Me with Therman

The following is a phone conversation I had with my Uncle Therman who, for the past seven years had been…missing. His “reappearance” into our lives has been like rue in gumbo. The sticky substance that keeps the contents together. What time? What seven years? Love remembers what it wants to remember. And then it moves on. We are moving on. Stronger.

We had our individual theories but none of us knew. Perhaps he didn’t even know. Do any of us know why we do anything? Usually not, not the big big picture of it anyway. Behind every major occurrence there are a million tiny steps it took to get to that…point.

J* I don't know, with you I don’t really have a prompt question. I figured you would have a place you wanted to begin. Do you?

T* No. Just ask me something and I’ll go from there.

J* Ok. Why an actuary?

T* Good question. In 1963 I graduated from high school. I didn’t know what I was going to do afterwards but I knew I couldn’t stay home. That wasn’t an option to any of us. I applied to city college, I put in an application to the air force and other places and I knew something was going to come through.

I saw a paper that talked about actuaries. I liked math. I liked using math to solve problems. At Occidental College, the same one Barack went to for two years, my teacher called me one day and said that there was a guy from Prudential there to interview people and nobody showed up. I went to see him and we started talking. When I graduated from Occidental College in 1967, I had two job opportunities, one at IBM in Los Angeles as a computer programmer and the other in Newark, New Jersey with Prudential as an actuary. With Prudential I would have to spend five to seven years studying to be an actuary, then take a test to become an actuary. It had a lot of ifs to it. It was because of the ifs that I was attracted to it.

I liked science. I had to use science to figure things out and I was good at it. Over the course of the next three decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties, I quit the actuary profession three times and went back three times.

J* Why quit and go back?

T* Well, I’ll explain it like this. In 1971 Angela was born and I had been in New Jersey since 1967. And if you go from southern California to New Jersey, you are going from paradise to purgatory. I transferred to their office in California. I worked there eleven months and decided I didn’t like California and Marilyn was tired of me going from job to job.

J* Job to job in California?

T* No. I quit the office in California and went to Philly. Quit, then left that job to take a job in New York and at that point she said “That’s it.” She was on the outs anyway. I took the job in New York and she stayed in Philly with Angela. I took an apartment in New Jersey.

J* Why New Jersey?

T* It was the halfway point between us. I did it to see Angela on the weekends. I pretended that that worked for two and half years. I had a vw bug and drove it for two and a half years. I hated that job in New York. I kept seeing how corporations could make more money.

In ‘74 I knew my marriage was gone. I knew I wanted to be with Angela. I knew I didn’t want to be an actuary. Here’s what I did. I researched Temple University and found out they had a master’s program in Urban Studies and I wanted to study urban studies. So I said “I’m signing up for that.” That was supposed to begin in September. So my plan that summer was to start school in September at Temple studying something I wanted do and I would be in Philly near Angela.

At that time, Herman was in Ghana and so I was gonna take my money to visit him, then go to school. That’s what I did. When I returned from Ghana I flew back to New York and took a train to Philly and didn’t know where I was gonna stay. I was talking to Bobby at the time and she said she used to go with a guy in Long Beach named Gregory who lived in Philly. I called him up. I moved in with him and he worked in this big factory and I hung out in the little bar with him and the factory workers. I was a student and I bought a ten speed bike. They called me The Professor.

I found out the master’s program was a farce. In their Urban Studies program they had us studying Italy and old buildings in Europe. We had to write a thesis and they kept rejecting my masterpiece. I showed the gap between what they were teaching as urban studies and what black history was. I was gonna write a template and compare that with what they were teaching.

J* I guess that didn’t go over well.

T* No. So at the end of the school year I was in a long line to register for a program I didn’t wanna take. Next to me, someone was in another line and I started talking to him. I asked what he was in line for and he told me it was for the master’s program in Urban Education.

J* Like you?

