Letter #234: Howard Lutnick (2011)
Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC and Chairman of Newmark | Haverford Friends & Family Weekend Speech
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Howard Lutnick is the Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (a global financial services firms), Chairman and CEO of BGC Group (a global brokerage and financial technology company), and Chairman of Newmark Group (a global commercial real estate services firm). Howard started his career at Cantor Fitzgerald right out of college in 1983, was named President and CEO of the company in 1991, and became Chairman in 1996. In 2004, Cantor Fitzgerald separated out its voice brokerage business to create BGC Partners L.P., which in 2008 he merged with eSpeed to form BGC Partners, Inc. In 2011, Cantor Fitzgerald acquired Newmark, and subsequently invested heavily in the growth of the commercial real estate services business. Newmark went public in 2017 and spun off from BGC in 2018. In 2024, BGC launched the FMX Futures Exchange.
Today’s letter is the transcript of a speech Howard Lutnick delivered at Haverford College in 2011. In this speech, Howard concurrently shares his story and a story of the firm he leads, Cantor Fitzgerald, starting when he became CEO and established a culture of hiring people you like to spend time with, tragically losing 658 out of his 960 New York employees to 9/11 (their offices were in the 101st-105th floors of the World Trade Center), how he found out a plane had hit one of the towers, rushing over, getting caught up in aftermath of the crash, leading through the crisis, setting up a crisis center, setting up a 501c3 relief fund, the kindness of strangers and business partners, taking care of the families of the employees lost, how the media failed him, navigating through the tragedy while competitors were trying to take advantage of them, why he was personally motivated to take care of the employees’ families, why he loves Haverford (they took care of him when his father was killed his first week of school and gave him free tuition, whereas his sister’s school told her to become a waitress), and ends by highlight two books, one written by his best friend’s widow (he died in the tragedy), and one written by his sister who ran the relief fund.
I hope you enjoy this story! It’s a tremendous one filled with resilience, rebuilding, and triumph after tragedy.
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
So I asked LaChanze--she was sitting next to me--so what are you doing here? And she said, It's none of your business. Thank you, Joanne, for that wonderful introduction, and thank you for your service to the college. It's tremendous.
I'd like to introduce you to first my wife--my wife Allison is in the front--and my four children. So I'm going to tell you a story of how we got here. But my four children are the most important thing. So my son, Kyle, 15--Kyle, can you stand up? He's gonna feature in the story later, so at least you can know, when he was five years old, he was only this big [gestures to a short height]. Now he's not that size anymore. My son Brandon--and Brandon and Kyle, by the way, went to the Krinsky camp summer before last. So they've been to Haverford before. And my son Brandon--so Brandon wants dinner. And I have three boys and I have one princess. So my princess, Casey. And the most incredible six year old, Ryan. So Ryan, we stand up.
I have seen so many wonderful people here. My dean--my dean when I was a freshman is here. Now, I can't really point her out, because she looks like she's just the dean of the current freshman, so it's not possible she could be my dean. So I think Haverford broke the child labor laws when they hired her, years ago. Donna Mancini, who--incredible to see you, and I love that. Some of my professors, who managed to continue to kick the can down the road and allow me to graduate from the place: Sid Waldman, Roger Lane, and Dick Bernstein--really spectacular people who truly helped influence me. The President of Haverford College for the prior 10 years, who I spent long and many years with together, who was with me, having dinner, when I got the call that Allison was going into labor, and I had to quickly dash out of dinner with Tom Tritton, in order to run and and participate in my son's birth--the way men participate, as in standing nearby and watching.
So I'd like to tell you a story.
So my company is named Cantor Fitzgerald, and it was on the 101st-105th floors of the World Trade Center. We had the most beautiful views in the world. I called them democratic views, because what was a better view: looking out over Manhattan or looking out over the Statue of Liberty? The views were spectacular from every hallway, and every inch of the place.
