10

Life after Citigroup

Now, from the vantage point of nearly fifteen years later, it is clear to me that many good things did come out of the embarrassment and betrayal of my ouster from Citigroup and the fight for my reputation that followed. I had prayed to understand the good in my ordeal, and now I found that I had been unexpectedly blessed in three ways.

One blessing is better physical health. I hadn’t fully appreciated the toll that was exacted by my work habits and the stress of the Citigroup environment. For over thirty years I had been working at a pace of 100 percent commitment to do my best every day. It wasn’t until I slowed to a more normal work routine that I realized the physical price I’d been paying.

A second blessing is better spiritual health. I have spiritual peace, and I’m content with the life God has given me. I have grown closer to my wife and children than ever before, in part because I’m able to spend more time with them and focus more of my energy and attention on their needs and well-being.

The third blessing is better financial health. In February 2005 I sold all my Citigroup stock out of conviction that Chuck Prince would not succeed as CEO. (My sale prices ranged from $45 to $48 per share, ten times the value those same stocks had by the end of the Chuck Prince era.)

In April 2005 I launched my own investment business, TWJ Capital LLC, which would operate on a business strategy founded on the following three premises: One, the venture capital and private equity investment business had been consolidating in the hands of a shrinking number of competitors who controlled increasingly large investment funds, and it was becoming inefficient for those large funds to invest in smaller deals in the $1 million to $10 million range, so there was inefficiency in the pricing and quality of these smaller investments. It takes as much work to perform appropriate investment analysis and due diligence, and transaction pricing and structure negotiation, on a $10 million investment as it does for a $50 million transaction. But a $10 million investment doesn’t move the needle for a $500 million investment fund (after all, it would be only 2 percent of assets), so larger funds tended to avoid these smaller deals. Less attention from larger investors meant more opportunities for mistakes by other potential investors competing with me in evaluating the quality of company business plans and management teams. Two, I had an extensive network of investment community relationships which would enable me to find and participate in attractive co-investment opportunities in this “lower-institutional” range of $1 million to $10 million deals. Three, I could be flexible and would not have to specialize in a specific narrow investment sector such as financial services because I could partner with experts to co-invest in any investment sector I thought attractive.

I rented an office for TWJ Capital in an executive office suite in downtown Stamford, a short commute from my home in New Canaan. Now I could work what is normally considered a full workday, but which to me felt like the equivalent of an undemanding part-time job compared to my previous experience.

“Click that light on, Tom,” Addie said to me one night when she walked into the den and found me reading a novel on a Tuesday. I turned on the light and looked up at her and grinned. Ah, the pleasure of reading a book just for the hell of it! Of course, this was something she had been doing nearly every day of our thirty-year marriage. I had often seen her curled up gracefully in a chair, oblivious to the world around her because she was so deeply engaged in her reading. It was a habit our children had all inherited from her too. And now, finally, I was joining them in this lighter side of life. I found that I liked history, sociology, and economics best, and biographies of people who’d lived admirable lives. For the first time in years, I had time to read for pleasure and watch sports and late-night television. My best friend, Charles, was happy to find that I now knew what he was talking about football-wise. I felt comfort, and a sense of relaxation, creep into my bones and stay there.

I was pleased to be suddenly able to participate, too, in more of my younger daughter, Victoria’s, high school activities. Intelligent, talented, and attractive, Vicky was co-captain of the girls’ field hockey team and won the lead role of Sarah in her high school’s production of the musical Ragtime in her senior year. As I sat in the audience on opening night, bowled over at her vivacity and talent up onstage, I realized that I had been so deeply engrossed in my own career, and away from home so much traveling for Citigroup, that I didn’t really know her very well. I also realized, belatedly, that because I had been traveling and working long hours for most of the high school years of my older daughter, Evonne, who graduated in 2000, I had missed witnessing much of her education and personal triumphs. Evonne, an accomplished equestrian who had ridden competitively both locally and nationally, had almost never had her father watching her from the stands. I’d been at work. My younger son, Michael, who graduated from high school in 2003, had a passion for music. He’d formed his first band in fifth grade, which played mostly alternative rock and had performed after his middle school graduation ceremony. In high school his band was The Ort Phenomenon, playing instrumental jazzy electronic music and performing at Arch Street Teen Center in Greenwich and other teen venues around Connecticut and New York City. Over all, Mike probably played in six or seven bands. Again, I knew this more from talk around the house than from firsthand experience, as I was absent frequently during much of his high school years.