T* No, I was there for urban studies. I had him explain what that was and he told me that you go to school one night a week and take teaching classes and in the day you teach in high school classes. That summer you had to teach summer school and based on how you did at the summer school determined how they placed you in the program. I would get paid a teacher’s salary. I said, “No problem.” So that’s what I did. That was funny because that’s what I wanted to do anyway, teach school. This was my second year out of the actuary profession.

The high school was interesting. Half of the students were white, half were black. Three quarters of the blacks were very poor and lived in poor communities. One quarter of the blacks were rich and lived in rich communities. And three quarters of the white students were very rich and one quarter was poor. There weren’t many black teachers. Before Christmas break, the principal came to me and said that the twelfth graders were fighting to get a black history class. He told me that John the p. e. teacher used to teach it but wouldn’t do it again. He told me I had the job. That’s what I wanted. I had already written a design for a black history program.

So, I was gonna teach black history in morning and then continue with my math classes the rest of the day. By the time June came I was out of the teaching profession and went back to being an actuary.

J* Why?

T* Remember what I said about the mix of black kids? Some of them rich some of them poor? The students fought a lot. The leader of the poor students was this tall militant and the leader of the rich kids was this short kid, but he was very spoiled and vocal. The rich kids resented the fact that they had to work in the class. They liked being able to say that they were taking black history though. One day the tall guy was up reading his report that I had assigned to the class. He was proud of his paper. The short guy from the rich side was mad at me. While the poor guy was reading his paper the short guy kept saying “This is bullshit.” I said, “What’s bullshit?” Then the rest of the class got involved. The poor guy was pissed off because his reading got interrupted.

As far as the math classes, none of the students could add, multiply, subtract or divide. The principal would come into my class and spot check me and tell me what I did and didn’t do.

J* Why you?

T* That’s what they did in the math department.

Toward the end I knew I was just in another bureaucracy and not making much money and I didn’t feel like I was reaching the kids. I called my head hunter in the actuary field and he found me a job. You may not remember, but in the funny paper on Sundays this company had an add that said that if you sent them a quarter, a physical quarter, then you got life insurance for that month. Of course for the next month it wasn’t a quarter, but that quarter would begin the policy. I ended up working for that company. The owner was this religious fanatic. Every Wednesday all the employees, all three hundred of us, went to an assembly to hear a testimony of how somebody found Jesus. Jojo Starbucks, who was married to Terry Bradshaw came to speak about how Jesus came into her life and how Jesus was good. I stayed for two years and it was a miserable job.

After that, I called my people at Prudential. I went to work for Prudential in the third office in Philadelphia. I got the job in Philly and was there for three years. I was designing pension plans for employers. I was loving this. After two years I said, “Shoot, I can do this on my own.”

J* I knew I got it from somewhere.

T* In ‘77 I met Louise and had my own apartment. I would pick her up every night after my meetings.

J* Meetings?

T* I was always going to meetings at night in the seventies about black revolutions and devolving models for revolutions. We studied W. E. B Dubois. We would meet every night and go to the parks on weekends and have rallies. Louise would spend the night and I would take her back to her house so she could go to work. She worked as a teacher’s aide.

In the beginning of ‘81 I quit the actuary profession again and was going to work for myself. I was gonna be doing pension consulting work for the black businesses. (Laughs)

J* What’s wrong with that?

T* There were no black businesses in the seventies and the ones that were around were operating on a cash register. At the same time my rent was going up from $125 to almost $200. I couldn’t believe I was paying that much for rent. (We laugh)

I was going to leave the profession and go on my own. It was a romantic idea and not a practical idea. Certainly not a thought out idea. I told Louise the idea and she said that for the same rent I could move into her basement and could save all this money on rent. In ‘81 I moved in and of course I didn’t stay in the basement. I stayed in the bedroom. No, it was in the last part of ’80? No. January ‘81. After three months I realized that it wasn’t going to work. I was living in a household with three children and a woman. That same year she hurt her back. She was chasing a fifth grader down a hallway and fell and that was the last time she worked. So now, I’m the breadwinner for the household. So I gotta go back to work.

