I live in Punta Gorda, a beautiful little coastal village on the west coast of Florida, where I work as a financial advisor. I have been married to my kind-hearted and beautiful wife Yoko for 26 years. We have three lovely daughers. Paula is a 1st grade teacher, age 25, living in Bakersfield California; June, 22, lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and works for the Kahala Hotel and Resorts. My youngest daughter Jessica is 19 living in Talahassee, Florida and attending Florida State University. I will have lots to say about my family. Suffice it to say that I love them all with all my heart. I never say that enough. I am not a boater...but I have friends and clients who do boat and this is the best photo of myself that I have on file. This photo was taken on Jan 1 2004 on my clients boat in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. I have another photo somewhere of my entire family...my wife and three daughters taken on the same day, which I will have to find and post.
I thought it would be good to start this blog with a short biography and background about myself. If you already know me you may want to skip to the next entry...otherwise read on. If you notice this rambles on in many different directions, you will have learned a lot about what I am like!
I was born in Stamford, CT and raised there until about the age of seven. I have a brother and three sisters, all of a similar age and upbringing. Everyone in my immediate family is alive and well, except my father, who passed away in 2002 from multiple causes. I really miss my Dad, but at least had him to turn to well into my married life. It makes me sad to think I might not be there for my daughters the way my Dad was there for me.
My brother Frank had prostate cancer last year, which they treated by removing the prostate. My father also had prostate cancer, but they treated his less radically with seed radiation. My 84 year old mother has had breast cancer, twice now, and is being successfully treated with radiation. Cancer in my family is a relatively new phenomina.
My family (except my sister Peggy, who was yet to be born) left Stamford in 1962 and moved to Syracuse, New York where my father worked as a manufacturer's rep. My sister Peggy became a part of the family in 1965. In the summer of 65 my father's job took him to Pennsylvania, so we moved again. I have few childhood memories of Stamford, more of Syracuse, but most are clearly of Horsham, which is where I really say I am "from" when people ask. My sisters Jane and Linda live near my Mom in Pennsylvania. My brother Frank lives in Boston. Peggy is in Houston with her young family. All my bothers and sisters have children and some step children. In all I have 12 nieces and nephews on my side of the family and just two on my wife's side...so a total of 14 all together. It has been fun watching everyone grow and develop, even though we don't get to see everyone all that often.
I attended catholic elementary schools; Holy Cross in Dewitt, New York from 1st to 4th grade and then St Cathrine of Siena in Horsham (5th and 6th grade). I have only a few memories of these years...like being on the school safety patrol in 2nd grade (the whole 2nd grade was the "patrol".) My older brother Frank was running or talking in the hallways (knowing I was on patrol and taking advantage of his position) so I gave him a ticket. That night mr brother told my father that I had turned him in; my father was furious and made me quit the safety patrol the next day. He wanted to teach me a lesson in family loyalty. My parents were also angry that the school was putting 2nd graders in charge of the 4th graders....and wanted to make a point with school officials. Anyway, I was the ONLY 2nd grader not on the school safety patrol and that was a tramatic. I have a lot of other scattered memories of Stamford and Syracuse which I may write about later, but for now let's get through the basics.
I attended Hatboro-Horsham Junior High School and Senior High. In those days "junior high" was from 7th and 8th grade and "senior high" was from 9th to 12th grade. I was always very small. In 7th grade I joined the 80lb Track Team. I wanted to play football and basketball, but I just did not have the physical size. The good news was that I was pretty fast, so track became my sport in junior and senior high school. I met Eric Madsen and Jeff Ginsberg (and a bunch of other people) through track and other activities. To this day Eric is one of my best friends; we've kind of lost touch of Ginsberg.
When we moved to Pennsylvania my Mom got involved with hosting exchange students from the University of Pennsylvania and I remember one year (maybe 1967?) she invited Max and Yashiko Sato to our home for Thanksgiving. Mrs Sato was wearing a Japanese kimono for the occasion. They were the first Japanese I ever met, but my mother's hosting of international students first got my attention about the world around us.
