Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.

Ed Hajim (MBA 1964) has had a legendary career in finance, including high-profile stints at E F Hutton and Lehman Brothers and 14 years leading Furman Selz.

But his success came against very high odds, which Ed chronicles in his recent book On the Road Less Traveled: An Unlikely Journey from the Orphanage to the Boardroom.

READ MORE

Courtesy Ed Hajim

Courtesy Ed Hajim

In 1939 Ed Hajim's parents divorced and his mother was granted custody of three-year-old Ed, and they moved from Los Angeles to her native St. Louis. Granted Sunday visitation rights, his father only made the 1,800-mile trip twice. And on the second visit, his father kidnapped him, driving him back to Los Angeles.

The event would shape Ed's life.

Sometime after they left St. Louis, Ed's father told him that his mother had died and his father, as it turns out, wouldn't be around for very long either.

Morrell: Ed, I want to start in the early part of this book, you know, there are some dramatic things that you go through as a child, obviously, right? You know, there's so much disarray in your young life.

And one of the scenes that really stuck with me was in 1942. Your father joins the Merchant Marines and then he's immediately called into service, because we're in the middle of World War II at that point. And then he left you with the Catholic welfare agency. How old were you at that point in '42?

Hajim: In ‘42—I was five and a half years old.

Morrell: Tell us about that day. The feelings you had, the scene itself.

Hajim: The few things you remembered in your life. I remember that one because I couldn't figure out, you know, dad was away quite a bit through the first two years anyway. So I was used to him being away, but when he was there, we were really pals. We were buddies. We went every place together. And I, you know, in the book I say that the fact that when my father kidnapped me, he was feeling and not thinking. And my mother was, you know, thinking and not feeling. He really loved me more than anything else in the world.

I was the only thing he had, but then when he left me it was cataclysmic. I mean, here's a man, really the only family I had, he was leaving me and he was leaving me with strangers. I mean, these were total strangers in an organization that I didn't know anything about. And so I physically got sick.

In the book, Ed recalls asking his father that day, why he was doing this and promising to be a good boy if he would stay.

Hajim: But it's one of these things that I keep telling people, you know that experience alone paid dividends the rest of my life, because I was able to get through it.

Disadvantages become advantages. You know, there's probably, that may have been the worst point in my life and I got it over early.

Before he left, his father had arranged to get Ed into the foster care system where he would bounce around from family to family, eventually into a series of orphanages, his connection to his father coming mostly via letters and the occasional brief reunion.

Morrell: But that period in your life, so fascinated me in the book. You know, you moved around from foster family to foster family. You lived in a series of orphanages, you lived in a hotel room at age 11, and among the challenges that something like that poses is that it doesn't give you any real grounding.

And this is one line from the book. You say, “Having bounced around as much as I did, I had to set my moral compass by taking the measure of the various situations I found myself in.” What did that mean for you in practice? How were you doing that?

Hajim: Well, one of the things I developed somewhere along the line is I didn't become a victim. I always looked forward. I felt that, you know, and maybe that was just, you know, it was John Wayne or something. It always seemed to me that it didn't do me any good to take pity on myself or to say, woe is me. I just kept saying, what's next.

And how am I going to get through this? So I developed a survivor mentality. And the moral compass really in those days, between the nuns and the movies … the movies, by the way, in those days, all the good guys did well. They usually smoked a cigarette at the end and died, but they always won, and so there was this thing and at five o'clock in the afternoon, there were these serials, Jack Armstrong, Terry and the Pirates, their 15 minutes serials that you listen to between five and six at night before dinner. And always there, they did the right thing.

I picked these things up. I felt this was the easier path, you know, being good, being, doing things right.

Morrell: Which is funny because early on in life, you had behavioral issues, right. You know, this was coming back in your report cards. People were saying that, but eventually you become an excellent student, right? You excel academically. Was it something that changed or, or did you figure something out? What was driving you at that point?

Hajim: Well, I was looking for the ticket. I always was a reasonably good student and a reasonably good athlete, but when I went to Yonkers orphanage, I decided my ticket out of this situation was private college.

How do you get to private colleges? Good grades and athletics. Those were the two things that I focused on. People are influenced by two things. They're influenced by both their environment, which I was, and also genealogical. I had a math capability that just came naturally. Somewhere between freshman and sophomore year I focused, this is my ticket. The only way to get that is to be a good student. So I really concentrated on those two things.

Ed's commitment to academics would see him earn a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester and eventually HBS. After HBS, Ed would begin a storied investment career, eventually becoming CEO of Ferman Selz. And it was during this stint running Ferman Selz that his life took another unexpected turn.