But because we had the 101st-105th floors--and we were in the North Tower, the one with the antenna--when the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 that morning on September 11th, each and every person who was in the office was lost. Not a single person made it out, because there was no way out. 658 of my 960 New York employees were lost.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, but I'd like to take a step back for a minute and talk about 1993. See, 1993, there was a terrorist attack in the World Trade Center. And I had recently become the CEO of the company. And it was more of a business crisis. We lost our building for a month. And what happened was, there was tremendous infighting amongst the senior executives of the company. There was basically the new camp, of which I had just become the CEO, and the old camp. And even though we were in a business crisis, what I found was that senior executives of companies don't give a hoot about anybody but themselves.
And so when that was over, I made a different kind of decision. I decided that I no longer wanted to work with people who I didn't want to spend time with. And so we made a rule at the company: we only want to work with people that we like. And that was not only a rule for me--I hired my brother, my best friend Doug Gardner--but that was the rule for everyone in the company, all the way down to the security guard who worked with his brother-in-law and his best friend. And fascinatingly, we changed the company. And we would interview people, and when the interview was over, we would ask the person who interviewed them, do you like them? Could you see yourself spending a lot of time with them? And people would say, Is that a proper question? The answer is, you're going to spend more time with the people you work with, probably, than you spend with people at home. So you should care. And so that became the model of the company, starting in 1993.
Now, the way I described it was this way: Each of us in this room has the same rainbow of friends. We have the ones on this side (gestures to the right) who are smart, articulate, capable and sharp, and then we have the ones on that side (gestures to the left) that will make you laugh at a party harder than you ever did, but you know you shouldn't work with them. Do we all have the same rainbow of friends? Exactly. So let's hire the ones on this side (gestures to the right). And I would describe to people, I'd say, just be careful, because it'll be your Thanksgiving Day problem.
See, we hired lots and lots of family members, lots and lots of brother-in-laws, lots of family members. And I'd say, just remember, it'll be your Thanksgiving Day problem. And someone would say, What do you mean? I'd say, Well, if it doesn't work out with them, we're going to let them go. And then when you go to Thanksgiving and your sister's beating the heck out of you because they lost their job, it's not my Thanksgiving Day problem. So we hired people that we liked.
Now think about September 11. We all hired the people that we liked. We lost--we lost 26 sets of brothers. That means a mother lost two sons. We had a gentleman, lost two daughters. We employed 48 sets of brothers--so I have worked there with my brother, but since I wasn't killed on that--I'm not part of that list.
Why am I here? Remember I introduced you to my 15 year old son, Kyle? Well, he was five 10 years ago, and it was the first day of kindergarten, and my wife and I were taking him to his first day of kindergarten. And we were standing outside of the Horace Mann school that morning, taking that first day picture, and it went behind the ears, his backpack on. And that's where I was standing when the first plane hit.
So I went upstairs, and my phone was ringing, but I couldn't get through, and I was thinking to myself, Why are they bothering me? I mean, I'm just taking my son to his first day of school, why couldn't they leave me alone? And then an administrator came down and set a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
So like a moth to the flame, I got in my car and I went straight downtown, went to the door of the building and started grabbing people as they were coming out, trying to find someone who came out from one of my floors, because I figured if someone came out from one of my floors from that doorway--there were lots of doorways for the World Trade Center--then they'd be pouring out of all the others. And I had gotten to the 92nd floor before the loudest sound I'd ever heard happened.
And I had no idea what was happening--I'd never seen a video of this. I just headed straight downtown. It was the South Tower, the other tower, collapsing. North Tower, of course, if it collapses, I'm not here telling you this story. South Tower collapses.
I run to my right. And I'm the guy in a suit, sort of running, and I look over my shoulder and there's a tornado following me. And you've seen the video of that big black cloud. Well, I'm standing right there running from it, and I'm the guy in a suit, wearing a tie, running from the tornado--usually it doesn't work out very well for that guy. So I dove under a car, the world went black.
I thought for a while I was dead, because it was black and silent. Then I thought, maybe I'm blind, because I couldn't see. Maybe I'm deaf. Then I poked myself in the eyes, and I realized, Ah, that hurts, so I guess I'm alive. I just poked myself in the eyes. And so when I realized I could--I'll have to tell you--so I realized I was alive.
I stood up, but it's absolute black. So I started to run. You know what the first thing I did was right? I ran right into a parked car and went flying over it. So anyway, as the world cleared, I went uptown, and I walked uptown until people were clean, because I was covered in junk.
