poorly. Don't laugh, but we are also minor patrons of the San Francisco Opera.
I vowed to keep this short, but it's been too much fun reminiscing. See you all at the reunion where I can hear your stories first hand.