I tried to atone for my absences and lost time by communicating my life philosophy to my three younger children in various conversations, emails, letters, celebration cards, and whatever other opportunities became available. My major points of emphasis can be summarized as follows:

1. Learn personal discipline skills to manage time effectively and to feel good about how you’ve spent your time each day.
2. Learn personal discipline skills to always give 100 percent effort and perform to the best of your ability, and to feel good about your efforts to achieve your highest potential. Only you know in your heart if you’re being all that you can be. Give 100 percent effort for yourself, because achieving your fullest potential is one of the greatest fulfillments possible in life.
3. Learn personal discipline skills to make good decisions about friends, and spend significant time only with positive and constructive people.
4. The only way to get and keep your life on track is personal discipline and hard work. Personal discipline means devoting each day to a healthy mix of work, physical exercise, spiritual reflection, and relaxation. Personal discipline also means being responsible to yourself and others, and doing whatever you are responsible for getting done every day. You will find yourself in a “loser’s trap” if you think you can succeed by being slick and clever.
5. The only deep and lasting happiness comes from the joy and satisfaction of achieving difficult goals and feeling good about yourself. This applies to personal relationships, work and career, and your physical and spiritual self. It is the satisfaction of being rewarded for your discipline and hard work. It is the joy of living a “good life.”
6. A book is a metaphor for life. If life as a book has around ten chapters for most people, you are only in the early chapters of your lives. Everybody has bad chapters in their lives; for some it comes in an early chapter, and for others it comes in later chapters. The difficult chapters you encounter do not define your life. Your life is defined by what you do to overcome adversity when you encounter trouble and failure.
7. Each of you has wonderful talents, you are smart, and you are attractive. God has blessed you in abundance. The weaknesses I see in you are primarily with regard to self-discipline. This discipline problem is fixable, but the commitment to fix it has to come from you.
8. The importance of self-discipline is a core determinant of success or failure for everybody. I learned as a young man to pray each morning for the discipline and strength to do the things I needed to get done each day, and to live that day in the right way. Our family would have suffered if I had failed to develop the discipline to do the right things every day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. When you look around the black community, you can see that many of the problems stem from lack of self-discipline—people lacking the discipline to do the things they could do each day to improve their own lives. Things they could do in school to improve their skills, things they could do to avoid drugs and alcohol, things they could do to avoid pregnancies with people who are not able to function effectively as parents, things they could do to help improve their communities, and so on.
9. One of the most useful self-discipline tools is to have a plan to move forward so that every day you do something that helps you achieve the life you want. You will discover that when you live this way, you will feel good about yourself, and you will like yourself. You will also find that it is much easier to make friends, because people are attracted to people who feel good about themselves, and most people want to be around someone who is positive and happy.
10. My prayer discipline provides a solid foundation for my daily living and has helped me to not let my spirits get either too low in days of adversity or too high in days of triumph. You should consider building a similar spiritual foundation for your lives.

Soon after opening for business in April 2005, I was having lunch with a friend who mentioned that his firm had invested in a very promising retail flooring business, but the investors had grown the business too quickly, triggering bank loan covenant violations. The company was in technical default on the bank debt and needed $2 million in new capital to cure the default. His firm had already reached its maximum investment limit for any one company, so it could not provide the necessary capital itself. The business had only sixty days to cure the default before the bank called the loan and commenced collection actions, which could push it into bankruptcy. “Would this be an investment you might consider, Tom?” he asked me.