I had a lot of friends or people I knew that were exchange students abroad. Debbie Miller went to Argentina for a year and came back; Rod Miller (Debbie's brother and my sister Jane's boyfriend) had been to Australia through Rotary International's Student Exchange Program. I met a girl I rather liked, named Kathy Beety, from New Zealand when I was in 10th grade. Kathy had also came via Rotary. I loved the idea of having a travel adventure. Jeff Marchant and I use to ride bikes and planned to take a cross- country bike trip one day. (Never did it, but we did talk about it alot!) Anyway, in high school I thought it would be neat to go abroad for a year and experience another culture. I heard about the Rotary Program through friends and decided to apply.
I never realized what an impact this decision would have on the rest of my life. At the end of my junior year in High School I was selected to represent my Rotary District as an exchange student to Izumiotsu City, Japan. It meant having to give up graduating with my friends and graduating a year later with the class behind me. At the time I was dating Gail Eichland and I pined for her the whole year I was gone... By the time I returned, she was in college and had moved on.
Had I NOT gone to Japan, I might still be with Gail Eichland! AND I might never have begun smoking. The Japanese kids I hung out with all smoked and I would go with them after school to the "Spot Five" coffee house, where you could listen to music, drink coffee, smoke and talk. I always associated smoking with "having a good time with friends" and maybe that is why it was so addictive.
In hindsight leaving the familiar behind and going to Japan was one of the best decisions I ever made. That year in Japan opened my eyes to the world and changed my life forever. I learned to speak Japanese (something I still work on); I ended up going to George Washington University so I could continue studying Japanese; attended Georgetown University Language classes for the years I studied the language; found a job working for a Japanese company coming out of college. And that's when my life began.
The first company I worked for after college was Nissho Iwai, in Tokyo. They were a very large trading company (sogo shosha). My job was to help the company produce an English language PR magazine, English language annual report, represent the company with the foreign press, etc. I worked for Nissho Iwai for four years and I must say that it was a formative experience. There are lots of stories about Nissho Iwai I could tell, but the most important was that working there lead to my meeting my wife Yoko one night.
She was out in Roppongi celebrating her college graduation with friends. I was out with Dan Ginns looking for Japanese girls. Dan and I had had zero luck picking up women that night; our "last stop" was TGI Fridays. Dan and I occupied a booth and we were about the only people in the bar when in walks 6 or so Japanese women, dressed to the tees. They were obviously out to have a good time. They all sat down at the bar but they did not sit all together. So Dan and I walked over and plunked ourselves on the randomly open seats. Yoko was on my left and I began talking with her. We spoke for maybe half an hour or so and I fell head over heals in love with her sparkling eyes. I tried to get her phone number but she would not give it to me. Finally, I gave her my business card and begged her to call me. I never expected to hear from her again, but the next day she DID call. She insisted on going on a double date -- not just the two of us; so Dan and I made plans to take Yoko and her friend Mika Kishigami to a very expensive Japanese restaurant in Roppongi called Serina. Ginz and I strategized about how we were going to "get" these girls....and we decided that we would make them think we were rich by taking them to some of the best places in town. After dinner we went to an expensive disco; we had a good time and obviously the strategy woked! I remember the night I came home from our first date, I told my friend Hanai that I had met the girl I planned to marry.
I pursued Yoko for six months after that, calling her every night. It took a long time, but eventually we developed a romantic relationship. Yoko and I dated for nearly three years before we were married in May of 1981. We had our first child, Paula, in March of 1982.
The summer after Paula was born we decided Yoko needed to learn to speak English and I needed to get a degree in business if I was going to have a business career. So in July of 1982 we moved back to the US. Initially we stayed with my parents while I took an accounting course that was a prerequiste to attending Penn State. We had very little money -- only a couple of thousand dollars in savings is all. We bought a green 1967 Maverick (manual, no power steering) for $1200-- which was my first car at the age of 27. We moved to Penn State to begin classes in September of 1982.
We only spent one and a half years at Penn State, but we had a good time, made lots of friends and had a good learning experience. While we were at Penn State I was contacted by John Greene, who was the Managing Partner for Arthur Andersen in San Francisco. He had met with me when in Japan calling on Nissho Iwai and he later saw a story about me in Fortune Magazine in July of 82. The article had mentioned that I would be leaving Nissho Iwai to attend gradate school and John wanted to know if I would be interested in coming to work for Andersen after completing my MBA. John arranged for me to meet with Mike Emmons in Chicago to explain what I would be doing.
