1. I am originally from Pittsford, New York, a suburb of Rochester. I went to a medium size public high school and was very involved in extracurricular activities such as Boy Scouts (I was an Eagle Scout – more about that below!), Model United Nations, the school yearbook and newspaper (I took candid and sports photographs for both) and my synagogue youth group.
2. My parents were both professionals, my dad a real estate lawyer and my mom a professor of political science at SUNY Brockport. We had some interesting dinner table discussions with my mother and me in the middle of the debate and my younger sister, Jane, taking the liberal side and my dad taking the more conservative side. It could get a little heated, but never personal. My dad was good at moderating things, and he and my sister were very close throughout his life.
3. After high school I went to Yale, where my dad had gone, and thought I would study political science like my mother had. However, my first semester there I had this amazing economics professor (he was a senior level PhD student – graduated college at 19 and got a PhD and a law degree while he was at Yale) who came to my dorm room to help me prepare for the final microeconomics exam. I got an A and became at economics major with my professor’s kindness sticking with me. Besides classes I was also involved in lots of extracurricular activities, such as intramural athletics (I wasn’t very skilled at any sport but was incredibly enthusiastic at all of them), student government and helped found a Reform Jewish group on campus.
4. After college I went to Washington, D.C. thinking that I would end up with a really cool first job working for the federal government. Unfortunately, in the fall of 1980 there was lots of uncertainty about the future in D.C. and literally no one was hiring a newly minted college grad for those kinds of jobs even with an Ivy League degree. My dad had a law school classmate who was the managing partner at a D.C. law firm and told him that he would “find something for me to do” while I was looking for a full-time job. I ended up working in the mailroom with several people who only had high school degrees but were incredibly good at what they did and taught me a bunch about how to do a good day’s work and left a lasting impression on me. While looking for my dream job, one of my colleagues at the firm who was doing paraprofessional work as a “legislative assistant” for a client got hired away and she recommended me for her position. So, I ended up working for a couple of years doing legislative work for the City of Baltimore, a place I had never been but grew to really love and have visited many times since.
5. After a couple of years in D.C. I ended up going to Duke, where I got a law degree and a master’s in public policy. More significantly than my two advanced degrees and a lifelong passion for ACC basketball (Go Blue Devils!), I acquired many long-term friends and a spouse (of 37 years!). My now wife, Libby, and I met early in our first year of law school and starting dating in March of our first year.
6. After Libby’s graduation (I had an extra semester due to the graduate degree), we moved to Washington where she started with a law firm. Our August 1985 wedding was in Geneva, New York (she grew up in Elmira and Geneva was halfway) on the shores of Seneca Lake. It was an outdoor wedding ceremony, and we didn’t really have a good plan B, but the rain blew through early in the day leaving a gorgeous sunny day. One interesting fact about the wedding was that the wedding party had six Eagle Scouts (me, my father, my father-in-law, my best man, my brother-in-law, and my law school housemate).
7. We stayed in Washington for about five more years, where I worked for the Treasury Department and the securities industry, and we had a child (Jennifer, now 33 and living in D.C. and working for the federal government) which made being near our parents in Upstate New York a stronger draw, so we moved to Albany in July 1990. Libby got a job with a law firm and I with the NYS Division of the Budget.
8. In 1999, we moved to Wellington, New Zealand, where I had an eight-month fellowship studying their tax and social welfare system, and we did lots of “tramping” and exploring that magical country. For the next almost 10 years I worked at UAlbany as a faculty member and administrator, first as the director of Jewish student programs and then as the career dean at Rockefeller College.
9. After trying my hand at management consulting for 18 months I decided to do something totally different and became a life coach and organizational consultant, while continuing to teach part-time at UAlbany. In late 2011, I responded to an ad in the Times Union for an economics professor at Siena and was hired to teach introductory economics. It was one of the six different courses I have now taught in almost 12 years at Siena, where I have won two teaching awards and have really enjoyed being part of the campus community.
10. We love living in this area because of its natural beauty (even during winter when we ski and snowshoe) and the wonderful people. We have been very involved with our synagogue, B’nai Sholom, where we have both been president and have made many close friends. It has been a great place to live and work and raise kids (our younger daughter Rebecca, 29, was born here but now lives in the Bay Area and works for a tech startup), and we hope to stay here for many more years, although we will continue to find time to travel (including a bucket list trip to Alaska this past summer).