And I called my wife--I went up to--there was a line for pay phone, and there was this whole line of clean people at the pay phone, and I walked up to the front of the line, took the phone out of the woman's hand who was talking on the phone, and hung up the phone. And she turned to look at me with this great anger, like, how could I touch the phone? And then she looked at me like she was looking at a ghost, and she let me call my wife to tell her I was alive. And so my wife knows, for an hour and 20 minutes, what all those other people knew. What it felt like to not know if they were alive at all.
And so that night, we had a call amongst the survivors of Cantor Fitzgerald. I don't know who was on the phone. I still, to this day, don't know. Because there was no way to contact them. There was no way to connect them, because every person who worked in, let's say, our HR department had been killed. Everyone was gone. We had a phone call. The way we scheduled the phone call is we told the news media that there was a phone call--If you worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, call this number.
And we had a phone call. And the phone call was, What should we do? Because if 700 people died, or 800 people, that would be 20 funerals a day--everyday for 35 or 40 straight days. You couldn't physically, humanly possibly go to them all. Or if we were going to work, we'd have to work harder than we'd ever worked before.
And you couldn't--there was no way to lead through this. Couldn't tell my employees what to do. That was not a possibility. But what I was able to say, I think, was raging through all of them. I said, If we're going to go back to work, it sure as heck isn't for money. Because Lord knows, I really couldn't care less about going to work, and I couldn't care less about money. What I want to do is I want to crawl in bed, into a ball, and just hold my family as tight as I possibly can. But if we're going to go to work, there's only one reason we're going to work. And that is, we have to help our friends' families of those we lost.
And through lots of conversation and lots of talking, we ended up with unanimous decision of all those on the phone, that we were going to rebuild the company--try to have the company survive--for one reason and one reason only, and that was to help the families of those we lost.
And so at about four in the morning, so this is September 11, now rolling into September 12, at four in the morning--I couldn't sleep. I dozed off, I had horrible nightmares. So that was about that. So I decided, Nah, I won't sleep. That's okay. My wife suggested we needed a place to get together.
And so at four in the morning, we started calling our friends. And one of my friends who I went to high school with was running the Pierre Hotel, and he gave us the Pierre Hotel. And we set up a crisis center. If you think the government helps in any way, shape, and form--they don't. There's no rule book, there's no assistance. No one calls, no one helps. You do it on your own, or you don't do it at all.
So my wife suggests we have a crisis center, and so we have a place to get together again. We tell the news media, we have a crisis center. Come to the Pierre Hotel if you wish. The next day, at 12 noon, there were about 1500 people at the crisis center. And they were looking for information. Sadly, it was information I didn't really have. But I told them all, when I spoke to them, that I would tell them everything I knew, and I would tell them the truth. And then I asked them two things: that they don't yell at me, and they don't get mad at me. Because I was just going to tell them the way it was. And I told them that I had, as of yet, never heard of any single person who had been on the floor who got out alive. And that was painful for them to hear, but it was the truth. And I was not capable of creating anything other than what you'd call the raw truth, because I was as raw as I could be. I knew we had to take care of the families.
So for those of you know, my--and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later, but my mother died when I was in 11th grade, and my father was killed the first week I was at Haverford College. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So my extended family, they pulled out. We were three children: 20 year old sister, 18 year old me, 15 year old brother Gary. They thought we'd be sticky. My uncle thought if he reached in and he touched us and we came over for dinner, maybe we'd never leave. And so they chose not to invite us to dinner.
And so I knew what it was like when people pulled out. But here was my sister, who had me, my brother, and her. And the way I would describe my relationship with my sister is I did all the big things--I bought her a car. My brother Gary did all the little things--he went to dinner with her and took her to the movies. And so the loss of my brother, Gary, sent my sister into a very, very bad place.
And so I called her up and said, I need you to run--we're going to start a relief fund to take care of our families, and I need you to run it. And she thought I was crazy. But I convinced her that she had to do it because she was a part of me and our families needed--they needed her, and this is what she had to do.
And so on September 14, we got approval from the United States to form an emergency charity, a 501c3. On September 14, the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund was born. And I gave an interview to the New York Times, and I granted the interview to the New York Times under one condition that they publish the relief funds address that people could make donations. And I promised that every donation the relief fund ever received would go 100% to the families.