Prior to hearing from Andersen, Nissho Iwai had also contacted me wanting to know if I would be interested in coming to New York to work for them in HR when I finished my degree. Had Nissho Iwai offered to send me to graduate school, like they do many of their Japanese male hires, I might have agreed. Unfortunately, they never layed out a career path until after I had returned to the states. I ended up doing "consulting" work for Nissho Iwai to earn a $700 per month stipend, which helped me get through grad school. But I ultimately took the job with Arthur Andersen, primarly because I thought it would be more interesting and more importantly because I thought it would likely lead to my returning to Japan as an expatriate employee, which was one of my goals.
In January of 1984, having finished all my graduate school classwork, Yoko and I packed up and moved to California so that I could begin work for Arthur Andersen. Paula was not even 2 years old. We found a place in Concord, in Contra Costa County in San Francisco's East Bay. I worked with Mike Emmons in the Oakland office. My job was to help organize a marketing and sales effort aimed at selling audit and tax work to Japanese companies investing in the US. My timing was impecable as this was the year that Japanese money began pouring into the US. One of our early successes was obtaining the audit and tax work for New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) a GM/ Toyota joint venture, which happened to be located in the Bay Area.
The program John Greene, Mike Emmons and I created at Arthur Andersen was called JIN (for Japanese International Network). The program became prominent within Arthur Andersen fairly rapidly because of the high profile investing being made by the Japanese. Within a short period of time we had JIN offices in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Toronto, Houston, Los Angeles, London, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei and other loations around the world. I got to travel to all of these places while working for Andersen. Mike Emmons and John Greene (who also smoked) were generous to me and I received rapid pay raises. I became good friends with many of Andersen's Japanese partners, as well as senior partners in many Andersen offices around the world.
1985 was a big year for us. That was the year my daughter June was born and it was the year we bought our first house in Martinez, California. June was born in June of 85 and very soon after she was born, we moved into the new house. I remember what a strech it was to buy the house on Quite Lake Place and how we had to borrow and "do a deal" with the developer. We made it work, but always felt we were financially behind.
We stayed in California for three years -- until October of 1986, when I was assigned to work with Yoshiaki Yamauchi, Andersen's new Managing Partner in Tokyo. I'll never forget the job was offered to me during a taxi ride with John Greene when we were in Paris for a JIN meeting. My career was moving ahead and I knew Yoko would be pleased with the idea of moving back to Japan.
Our life in Tokyo was fabulous. We had expat housing in Fukazawa; we were near Seisen International school and Yoko's parents. We could not have planned things any better. On top of this, finanacially each year was getting better and better. I will probably spend some blog time talking about our life in Tokyo. For now, suffice it to say that we were very happy in our new surroundings. My daughter Jessica was born in Tokyo in 1988, at the height of the Japanese foreign investment boom.
I stayed with Andersen in Tokyo until 1994. By that time, the Japanese investment boom had ended and it was not clear what more I could do at Andersen. In 1993 they had aquired Asahi Audit Corporation and become the largest accounting firm in Japan. My future career at Andersen was uncertain and I began looking for new opportunities.In July of 1994 I quit Andersen to begin a start up of my own called Multimedia Learning Systems KK. Again, it is a long story I may tell later. I ran MLS for three years. I eventually had to close down the business for lack of funding. It was tough transitioning from ex;pat employee to self-employed, but somehow we made it through.
I closed MLS in July of 1997 and for the next two years, I was essentially unemployed. I should say, I was working, but I wasn't earning anything. We could no longer afford the private school in Tokyo, so I sent Yoko and the girls back to the States. They landed in Punta Gorda in July of 1997, staying with my parents that first month or so. They eventually found a place to rent. After selling the assets of MLS I followed the girls to Punta Gorda in the spring of 1998.
I sat for the Series 7 exam in October of 1998 and passed with flying colors. My sponsor was a company called Chatfield Dean, a somewhat notorious boiler-room operation. I worked for them for about 3 months in Tampa, when it finally dawned on me that I might find something in Punta Gorda with the legitimate brokerages. Chatfield Dean became CSG Securities in January of 1999 and soon thereafter I quit to join Smith Barney. I worked at Smith Barney until May of 2007, when they decided to close the Punta Gorda office. Since then, I have been with Morgan Stanley, my current employer.
So now you know, in sumary form, my life story to this point and how a Japanese-speaking financial guy ends up in Punta Gorda, Florida fighting cancer. The remainder of this blog is about my life going forward.
