2

1970s: Getting Started

Stephanie took Nigel with her when she moved back to her mother’s apartment in New York. Now I was alone again and, as always, ambitious. My brief attempt to start family life with as much effort and good faith as possible had sputtered out in under a year, during which time we realized we just weren’t that compatible. Much later Nigel would say of us, “Mom and Dad are oil and water,” and he was right.

One day in graduate school, I saw a job notice pinned to the bulletin board in the hallway outside the department office. The NY-PENN Health Planning Agency (NY-Penn) in Binghamton, New York, a small city about an hour away from Ithaca, was looking for a planning analyst. I was hired by the president, Richard Landis, and I worked for him for two years while finishing up my degree coursework. This was in the early days of Health Maintenance Organizations, and during my tenure with the agency, I got a deep education in the philosophy, economics, challenges, and benefits of HMOs. I helped NY-Penn develop Binghamton regional health demographic data, service provider network data, and medical cost data. I also assisted in outreach and networking with local medical providers.

I worked hard and did a good job, and Richard took an interest in me both professionally and personally. This was the beginning of a pattern that recurred throughout my career. I am not sure if it is possible to rise far, in fact, without the presence of interested and well-placed mentors along the way.

When I completed my master of regional planning degree in 1972, I wanted to leave upstate New York and move to a more cosmopolitan area. I had been in Ithaca, and then Binghamton, for a total of seven years and was ready to live in a city.

Abt Associates, a leading social science research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to my attention through a Cornell friend who worked there. Abt had opened just a few years earlier, in 1965, with thirty employees, and the idea of Boston appealed to me as an attractive place to live—larger and more sophisticated than Ithaca but not as expensive and overwhelming as New York City. Abt had recently won a federal government contract for research related to health maintenance organizations, and my HMO experience in Binghamton made me a good fit for its contract research staff. I succeeded in securing a job there and drove off with all my things packed in boxes in the trunk and backseat of my car. My Boston apartment was a comfortable one-bedroom in the South End; not yet the upscale area it has become, it was the best neighborhood I could afford at the time. On my first night in my new place, I called home and spoke to my parents. Then I called the two Cornellians I knew in Boston and made plans to have drinks with them later in the week.

Abt was in a squat glass building on Wheeler Street in Cambridge and was full of fairly radical recent college graduates—policy wonks and idealistic young scholars with a social work bent. I was not the only associate there who had been involved in a nationally covered student revolt on a college campus. Men and women came to work in sandals, with their shirts open one too many buttons down. Most of the black people at Abt—and it was a markedly diverse group for Boston—wore their hair in big afros. In comparison, I practically looked like a Wall Street banker, according to my colleagues’ teasing. Well, the way I dressed and carried myself was just a reflection of how serious I was and how hard I worked. Within one year, I was promoted to contract manager.

One day in 1973, my old boss Richard Landis from NY-Penn called to ask if I would be interested in working for him again, this time at Arthur Young & Company (AY), where he was the new co-head of a health industry consulting practice based in Washington, D.C. I told him I liked living in Boston and wasn’t interested in relocating, but would consider an opportunity if something was available in Arthur Young’s Boston office. Landis arranged for me to be interviewed by Arthur Young executives in Boston and the national office executives in the New York headquarters.

That first glimpse of the Arthur Young & Company offices made a strong impression on me. The elevator opened onto a plush waiting room with deep carpets and big windows that looked out onto Boston Harbor and the financial district. Everything gleamed. People practically whispered. The art on the walls was beautiful and lit from above as in a museum. I announced myself and was asked to take a seat. As always, I was extremely well prepared and confident, but as I looked at the water below and the tugboats silently inching across the expanse of blue, I felt a pang of even stronger yearning than usual. This was the kind of place where I wanted to be. This was the pinnacle, one of the leading accounting and consulting firms in the country, and even though I didn’t yet know the ins and outs of that excellence and what made it possible—that it was built on pride and a culture of high standards and long hours—I could feel it, just sitting there.

I received an offer to join Arthur Young as a manager in the health industry consulting practice, based in Boston, and I started work in September of 1973. The Boston office had approximately 250 professionals, which was mid-sized for AY offices. My initial reception was decidedly cool—not overtly hostile but distinctly wary. I realized that I didn’t fit the mold of the other professionals in the office, most of whom were accounting or business majors with significant corporate business experience. Also, stories about guns at Cornell and my “black militant” past circulated around the office. Someone would tentatively ask me to explain my role in the takeover, or ask me if it was true that I was a Malcolm X devotee or what did I think of the current busing crisis in Boston, in which white families were stubbornly fighting the court-ordered integration, via busing, of Boston public schools. (I supported the push to follow the law and end school segregation based on race, but I wasn’t about to enter into such a discussion at work for the titillation of white colleagues.) It was clear that many of the professionals in the Boston office thought that I was some sort of alien aberration who would probably not survive for long. Fortunately for me, my childhood experiences of frequently being the new kid on the block and youngest in the class had inoculated me, I think, to social isolation. I didn’t crave peer approval and support. In fact, the coldness and the questioning looks pushed me deeper into my favorite mode of operation: keep your head down, work harder than anyone else, stay smart and alert and as correct as possible, and, finally, don’t let anyone else’s vision of you, or their dismissal of you, chip away by even a millimeter at your sense of self-esteem.