In March in ‘81 I called this guy, the guy who hired me from Occidental. He got me this job in Philly. Where Louise lived was a poor working class area. I had to wear a suit and tie every day and had to catch the bus. I stood out. I got to know the people though ‘cause Louise knew the people.

I worked at this job and it was very interesting ‘cause it was with a brand new company. It was a subsidiary of a company based in the Netherlands. It was Netherlands Reassurance American.

J* Reassurance?

T* Like a bookie.

J* Oh.

T* They wanted to tap into the American market so they started this company. We started with twelve people and from ‘81 to ‘84 we went to being number one in the country. A year after I left, they didn’t exist.

We were using this tax loophole. We were going to the insurance companies showing them how to convert their taxable income to nontaxable income. All the big companies came to us. We had this marketing guy who eventually had a role in my coming to Atlantic City twenty years later. Larry. He was tall, thin and meticulous about his looks. He was a marketing guy and he was good. We went to insurance company conventions where executives would gather. He would research where the conventions were. At one of them I had a job where I manned the bar at the Waldorf Astoria and when they came to get their drinks, we would tell them about our product.

J* And they didn’t look at you like, “What do you know, bar guy?”

T* No they looked at us like, “When can you come down to my office and show us your work.”

One of my clients was an insurance company in Atlanta, another Jewish guy. Jewish actuaries cling to me. The one who hired me at Occidental was Jewish. The one in Atlanta called me and said, “Why don’t you come down here and work for me?”

At that time April had graduated from high school and she was the last one of Louise’s children. She was very attached to her children. I told her, “I’m going to Atlanta and you can come with me or not.” She came.

So the job was going great from ‘84 to ‘88. He had three actuaries and each actuary had two assistants. Our job was to develop products. We had a lot of products we were developing at the same time. I was developing the single premium. This was designed to take advantage of a tax loophole. It was for very rich people. If you wanted to hide your money you would give this company a million dollars then you got life insurance of ten or twenty million dollars and never have to make another payment. The thing about that was that was the life insurance company would send you back $800,000 and then when you filed your taxes, the government would give you a tax deduction. So it was loophole for the very, very rich.

This became so popular that here’s what the owner of the company did. He didn’t like or understand life insurance. He made his money in the home business. He built homes in Europe and America. But life insurance had become so big. In the company in Atlanta he had three hundred people working for him. The lower people were black and the upper people were white except for me. He figured out the products were loopholes for the wealthy and he knew that people who were shopping for million dollar tax policies would be listening to their stockbrokers, not to his agents. So he said that he would teach the people at Meryl Lynch and firms like that so that they would have it in their arsenal. He moved his company from Atlanta, Georgia to Century City, California. He didn’t want all those black people on his payroll or all those agents. When he moved to L.A. I was the first to be let go. I saw the handwriting on the wall. I saw how the business was shifting. I was called into an office and a man told me that I was being let go ‘cause I was the most mature. He said that I had more marketability. He said that I was going to get a nice severance but I had to go.

Three weeks from being called into that office, I got a call from one of my favorite head hunters who said that he had the perfect job for me which was at Bell South. That was in ‘87. I was their first ever in house actuary. It was right up the street! Usually companies didn’t hire actuaries. I interviewed for the job and Bell South wanted an actuary but didn’t know how to hire an actuary. So they hired an actuary consulting firm. The firm they hired was owned by my friend. I interviewed with him and he wanted me to work for him, but he was in Philly and I didn’t want to go back to Philly. I wanted to stay in Atlanta. I started February 1, 1988. I'll never forget that date ‘cause that’s when Doug Williams with the Washington Redskins won the Superbowl against John Elway and the Denver Broncos. They killed ‘em! The next day I started working at Bell South.

I worked at Bell South from 1988 to April 1995. It was the best job I had in my life. I had never worked for corporations before. I had always worked for life insurance companies. The job description of the Bell South job was this twelve page business plan they got from a consulting firm. I was working in the treasury department. Of course I couldn’t do all that. They told me to create the job as I went.