“I’ll take a look,” I told him, “and give you my decision in thirty days.”

The company was Floor & Decor Outlets of America, and it qualified as a “category killer,” a discount chain that has the potential to dominate a market by specializing in one narrow niche product. It was a superstore for hard surface flooring products such as ceramic and porcelain tile, stone tile, wood flooring, tumbled stone, and flooring accessories. It purchased its products in ocean shipping container quantities directly from manufacturers in over twenty-two countries, eliminating the markups of importers, distributors, and other middlemen. Its products were typically priced at 20 percent to 70 percent below competitors’, but it still achieved approximately 40 percent gross margins. The target footprint for Floor & Decor stores was fifty thousand to sixty thousand square feet, which allowed it to boast the largest in-stock selection of hard surface flooring in the industry. My friend’s firm had invested in 2003, when Floor & Decor had two only stores and a $25 million annual revenue run rate, and the company had grown to nine stores with an annual revenue run rate of $80 million in mid-2005. That rapid growth had triggered the loan violations because critical financial performance ratios and calculations were below the level required by the bank. Every time Floor & Decor opened a new store, it had to hire and train staff, rent the real estate, build out the interior amenities, and stock the store with inventory. From opening day to operating break-even was typically a tento-twelve-month period. Any negative variances from the revenue buildup model or the operating expense model could trigger cash flow deficiencies and operating losses greater than planned. And so, while the business was growing very well, operating variances had tripped-up Floor & Decor.

I immersed myself in due diligence analysis of the investment opportunity and quickly reached several conclusions. First, the build-out from two stores with $25 million revenue in 2003 to nine stores with $80 million in 2005 had enabled the company to refine its business model for store openings, and the management team was increasingly adept at executing against the model. Second, I determined that the company had developed an effective store format and marketing strategy, which enabled it to deliver a broad line of hard surface flooring products to consumers at substantially lower prices than the traditional fragmented and inefficient system based on small retail stores using distributors and importers. Third, the important components of the company’s category-killer business model provided protective barriers against competitors, including a deep product assortment at low prices; unique products purchased in large quantities directly from international tile manufacturers and stone quarries; consistent purchases of large quantities, which allowed manufacturers to produce full runs and allowed quarries to produce “full block” quantities, maximizing their productivity and lowering costs. Fourth, the company was also able to make occasional “opportunity buys” from manufacturers and quarries that wished to clear certain products, which enabled Floor & Decor to offer high-value special sales to attract customers and create marketing excitement. Finally, the company was employing effective supply chain and inventory management techniques and had strong relationships with major suppliers. My research also confirmed that the U.S. hard surface flooring industry exceeded $14 billion annual sales, and the annual growth rate exceeded 10 percent. I met several times with Floor & Decor’s senior management team and was impressed with them and their capabilities, especially Vincent West, the founder-entrepreneur and merchandiser, who was uniquely gifted in his understanding of flooring product styles and fashion merchandising opportunities.

As promised, I made my decision within thirty days and offered an attractive investment proposal. Instead of trying to take advantage of their distress by demanding superior economic investment terms relative to my friend’s firm, I offered to invest $2 million pari passu with the terms of their last investment, but with one caveat: my investment would be in a separate class of securities that would have certain special rights in the event of violations of debt covenants, failure to achieve operating budgets, or decisions to raise new debt or equity capital. I was in effect requiring covenants that would enable me to exercise disproportionate influence in distressed circumstances, while accepting my pro rata share of the upside if things went well. I also requested voting rights to designate one seat on the seven-person board of directors, including positions on the executive committee and the compensation committee. They accepted my offer in July 2005. This confirmed to me that the speed with which I could perform due diligence, make investment commitments, and fund investments was a competitive advantage. Floor & Decor continued to grow but encountered adverse economic circumstances in the 2008 recession. I made additional investments amounting to $2.8 million in late 2008 and early 2009, bringing my total investment in the company to $4.8 million.

