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Richard learned early that life is a gamble. After he and his older brother Ed (’52) went to a Methodist camp one summer, Ed developed polio, and health authorities quarantined both of them. Ed spent more than a year in the hospital and emerged with crutches, braces and a lifelong bad leg. Ed would come back to school and prove losses are not permanent. He would win senior honor student, later an honorary doctor of law from Hartwick College, and serve as President of the Baseball Hall of Fame as well as a director of numerous businesses, charities and cultural organizations.
The 1957 yearbook note for Richard Stack said, “A business career is right up his alley.” He went into business straight out of high school and a short walk down Back Road Hill from his home on Altamont Avenue—six days a week washing dishes in a luncheonette. He also went to night school at Hofstra to improve his chances in the business world. “I was too young to go to night school,” he realizes, but his courses saved him when, after three years of drowning dishes in sinks of detergent, his skin erupted in allergic reactions.
A friend who ran a gas station also repaired card reading computers for the Long Island branch of Sperry Rand Corporation. “Go to Sperry,” his friend said. “They hire people who run these computers.” Sperry hired Richard to do the kind of basic clerical work he had started learning in school. “I really hated it,” he says, “but when I was about to leave, my boss suggested I try computers.” Richard had been good at math in high school, although a long bout of asthma in his sophomore year meant, “I barely passed by the skin of my teeth.” The asthma disappeared after high school and nothing prevented him from developing his career as he liked. He rose in the ranks of Sperry to become Senior Programmer Analyst.
The “Rand” in the corporate name came from Remington Rand, best known for their typewriters. Sperry developed the famous UNIVAC computer. But Sperry was soon to be eclipsed, and Richard’s instincts were good. He wanted to learn the IBM computer systems, and IBM would soon become America’s computing standard. Richard moved to the Harris Corporation that used IBM equipment. There he developed his programming skills and worked for the company’s director on special projects. He also honed his gambling skills, playing poker every day at lunch for 17 years and many Friday nights at friends’ homes.
Around 1990 government spending cutbacks left Richard unemployed. “I had my resume out all over,” he says, but he had been looking at land in a Kingman, Arizona development. He flew out on vacation and surveyed the area around the Grand Canyon. He liked the quiet, the waters of the Colorado and Lake Mojave. He didn’t like the idea of commuting to New York City. And he loved to gamble.
For six months he rented a condo in Laughlin, Nevada and signed up for unemployment. “I was entitled to rehabilitation,” he says, and he found that the local community college offered a six week course in card dealing. He also “found a piece of property on top of a hill overlooking the mountains” where he now lives. He turned down a job in Vegas and began to deal in one of Laughlin’s ten casinos, eventually also working roulette. After a couple of years, “I got physically sick dealing with the public and people in gambling. You’d have to be brought up in the business to really like it.” He saw that the people who came for short term work were always broke.
He has retired to Laughlin where he contentedly runs his own life—cleaning, cooking, doing the yard work, and and walking with a neighbor every morning. Richard, however, did not get sick of gambling. “I love to fly to Vegas every year on vacation for a week or ten days.” He also plays video poker. “I’ve been playing so many years I’m pretty good,” he says. He is cautious with his money as befits a former business manager for the Senior Play. He doesn’t bet a fortune and as this biography goes to press he says he is still in the black. “It’s satisfying when you win a little bit.”
