Like many others in our class — I was out of funds when I graduated and, consequently — was without ideas of what to do next in life during the Eisenhower Recession. Fortunately, Ted Mitau sent me off to the Minnesota Legislative Research Committee where I worked for three years. I saved money and — influenced by lots of lawyer-legislators — set off for law school with the intention — never realized — of returning to Minnesota to enter politics. Harvard Law School was tough but led to a job with a major Wall Street law firm. I had enough savings for a summer in Europe before starting work and then stretched that to a full year which included a camping trip in a VW Beetle with two friends touring Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — so unheard of in 1965 that I seriously thought we should report the miserable conditions we had seen to the CIA. (Years later my CIS friends told me that 1965 was among the Golden Years of Communism.)
I then spent seven marvelous years in New York working on major real estate projects in California and Georgia, on financing movies (remember Woody Allen’s Bananas and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang?) and on Eurodollar bonds. Those were the years of Viet-Nam protests and flower children. I married an English woman who wanted to return to Europe and, with our first son, we moved to London in the early 1970s. We had two more boys and then were surprised when the twin boys arrived. We eventually divorced. All five sons went to Eton College and on to English universities. Two are lawyers (solicitors), one is an IT expert, and the twins are in television production and advertising. I have two grandchildren and a third is expected just before our reunion.
I did a lot of work on trail-blazing projects for Hyatt Hotels in Belgrade, Warsaw and elsewhere in the late 1980s. People in my law firm thought I had skill at dealing with difficult foreign languages, alien cultures, and beat-up Communist and post-Communist economies, so I was asked to set up an office in exotic Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan, in February 1993. If Belgrade and Warsaw were challenging, I hadn’t yet learned the meaning of challenge! I was the first foreign lawyer to set up shop there and — having endured the total collapse of the economy in 1994-95 — I stuck it out for a total of 14 years. These have been rewarding years for me as I trained local lawyers how modern legal systems work and even taught English to translators. I feel like a father to many of my former and present employees, helping them to mature as young professionals, aiding them when they wanted to study abroad, helping one to get through Columbia Law School, and — rather involuntarily — being a role model.
Currently I work part-time as a lawyer and serve as a non-executive director of a Kazakh company that recycles paper into cardboard.
I eventually married again, to Dana, and we now have a daughter only slightly older than my grandchildren.
I wrote a book on U.S. taxation of overseas Americans and then published a newsletter on the same subject for nine years, all while working as a lawyer. Many other articles were published in international tax and business planning publications, and I am currently writing a novel set in Central Asia and focusing on corruption.
Since 1959 my main strenuous recreational activity has been skiing; my main hobby is genealogy and family history.