AY had three business practice areas—audit, tax, and management services (consulting). Audit was the core business, and AY was the independent public auditor for many Fortune 500 and other major companies. AY was a partnership consisting of several hundred U.S. partners, and the partners were extremely proud of the firm’s professional reputation and stature. All partners were certified public accountants, and they were intensely protective of their reputation for being one of the highest-quality public accounting firms in the world. Partners were generally well compensated (typically several hundred thousand dollars annually in 1973 dollars, approximately $1.5 to $2 million today), and were able to support comfortable lifestyles. I was impressed with the long workdays and working Saturdays, which was the norm during the busy season—the year-end audit and the months leading up to Tax Day on April 15—and the personal satisfaction that most of the partners seemed to derive from their work. I felt that I had found my people, in a sense.

But as the first few months passed, I began to perceive with a growing certainty how different AY was from any environment I had experienced previously and how difficult it would be for me to be promoted along to the next level. At Abt Associates, I had stood out as an anomaly—more serious and focused than most of my peers. But here at AY, everyone was working their tails off, and nearly everyone around me seemed highly intelligent, too, and most had gone to top-tier colleges. All that was left was for me to focus my energies on the things I could control and forget about everything else. I decided that what I could control was my attitude, my demeanor, my effort, and the quality of my work. So I always maintained a positive attitude in the office, and I avoided any negative exchanges even if I perceived slights or provocations as intentional.

I also showed a talent for developing new business. In early 1974 I wrote a proposal that won a $250,000 consulting contract from the federal government—the Boston regional office of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—for work on HMO projects in New England. A quarter-million dollars was significant money in 1974 (my salary was only $25,000), and my ability to be a rainmaker and bring in substantial revenue finally managed to set me apart from the crowd.

I began to attract the attention of senior executives at AY after winning the HHS contract. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but there were occasions when I was giving presentations and a senior partner would just happen to be in town to sit in on the meeting. My most frequent senior-level interactions were with Len Miller, the eastern region managing partner for management services from the New York headquarters. He was a gregarious man from California, with a great sense of humor paired with an underlying seriousness, which I liked. Len ultimately adopted me and became my friend and key senior management mentor. I also attracted attention from Arthur Koumantzelis, Boston office managing partner, who also became my friend and mentor.

My mentors usually began by engaging me in one-on-one conversation over coffee or lunch, and always with a focus on work—my projects, clients, revenues, and so forth. Over time, these conversations would broaden to include my family background and career aspirations, and in turn I learned about their personal and career backgrounds, about the paths they’d traveled to success. The third stage—and I outline this for the benefit of young people reading this book, wanting to know how fruitful mentorships grow, and how they can be fostered—was social engagement, usually in the form of an invitation to dinner with their spouse or significant other. Now, if the social invitations were repeated and made known to the office by the mentor (never by me, of course!), then it was the equivalent of a public declaration by the mentor that I was one of his people. Sometimes the social engagements with my mentors and their wives went beyond dinner—for example, theater weekends in New York and ski weekends in Maine.

These two mentors, Miller and Koumantzelis, were critical in providing me with promotions, compensation increases, and psychological support during my years at AY, from 1973 to 1981. They also protected me from people who didn’t like me and would have done me harm. The best mentor relationships are usually reciprocal, and I made them look good by bringing in new business every year that was a multiple of my compensation. I later came to understand that the most successful senior executives in large business organizations are often like coaches for sports teams. They are always scouting outstanding talent to bring onto their team, because in business as in sports, the team with the best talent usually wins. I attracted their attention because I had a knack for generating revenue, which is highly valued in professional services businesses, and clients were pleased with my work. I also eventually developed friendships with Richard Myers and Ron Mastrogiovanni, my Boston office colleagues who were computer systems consultants in management services. Having two friends in the office was a critical ingredient for workplace satisfaction, and I grew increasingly comfortable and enjoyed working for AY.