I learned first hand how the company works! I didn’t get the significance of that at first, but I did over the course of seven years. See, the treasury department is where the money is. The reason this guy decided he wanted an in house actuary was because he was paying another guy millions of dollars for actuary advice on how to run his pension and life insurance plans. He had three consulting firms that he was paying for all these plans and he didn’t understand anything they were telling him. He wanted someone to oversee the consulting firms and lower the fees. That was my job and it was fantastic.

In the early nineties the country started to change into what it is now. In the early nineties one of my little side jobs was executive compensation. This was where they set money aside to pay the top four hundred executives. It’s hidden from the regulators but it’s all legal. The way they were funding them was that they would put money into these life insurance products called COLI. You have to keep a lot of records on this. It was a gruesome job. A side job. In ‘92 it started breaking apart. Three of our companies went belly up. This started a panic. This became a high profile thing for the executives. The treasury, accounting and human resource departments had this turf war about all this and I was the only one who had the numbers. They had been relying on the consulting firms who had been bedazzling them all that time. They decided to have me teach them what was going on so that they could start handling it. Of course they didn’t want it all left only with the treasury department, which was really me.

In 1994 I had my annual review. Now usually my reviews went like this. We would sit and talk and he would say that he had spoken with my clients and they were all well pleased and that I had done an excellent job. In 1994 I told them I wanted to leave but I wanted to leave under the program that would give me all of the insurance and benefits I deserved. The benefits that they gave to their fair haired favorites. They said no. I said, “Ok, I’m not leaving.” So I decided I wasn’t going to do anything. I used to type up your poems, Bubba’s journals and a lot of other things. They didn’t have any work for me to do but I wasn’t leaving. Do you remember when I sent you your poems and Bubba’s journals?

J* Yeah.

T* In 1995 when I had my annual review they said that they weren’t happy with me. He asked me if I was still interested in taking that buy out. I said yeah and left the next day. I was going to leave on my terms.

J* Were you afraid at that time because of all of the information you had about people who had that kind of money?

T* I wasn’t afraid at that time, well, I wasn’t afraid at any time, but it got more interesting, because it wasn’t over. It got interesting because of what led me here to Atlantic City.

Everything in my career has been at the forefront of what’s going in this country.
In 1974 the congress passed the ARISSA act. That’s the act that revolutionized the pension plans. Companies had been abusing that because they would fire people before they were sixty-five. See, they were following the baby boom age. The housing industry built up to take care of the baby boomers. The car industry did the same thing. Then they started these 401k plans to have the individuals take responsibility of their own plans. I saw that that was happening. Prudentential did it before IRA was invented. This was in the early seventies, late sixties. It was unheard of for companies to match the money people would put into their own plans.

The bottom was falling out and I had been watching it. In 1995 when I left Bell South, if I had followed my plan, two things would have happened. One, I would have been very successful and very comfortable, and two, I would not have been where I was for the last few years. Which I’m happy about because that’s just how it worked out.

J* What happened?

T* I got diverted. I invested in things that I should not have. And they were all black business. A black restaurant, studio, a sports product and other things. If I had stuck to my plan I would have been very comfortable, but that’s just how I did things. When I left Bell South I had over $400,000. Three years later, I went through the money and had to go back to work.

I talked to a head hunter again. In that profession, you became an expert at the last job you were in. That was the only thing you were marketable in. I was in Atlanta, broke and frustrated. I said, “I gotta go back to work.” I got this job in northern Jersey. When I left Bell South in ‘95 I thought I won the war. Well, I had won the battle but not the war, because Bell South had something for me.

I had an interview for a job in Jersey. The interview was in Atlanta at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. He said they had fifty people working for them and that they were a subsidiary of Hartford Life Insurance. They used to be a part of Mutual Benefits in Newark. They were clients of Bell South.