In late 2005 Floor & Decor opened two new stores, then six new stores in 2006, followed by six again in 2007 before being hit by the 2008 recession. Alert to the deteriorating economic environment, we did not open any new stores in 2008, and only one new store and one small-footprint prototype design center in 2009. We continued disciplined growth in 2010 with one new store and two more small-footprint design centers to increase market awareness and drive high-end sales in strategic locations where the company already had significant market presence. Our revenue run rate in 2010 reached $250 million, and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) was approximately $31.7 million.

Floor & Decor’s major shareholders agreed to launch a targeted sales process in 2010 to determine what exit value we could achieve, and we also analyzed status quo and recapitalization alternatives. Status quo meant maintaining the current ownership and capital structure and continuing to grow the business. The status quo alternative was rejected because it provided no near-term liquidity for shareholders, and shareholders would continue to bear all the risk of executing the company’s growth plan in the still difficult economic environment. Recapitalization meant raising debt to pay a special dividend to shareholders, and continuing to grow the business under current ownership. Recapitalization was rejected after discussions with several banks indicated that debt leverage would be limited to paying a dividend in the range of $60 million to $80 million, and shareholders would continue to bear execution risk in a challenging economic environment while being additionally constrained by a less flexible balance sheet.

Our targeted sales process resulted in contacting forty-four prospective buyers, receiving eleven first-round indications of interest, and conducting eight first-round management due diligence meetings. The second-round process of management presentations and buyer due diligence resulted in four parties submitting letters of intent. We ultimately sold the company in November of 2010 for $340 million to Ares Management and Freeman Spogli & Co., large West Coast private equity investors.

After payment of amounts due on senior debt, employee compensation, and transaction expenses, and release of indemnification escrows, TWJ Capital Opportunity Fund received approximately $43.3 million, or over 900 percent return on invested capital and approximately 70 percent internal rate of return.

The buyers planned to accelerate the build-out of Floor & Decor’s store count and geographic coverage. In November of 2014, they filed to go public with a footprint of forty-five stores, and their initial public offering occurred in in 2017.

While I was working to build my own business investing in startups and early-stage companies on the rise, I was still plugged into a behemoth of corporate America, Altria, as a member of its board of directors. I had been recruited by retired Citigroup co-CEO John Reed while I was still at Citi-group in 2002. Altria intrigued me primarily because of my curiosity about what went into its marketing wizardry, marketing that had made Marlboro one of the most iconic and valuable brands in America. One cigarette is pretty much like any other cigarette, after all, and so I was impressed that this corporation had managed to have its products rise above the throng, primarily through brilliant marketing.

In 2008 Altria Group spun off Philip Morris International (PMI) as an independent publicly traded tobacco company, enabling each of Altria’s international and domestic U.S. tobacco businesses to focus exclusively on realizing its opportunities and addressing its challenges, and removing the international business from the risks of ongoing U.S. tobacco litigation. I was one of only three Altria Group board members who chose to go with the domestic U.S. business. Most of the board members and stock analysts thought the growth opportunities were primarily international, and the domestic U.S. business would be little more than a stable cash cow.

After the PMI spin-off, Altria assembled a new board of directors which proved over time to be very effective. I became chairman of the finance committee for the new Altria board. We encouraged the management team to focus on shareholder value creation and to bring a growth strategy to the board. Altria’s new board embraced management’s growth strategy, which encompassed product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, and cultural innovation.

