John D. Spooner - No One Ever Told Us That: Money and Life Letters to My Grandchildren

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Copyright 2012 by John D. Spooner

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ISBN 978-1-4555-1156-3

The Pheasant-Lined Vest of Charlie Freeman:
A Novel of Wall Street (1967)

Three Cheers for War in General:
A Novel of the Army Reserve (1968)

Class (1973)

The King of Terrors (1975)

The Foursome (1993)

Confessions of a Stockbroker (1972)

Smart People: A Users Guide to Experts (1979)

Sex and Money: Behind the Scenes with the
Big-Time Brokers (1985)

A Book for Boston (1980)

Do You Want to Make Money or Would You
Rather Fool Around? (1999)

For my grandchildren:

Alyssa, Wesley, Marlo, Teague, and Gala.

And above all, for Mimi,
the founder of the feast.

Grandchildren:

All life is relationships. On that score, several extraordinary people who truly get it offered me wisdom and encouragement through the writing of this book. In no special order they are: Peggy Hogan and Steve Hill, Louie Howland, Bill Phillips, Bill Whitworth, Scott Abell, Peter Flaherty, Dwight Crane, David Tobias, Joe ODonnell, Lay Lee Ong, and my editorial right arm, Yvonne Russell.

And as Ive told you, Alyssa and Wesley, one of the keys to business success is closing the deal. Heres a special toast to my agent, John Taylor Ike Williams, and my editor, Rick Wolff.

I see dozens of young people every year, most of them eager to have careers in finance or in journalism. But in the last several years, Im increasingly seeing college graduates having problems getting any job or finding new ones after being let go from where they started. All of these graduates have been eager for personal stories about being in the business trenches over the last fifty years. They particularly liked tales of problems, bumps in the road, bear markets, political missteps, and how people reacted to the tough stuff. So this book is not just for my grandchildren about to emerge into a challenging adult world. Its for all of you children and grandchildren, with too few practical mentors, who can all use some advice from someone with lots of bruises, someone still standing and still up for the game.

John D. Spooner

Winter 2011

I know its old-fashioned, but I love letters. I love to write them and receive them. I enjoy the quality of the stationery and the hardness of fine card stock. And, as in many things in life, I enjoy the anticipation; whats in the note or letter? And I think more weight is given to something handwritten. Often, the real letters are saved as a memory of something special.

When I was sent out to summer camp at age nine, I was ordered by my father to write home. Not just I played baseball or went swimming; send comic books, he said. I want letters of substance: what youre seeing, what youre feeling, what your new friends are like. My father was tough and demanded recognition that what I received was never to be taken for granted.

This discipline continued when I went to college, when I first visited Europe, when I was in the Army Medical Corps stationed in San Antonio. Often it was a real pain in the neck to write, another chore like taking out the trash or shoveling the snow off the driveway. My father never wrote to me. It was a one-way street because, with him, I was continually being tested. He made his philosophical points verbally, peppering me from childhood on with his observations on life. Here are a few: Life is work, whether you want to hear it or not. And Life is hard, punctuated by moments of brilliance, Marry funny, The paths of glory lead but to the grave (from the poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Gray), If you only read three books in your life, read War and Peace, Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and James T. Farrells Studs Lonigan.

In my freshman year in college my father gave me a copy of Studs Lonigan, which tracks the childhood and young manhood of a kid from the mean streets of Chicago in the 1930s. It was a raw slice of life, profane, and in the view of many critics obscene. I liked it a lot and gave my copy to my girlfriend at the time. When her father found out she was reading it and that I had given it to her, I was banned from his house. He actually said, That boy will never darken my door again. I really like old-fashioned. But the father and daughter flunked the marry funny principle. And that was the end of that.

My mother wrote me letters when I went to camp, to college, and to the army. She was prepared for the task because she had kept a daily diary from age ten to practically until she married my father. In the 1920s, as a teenager, chronicling her adolescent years, every four or five pages she would say, Fell off the roof today. What a bore. And again, Fell off the roof. Headache and tummy ache will not stop me from going to the Tea Dance at the Copley. Falling off the roof was shorthand for having her period. She wrote me opinionated, personal, bitchy observations, sprinkled with warnings as well: Dont follow the crowd wherever they go, they always wear the worst clothes, like brittle corduroys. Avoid anyone who, when they walk, the noise is swish, swish.