I was twenty-five years old. I dated many women and had a large circle of friends I socialized with, many of whom lived within blocks of my apartment in the South End. “Tom, why don’t you bring over your latest lady and join us for dinner Saturday,” Flash or Charles or Aggrey might say. “Flash” (Fletcher) Wiley was a new friend from my year at Abt Associates, where he and his wife, Bennie, also worked. Flash was a recent joint-degree graduate of Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, and Bennie was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and they introduced me to the black social world that revolved around Harvard. Charles McLean was my good friend from Cornell, who had also moved to Boston. Aggrey Mbere was also a Cornell friend, a refugee from South Africa active in the African National Congress’s fight against apartheid, who had been a graduate student in the history department at Cornell and was now teaching at Roxbury Community College in Boston.

Some of the women I dated were black, some were white, but most of my friends—some of whom were single like me, others in relationships or married—were part of a new breed of Bostonian: black, well educated, ambitious, and not willing to settle for old limitations placed on people on the basis of race and background and neighborhood. Boston was a city that seemed to want to cramp and squeeze blacks away in a corner, separate from most of the city. The South End was very diverse, but mainly the city was starkly segregated by race. There were neighborhoods where it wasn’t safe to go if you were black. My friend Charles worked for a time at the Suffolk County House of Corrections, and he was on very good terms with his boss, an Irish Catholic guy. The boss said to him one day, “This is such a horrendous thing that I can’t invite you over for dinner at my house. It wouldn’t be safe for you, and it wouldn’t be safe for me either.”

Charles had a girlfriend who was a teacher at a school in Charlestown, one of those neighborhoods where it wasn’t safe for black people to go. He would drive her there and, he told me, “as soon as I cross the bridge into Charlestown, I’ve got this whole group of Charlestown Marshals on my tail!” The Charlestown Marshals were a vigilante group of white supremacists who were monitoring the racial situation to ensure the so-called integrity of their community. Every weekday, Charles’s day started with this scene of major tension, a whole cavalcade of white people following him. On his way back out of Charlestown, they kept close to his bumper, but they’d turn around as soon as his car passed over into Middlesex County.

The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, founded in 1950 by a woman who would go on to win a MacArthur fellowship and the Presidential Medal for the Arts, was a jewel in black Boston society. The school offered instruction in painting, acting, music, and sculpture. Elma Lewis also founded a black theater production company that put on plays in Franklin Park in the summers, and she founded the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968.

Her eponymous school’s annual fund-raiser was an important event where you could rub elbows with the city’s most prominent black people, both artists and the philanthropists who supported their work, and many of my friends were planning to attend the gala, so I thought I’d go too. But who would I take as a date? This wasn’t a function to which I could or would want to take a white woman, and I didn’t have in mind any serious black girlfriend I could go with that month. But I knew who to ask: Flash Wiley. Flash and his wife were my good friends, though seven years my senior. Flash was now a lawyer in a prominent Boston firm and a transplant from Indiana, where I knew he had traveled in the best circles of black high society. Flash was the kind of person who knows everyone.

“Well, sure, how about Addie Knox?” he said, a smile in his voice. I had called him at work and at that moment he just happened to have a certain Addie Knox, a twenty-four-year-old woman from his hometown, sitting in his office with her mother. They had just arrived in Boston to install Addie in her brother’s apartment. The brother, George, was attending Harvard Business School, but was lending the apartment to his sister for the summer while he was away.

“I think I’d have to meet her first,” I told Flash, much to his amusement. I drove a hard bargain for a man begging for a date. And so he invited me over to dinner. When we got offthe phone, Flash told Addie and her mother about me—that I was a straight arrow who would be a suitable escort for Addie.

That night, I arrived at Flash and Bennie’s house with a bottle of wine, and there, sitting on the sofa smiling, was Adelaide Emma Knox. I was immediately struck by her deep, reflective eyes, which I thought seemed to have a clarity and purity that must be reflecting the soul of a very good person. This is what songstress Erykah Badu meant in her lyric “I see God in your eyes.” Having just finished graduate school at Southern Illinois University, she had moved to Boston to look for employment. She was very quick to laugh, strikingly beautiful, and very easy to talk to. And I liked her impeccable personal grooming; her manicured and polished fingernails matched her toenails.

Addie and I went to the Elma Lewis event. I picked her up at her brother’s apartment and she came to the door wearing a green “pilgrim dress,” nearly floor-length, with a broad Quaker Oats white collar around her neck. Her brown shoes were clunky and reminded me of something a nun might wear, or a schoolteacher. Interesting choice, I thought, for a high-profile gala! I myself was dressed to the nines, very fashionably, in a white suit with red patent leather shoes.