So we had two worlds going at the same time. We had the world of the families, and we had the world of business.
Just talk a minute for about the world of business. You all have a laptop or a phone with a with a password. So at the business, since we had this 93 experience, we--everyone has a password, and then their password would be shared with their coworkers--let's say five passwords. And then we would have the password repository, where all passwords were stored in case something happened to you. And then we had the off-site password repository under 2 World Trade Center. We were in 1 World Trade Center--and by the way, 2 World Trade Center was a good 15 minute walk away. All the people are gone. All the people you shared the passwords with, the password protections are gone, and the backup passwords. So you know what we did?
For the first 48 hours, Microsoft flew in 50 people, and we broke into our own systems. Cisco--we had a big Cisco system in our backup Technology Center. Cisco brought 20 18-wheelers of every piece of hardware known to mankind. They parked it as far as the eye could see. So if we asked for a piece of hardware, it was in truck 12, they took a dolly, they brought up truck 12, and they brought it in. So when you're picking on all these giant companies, I didn't ask them. I didn't call them. I didn't have the capacity to call and ask. They just sent people to do it. I mean, really, extraordinary.
My London office really did everything. They ran the whole business for us, because without them, we had nothing.
So we had the business crisis going on, and the family crisis going on. You've got to call all these families. I'll teach you something very quickly, which is, officially, there's the next of kin. Let's say there's a 30-year old gentleman who's been married three years--officially, his wife is this next of kin. If you don't call his mother, you haven't scored any points, because she would say something like she's had him for five years, but I've had him for 30. So I wrote 1700 condolence notes. I wrote them by hand. If you think they took three or four minutes each, if you did it three hours a day, it took you two months. Three hours a day. That's what I was doing instead of sleeping. You know, not sleeping is very helpful when you're having terrible nightmares. I'm not going to sleep--I'm going to make phone calls and write condolence notes all night long. That'll be the idea.
In our business--so in our backup data center, we lined up cots along the wall. And these were the employees who just were not at work yet, in the morning. Line up cots all along the wall. You slept for four hours, someone tapped you on the shoulder, you got up, someone else went and laid down on the cot. That's how it went. You wanted to see your family, your family came, you met them in the parking lot, you hung out with them for 45 minutes, went back inside. The extraordinary dedication of the people at the firm to rebuild the business, instantly, was remarkable.
Now, we had two businesses, one on Wall Street, stocks and bonds, and they acted differently. So we were sort of like the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ for bonds. We had been building an electronic system. It was kind of in its early stages. Now all my guys had been killed. Think of like the whole floor of the New York Stock Exchange getting wiped out. Would it go electronic? The answer was--for my company to survive, my clients had to decide they were going to go electronic--and they were going to go electronic now. Either the world was going to change and move forward at this minute, or we were done with that business.
Now, our competitors saw this as a great opportunity--in the bond business. They could not separate, in the bond business, humanity from opportunity. And so they decided to open the bond market of America on Thursday, September the 13th. Football games on Sunday the 18th were canceled. Football was canceled. But the bond market was going to open on the 13th, because nobody in the world gave a hoot. But, in that four hours a night sleeping on the cots, and all the rest--those superhuman people--had, when the market opened, on September 13, our computers flickered, and they came on. And so if our clients wanted to do business with us, they could do it electronically with us.
Now I had something else going on, which is--people malign banks all the time. Well, we had done a huge amount of business on September the 10th, and we had to pay for all of that. What we bought, what we'd sold. As it turns out, about $70bn worth our computers--we needed to buy and deliver out. So we had received a lot, but we hadn't yet delivered it out.
Now all our computers weren't working yet, and all our backup systems weren't working. So I had banks lending me $70bn. And on Monday, when the market opens, it's going to be a stock market crash. So the deal I made with the banks was they agreed to let me open for business, provided that at no time did my loan ever go up. So basically, if I was going to do more business, I had to figure out a way to get rid of the old stuff every time I did something new, because the company was a wreck. And if we did something new, I promise you, we wouldn't be able to receive it, and then sort of send it on willy nilly. We didn't have anybody really working for us. We had no idea what we were doing, frankly. So that was the balance. And so the fact that I had the banks agree to let us open for business is why I love them. And so we opened for business, and off we went.
