Gene Carter, Learning and Musing 1950-2020

Gene Carter, 1960

To live, one has to move forward, but only then can you look back figuring out the why of your history.  Still, moving forward there are many ways to go wrong.  There are few signs.  Even talking with older people, who helped me so much, we are still on our own. 

Facts are easy.  After East, I went to college on a scholarship restricting me to liberal arts and business when I’d planned to become an engineer like my dad.  (I have all my tax returns starting in 1958 when I was paid less than Calvin Ross working on the asphalt crew in the summer…though I ran the 12-ton roller that could do more damage. My dad pointed out—I got to sit.)

In 7^th grade most boys were interested in changes in girls.  Although I noticed the differences, I was focused on the Federal tax brackets, appalled that they hit 91%! Looking back, I was an economist before I knew the term. I still managed to have dates to the proms, enjoy being a basketball team manager and attend school events with classmates.

Freshman year of college I found a tube IBM 650 computer, donated by Boeing to Northwestern where I was a student. In an air-conditioned basement, the “brains” of the machine took up a whole room, yet had less memory than today’s cell phone.  I wanted to study “risk in outcomes,” but an accounting professor said that was not business which dealt in “verifiable certainty.” That remark of the accounting professor told me accounting was a language like economics, psychology or statistics. It was not always very helpful.

By 1967 I learned that the maximum 70% rate applied only on income ABOVE $200,000 at a time when the average income was $6200 and the top 5% household incomes began at $19,000 per year.  I learned that lots of quirks affect the definition of income.

I went to Carnegie Tech for graduate school, as it had the most computerized program AND students could wander into all subjects.  Graduating, we had to pick a field, and finance seemed like applied economics.  I contracted to have a Teletype terminal in my office and went off to teach at Harvard.  I learned a lot when a new PhD came through my first year and a senior prof said a woman should not be teaching at Harvard Business School.  That alarming statement seemed both stupid and not what America was supposed to be.  Harvard hired her when students after a pub hour deemed her acceptable. She was Rita Rodriquez and we married in 1972.

Our first date was to KFC on my nickel after a particularly insane faculty meeting which decided that faculty could cancel finals as a matter of conscience over war protests.  I had my Afro and had demonstrated against the war which I thought was unwise, but my job was to teach a class.  These were would-be MBA’s and many were veterans in the class.  I told the dean to call the cops if necessary, but I was giving a final and it was the students’ job to take it.  He stonily muttered that was my right.  Oddly, I missed tenure at Harvard.

I attended Rita’s naturalization ceremony in 1971, concluding that maybe all 18 year olds should take the oath of citizenship.  I invited her to share a drink as a new citizen, and we headed to a bar near the Federal Court House.  Empty.  Never the less, “We don’t serve women.”  A few years later students invited us to the premier public restaurant in Boston.  I noted a private dining room, but was told it was the only choice as women were never served in the main dining room. Some things change for the better.

We had a daughter, and I taught for 20 years. I thought I should learn Rita’s field, then became convinced she should staple her materials for a book.  She said if I wanted it, do it.  We co-authored three editions of the leading international finance text. 

I spent three years at MIT as a visiting professor teaching finance to executives whose companies paid a great deal of money.  The previous instructor, a Nobel winner, the execs never recognized because most of the time he was writing equations on the board, mumbling.  (The instructor and wife were both delightful socially, playing with our daughter in later years.) MIT was excellent anthropological training for later life in Washington.  A wise prof my first week of grad school told me if the world was organized it was because I was organized, not the world.  What?  

I wondered why my large top floor office overlooking the Charles River was larger than that of some Nobelists, and why the first faculty meeting seemed to have people acting as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year. There was ONE faculty meeting a year. Once a semester a savvy dean came into my office, slammed the door, and lamented some madness he had to face, later acknowledging my office assignment was to avoid deciding a fight over who would get it next. The dean explained a need to trim budgets because of a decline in the market value of the endowment, whereupon another Nobelist of acclaim  explained that yearly accounting returns were meaningless, etc.  Once the dean fumed to me about one senior prof’s only contribution to any hiring or tenure decision was, “Not him (her),” never finding a candidate but maintaining high standards.  A month before any semester at least 10% of the classes did not have an assigned instructor.  MIT was run by the faculty for the benefit of faculty.  My two best academic friends of 30 years came from the many non-tenured youngsters, each far smarter and better trained than I.  I also saw very young Nobelists regularly working until midnight on some weekends.