We went to dinner at the best black restaurant in Boston at the time, Bob the Chef in Roxbury, where we talked so much that our food got cold on our plates before we remembered to keep eating. Then, artistic performances and dancing at the gala. Afterwards, we went to a party hosted by some of my friends. In the early hours of the morning, I drove her back to her brother’s apartment.

Every day for the next twelve days, Addie and I went out together. Charles, who had helped me move out of the apartment I lived in on West Canton Street and move into another apartment in the next building, carrying boxes and individual items up flights of stairs—items like a giant two-hundred-pound abstract sculpture made by my Cornell friend Reginald Bradford, who had needed to sell some art to support his family and found a willing art collector in me—was shocked to learn the next week, from a mutual friend filling him in on the latest gossip, that I was seriously dating a new woman. “How did that happen?” Charles asked, incredulous. “I just saw him!” But two weeks was enough. Neither of us had ever felt so comfortable with someone or had so much fun talking. Addie had practically moved out of her brother George’s apartment and into my new one on the top floor of a South End brownstone. We had enormous fun playing games such as cribbage, gin rummy, and chess with each other. And we enjoyed playing card games such as pinochle and bid whist with our friends.

I enjoyed the unusual perspective Addie brought to life. On the one hand, it was a global, sophisticated view, but one that included the insight gained by living in a predominantly black community in Alabama in the 1960s, during the racist reign of Governor George Wallace. You didn’t have to go far from the town where Addie had lived to meet black sharecroppers, victims of terrible racist abuse, but she had also grown up surrounded by black scientists, black scholars and lawyers and poets and socialites.

Figure 4 / Tom and Addie’s wedding, June 1975

Addie’s father was a Tuskegee Airman, one of a group of black aviators sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt. They broke the U.S. Air Force color barrier and became fighter pilots in World War II. Later in his career, her father held the rank of lieutenant colonel and headed the air force ROTC program at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, until he died there in an accident in 1964. As an air force brat, Addie had lived in interesting places, including Japan and Alaska, but her most formative years were spent in the strong and supportive black professional community built around Tuskegee Institute, where her mother continued to live and work after Addie’s father’s death. That environment is what shaped her as a confident, educated, and socially graceful black woman. I thought that I was very fortunate to meet her, and fortunate that she saw good things in me. (I now know, because she has since confessed it to me, that what she saw in me was maturity. I think she saw a young guy who was really a man, someone serious about trying to do something with his life. And she liked that I was serious. When Flash showed her the photograph of me armed with a rifle and knife, standing on the steps of Willard Straight Hall, she liked that too.)

Addie and I were married at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Tuskegee on June 14, 1975, one year and one day after we first met. My groomsmen included Flash Wiley as best man; my two brothers, Edward and James; and two Cornell friends, Aggrey Mbere, who had been in the doctoral program in history at Cornell, and Tim Weldon, my classmate in the city and regional planning master’s program.

My wedding toast, which I was told later held the room spellbound in mingled admiration and surprise (at its length and thoroughness), went as follows:

“You were sure going to let every person in that room know that Addie had selected the correct groom,” Flash teased me later.

We honeymooned in the Bahamas, with the Wileys, who had introduced us, after all, and who were our closest friends. One day on the beach, Addie and Bennie lay on towels sunning themselves, two brown-skinned beauties. The water was impossibly blue, the sky wide. There was a gentle breeze and it seemed that everything was right in the world. Two locals approached Flash and me and said, “Whatch ya doin’ wasting your time with these black women? There’s beautiful white women just down the beach!” and Flash and I looked at each other and laughed. We knew we were already with the two most beautiful women within thousands of miles.

The honeymoon gave me a chance to relax and take careful stock. I told Addie that even though I was doing very well at Arthur Young, I didn’t think I had the training, skills, and credentials to sustain success over the long term. I told her that I needed to attend business school to get an MBA degree, and I needed to acquire strong accounting and finance skills. “What I’d like us to do,” I told her, “is try to live on one salary even though both of us are working. That way, we can save the second salary to build investment capital.”

Addie agreed readily to both proposals, my enrolling in business school and our saving one salary with the idea of using it to buy real estate later, or invest it in a company, whichever looked best to us when the time came. While her acquiescence might seem inevitable in hindsight, my proposals actually entailed considerable sacrifice. I was proposing to get my MBA by using Arthur Young’s tuition reimbursement program for part-time college enrollment, so that my tuition would be paid and I could continue to work and generate income. This meant that I would be working full-time, and going to school most nights and weekends. Living on one salary meant we couldn’t afford the vacations, nights out on the town, or clothes that our peers enjoyed.

I enrolled in the evening MBA program at Boston University Graduate School of Management starting in September 1975, three months after our wedding. I selected Boston University because the more prestigious business schools at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not offer part-time evening programs. “What do you expect to do with a business degree from Boston University?” my older brother Eddie (a 1973 Harvard Business School graduate) asked me, laughing.