So I went on television, because I had no salespeople, I had no way to tell anyone that we were actually in business, because we didn't employ anyone anymore. And so we went on television, and I told basically the story I've told up until now. And I started crying. Because, as it turns out, at that time when you said 658 to me, I couldn't not cry.
Now I'd been on television hundreds of times, and I promise you, when you're staring at a camera, the interviewer isn't in the room, you have a little thing in your ear, there's nothing sad about it. It's not even interesting. You're just staring at a blank camera. There's no one else there. There's no reason to cry. And I thought, of course I could keep it together. How could I not? But whenever the number 658 was said, I started to cry. And so we became well-known. We became well-known.
But we had to try to take care of our families. And so on September 17 when the New York Stock Exchange opened, we announced we'd open for business. So we had the electronic business, and the good part about the bond business is now that it was electronic, we couldn't really screw it up very much, because the computers were there and they'd say who the buyer was and who the seller was.
But over that weekend, we hired between 30--I can't remember about--but let's say between 30 and 50 people. Basically, we had this sort of conveyor belt of hiring. The head of my equities business had survived, fortunately, when he was playing golf that Tuesday. And so we'd have three people interview. One would get all the details. They'd see Phil Marber, who ran my equity business. He would interview them. And then they would come see me. And my job was to determine, Could they start on Monday? If they could start on Monday, and they were breathing, and we thought they knew what they were doing, they were in.
So we opened for business on Monday, in our stock business, equities. New York Stock Exchange opened, we opened for business. We have a rule: one trade per client. We wanted to make sure we couldn't screw it up with the banks or they would close the firm. One trade per client--only one trade per client because the company was stuck together with glue and bubble gum and string, and couldn't mess it up. And then, of course, something--in that division, by the way, we had 114 people in that division in New York before September 11, 108 were killed. We had six who survived, just to give you a sense. So one trade per client.
And I'm sitting there, and a client calls up, and we say, okay, look, only one trade per client. And the woman on the other end of the phone, who works for one of the biggest money managers in America, she says, No, no, you don't understand. Our investment committee got together this morning, we've decided we're doing all of our business with you. We said, No, no, no, you don't understand. We won't have anybody. We can't do it. We'll do a terrible job. You can't do it. She said, I don't have a choice. I was ordered to do this. If you don't do it, I'll lose my job. I'm sending you by fax everything we want to do. You need to take care of it. Do the best you can. We're okay with it. And hung up. And so we ended up being busy. The fact is, we had the busiest day of our firm ever, because our equity clients tried to save the firm.
And so I went home that night and I saw my wife, and she said, so what happened? I said, we've been killed with kindness. That we announced to the world that we were hungry, and everybody in the world reached out and took a little piece of bread and stuck it in our mouth. Because if--as it turns out, each time the loan went down, it couldn't go back up. So now the loan was $58bn, and we needed to process all this business on the 19th of September, and we were going to screw up tons of it, tons of it was going to get screwed up. If we couldn't get rid of the old stuff and bail the old stuff out faster, we were done.
And so I was at the bank, standing at the bank waiting to see what our number was, on the 19th of September. And. In that moment when it came up, came up 57 and some odd number--if you had seen a picture of me that day, you'd thought I just won the greatest lottery of all time. I was the happiest person ever, in the saddest time in my life, because now, our company was going to survive.
And we had, as a firm, decided that we were going to give 25% of our profits, and pay for 10 years of healthcare, for the families. But I couldn't announce it, because how could you say on the 13th of September that was your plan, and go out of business on the 17th? That's useless.
So now that we were going to survive--and that was on the 19th of September--I went back out on television, and I told Larry King that we were going to give 25% of our profits and pay for 10 years of health care of our 658 families. And then something I hadn't really anticipated happened.
The media decided that 25% of nothing is nothing. And there were stories about me in the news, including I was crying crocodile tears, faking it. Imagine you lose your brother, your best friend, everybody works for you, and you're faking it. Well, we decided I was no longer going to go out on television. We were just going to do what we said.
