DOUG: We lived a very nice life for four years. I had a very good job as a controller of IBM Europe. There were 100,000 people there working at IBM at the time. So, it was nice. Then we came back. We could have stayed longer but –

GINGER: I could have stayed there for life! It was fun and interesting people; all kinds of people!

DOUG: We tried not to get into the American community. We tried to get into the French or international community so most of our social contacts were not Americans. We both got pretty good at French.

Anyway, we came back to the same house. We had rented our house in Greenwich for four years while we were in Paris so we came back to the same house. I continued to work at IBM but right nearby, a short drive. I pretty well decided by that time that it was too slow moving for my tastes. I wanted to leave.

GINGER: I have to get in something. To give you a little of the social scene; when we got back from Paris there was a new family living behind us, or we hadn’t really…they built it. They were afraid that their house value was going to go down if there was Down’s syndrome child in the house in front. That gives you a picture of the times.

It is shocking, yeah! I always would ask people over and all the kids would play together and then they’d relax around that. She actually would; the woman, who thought that the house values would tumble, became Debbie’s best advocate.

DOUG: Let’s just sort of proceed to capture the history. So, I left IBM about nine months after we got back from Paris and went to work for a company in Boston called Millipore, which was in the filtration, separation, measurement business, high technology, different. We had moved for about a year or so. We were in Greenwich for about two years after coming back and Ginger was very active in getting a handicapped kids program started and a parents’ forum. A federal law had just been passed to require equal funding for special education people and I guess “restricted environment” was a magic word.

GINGER: Yeah, I worked hard in the community. I mean, I was out there really banging on the community. I was not popular because it was I was going to find the right schooling for my child and that was that. Go to court, do what we needed to do at that time.

DOUG: Just to keep the ball rolling cause time is going to run out… We moved to Boston and lived in – well actually, we wanted to move to Cochrane, that’s a suburb. I actually bought a house there and then we started to get the schools lined up. But Carolee couldn’t get into the private school and the public school was going to track her because her English wasn’t very good.

GINGER: She read and wrote in French.

DOUG: When she came back to the United States she could read and write in French but she couldn’t read and write in English. She could speak English, but anyway. So, we quick switched and moved her to a private school in Brooklyn and bought a second house in Brooklyn. Actually, Chestnut Hills is where we lived; a part of Brooklyn. So, we were four years…three years in Brooklyn and I worked for Millipore up there. Millipore was a company that was interesting but they had some real integrity issues.

GINGER: I would say large.

DOUG: Big issues and I didn’t deal very well with a place that didn’t have high integrity so they half fired me and I half left. I am not sure which was more.

GINGER: They kept using his signature.

DOUG: I was CFO of the company

GINGER: Yeah, it was shocking.

DOUG: That was when we ended up coming to California. The guy that was a colleague and CFO for investment banking was with ________. He was the first boss of the company and so she says, “There’s a great job for you out in California,” and hooked us up and after much debate and deliberation about moving to California, which was a huge decision for us to move the whole family, we finally decided to do it.. Ginger made me sign a note that said, “If after two years this is not, in my opinion, an appropriate place to be you will go back.” (Laughter)

GINGER: I did. I was a little worried dragging the kids from school to school. Ask Carolyn! I mean, she was in so many schools and meeting so many new kids. It had a big impact on her.

DOUG: Yeah. Well, she and Reed both went to Parks School, a private school, which is a fabulous school in Boston. A very, very good school, and finished there and came out here just in time. So, Reed was 10 when we moved here and Carolyn was 13, but she got out here and it was just after the Proposition 13 was passed and all the public schools were preaching _______ and we heard all that stuff and we said, we want to put her public school but we better put her in private school.

GINGER: She wanted to get out of here. She wanted to go back east.

DOUG: She ended up going to private school for three months and wasn’t happy and so we went back east to check out boarding schools.

We said, “Look, if come summer you are still unhappy you have a choice,” and she went back there and went to school with a good friend of hers.

They said, “Our second semester starts next week, we’d love to have you right now.”

So she said, “Okay, I’m on!” and she made a very quick jump to the boarding school back east for two and a half years. Which was a quick jump, and she didn’t have any time to transition so it was a tough start for her.

GINGER: It was tough because she was sophomore and there was a – Carolee, I gotta tell you, was strikingly beautiful. I mean, not just a pretty little – I mean, just strikingly beautiful.
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