“As far as I can tell,” I replied, annoyed at the sneering tone in his voice, “the primary difference between BU and Harvard seems to be that your professors are more famous than mine. But I’m not going to be competing against your professors; I’m going to be competing against people like you.”

My radio alarm clock went off at 5:45 am, as it did every morning, and I reached over and shut it off with the palm of my hand. Addie stirred next to me but did not wake. Time to get up and start what I knew would be a very full day. There was getting to the office by 7:00 am, meetings, the work of completing consulting engagements or auditing a business’s books. I would be one of the first people in the Arthur Young offices. If I happened to walk by the big windows looking out onto the city, I would see the sky go from dark gray to blue. Then, at around eight, others would start to arrive, getting coffee from the break room, greeting one another, pausing outside my office to say a quick good morning. At 5:00 pm I would be one of the first to leave, which was always a bit nerve-wracking in an office whose culture prized long hours so highly. But I’d put in my hours, and I had a train to take and class to get to. Each class met twice a week, for three hours at a time, from 5:30 to 8:30. After class, another train ride home to our apartment and to Addie. We’d trade accounts of our day before I would retreat to my desk in the dining room to hit the books for another hour or two of study before bed, while the new material was fresh in my mind. If there was an extra exercise or study test in the textbook chapter, you could be sure that I would take it. My goal: to know the material as well as anybody possibly could. Then, on some weekends, Nigel, who was in the first grade during my first year in business school, would visit, and we would take him to a children’s museum or the library or a theater performance, and go for long walks in the Back Bay and Boston Common and along the Charles River.

Figure 5 / Nigel and Addie on a Bike Vermont vacation, August 1976

Boston University Graduate School of Management was the first time I had ever approached school with really serious purpose and focus. I took two courses each fall and spring semester, and one course in each of the two summer sessions. To concentrate on accounting and finance as much as possible, I frontloaded my curriculum with those courses, while deferring distribution requirements in areas like marketing and organizational behavior. I attended classes and studied with purpose and passion. For the first time, I discovered the difference between working hard and working to full capacity. I did this day after day, for three years, between 1975 and 1978.

I learned that, like most people, I had rarely exceeded a 95 percent level of effort before, probably because most of us are socialized to think that 95 percent is an A, and an A is the best grade, isn’t it? But I didn’t have to stop at average or above average. I could work nearly every waking minute, and it felt good. I had the energy for it. I never stopped at 95 percent anymore, and the resulting gap between me and my peers who were top performers drove much of my subsequent career success.

The five points separating 95 and 100 don’t seem like much—and they aren’t, on any given day, or any given test or work assignment. But it’s a lot when those five points are compounded every day, week after week and month after month. Over the span of five years, it becomes an enormous gap in effort and achievement. When you do it—push yourself to the 100 percent mark—over the course of a forty-year career, as I learned to do, you can lift yourself to an elite level. But what’s most fulfilling about giving 100 percent commitment is the resulting feeling of self-actualization, meaning that you’ve achieved your highest potential, which is all that any person can do—regardless of whether you eventually “win” or “lose” the worldly “prize” you seek. This is a spiritual gift you can give to yourself, and you guarantee yourself a spiritual “win” when you achieve your highest potential—whatever that may be.

I never received less than an A-minus grade in any finance or accounting course (and only one A-minus at that). At the end of the second summer session in August 1978, I completed my MBA degree and enrolled immediately in a certified public accounting licensing examination preparation course. I sat for the three-day examination in October 1978, passing it on my first attempt, and became a licensed CPA in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“Let’s play tennis,” Addie said to me one day as we watched the U.S. Open on our little television set in the kitchen. A dashing Spanish player, Manuel Orantes, upset Jimmy Connors in a thrilling final, and earlier in the week, Chris Evert had won her fourth Grand Slam title by defeating an Australian woman, Evonne Goolagong Cawley.

We signed up for private lessons at a nearby tennis club, and before long, we were not terrible. In fact, since we played every Saturday, and sometimes more than once a week, we got better and better. (Our weekly tennis tradition continues to this day, over forty years later.) We also played card games and board games together and with friends, and we hung out with young black professional couples in Boston and Cambridge. We also socialized regularly with my Arthur Young friends Ron Mastrogiovanni and Dick Myers and their spouses. Dick was a white man from Texas, about my age, with a strong southern drawl and very good manners. It was Dick who, in one of my first weeks at AY, had stopped by my office and leaned in to invite me to join him and some others for lunch at a restaurant. I had just been about to bite into the sandwich Addie had made for me, but put it back down and wrapped it back up in its foil. “Sure, let’s go,” I said, and that was the beginning of a friendship that would last for decades.