And I'll give you an example. So we had our memorial on October the first. Our first Memorial, which we have every year, in Central Park. About 5000 people had come, because remember 658 people have husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children and friends and cousins.
And my LA office--my Los Angeles Office of Equity salespeople was the best I had. They were incredible. They were huge producers of revenue. And they were spectacular. They could get a job anywhere! And we were a broken firm. Plus we were giving 25% of whatever we're going to make to the families. So they could easily go across the street. Not only make what they used to make, but get paid to go across the street and make more money. So they called me and said, We're going to close the office in LA, we're all flying in for the memorial. We’re going to close it the day before.
Now, that's very bad--one because they're closing the office for the day, and why they're all coming to see me--that can't be a good sign. And they said they needed to meet me before the memorial. And they came to my apartment. And all 16 standing in my living room. And my heart was leaping out of my chest, because if they said, Howard, we love you, but we're sorry, we're going to leave because we're not making--they probably were making 20% of what they used to make, and the prospects for the firm were bleak, at best. Survival was the idea, not profits.
So as I walked in the room, my chest was exploding, because I felt, if they left, it would be the beginning of the end of the firm. And again, something amazing happens. So I walk in the room, and they all surround me, and they said, We're never leaving. It still gets me. It's unbelievable. And they're all, by the way, they're all still here today. Incredible. So they stayed to take care of their friends' families.
So you have to realize Cantor Fitzgerald is built on the shoulders of not just me. It would be entirely incorrect to suggest otherwise. The men and women in my company are--they are extraordinary people, because they gave of themselves, in an extraordinary way, to help their friends' families.
So what we did next is we figured out we were going to be a much smaller company--that was clear. And we were going to survive. So companies like ours have capital in order to live--you've read a lot about that in the newspapers if you read that section of the paper--and I have to. But we decided how much we could live without at the company. And on October 22, we sent out $45mn to the families.
And since October the first, when the media started picking on us, till October 22, I was a pinata. There was probably two or three stories a day about me or the company, basically bashing us, trying to make it impossible for us to survive. And then something interesting happened on October 22--absolute silence. Because the media doesn't know what to do with someone who actually does what they say they're going to do, and does it faster and does it bigger. And so they completely left me alone starting on October 22. No more stories, no more words, no more nothing.
So where are we now? We had 960 employees in our New York office before September 11. We lost 658. That went down to 302. Then we had secretaries without bosses. We had divisions that we couldn't rebuild. Basically, if the boss was alive, we rebuilt the division. If the boss wasn't alive, I helped those people get jobs at other firms. We went down--on December 31, we had 105 people in New York. We now have just over 1800 people in New York, about 5000 globally. Our 25% commitment was $180mn to the families of those we lost. Of course, we took care of their healthcare for 10 years, as I said.
And each September 11, or the business day closest to it--like this year, it was on a weekend, so it was the next day--we donate not our profits for the day, but we donate our revenues--every dollar of business we do around the world. If a client wants to help us, they can do business with us, and we'll donate that to over 150 different charities all around the world, lots of children's charities, lots of medical research, but all around the world. And this year, we raised $12mn on September 12 for charity, and each and every penny goes out the door.
What's the nicest compliment I get these days? I hire the children of people who lost their lives who worked for us on September 11. They think that means we've worked so hard to have a great relationship with the widow or widower of that family, that they think highly enough of us that they would allow their children to come work for us. But think about the 22 or 23 year old. Never underestimate the strong opinions of a 22 or 23 year old. And so the fact that they're willing to come to work where their mother or father was killed is the greatest compliment that I have. And it is my objective, if any and all of them wish to come to work, we will find a place for them. Because this is their home. If they want to come work here, that will be fine with us.
So people ask me, how did you come to this? How did you come to think about things in this way? Where did it come from?
And I told you my--when my father was killed my first week of Haverford College, my family pulled out. And I didn't really understand it then, but as I lived my life, I understood what was wrong with that picture. And when September 11 happened, this was my chance to replay a different story. And I was not going to allow the families to feel that we pulled out. And we were going to be in, and we were going to be all in.