By accident as a political independent, Rita was found by the Reagan Administration and became a Senate-confirmed director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank for 17 years.  We moved to Babylon on the Potomac temporarily with our three-year-old daughter 40 years ago.  After a few years juggling too many demands, I quit academics. I had met my goal of BECOMING a tenured full professor by 35 and at two schools….then realized I did not want to BE one…bummers. 

So I became Mr. Mom, moving from “Dean Carter” to “Adi’s dad” in the world, surviving with counsel from Diane Rusch, Glenna Stearman, and Marilyn Tompkins who knew my world in high school, but had children, often daughters, older than mine.  At social events I was tolerated as arm candy, spouse of, my history irrelevant as people are at parties to WORK in DC. On the other hand, I met some interesting people who would talk with me at length (though not the five presidents, foreign leaders including three Israeli prime ministers, etc.). I learned Jim Lehrer of the Newshour had lived at 622 S. Ash St. two blocks from our 844, both of us terrified of our Willard School principal.  Small world. I enjoyed the AP distributing pictures of my official Inaugural plate: CARTER for Reagan II was considered amusing. One Inauguration was enough–we left town in later years.  I saw Gorbachev welcomed to the White House, and the rollout of the last new jet of the 20^th century.  Former students became CEOs, a vice-chair of the Fed, and some jailed.  I was a corporate director, did some consulting in artificial intelligence and was involved with non-profits in Chicago and Washington.  We kept the Boston house we bought almost 50 years ago, always considering Washington temporary, and have now returned full time. 

So.  There’s a harmless annotated bio.  So what?  I was nervous at my first East reunion in 1980, but was counseled it would be fun because everyone will have been beaten up somewhat by pre-adolescent children.  I bragged to Kay Brinnon that in 243 more days I was DONE as our daughter was through high school. She remarked I had not started: “They get involved so there are more people to worry about, the problems are more serious, and you can do less about it.”  Oops.  It is their cradle to your grave.  I learned child rearing was like Glenna doing art if she couldn’t choose the medium nor mix the colors and had cataracts.  My parents had passed away when we were expecting, and my grandmother said it would be the most interesting thing we ever did. Interesting?  Not great or wonderful but…INTERESTING?  Yep.

David Kroenlein produced a great athlete, surpassing his athletic…talents.  But I produced an athletic talent from a far greater deficit in athletic skills or interest than Dave.  If you might get hurt or sweat, why do anything you did not have to do? was my attitude toward physical exertion.   Accused of feeding my kid barbed wire for breakfast as a 6^th grader, I saw her become a good basketball player in high school. Dave Alldritt and Lee Ayres asked for a paternity test; Fred Elder ascribed her skills to Rita whom he’d never met. Adi spotted me two letters in HORSE shooting hoops and I still lost. Recently, she said, “But you tried, Dad.” I felt putting your hand in front of someone’s face was rude. As a self-centered only child (many classmates noticed, I suspect), I worried about her behavior. More important to me than her all-city designation (and meeting Billie Jean King) was her being varsity MVP three years in high school.  Watching our East High teams, I knew the best players weren’t necessarily the most valued as teammates.  Adi learned teamwork and consideration.  I am still learning that kindness is too rare.  She just did it.

The writer Jane Smiley thought Midwesterners had one of two reactions to most events: “Who do you think you are?” and “It could have been worse.”  Indeed.  From both attitudes I decided I wanted to make money, a natural fit with economics I thought.  I heard Sophie Tucker remark in 1962 she’d been rich and she’d been poor, and rich was better.  I figured out in high school that rich parents bought nice convertibles for their sons.  Duh.  A retired Fortune 100 CEO told me at college that it was hard to make money, harder to keep it, and hardest to use it wisely.  I thought: Let’s get the first taken care of. But the trouble is risk: you can eat well or sleep well.  You have to pick associates carefully (one of my last private jet rides was in Bernie Madoff’s plane).  A friendly person was not necessarily a friend, because friendliness mainly helps get things done.  As Harry Truman said, if you want a friend in DC, get a dog.

Summary: I once told a close friend my wife was one of the few nice people I knew.  He quickly seriously remarked, “You’ve been in finance, worked in academics, and lived in Washington 30 years.  The competition is pretty weak.”  Bingo.

