Anyway, at that point I was in the Naval ROTC when I was in college which I wouldn’t do if I had to do it over again. It took a lot of time away from other things I wanted to do at college.

I spent two years in the Navy following college as an officer. I was on the Destroyer Escort out of San Diego for a year and then out of Long Beach for a year so I got my first exposure to California.

I had a trip to the Far East. It was actually in Destroyer Escorts and we weren’t fast enough to work the carriers and all the big guys so we did unusual things like train the Philippine navy and the Korean Navy. And we functioned as the station ship in Hong Kong. The military had no base in Hong Kong so it was on a ship communication post.

That was two years of great learning experience, but two years was enough. I was done with that learning curve by the time I had finished. I was engineering officer on my ship for the last year which is a lot of responsibility; about 75 people or 85 people who worked for me. So as a young officer they sent me to destroyer engineering officer’s school for the first three months I was in the Navy. I had been in school a long time. I didn’t want to be in anymore school, but they sent me to school so I spent three more months in school.

I was an engineering major in college so I had an engineering degree so it made it reasonably easy for me, but, in fact, it’s a funny story.

So I didn’t want to be in school. I just kind of coasted the first six weeks and about 80% of the people in my school were Naval Academy graduates and they were on their career path. They had been in the Navy two or three years and were training to be a destroyer engineer office, but they looked down on people like me. We were just total scum. We weren’t regulars and we weren’t going to be career guys and we were inferior. I just really got angry at how I was being treated so halfway through the school I said I am going to show them.

So, I really started to work hard. I ended up second in my class even though I was not doing very well in the beginning, because I just really didn’t put much into it, but I got angry (Laughs). So I learned a lot being aboard ship and working with people, and managing people, and interacting with people who were very different from my background.

I came from a WASPy Princeton etcetera background it was probably hardly what the average Navy guy – it was a great learning experience for me. In a lot of situations I was really over my head but I learned fast.

We went from being one of the worst engineering plants in our squadron to winning the engineering E my last year. It was the best engineering plant out of the eight in the squadron so the ship flew a big red engineering E on its smoke stacks. The captain was all excited about that.

Anyway, we spent six months in the Far East which was a good big eye-opener. Shore patrol in Hong Kong for three weeks was a big eye-opener looking at all the crazy situations that the guys got into. Oh boy, what I didn’t see didn’t happen I’ll tell you. Trying to dig guys out of bizarre – get a few drinks in a man, they gotta do all kinds of crazy things!

They’d get into the brothels and the bars and the fights with locals. More just the usual kind of guys being on board ship for six weeks and they want to blow their head off a little bit.

So while I was in the Navy I applied for business school. I went to Harvard to business school after I got out of the Navy.

Actually, between business school and the Navy – oh, I should go back.

Between prep school and college I went to Europe for the summer and toured around with a friend of mine. We toured all around the continent. Bought a Volkswagen Beetle and drove around and brought the deal back and that was my wheels for a while – a long while. When I got out of the Navy I went back to Europe again and spent another summer in Europe between Navy and business school.

Three dollars a day was kind of our budget – we couldn’t spend more than three dollars a day. We went on a tight budget. We stayed at very minimal hotels and youth hostels and things. It was fun. It was great. We had a ball. Then I spent some time in Russia. I did take a tourist trip to Russia there and then off to business school for two years.

My father died in the middle of my first year in business school. He was on a business trip in India and had a stroke. He couldn’t be operated on for two days so the blockage was there long enough so that one whole side was basically paralyzed. He couldn’t say more than five words at the age of 52 which was kind of a – he was never in good health.

He smoked like a chimney. I could just never understand why he never took care of himself. Anyways, so he was kind of a vegetable for 10 years which was really tough. I finished business school and did well and graduated with honors. Well, actually they didn’t give you honors they had third of a class you’re in – top third of the class, unless you’re what’s called a scholar. That’s the top 5%, which was not me.