Graduated in 1975 with a degree in Applied Mathematics -- Harvard's term for fooling around with computer programming -- and wanted to be a sportswriter.
In the throes of the Oil Embargo recession, Harvard's Office of Graduate and Career Planning (they have a much sexier name for it now) used the bulletin-board approach to job-finding -- no help. I had arranged to go roommates with two other guys living in a drafty huge dusty rent-controlled apartment on upper Mass. Ave. where my share would be $68 per month.
Two days before I moved in, both roommates suddenly bolted, one homesick for California (where he eventually became gay), the other in lust with the woman downstairs (whom he subsequently married). There I was, five days into the month, the psychotic landlord knocking at my door -- literally -- demanding $202. Which I didn't have.
Back then, to be a sportswriter, you started a stringer job with a micro-paper (the Marblehead Messenger) and wrote 150-word pieces on high school lacrosse. After a few years of this, you moved up to a third-tier paper (The Salem Evening News) and wrote 300-word pieces on junior college baseball. In between writing gigs, you hung around in hotels and bars with athletes and other sportswriters. In a few more years, you made the leap to the big paper in a second-tier city (Quincy Patriot-Ledger); five years more and you might get a call to the big city (Boston Herald). If you aspired to Sports Illustrated -- anything short of that was going to be marking time -- you might as well escrow the next 15-20 years of your life, with no guarantee of reaching the pinnacle and many dim nights watching ESPN flicker above a bar.
I hate being stuck in traffic. Fifteen years of it was unimaginable. Trying an end run, I had secured a line on a possible job in New York City with a high-end magazine being formed (Classic, the Magazine of Horses and Sport -- really, of money and country clubs), but the interview lay some weeks in the future and a job was even further off.
There I stood at my apartment front door in my underwear, promising the aforementioned psychotic landlord he would get his rent soon ... and not knowing how to do it.
How to make money, quickly and legally? I hiked myself down to a temporary agency, blitzed their typing test, falsely claimed I could run every piece of equipment they listed (not a fib, I'd figure it out when I got there), and emerged that morning with a slip pointing me at gainful employment.
For about six weeks, I went to eight or ten different Skill Bureau gigs -- telephone receptionist, typist, file clerk, the vital Dumb Stuff that keeps an office functioning. At one, Learning Dynamics, Inc., I assembled sets of twelve self-help tapes into injection-molded plastic saddles captured in a notebook diptych. They had a dark cheap office with fake wood paneling walls on the second floor of a walkup strip mall in Brookline but maintained a Boston post office box because the founder thought it added class. After four days of this spectacularly depressing and smarmy job, he offered me a full-time position. That day I was out of there.
At another job, a company with the impenetrable name Boston Financial Technology Group (BFTG) had had bad luck with temps. Though they needed someone to cover for an executive secretary who was away for summer vacation, they brought me in on a Monday for a one-day gig -- and for two weeks straight, at the end of each day I trooped into the office manager to ask her should I come back tomorrow.
Male secretaries were rare in 1975. Non-gay male secretaries were really rare. Having one tickled the fancy of my boss, Jim Hughes, one of the partners. When his secretary moved up to an administrative post, he offered me the job full time.
As a full-time secretary, I typed long offering memoranda that underwent endless revisions and changes. The product was the paper, not electrons. Originals were cut and pasted, gradually developing topographic isobars of scotch tape. When the first generation of memory typewriters came in, I became expert as shuffling their card files (the punch-card-shaped predecessor of floppy diskettes).
Back in those dark times, printing was an expensive process. Printers were not desktop peripherals, they were companies that made money from offset reproduction and aging salesmen who learned their trade in the Forties and Fifties, when suppliers presented clients annually with small gifts. The Friday before Christmas, Mac Beaty arrived in his rumpled raincoat, a cross between Lieutenant Columbo and a flasher. Leaving Hughes' corner office, he made his way past the secretarial desk, slowing at each one to dip into his right-hand pocket and produce a small bottle of perfume, which he left by the phone without looking at the recipient. Another desk, another fragrant glass flask. Approaching my desk, Mac dipped his hand, slowed ... and then suddenly plunged his hand back into his pocket, accelerating like a fogbound pilot flying on instruments who had just caught sight of the runway and waved off a dangerous landing.
The next morning a bottle of Jack Daniels was delivered to my dusty rent-controlled apartment.
Starting my business career amid a recession proved serendipitous. Boston Financial's founder had been ejected from management by a bank that gave him the choice of that or shutdown, six senior executives (none older than forty) had taken over management, and the headcount had shrunk from sixty to thirty. There was plenty of room to grow, so I:
Somewhere in there they made me what passed for a partner.
I learned this business via emergency-room anatomy:
What's the femur?
It's that bone protruding from his bleeding leg.
Oh. How do we put it back where it belongs?