I learned rich people are not necessarily smart and certainly aren’t particularly kind.  I grew up amid the sneer “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’  The right question is “If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?” Workaholics abound, and in any area they like what they are doing–the addiction part.  It’s all part of the scene.

So you take your risks, and maybe it works and maybe not. If you profit the first time, it’s easy to confuse luck with brains.  Unfortunately, the biggest average market gain was as I first invested: 1958 (43%).  What’s left?  Gamble again to do bigger/better/faster than before and than anyone else? Gets tedious.

My wife was a government worker, but she could be fired instantly.  She did join a number of corporate boards later.  If money isn’t needed beyond one level, so what?  People rattling on about self-effort and hard work still seem to want to leave money to kids and grandkids. As one beneficiary of the college admissions cheating scandal remarked about his father buying his way into some school, I guess he was thinking that I could not do it on my own.  Just as rejecting a woman for a job because of gender, this seems antithetical to our national pieties.

So I decided to create an incentive system to help Latinas graduate from engineering school.  That was my dad’s field, my wife was Hispanic and I knew women faced hassles.  Education gave me huge opportunities.   Public universities, especially land grants, are a national treasure, although when we were in high school they often got more than 50% of their budget from the public versus single digits now in many cases.  These first-generation-to-college students are often recruited but many fail to graduate.  There is pressure among Latinas to get a skill to enter and leave the workforce easily to help with family concerns. Debt is bad.  If the family sacrifices for higher education, it will be for a son.  So I offered to repay their subsidized federal loans WHEN they graduated.  We moved the typical graduation rate from 40% to 90%.  It has been great fun.

So we learn from life, but our lessons aren’t what everyone else learns, nor do they hold through time.  My dad was born in 1897, drafted into WW I and was in the mid-Atlantic when the war ended.  The ‘20’s were a disastrous time for rural America, and then came the Depression (“Who noticed?” he once said) and WW II.  So he was over 50 before normal economic times.  Think of graduates entering the work force this year.  Think of my wife’s parents with no schooling of any kind.  They sold the cow to get to Havana, built a children’s clothing business, and went to Miami to await a successful over-throw of Castro.  They were stranded in their mid-40s with no skills, no language, no money, 5 and 15 year olds, and told to start over.  Try that. 

My wife remarked that nowhere else in the world could she have done what she did as a refugee in the United States.  I’d decided success reaching goals is a function of talent (skill, education, temperament), doggedness (ambition, focus, stamina) and random error.  She repeatedly notes it is better to be lucky than smart.  We handled two unscheduled cancers in 1999.  Not convenient. It is supposed to be about me.  At 35 our daughter texted “Thanks for letting me live such a great life.”  I always felt I did not have to meet my parents’ standards; it WAS my life.  Lacking siblings, after my parents’ deaths some of my classmates became links to my youth.  A daughter of Jim Davidson’s brought her fiancée over when I was visiting, telling him meeting me was the closest he’d get to meeting her dad. I thought it an odd remark, as Jim and I were very different.  But with time, reared in urban Midwest in the ‘40s and ‘50s is a particular experience.

A Carl Sandberg anecdote I heard in 1961 stayed with me.  He noted two maggots fell from a workman’s shovel.  One fell into maggot heaven, a sidewalk crack with moist leaves and soil.  The other was ¼” later, soon to be baked on the boiling sidewalk or stepped on.  The latter asked his companion why the first was where he was instead of on the sidewalk.  “Brains and personality” was the answer. Another construction foreman’s son I liked working with was killed in Vietnam combat at Christmas 1966. The retired CEO who commented on money noted nothing in his life worked out as he’d planned, but his life worked out far better than he could have planned. Again, Bingo. Support for education, an optimistic public after WW II, and economic growth meant we were extraordinarily lucky to grow up in Wichita. It was even better as a white male.

Now, it is not one thing after another but one health issue with another.  I buy smaller bunches of green bananas.  It’s fine.  Still standing. I watched my dad move stiffly when he was 68 (I don’t even REMEMBER 68).  I remarked that I bet he wished he were younger.  A quiet guy, he simply said, “Nope.  Every age has its compensations. And the older you get the less you care what anyone thinks.”  I thought How odd.  Dad was right. 

Editor’s Note:  Gene is still learning.  Here he is playing with one of his godsons, a budding engineer.