Altria management developed a “Total Tobacco” strategic plan, and the board approved the acquisition of United States Smokeless Tobacco Company for $12 billion in 2009 to secure the Copenhagen and Skoal smokeless tobacco brands. In addition to supporting this product innovation by acquisition, the new Altria board also supported increases in research and development spending to create innovative and reduced-risk tobacco products, such as e-vapor, to meet changing tobacco consumer preferences. To achieve process innovation, Altria management reconfigured manufacturing and consolidated plants and other operations to reduce costs by over $2 billion. And to improve its marketing, Altria management developed a new Marlboro brand architecture which expanded its product lineup, revitalized its growth, and strengthened its brand equity. Altria management also innovated unique digital consumer engagement capabilities, which ranked with the strongest among consumer product companies. And regarding company culture, Altria’s board encouraged senior management to emphasize employee engagement and a culture of innovation.

The result has been a remarkable economic performance by Altria. At year end 2008, Altria’s market capitalization (total common shares outstanding multiplied by closing price per common share) was $31 billion, compared to PMI market capitalization of $87.3 billion. At year end 2016, my last full year on the board, Altria’s market capitalization had increased 424 percent to $131.4 billion, while PMI market cap had increased 62.5 percent to $141.9 billion. Altria’s share price increased from $15.06 closing price in 2008 to $67.62 closing price in 2016. In the five years from December 2011 to December 2016, Altria’s cumulative total shareholder return (share price appreciation plus reinvestment of all dividends on a quarterly basis) was $286.61 on an initial $100 investment. This compares to $192.56 for Altria’s peer group of consumer product companies (Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Conagra Foods, General Mills, Hershey Company, Kellogg Company, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, Kraft-Heinz, Lorillard, Mondelez International, Pepsico, and Reynolds American). The corresponding S&P 500 Index total shareholder return calculation for the period 2011–2016 was $198.09. It was fulfilling and enjoyable to be a core member of such an effective board, and to be part of the management and board team that delivered such extraordinary shareholder value creation. I retired from the Altria board in May 2017 as its most senior member after fifteen years of service.

There was a retirement dinner for me held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and Altria’s lead director, Thomas Farrell, chairman and CEO of Dominion Energy, Inc., honored me with a farewell speech that I appreciated deeply. I include some of his remarks that evening here:

At the beginning of my second year running TWJ Capital, Nigel asked if there was any opportunity for him to come and work with me. He’d left Goldman Sachs in 2000 to join the private equity firm the Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C., as a member of its U.S. buyout team, where he’d risen to the rank of principal. His work took him frequently to countries such as India, where large firms like Carlyle were able to find opportunities to deploy their multibillion-dollar investment funds more readily than in more efficient developed markets like the United States. This travel routine was wearing on Nigel, who had married in 2001 and become a father in 2004. I thought about his inquiry and told him to wait a year until I could get a better feel for my business prospects. While it would certainly be a disappointment for me if TWJ Capital didn’t succeed, it would be an absolute disaster if Nigel were to join me during the critical years of his career and be derailed by our failure.

By early 2006 I was confident that TWJ Capital’s business model was viable, meaning that I could (1) identify sufficient attractive investment opportunities through industry contacts; (2) achieve competitive advantages through investment sector flexibility and speed of decision making and deal execution; and (3) exploit market inefficiencies at the $1 million to $10 million low end of the institutional investment space. So in early 2006 I agreed that Nigel could join me as a partner. He set up an office in Bethesda, Maryland, to provide broader geographic deal sourcing by covering the greater Washington metropolitan area.

On his birthday in January 2006, I wrote a letter to Nigel that read:

Over the years after 2006, Nigel focused primarily on telecommunications software companies. One of these companies was NetNumber, which develops and delivers software addressing solutions and services to mobile operators, fixed-line carriers, and IP-based communication services providers. NetNumber is a leading provider of centralized signaling and routing controller solutions through its TITAN platform, which is a virtualized infrastructure for all signaling control, routing policy enforcement, and subscriber database services in the telecommunications network. Net-Number has won numerous awards for its innovative technology, and had an estimated market value of $150 million to $200 million in 2018. A second company, KoolSpan, developed TrustChip technology, which is a hardened microSD cryptocard specifically built for smartphone telecommunications security. KoolSpan addresses the problem of mobile voice and text intercept, and enables any two smartphones equipped with TrustChip to make secure encrypted calls and text messages end-to-end over public wireless networks. KoolSpan launched its software-based mobile voice and text encryption product in 2015. In 2014 Nigel was asked by the board of KoolSpan to step in as chief financial officer, and he was subsequently asked by the board to assume the chief executive officer position. And so our eight years as active partners at TWJ Capital had come to an end, but his career driving the growth of a high-profile startup company had begun, of which I am incredibly proud.

Addie and I suffered a rough four-year stretch of adversity from 2003 through 2006. Addie’s mother, Yvonne Wright Knox, was afflicted with severe dementia and passed away, in 2003, at the age of eighty-three. On one moving occasion, during her last year, Addie’s mother said to her, “I don’t know who you are, but I know that I love you.” I admired Addie’s mother for her strength and courage in raising a close-knit and loving family after her husband’s tragic death in his mid-forties, when Addie was only fourteen. Mrs. Knox was a regular part of our lives as the matriarch at Addie’s family reunions, which we hosted for many years on the Fourth of July. Mrs. Knox had attended Spelman College in Atlanta, and after her death we established a scholarship there in her honor.

Our tribulations continued with my firing by Citigroup in 2004, the SEC’s charging me with civil fraud in 2005, and the legal battle of 2006. In some ways this four-year ordeal drew Addie and me closer together. I gave Addie the following letter on her birthday in 2006.

Addie and I bought our summer home in Quogue, New York, in early 2002. Quogue, situated in the Hamptons on Long Island between Westhampton Beach and Southampton, is a low-key area often called the “un-Hamptons Hampton.” It soon became a gathering place for our family and friends, and now it is rare for a summer weekend to pass without at least one of our children visiting, and often bringing friends. And that, after all, is one of the very best reasons to have a summer home.

Our dock, which sits on Quogue Canal near Shinnecock Bay, is what first inspired me to take up boating. Over the years, I progressed from a thirty-foot cabin cruiser, to thirty-four feet, then thirty-eight feet, and eventually a forty-seven-foot powerboat, which Addie named Sugar Daddy. Our cruising range extends as far north as Provincetown on Cape Cod, and as far south as Cape May on the southern tip of New Jersey. We are regular cruising visitors to Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Newport. We take river cruises up the Thames River at New London, Connecticut, to the marina at Norwich, and stay overnight for dinner and entertainment at the Foxwoods and MGM Grand casinos. We cruise up the Connecticut River at Old Saybrook and stay overnight at the marina in Essex to enjoy some of the excellent local restaurants. We have a boat slip in Stamford on Long Island Sound, a few miles from our home in New Canaan, and cruise from there down Long Island Sound to the East River and around Manhattan, then up the Hudson River to West Point. We take day-trip cruises from Quogue to Greenport, Shelter Island, Orient Point, Sag Harbor, East Hampton, and Montauk. From Stamford, we take day trips to Huntington, Port Washington, Northport, and Oyster Bay. For several years I commuted most summer weekends on my boat between New Canaan and Quogue, cruising east on Long Island Sound to Orient Point, through Plum Gut at Plum Island, south down Gardiners Bay, west around Shelter Island, and down Peconic Bay, through the Shinnecock Canal to the south shore of Long Island, and then west through Shinnecock Bay and Tiana Bay to Quogue. I love the sea and wind and sun, combined with the mental exercises of navigation and boat handling. I’m considering extending my cruising range farther north to Boston and perhaps Portland, Maine, and farther south to Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay.