When Mutual Benefit went bankrupt, Hartford Life bought them because that department specialized in COLI. It was very complicated and very few companies even had it. Hartford took that department and moved it fifty miles west and made it a subsidiary. The guy who used to manage it when it was a department, was now the president of the subsidiary. This guy is a brilliant actuary. When he became the president of the subsidiary, they told the company that they were in a big risk because one guy had all that knowledge. If something happened to him no one would know anything. This guy was very rebellious and didn’t like people telling him what to do. In an act of rebellion he hired me. He knew me because he dealt with me at Bell South. His people dealt with me. He didn’t want me. He knew I knew all about COLI. We talked about technical stuff. The job was mine, period, so we just talked about stuff.

From day one that was the worse job I ever had. He was only hiring me to get Hartford off his back. When an insurance company goes belly up, they have to leave a skeleton crew there. He was waiting for his two key people who were still in his old company. He wanted them in his subsidiary in Jersey. He hired me to stay only until they were freed up. It was a very tight operation and I wasn’t interested in the work they were doing. In May of 2001, I finally ended up leaving. I had really left six months before then. He and I both knew that it was over. In that time I paid down some of my debt that I owed to some people. Louise and I were basically finished. There were bizarre things that were going on.

I was still friends with that marketing guy, Larry. The brokers were selling the COLI plans but they needed an actuary to make them work. When I left Bell South, I had some plans with some actuaries on how to make some money. I would I come up to the hotel in Atlantic City and sell the COLI plan to the parent company of the casino. The head of the human resource department of the parent company that owned the hotel knew that they were in the process of selling the casino to another corporation. What he was doing was telling the hotel human resource that they were going to buy the policy to provide benefits for the executives. He had my friend Larry come in and set up the policy. When the money would be allocated to do that he was siphoning it off, creating the black holes. Larry and I didn’t know he was doing that.

Over a two year period he was telling Larry that the money hadn’t come in yet. But by the time the hotel sold, nobody was interested in where the money was.

J* Where is he?

T* He is gone. He’s somewhere in Europe or something. In this two year period we were convinced that we were going to get all this money. We thought once we worked with them that we could get other jobs from the other casinos.

In the two years I was staying up here in Jersey I was staying with my friend George and his wife. I saw all these people getting up and jumping on the trains. I had to get up at a certain time and take a certain train to go to a job I hated. Every day. After about a year and a half I stopped staying with them. I hated that I was working in the insurance industry. So I just floated.

I enjoyed not being on the clock somewhere. I lived on the streets the year and a half I was working for, what was the name of that company? I have a mental block? International Corporate Business Management or something like that. I lived on the streets figuratively.

As for the ride that brought me here to Atlantic City, when I never left again. Me, Larry and another broker were together for about a week. The last thing we did was drive down to Baltimore. It was a rainy night. The other guy had to get a deal together in Baltimore, which eventually did go through. Anyway, we drove to take Larry home and then he asked me where I wanted to be dropped off. Angela was in Philly at that time and I said, “Take me to Philly.” I had nothing. I didn’t have a nickel. He dropped me off at the train station in Philly. Angela was staying with Mike and I didn’t reach her. I stayed in the train station that night. I got to Atlantic City. I think George wired me $50. I went to the hotel. The executive that we were dealing with wasn’t there. There was a headline in the paper announcing that the hotel was going to be sold. I was there when it imploded!

I did some soul searching and realized that I had no option. I said, “Until I get an option, I’m gonna sit here.” I sat until it started raining. I found some place dry. I said, “Until it gets bad or until I get an option, I’m gon sit here.” And then it started from there. The slowing down. Then I started to breathe. I just stopped. The more I consciously stopped, the better it felt. Then I started taking inventory of what I like to. I like to read and study politics of what’s going on. I got that information from the library. I started journaling. It was on my birthday. I wanted people to know, when I did return to civilization, people would know what I did and what I was thinking. I realized that I liked Atlantic City. I could be with most people without being with most people. It fit. For the time.

“In search of my voice, an odyssey.” That’s the name of my journal. I thought I was looking for my external voice, but it was my internal voice. This would be a good time for you to read my journal. My journal of my seven years.

J* I can’t wait.