Ed's father died in 1971. And among the items retrieved from his home was a suitcase full of letters—presumably the ones Ed had sent his father as a child. Not interested in revisiting the pain of his youth by rereading those letters to his father, he stowed the suitcase away. But in 1996, when Ed was 60 years old, his wife Barbara urged him to finally go through the suitcase and see if there was anything worth keeping.

Otherwise she would just throw it out.

Morrell: So take me through this moment in 1996, when Barbara finally gets you to open your father's old suitcase.

Hajim: Again, luck. It was a rainy weekend.

And she was cleaning out as she does every once in a while she would throw the suitcase. I'm throwing it away unless you look into it.

When Ed finally opened it, he came across some legal documents. Among them were divorce papers and alimony agreements with his mother's name on them.

And the truth hidden from him for some 57 years began to unfold. His mother hadn't died as his father had told him. He'd just hidden her existence from him.

And now he was faced with a bigger question. Do I look for her and potentially upend this great life I've built? He'd buried his mother long ago. Did he really want to unearth any more potential pain?

Hajim: You know, life is pretty good. 1996, I was running my own company. We had a wonderful house in Greenwich. I had three children and everything was good.

We're going to bring this strange person into the family. You know, in fact, my father told me that she was terrible. She didn't want children. So I had this vision of her, which was not good. But we said, we've got to do it. So I wrote a letter. It's in the book.

It said I think I'm your son. If you want to see me, call, so she called, we got on a plane. I took my little video from my 25th wedding anniversary out to her and I rang the doorbell in St. Louis. And I said, “I'm your son—57 years late.”

She wasn't emotional at first. We got emotional about three hours into the visit. But before that, she wasn't emotional. She was, again, thinking and not feeling. She felt very strongly and she made it clear given the fact that her father, her parents were not receptive to her coming home that I'd be better off with my father. Also, he threatened her. And she turned out to be totally different than my father had said. She was a nice lady. And in St. Louis, no one talks fast. She talked fast, you know, and I'm tilted over, you know, I'm sort of, I lean forward, like you're in a tennis position or, you know, I don't stand up straight. My mother didn't stand up straight.

And she rhymed. Whenever somebody invites me to a party to a, to a birthday party, I'll rhyme for them. I'm pretty good at it. And I'm not great. She was great at it. But her 85th birthday. She just, she stood up there and read off a 20 couplet rhyme.

So we had a lot of things in common. I knew she was my mother right away.

But you know, we lived together for 12 years and she said, I'm not your mother, it's okay. And the biggest funniest story of all, she calls up her son who she didn't tell about me and said, “You know that brother you always wanted to play with? I found him.” And Phil and I have become, he's a doctor in Lexington, Kentucky, we've become very close friends.

And he was at the first meeting and so forth. But my mother and I had a really good time and we took her all over the place, took her to our houses in Nantucket and in Florida. And, and she had a couple great grandchildren, which were great.

And so, so it all worked out really well. And [in] many respects it was time for her. Her husband died a few years earlier and it was time for me. If I tried to find her out someplace along the line, when I was, when I was at Lehman brothers, having great difficulty in my corporate career, you know, might not have worked out so well.

So, good Lord took care of us. It was the right time in the right place. And we had a very good time together for 12 years. So it was really a wonderful thing.

Morrell: You've spent so much time in this book thinking about your own personal history and ruminating on it and reflecting. And your dad was such a big part of that. How do you think about your father now?

Hajim: I've had friends from the Business School or other places really go downhill in life, you know, and he went as a rocket ship in the twenties, you showed a picture of him next to an airplane.

I know he owned a couple of buildings on 110th street. I know we owned a lot of RCA stock, you could see he had, he had his shirts done, you know. I have pictures of him in spats and the whole work.

So he really, he was the top of the pile. So, but [from] ‘29 to ‘33, he lost literally everything. And his mother died during that period. She was a matriarch in the community. And according to him, she died of a broken heart because everybody in the Bensonhurst community, all the Syrians went down with ‘29, ‘33—like a lot of the people. And so he lost everything. When somebody loses something, you know, the demons are unbelievable.

So his life didn't work out. His family, his marriage didn't work out and then his work didn't work out. So he suffered pretty, pretty terribly from the whole thing. But in writing the book and understanding what he went through, I understood the demons were just pretty horrendous and he did a pretty good job. And he did give me certain kinds of things. He gave me unconditional love.

I never hated my father. I never hated him.

He—he loved me. And when someone loves you the way he loved me, you can't hate them.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald, with additional production by PRX Productions. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Post a Comment