Our older daughter, Evonne, graduated from Georgetown University in 2004 and pursued a career in education. She returned to school and received a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard University in 2009 and is now employed as a policy analyst with Democracy Prep Public Schools, a charter school operator. In July 2012 Evonne became engaged to a college classmate from Georgetown, and they were married on Saturday, June 22, 2013, in a beautiful wedding, with all their family and friends joining the celebration. The wedding was at the new Alvin Ailey Center for Dance at Ninth Avenue and West 55th Street in Manhattan, where Addie and I had gifted a rehearsal studio. This was fitting because Evonne and Chris’s first date was an Ailey performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington. A special touch was that the wedding ceremony was performed by Father Michael Bird, a talented young Episcopal priest who had been youth minister for Evonne, Michael, and Vicky at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in New Canaan. Vicky was the maid of honor, and Michael was a member of the groom’s wedding party. Nigel’s daughter Isabelle was the flower girl, and his two boys Carter and Logan were ring bearers.

Figure 19 / Tom, Addie, Nigel’s wife Diane, Michael, Evonne, Evonne’s groom Christopher, Victoria, Nigel (rear left to right), Nigel’s children Isabella, Carter, and Logan (front left to right) at Evonne’s wedding, June 2013

Michael graduated from the University of Vermont, went on for a master’s degree from the University of London in the United Kingdom, and has remained true to his passion for music. At the University of Vermont he joined the Student Activities Concerts Committee and was responsible for bringing a wonderfully diverse range of musical groups to campus. We had encouraged Michael to pursue his love of music but also to think more broadly about career opportunities in music. Very few people succeed as professional musicians; many more succeed in other aspects of the industry. He launched his career by working as a publicist with a start-up music-marketing company in Brooklyn. No longer in a band, he supplemented his income by DJing in his spare time at weddings, corporate events, private parties, and clubs. In late 2015 Michael was recruited to become director of publicity at Dim Mak Records and moved to Los Angeles. Mike and his wife, Rachel, an elementary school teacher, married in February of 2017. Michael has grown to be a wonderful young man—friendly, honest, caring, and hardworking. We are delighted that Mike pursued his dreams and found a career in music.

Our younger daughter, Victoria, always had a passion for fashion. She researched different aspects of the fashion industry, spent time working in high-end fashion retailing, and obtained an internship with OTEXA, the textile export and international trade program in the United States Department of Commerce. These experiences helped her to better understand the interesting possibilities in the fashion industry. Vicky graduated summa cum laude in the International Trade and Marketing for the Fashion Industries Program at Fashion Institute of Technology (part of the State University of New York), and also received an associate’s degree of applied science in fashion marketing from Parsons School of Design–The New School. She has worked in merchandise planning at Century 21, Gap, and Under Armour, and is now a planning manager at Optoro, which is a startup technology company that works with retailers and manufacturers to manage their returned and excess merchandise.

One day in the spring of 2005, Addie’s delighted laughter called me into the kitchen. She held a gilt-edged card in her hand. It was from Bennie and Flash Wiley, the couple who had introduced Addie and me in 1974. Composed by Bennie, it read:

It was one of the most love-filled and funniest nights of our lives. As we were gathered in our living room enjoying champagne with our friends, Addie employed her wonderful sense of humor and recited a poem she had composed in honor of the occasion, titled “Ode to Tom.” It was the hit of the party:

I could not and cannot imaging loving a wife more than I love Addie. She is my best friend, my anchor, and my partner.

In quick succession, I lost three members of my family in the span of two years. My mother passed at age ninety-eight in May 2009. She had been in excellent health until falling and breaking her hip two years earlier, which started a pattern of physical decline that is common among the elderly. Near the end, it seemed like she simply made a decision that she was ready to leave this world. She refused to eat.

My mother had been very actively involved with our lives for many years. She’d taken care of Nigel for an extended period when he was young and was present at the birth of each of our younger children, always staying at our home to assist Addie after childbirth. She accompanied us on our winter vacations to Sanibel Island during the 1980s. She lived near us in an independent living apartment facility for the elderly in New Canaan starting in the early 1990s, and so was present with our family at all of our Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmas celebrations. My mother never asked for anything in return. All that she wanted was to be loved. Her heart was not exhausted by loving me, so she loved Addie as her own daughter, and loved each of my four children as much as she loved me. Her best friend once noted that my mother was “love never ending.”