And the other part of that lesson was why I love Haverford so much. You see, I was at Haverford one week--one week. Not--so all of you here were at Haverford--not the six or seven weeks you've been here so far. Think back to your first, first, first week. Your first week. So that's when I talked about my dean, Donna Mancini. I saw Donna right after they told me my dad was was killed, and she helped me go home, in a fog. And another strange thing. And my sister was going to the University of Rhode Island--big, giant school--and they basically told her, if she couldn't pay, she should become a waitress. And Haverford called me and said, Your four years are free. And they weren't betting on, oh, Howard's a great guy, he's going to do great things, he's going to build a great gym for us someday.
I say it was more about them, because they didn't know me. It was what kind of human beings they are. And I didn't understand it then, but they taught me what it was like to be a human being. And so, the events of September 11 opened the door for me to express my humanity, how to be a human being.
And I would describe it this way: each of you in this room, in the course of your life, will have the opportunity to change the life of someone else. If you realize it, it's presented in front of you, and you take it. Now, if you miss it, that's okay. You won't feel bad, because like a blink of an eye, it will be gone, and it won't sit with you, and you won't say, Oh, I missed that opportunity. That's actually not the way it works. It's if you see it, and you grab it, you can change someone else's life--just as Haverford did it for me.
And I didn't know they did it for me until it was time for me to do it for someone else. So that's why I love Haverford, because they taught me a fundamental lesson that in a blink of an eye, I would have missed it. But there was no chance that I was going to miss my chance to be a human being.
So thank you all for coming and listening to me, and thank you for all of your support for Haverford College, because I clearly love the place. Thank you.
[Applause.]
Thank you. So, I do want to tell you just one other thing real quickly. So this building is called the Douglas B. Gardner Integrated Athletics Center. And Doug was one of my best friends at Haverford. And his wife Jennifer wrote a book, and it's called Where You Left Me. And this is a--for those of you who are close by, you can see, but there's a picture of Doug walking away holding his little two children--and she wrote a book, and it's extraordinary. It's a book about love, loss, and love again. And I think what what she does in the book that is different is that she shows how it's okay to love again, and bring the love that you had with your first husband with you, and that it's okay to have him live in your current life, and not have to close the door on the past as you go forward, because they didn't split for any reason other than something that wasn't Doug's fault. And so I think it's beautiful. And if you get a chance to read it, I think it's it's extraordinary. And she's an extraordinary woman. And you're in her building, so it's pretty good.
And then lastly, my sister also wrote a book. It's called An Unbroken Bond. And it's a story of what my sister, who ran the relief fund, and how she came from the edge of negativity. And I described that she was just in such a bad place, and how the families saved her life, and she saved theirs, and the crazy things she had to get through with the politics of New York just to do basic, fundamental things for the families. If you really want an insight into how the just lunacy of politics works, because she was just trying to list the names of our family together, and the politicians in New York didn't want to. So you'll find it--it would just be much more detail of what I talked about today, if you're interested--it's my sister's book. And of course, the proceeds for these books go to go to the relief fund. So this isn't an economic event, it's to take care of others.
So again, thank you all for spending the time with me. And as they said, We're giving this up to the volleyball team, but I'd be happy to, and it would be my pleasure, if we go next door to the to the Carrie Lutnick Center, which I was kind enough--for those of you who have been associated with Haverford for a long time know that that shed, which I call the shed, what other people call the field house, I don't know why, it's a shed. I knew we were going to get to build it when Tom called it the shed? I kept saying the shed, and one time accidentally at a board meeting, Tom Tritton said the shed, and I said, That's it! But it was dirt. And I remember I graduated in there, because it was a disgusting day like today. And we were inside, walking around with all the dirt. And of course, after you spent a couple hours in the field house, if you coughed, you got the dirt. So now it is beautiful, so don't worry about it, and I look forward to seeing you there.
And I'm happy to answer any questions. So please feel free, if you have something that you'd like to chat with me about, or ask me, it would be my great honor and privilege to say hello to you, because you're all here at Haverford, a place that I totally love. So thank you all you.
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Wrap-up
If you’ve got any thoughts, questions, or feedback, please drop me a line - I would love to chat! You can find me on twitter at @kevg1412 or my email at kevin@12mv2.com.
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