Along the way, I found out some things about myself:
You could view my job in either of two ways:
I also discovered to my surprise that many participants in the business -- owners, regulators, investors -- thought of affordable housing simply as a shoebox into which a poor person was dumped and through which subsidy was pumped. It was where 'those people' lived. People saw it as real estate's Special Olympics -- laudable, perhaps, in a patrician way, but certainly not real athletics.
One day in September, 1987, in an amendment added by voice vote in the evening of the last day of the legislative session, Congress declared a national emergency (shortage of affordable housing) and unilaterally canceled the owners' right to go market after twenty years.
By now I had been living in Cambridge for sixteen years -- virtually the same interval of time that Our Fair City had enjoyed a particularly repressive and confiscatory form of rent control. Starting as a temporary law ("There is nothing so permanent as a temporary emergency" -- Robert A. Heinlein), it had been renewed, and extended, and made more onerous. It choked the housing and ran down neighborhoods. It favored bad owners by driving out good ones. It created bizarre finagles -- like the six-apartment building that was 'sold' to one of its residents so it could be subdivided into two threes and then went condo, one of which we had bought from its Ukrainian developer. (Rent control would not go away for another seven years, and then only in a statewide referendum.)
I thought the prepayment moratorium was pernicious. I thought it would not go away on its own. And I thought it should be opposed. At an owners' conference I said to the assembled audience, "give me your business cards and I'll sue the government."
My Boston Financial partners were cool to my crusade. They wholeheartedly supported the principle, the theory ... but why did it have to be us who sued? Would I please not use any Boston Financial letterhead in the effort? A few days before Christmas, 1988, a WBZ radio reporter showed up in Boston Financial's offices with the news I was about to be picketed by the Massachusetts Tenants Organization.
If you do it, you should stand up for it. When their delegation demanded that I come down to the street to speak with their whole membership and hear their demands, down I went onto pedestrian Summer Street amid the fat drifting snowflakes.
There were about a dozen. They had tacky hyperbolic flyers, hand-lettered but obviously scripted signs, handwritten notes of their speeches, and a bullhorn they passed around. A couple of them broke down crying as they read their speeches. I felt bad for them.
As they were speaking, an MTO organizer leaned over and said sotto voce, "You've got a lot of guts coming down here." They had probably expected a fat cat with a big cigar and a tinted windshield in the Mercedes he drove out of the underground parking garage. Instead they got their gangly brother who came out and argued with them.
When they were done, I explained very carefully that we had no interest in evicting anyone, that the answer lay with the federal government, and that I was willing to make common cause with them to go to Washington to pursue a joint solution. They listened politely, taken aback and undoubtedly disbelieving. When they were done, they gave me a paper bag filled with coal, my Christmas present. I said goodbye and took the subway home.
Next day, the Boston Globe reported it.
At the end of May, 1989, I gave my notice at Boston Financial. The battleship was going one way, the PT boat wanted to go another. It was time to separate and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was entirely burned out on tax shelter.
When wide receiver Randy Vataha retired from the Patriots and set about looking for a new career, every morning he went to 'work' -- put on a suit, went to a designated room in his house, and did nothing except pursue a job. Persuading a lawyer friend to rent me an office -- it was the beginnings of a recession and they had ample extra space -- with attendant phone and photocopying facilities, for six months in 1989, I did three things:
At New Directions they had a variety of tests -- Meyers-Briggs, a video feedback evaluation (that was an uncomfortable revelation), and one more test that the founder had designed on a lark and administered without telling me what it was. "You got the highest score anyone's received yet," he told me afterwards. As the sort of person who likes to do well on a blood test, I asked, "What was it?"
"Aptitude as an entrepreneur."
He pulled out a piece of paper, drew a circle, and wrote inside it, Smith, Inc. "Now all we have to do is figure out what goes in there."
Gulp.
My father was an artist with a great hand -- but instead of sketching women or painting seascapes he made a paycheck drafting containers to be lifted by helicopter. For years he commuted daily to distant, dirty Lawrence, Massachusetts, burning with the desire for his own business. In 1964 he got his wish. For nearly seven years thereafter he and my mother toiled in constant anxiety, measuring time by how many weeks' worth of work they had in the shop, until the business sputtered to a halt in 1971. Around then, their marriage died.
Me? My own company? What for? My immediate reaction verged on terror. This was not what I had in mind.
Yet I had shown little interest in pursuing new jobs. I had been continuing the litigation. Explaining it to anxious owners, more than one asked, "How are we going to get value out of these properties?" And it dawned on me -- cue light bulb in thought balloon -- what my company could do ...
Since then I measure time by offices, addresses, and phone numbers:
Twenty-six years after starting my business career, I'm in a building two blocks from where I started -- I can see it from my corner-office window -- in an old building bearing a striking interior resemblance to my original office at Boston Financial.
6/17/2002