I handled the arrangements for Mom’s funeral, and spoke at her funeral about her depth of love for me and for Addie and for our children. Addie wrote a tribute for my mother’s funeral, but was too overcome with emotion to speak at the service. It read:

My mother’s passing weighed on my heart for a long time. To this day I continue to visit Long Island National Cemetery every Easter and Christmas to take flowers to my parents’ grave, and to thank God for their lives, and to pray that He has redeemed their faith and received their souls into eternal life.

My oldest brother, Edward, died at age sixty-nine the very next year, in December 2010. Because we hadn’t been close for a very long time, his death affected me much differently. Edward had never achieved significant success in his career, and he also failed in his personal life. He died alone after having been divorced twice, and I don’t know how well he knew his two adult daughters, Sharon and Michelle, from his first marriage, or his grandchildren. I was not close to Ed because I did not think he was my friend. I had tried to help him by gestures such as buying him a new car in 2006. When he was hospitalized in mid-December 2010 after collapsing at his home, he gave my name as his closest relative. The hospital contacted me and said it was urgent for me to visit as soon as possible. When I arrived, the attending physician informed me that Ed’s illness was probably terminal colon cancer. I visited Ed several times in the next week, and counseled him that his illness could possibly be terminal so he should promptly attend to urgent matters such as writing letters to his children and preparing or updating his will. Ed ignored my advice and died intestate and without writing to his daughters.

When I was cleaning out his basement, I found our father’s model trains stuffed into four boxes stacked in a dark corner, apparently never opened from the moment he had taken them on our father’s death. The labels were spotted with mildew.

In March 2012 my second brother, James, died at age sixty-six. He also died alone, after three failed marriages and an unsuccessful career trying to follow in our father’s footsteps in the ministry. Jim had purchased a burial insurance policy and named me as the person to contact for funeral arrangements in the event of his death. I traveled to Greeneville, Tennessee, and spent a week organizing his funeral and trying to close out his final arrangements, such as removing his belongings from his apartment. I was not close to Jim because we lived in two completely different worlds and I did not respect the way he lived his life, but I had always included him in our family occasions when he visited our mother in New Canaan. Over the years, I had also helped him financially with cash gifts at Christmas and on his birthday, and by giving him my used cars or buying cars for him.

I spoke at both Ed’s and Jim’s funerals, and prayed for their souls, but I did not feel deep grief for either brother because I did not feel that I had lost someone to whom I was really close and bonded in love. Their deaths brought to the forefront of my mind the realization that neither of my brothers or my father lived to age seventy. While I take much better care of myself and I’m in excellent health, I’m mindful that I’m not assured of living to a ripe old age.

My sister Marie, nine years older than me, seems to be in good health, so that gives me some optimism for longevity. She lives in Texas but traveled to attend the funerals for our mother and brothers. Her daughter, my niece Kim, lives in Manhattan with her husband and two boys, and we invite them to our family celebrations. Kim is quite successful and I’m very proud of her. She graduated from Radcliffe College and Columbia Law School and is a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, one of the major New York law firms. I know that Kim is regarded as one of the top commercial real estate securitization attorneys in New York, because on more than one occasion New York real estate executives have praised her capabilities to me when they learned we are related.

As I’m sure many others do, I enjoy refreshing my memories over the years by rereading handwritten cards—from Father’s Days, birthdays, anniversaries—given to me by my family. As I revisit the messages and sentiments, I am reminded that my life has overflowed with love, that my children have heard my advice and been guided and encouraged by it, that my wife adores me just as I adore her, that my friends and family feel the depth of my love for them, and that my mother was proud of the man I became—and I am thankful.