Addie and I also spent time with my AY mentors Len Miller and Arthur Koumantzelis and their wives. Addie’s graciousness and positive relationships made a significant contribution to my career success. I loved to look over at her and see her laughing easily, saying something kind and interesting to my friends, listening intently. While she’s not a person who tries to gather people around her, people are attracted to her nonetheless, simply because she is gentle and confident and an engaging conversationalist. But she has always been just as happy to be solitary as to be in a crowd of friends, and that’s a quality that we share.

Addie and I were, in short, simpatico on all the topics that mattered—friends, work, recreation. And we were successful with our savings and investment plan too. After saving Addie’s salary for two years, we had amassed a nest egg of $25,000. We hadn’t gone out to eat much; we hadn’t bought much meat at the grocery store. We had instead perfected a small set of bean dishes from a book that compiled bean recipes from various cuisines—Moroccan, Mexican, Israeli. We had become bean connoisseurs. One time when Addie’s brother George was over at our apartment, she offered him something to drink. “I have tap water or chilled tap water from the fridge,” she said, informing him of his beverage options. It would become a story he liked to retell later, evidence of our extreme frugality in those early days of marriage.

In the fall of 1975, I saw an ad in the Boston Globe inviting bids to redevelop derelict residential properties seized by the city. “Addie, I think I’ve found our investment,” I told her. We submitted an application to the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) to acquire two adjoining abandoned brownstones at 325 and 327 Columbus Avenue near Dartmouth Street, a short walk from where we lived in the South End. The buildings were burned out and derelict. One had almost no unbroken windows left; the other’s front door had been replaced with plywood, which was covered with halfhearted graffiti. But we thought the location was near enough to Copley Square in the Back Bay that it could be viable as an apartment rental property. Living just a few blocks from the burned-out buildings, we were familiar with the neighborhood and believed that it was probably in the early stages of an urban renaissance. Rents were inching up, and more and more professionals, black and white, were moving in.

Figure 6 / Boarded-up brownstones purchased from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, October 1976 (front view)

Figure 7 / Boarded-up brownstones purchased from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, October 1976 (back view)

In the weeks that followed, I wondered how many other applications they’d received, and how stiff our competition would be to win the bid. But then the call came. It turned out that our application was the one and only indication of interest the BRA received on those buildings. As we worked through the application process, a friendly BRA official suggested that we consider also applying for Section 312 Housing and Urban Development mortgage funds, which were currently available but, with the related budget authority, close to expiring. The primary attraction of Section 312 financing was its 3 percent interest rate, which compared favorably to then prevailing 6 to 7 percent commercial bank mortgage interest rates. We quickly assembled and filed the Section 312 mortgage application and retained an architect to prepare building renovation plans.

By a stroke of very good luck, our South End apartment landlord just happened to be Mark Goldweitz, a leading real estate developer in the residential brownstone rehabilitation and reconstruction renaissance that was then in its early stages in Boston’s Back Bay and South End. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School, where he’d also served on the faculty during the Vietnam War. More than one case study given to business students at Harvard bore his name, including one titled “Gentrification: The Mark Goldweitz Case.”

Mark was my type of man—vigorous, no-nonsense, busy, and ambitious. He was thirty when I met him. He’d grown up nearby in Natick, gone to Harvard, bought his first apartment building when he was twenty-three, and now he owned half a dozen buildings (and would go on to be one of the primary real estate developers, managers, and investors in Boston). I had rented an apartment from him on West Canton Street in the South End when I first moved to Boston in 1972. We had become friends. Mark liked Addie and me, and regarded us as the kind of people who could help make the South End an attractive and stable neighborhood. When we started our development project, Mark helped us by recommending excellent architectural and legal professionals whom he used on his own projects, and by encouraging those professionals to accept us as clients.

By early summer 1976 we had completed architectural plans to combine the two Columbus Avenue buildings into a single ten-unit rental property, our Section 312 mortgage application had been preliminarily approved, and the BRA had granted us “preliminary redeveloper status.” It was exciting—and uncharted. We were still in our twenties, were black in a city with almost no black people in high positions in business or philanthropy, and had only moderately well-paid positions. But we’d planned and saved and done our homework. The next step was a public hearing process, since the BRA was proposing to sell public properties. I did not anticipate any problems. Why would there be? Ours was the only proposal the BRA had received on the buildings.

