#4 UC Berkeley / SAE

It was always in the cards that I would attend UC Berkeley. My parents were not wealthy enough to afford a private school, and I did not receive any scholarship offers even though I graduated 3rd in my high school class and had a reasonably high SAT score. My dad graduated from Cal and so did his older brother, my Uncle Dave.

I don’t exactly recall how I ended up rushing the SAE House other than I knew it was Roger’s fraternity at UC Santa Barbara. It was the only fraternity I checked out. I liked the guys I met and the location – right across the street from the law school. They promised me a single room, so I moved in right away.

The room was a mess, so I immediately called my dad and asked for his help making repairs to the room and buying some needed furniture. Dad was the world’s best handyman. He could fix anything. Long story short, I had a beautiful, refurbished room one week later with a new waterbed built by one of my new fraternity brothers. Sweet.

Dad felt strongly that each of his sons should have a car when they left for college. So, after we fixed up my room, we shopped for cars and I ended up with a cute, two-seater Triumph Spitfire which I drove until the late 1970s. Thank you Dad.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the SAE House (aka Cal Beta) was in financial trouble as were many of the other fraternities at Cal. Joining the Greek system was not the thing liberal-minded students of the late 1960s and early 1970s did. But all that began to change with my incoming class of 1971.

My pledge class was 14 members strong and helped stabilize the finances of the House. It didn’t take me long for me to make a difference. I saw right away that the cook was a crook. So, I got permission from the EA of the house to fire him with the promise that I would run the kitchen. I don’t know why I thought I could do this, but intuitively I knew I could.

So began an interesting year-long journey of buying fresh fruit and vegetables from the Oakland produce market, groceries from Safeway, and manning the kitchen for breakfast duty. We were all on our own for lunch and I hired a new chef just for dinner. It worked out great. The quality of the food went up and we saved a ton of money which we poured into the social fund. By the end of the school year, SAE was known to have the best Greek parties and coeds were flocking to our quad.

At the start of my sophomore year, I was ready for something new. I found another brother who was willing to take over the kitchen duties and I transferred to the role of Treasurer. I was very fortunate that I could work with a real CPA who was a Cal Beta alum from the 1950s. Together we got Cal Beta back in the black which allowed us the opportunity to buy back the house which had been sold to an investor in 1971. It also helped me see that I was a natural at accounting and finance which served me well for the rest of my life.

My Junior year I got involved with Rush and Social activities. By that time, Liz and I were a steady couple and I was already thinking about life after Berkeley. I became the EA (President) of the House at the start of my Senior year and got to live in the double-size EA room all that Summer and Fall. I graduated in December 1974, two quarters early, as I ended up with a bunch of French credits because of my fluency in French.

I am very lucky to have gone to school at Cal and to have learned about my leadership gifts at SAE. Everything that happened in the rest of my life was influenced by what I learned in those 3 ½ years. Go Bears.