Page Two
I went off to boarding school when I was thirteen, first as a five-day boarder at Shadyside Academy, a private school near Pittsburgh, and later at The Hill School in Eastern Pennsylvania, traveling back home by train via Philadelphia for the holidays.I started visiting New York for weekends during my sixth form year at the Hill School, hanging out “under the clock” at the Biltmore Hotel and in the jazz clubs around 52 nd Street. The two summers after I graduated from The Hill, Mama and Papa took me and my sister Carolyn to Europe.
After those first two visits, I was totally in love with European food, languages, history and culture (and women), a love which has persisted throughout my life. I thought of myself then, and still think of myself even now as a “citizen of the world.”
Thus, after getting an MBA, making an unhappy try at joining my father’s industrial supply business in Pittsburgh and hanging out at the local clubs and bars, I set my heart and mind on an international career.
In my first move to escape the old home town, I spent the summer of 1960 visiting Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In September, 1961 I went off to London for two years with Christa, my new German bride, and two hundred dollars a month from my parents to study economics and try to qualify for a job at the World Bank, where I thought I could “do well by doing good.”
In early 1963, while we were still living in a cold, damp third-floor walk-up in East Croydon in the London suburbs, I received a cable from Washington inviting me to the World Bank’s Paris office for a whole day of interviews with visiting Washington department heads. A few months later a second cable arrived. I was hired. The job came in the nick of time, for we already had a London-born, one-year-old daughter, and our second child was on the way.
For the next twenty-nine years I traveled all over the world, using a United Nations Laissez-passer instead of my American passport, which I only needed when re-entering the US. I traveled overseas on Bank business an average of about 120 days each year while assigned to the Washington headquarters, and for eight years I lived with Christa and the children in Africa and Indonesia while assigned to various World Bank field offices as Resident Representative, a sort of ambassador of money, with a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and a little, UN-blue World Bank flag fluttering on the front fender.
I made frequent visits to Europe also, attending consultations with the other “aid donors” in Geneva, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Bonn, Rome and Copenhagen. Whenever I found myself in Europe, I would be sure to visit my German in-laws in Christa’s home town.
For five years after retiring from the Bank in 1992, I kept on working part-time as a consultant for the Bank, the United Nations Development Program in New York and the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome. All in all, I have traveled to a total of seventy-five different countries on five different continents.
End of Part One