The first BRA hearing was held at the South End community center in a drab room with linoleum floors and folding chairs set up in tight rows, crowded with folks from the neighborhood. I was very surprised when community activists, organized as the South End Political Action Committee (SEPAC), stood and announced to Addie and Flash (our attorney) and me that they would oppose our project unless we designated some of the rental units for low-income occupancy. The idea had occurred to me before this meeting, of course, but I had considered and rejected it. I refused to accept their terms, reasoning that the economics of a ten-unit building could collapse quickly under the weight of rent and occupancy restrictions. Addie and I would be personally liable for the full mortgage obligation, and we would be legally liable for paying operating expenses—such as property taxes, insurance, utilities, and repairs—from our personal funds if the building failed to generate sufficient cash flow to cover those costs. We were already making a significant contribution to the community by taking abandoned, uninhabitable buildings and converting them into taxpaying property, and attracting tenants who would improve neighborhood stability and add to the economic activity for neighborhood businesses.

The activists were true to their word. Just as they’d threatened in the first public hearing, they formally opposed our application in the subsequent BRA community hearings that followed weeks later. Those hearings were crowded too, because the word had got out that rich developers (Addie and me!) were coming to exploit the community. Flash anticipated all of this and made the rounds, quietly, in advance of the hearings, speaking to key community members about us and our plans. “This young couple,” he told them, “are just the kind of people that we should be supporting, not fighting.” And then, when the neighborhood residents who attended the hearings had a chance to see and listen to Addie and me for themselves, they were impressed that a young black couple was trying to do a building redevelopment project. In the end, we won approval from the community review hearing process. The SEPAC newsletter contained the following article under “Neighborhood Notes … More on 312 Loan”:

I was alienated by SEPAC’s opposition to our efforts. It tasted like other conflicts from my past, and reminded me of my alienation from the Cornell black students who had criticized me as being “not really black.” Just like those bitter students at Cornell who seemed to cling to a mentality of victimhood, the SEPAC activists wanted to equate our success to our betrayal of them. We were taking something away from the community, they suggested, and therefore owed them an allocation of low-income units in return. But we weren’t taking anything away from “the community,” and we didn’t have to apologize for being prepared.

My maverick inclinations made me indifferent to—or rather affronted by and resistant to—the psychological intimidation. I wasn’t trying to win a community popularity contest, and yet they seemed to hope that their disapproval would sting, would sway me. It did not. I thought SEPAC could have better spent their efforts in organizing a cooperative to bid on development opportunities and provide legal and architectural assistance to low-income residents, rather than attacking people like us.

The purchase price was $6,000. Now that we owned the buildings, we needed to fix them. Our final step with the BRA was to complete a public construction bid process compliant with BRA regulations, since we were acquiring Boston city property and using federal mortgage funds. The low bidder on our project was Powell General Contracting, owned by Eric Powell, a West Indian who had a good business reputation. His bid price was approximately 20 percent below the bid from our preferred builder, Ben Polishook, whom we had invited to bid on the basis of Mark Goldweitz’s recommendation.

“He’s not going to be able to do it at that price. Not well and not on time, at least,” Goldweitz and Polishook both warned us. But my conscience obliged me to give Powell a chance. I met with him to discuss the details of his bid, and I told him that unnamed experts were warning me that he had underbid the project and wouldn’t perform. “Listen, Mr. Powell,” I said to him carefully, “my wife and I will be carrying these costs out of our own pockets, so finishing it on time is critical. We have a certain amount of money and no more, and so if you mess this up, we could be ruined financially, do you see? We can only afford very modest schedule slippage or cost overruns. It’s going to be tight.” Finally, I implored him, “Please decline this project unless you are one hundred percent confident you can deliver. And if you’re not one hundred percent confident, please withdraw your bid and we’ll work with you on our next project when we’re stronger financially.” He had been silent all this time, and now he looked me square in the eyes and said, “You can trust me. I’m one hundred percent sure I can do this at this price on time.”

We were in a tight spot. Our $25,000 nest egg had been completely consumed by purchasing the buildings and paying the architectural and legal fees. We would have to pay the monthly debt service for the construction loan out of our salaries during the construction period.

I was worried, but I could not in good conscience deny the project to a black man who had a good reputation and had built a successful construction business and seemingly won the bid fairly. So we signed a contract with Powell General Contracting. I made this decision with my heart rather than with my head, and I never again made this mistake in my business career.

Powell started the project very strongly in the first two months of what was scheduled to be a six-month project, but then started sending only skeleton crews to maintain a presence on the job. When I complained, he said he was “encountering unanticipated difficult construction conditions and building deterioration” which would require additional funds. I was furious, thinking that the only reason he had been the low bidder was that he had failed to make reasonable estimates for “unanticipated difficult construction conditions and building deterioration.” It was clear that he thought he had me trapped because he had started the project and had builders’ liens in place on the property. But he didn’t know me. Reasoning that I probably had only one chance to get the project completed before my funds were exhausted, I took an unexpected tack. I simply wasn’t going to trust him with a second chance.

Quietly, I lobbied BRA officials to cooperate with me to terminate Powell for nonperformance. I approached Polishook General Contracting for an updated “as is” construction bid to complete the building. And I sought Mark Goldweitz’s advice regarding the best law firm to quickly and effectively navigate the legal landmines of terminating Powell, clearing his builders’ liens, and hiring Polishook to replace him. When everything was lined up, I pulled the trigger. Powell didn’t know what hit him. Within one month, his contract was terminated and his builders’ liens were lifted, with the help of BRA affidavits that Powell had abandoned the project and had been paid in full for all work performed. Polishook was under contract and working on the building the next week. We were two months behind our original construction schedule, but we were moving forward with reasonably good odds of completing the project on the revised budget and schedule.

The delay threatened to leave Addie and me homeless, though. Our lease on our apartment was up in June, but the renovations on the buildings we’d purchased wouldn’t be done until the fall. We started to look for short-term leases nearby, but there didn’t seem to be any, and anyway we were close to broke. No amount of bean eating was going to put much cash in our pockets now.

Our friend Aggrey Mbere lived a few blocks from us in a large three-bedroom apartment, secured with the plan to have a wife and maybe even a family soon to fill the space. But he was still single, and so he graciously offered us a room for three months. All our friends were following our journey closely, cheering us on. I called Stephanie and Nigel and explained our vagabond status. “But when you visit in the fall, son,” I told Nigel, “you’ll have a new room in the new building. It’s going to be beautiful.”

Figure 8 / Tom on brownstones construction site, March 1977

Figure 9 / Addie’s cousin, Tom, and Addie (left to right) in front of brownstones nearing completion, fall 1977

My widowed mother wanted to help us too. She loaned us her last $10,000 certificate of deposit (equivalent to approximately $50,000 today) to use as working capital. Polishook completed construction on time and on budget, and delivered an attractive ten-unit building.

Before anyone—us or any tenants—could move into the building, it had to pass city inspection to earn a certificate of occupancy. Polishook, the architect who’d drawn the plans, Mark Goldweitz, and I met the inspector one crisp September morning. I stood on the sidewalk next to them looking up at what we’d done. In my mind’s eye, I could see clearly what had been there before—blight, disrepair, plywood, and dark windows. And in its place, we had put this gleaming, attractively appointed, solid red brick dwelling, where dozens of people would live in comfort.

“Very nice fixtures,” the inspector noted, as we looked at the first apartment’s bathroom. He was right. We had done good work, with the long term in mind.

Addie and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor with a roof deck overlooking Copley Square in early 1978. We soon had the other nine units rented, and the building was cash-flow positive by early 1979. That same year, Arthur Young promoted me to principal in the firm. It was a key distinction I had fervently sought.

To celebrate our success and reward ourselves for our years of beans and rice, Addie and I went on a three-week American Express “European Grand Tour” summer vacation in 1979. Charles agreed to stay in our apartment while we were gone, to keep an eye on things. Neither Addie nor I had ever been to Europe, so together we experienced the highlights of London, Paris, Normandy, Monaco, Rome, Florence, Venice, Munich, Zurich, and Amsterdam. And so it was with a mood of elation and pride that we strolled the Champs-Élysées, floated down the canals of Venice, and sat at a café in Rome, sharing a light breakfast of bread and coffee as men on Vespas zoomed past us too fast over cobblestone streets. Our travels were a special growth experience, resulting from our shared efforts.

I grieved that my father was not there to enjoy our success. In January 1976, seven months after Addie and I were married, I got a call from my mother to come home to St. Albans, Queens. My father had died.

He’d been in the basement that night, in his train room for hours. Then he climbed the basement stairs around nine o’clock and collapsed at the top of the stairs. The heart attack killed him before the ambulance that was carrying him reached the hospital.

He was only sixty-six years old. I couldn’t believe that my father, that towering exemplar of diligence and correctness, faith in God, and grace, had left us. I thanked God that Dad had lived long enough to meet Addie and participate in our wedding. He thought Addie was very special, and I could see that he hoped my relationship with her meant that I was finally beginning to get my life on the right track.

Figure 10 / Tom’s mother, Addie, and Addie’s mother (left to right) in renovated apartment, October 1978

Figure 11 / Tom’s mother, Charles McLean, Nigel, and Tom (left to right) in renovated apartment, October 1978

My father’s devout spirituality is reflected in an undated letter—likely written a year or two before Nigel was born in 1969—that he kept tucked in his Bible. It read: