Chase Global Training Class of 1970 Life Updates
On occasion of 50th anniversary reunion lunch in October 2019, updates on the last 10 years.
If you still want to contribute your update, please send (with photo) to news@chasealum.org. Click here for updates from the 40th reunion.
Ken Brown
Ten years ago, I was the "last man standing" at Chase from the original 6/70 Class in Global Credit Training. I stayed for four more years, retiring in July 2013. Immediately thereafter, I faced some severe back problems that took me years to resolve, but I am now back to normal, or as normal as one can expect at our age.My wife and I have lived in Berkeley Heights, NJ, for the past 30 years (since returning from our three years in the Bahamas) and have no plans to formally relocate, just hope to spend more time at the beach and travelling. I see several other local Chase alumni (Tom Mulligan, Steve Fullenkamp, Sushil Patel and, occasionally, Gerry Hillenbrand) for lunch on a regular basis.
My wife and I have been active in our local rescue squad, my focus being the banking/financial and fund-raising side. We've also gotten into genealogy, where I'm still trying to establish that my Carolina "Atkinson" ancestors were actually descendants of Atkinsons who landed in Jamestown in the 1610s. To stay healthy, I take long daily walks with our golden retriever and regularly work out at our local Y.
Laura Calhoun
Since retiring from BNY Mellon in 2009, I have been thoroughly enjoying life in New York City. I spend summers in the Hamptons and January in Naples, FL, and am working through my bucket list of world travel destinations. Next month will be Chile and Easter Island. Next up is a trip to explore human origins in South Africa. When in town, I am an enthusiastic fan of the Met Opera and NY Philharmonic and stay fit with tennis and yoga.
My years at Chase Paris made me a confirmed Francophile, and I visit the country often. Longtime Chase buddy Brigitte Mockli is now retired in Lyon, and we are enjoying exploring the region and its cuisine.
Ed Cooper
Ten years ago I was living in Hong Kong working on the sale of the AIG Consumer Finance businesses. The business world as I knew it at AIG fell apart in September 2008. After completing the sale of businesses in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and China at the end of 2009, my job was eliminated. There were few opportunities in the United States at that time, so I returned to Bangkok as a Director and CFO of Thailand’s largest residential real estate developer and manufacturer. Three months after we arrived, the military attacked political demonstrators in downtown Bangkok and killed 90 people. Many buildings were set on fire. This was not the Bangkok I knew when Chase sent me there in 1979. In 2014, I decided to retire, as the Thailand political situation was once again chaotic and dangerous. A week after Sandy and I left Bangkok, there was another military coup, and since then Thailand has been stable. If the coup had happened a few months earlier, I might have stayed another year.
Sandy and I returned home, sold our house, relocated to Ponte Vedra Beach, near Jacksonville, FL, and rentedan apartment in Manhattan so we could continue to enjoy all that the city offers and is unavailable where we live in Florida.
Our daughter lives in Seattle. It seems it was easier to see her when we lived in Asia than it does now from Jacksonville. Our son lives in Old Greenwich, CT, and we see him often when we are in New York City. He also enjoys visiting us in Ponte Vedra Beach for the golf at Sawgrass Country Club and for The Players Championship, where I have volunteered for several years.
We are making new friends and traveling to new locations–very different traveling when I no longer have business as part of the trip.
I am volunteering on a few boards and have lectured at the University of North Florida, and my golf game has improved.
Sandy and I look forward to many more years enjoying life, making new friends and reconnecting with old friends.
Vic Cordell
I retired from my second career as a professor and lastly as Director of Graduate Business Programs at San Francisco State University in 2006. My wife of 47 years, Karin, and I moved to Alameda, on the bay across from SF.In my first phase of retirement, I served on four not-for-profit boards: two small opera companies; a highly regarded, small experimental theater company, and an educational program for high school girls in which they spend a semester on a tall sailing ship cruising the Caribbean, learning maritime skills, crewing and ultimately captaining the ship, while also taking regular curriculum on board. Where was that option when we were young?
As the performing arts became more important to me, I began to review as an avocation–no pay, but great free tickets for two and many receptions and events as well as new social networks. I attend around 120 plays and operas and publish about 70 reviews per year which appear on both www.forallevents.com and www.berkshirefinearts.com. I am a voter for two different Bay Area “Tony-like” awards and a member of the
American Theatre Critics Association. We will be in NYC the first week of November attending an ATCA conference.
My other great diversion is travel, and we’ve consistently traveled 10-13 weeks per year since retirement, split between abroad and home. Internationally, we’ve visited the likes of Botswana and Bhutan and Bali as well as exotic spots like Italy and France. In fact, we’re on our way to a Bordeaux river cruise the day of the Chase alum reunion. Domestically, we always include Santa Fe for the summer opera (and much more) and Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’m an invited reviewer for both.
Bill Criss
I hesitate to add my past decade to such a distinguished group as CG’70 and attendees of the October 22 Chase Alumni festivity in New York. I retired from Chase in 2003 for the second time post the JPMorgan merger. I spent a banking career with Chase primarily in San Francisco but did brief tours with HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Fiduciary Trust International. I was active in the non-profit community in San Francisco and eventually survived all that and retired full time in December 2012. The past seven years have seen three grandchildren (global headquarters is now Tarrytown, NY, where my oldest son and grandchildren live). That is a full circle on the days at Pocantico. We also frequent Los Angeles, where my wife has family and my youngest son works. I get back to San Francisco and New York on occasion, and, to make the Los Angeles trips easier, have moved to La Quinta, CA, near Palm Springs. Unfortunately, I cannot get to New York on October 22 but have the highest regard for all the attendees and regret not having the opportunity to greet everyone in person.Alan Delsman
I left Chase Bank in 2001 and joined Deutsche Bank the same year, following in the footsteps of Dominique Clavel and Anand Srinivasan. I retired in mid-2018 from Deutsche Bank, where I worked in Credit(!!!), managing a group of Senior Credit Executives who covered approvals globally for the Investment Bank. Barbara, my wife of 47 years, and I continue to live in our house in Brooklyn Heights and our summer house in Greenport, NY. We enjoy being in the beach house in the summer, where I manage to have a respectable garden despite morning battles with deer. We also become much more popular with our four grandchildren.
Barbara has retired from running a not-for profit training program called The Hope Program and is now an active volunteer at CASA, an advocacy group for children in foster care. My son and his family live in Zurich, with him working in Private Wealth Management for Banque Internationale de Luxembourg. My daughter and her family live in Brooklyn Heights, and she works as an equity trader at Cowen.
As most of my banking career was spent in the Emerging Markets, particularly EEMEA and Latin America, I remain an active private investor in those regions, as well as a frequent traveler with Barbara. Of course, Zurich is also a place we visit frequently.
I have been on the Advisory Board of the Financial Economic Institute at Claremont McKenna College for over 10 years, and several years ago joined the Advisory Board for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, where I now serve as Chairman as well as serving on the Foundation Board. I mentor students in both places and sit in on classes when I am on campus. What’s interesting to me is that despite serving two very different sectors–i.e., a small, private liberal arts college of 1,300 students and the public University of Washington where the College of Arts and Science alone has 25,000 students–many of the challenges are the same.
Peter Dodds
In 2009, I retired from Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and returned to Charlestown, MA. Always a bit restless, I moved to Santa Fe, NM, where I volunteer for SCORE and, not able to accept retirement as a lifestyle, I joined Berkshire Hathaway as a realtor. I have two children living in Connecticut and Massachusetts and five grandchildren.
I will always view my quite short stay with Chase as the highlight of my career.
Jim Goulka
From my work as CEO of the National Technology Transfer Center, which marketed the intellectual property developed at all 10 NASA labs, I and my CTO left to start up a company to commercialize software licensed from NASA Ames. In 2009 we were in revenue and growing. At the same time, I was consulting for the U.S. Navy on business case analysis. Early in 2010 I joined the local angel investor group. At the end of that year, I was asked to lead the group. When sequestration killed our software business—cancelling our federal contracts and forced retiring 100% of our program managers—leading the angel group became a fulltime endeavor. We’ve grown from 25 to almost 100 members and have invested in 60 companies in 75 investment rounds. We invest in software, hardware, medical devices, diagnostics and capital-efficient green tech. I spend my days evaluating new ideas and working with very smart and capable people, all toward the end of making excellent investment decisions. I sit on a variety of companies’ boards, have testified to a subcommittee of Congress and repeatedly to the state legislature on issues relating to startup investing, and, for the last four years, have taught a session at the Arizona State University business school each semester. (I live in Mesa, AZ.)
In the small world department, one of our investments is in an Oregon company in which Tim McGinnis has also invested.
On a personal note, my wife, Ann, and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last month. We have two children and five grandchildren. They were all out here last weekend, which we spent at a resort with a water park, letting our inner 8-year-old selves cavort.
Peter Holzer (trainer)
We have recently moved from Princeton to Alexandria, VA, and are still settling in (418 Princess St., zip is 22314).Attached is a reasonable likeness of the current me.
I have been pretty much retired for the last 10 years. I’ve sat on the boards of an Oregon Museum (still on the finance committee), and Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. We split our time between the East Coast and Central Oregon. I see Tim and Martha McGinnis regularly during the summer as they are only a 35-minute drive away from our house.
Otherwise, we try to spend as much time as possible with our five grandkids.
Best to everybody at the reunion.
Cyrus K. Hui
Retired since 2005, moving from Beijing to Hong Kong, then across the border to Zhongshan, China, I travelled extensively throughout China, witnessing her incredible transformation from a "backward" country to what is today a most modern one.Having travelled to various Tibetan regions, I was most attracted to her people: simple, "backward" yet dedicated to her environment and religion.
Most recently in mid-June, I helped to organize a private tour to the headwaters of China’s three great rivers–Yangtse, Yellow and Lanchang–in Qinghai, at average 4,500 meters altitude, crossing rivers and pastures, now a "national park" with scattered herdsmen intermixing at times with wildlife–wild yak, wild ass, even wolves and most notably Tibetan antelopes, which were poached to near extinction some 30 years ago. We were most fortunate to have Zador, the leader of environmental protection of the last 30 years, whom I befriended accompanying our tour (see pix).
Blessed with good health as I am now approaching 80, I continue to travel worldwide. I just returned from a Canadian Rockies Tour with my high school classmates of 62 years.
I do keep up with a few Chase alumni: John Ward, Amy Braden, Chuck Adams, Bob Adams and, most recently when I was in Vancouver, Roger Griffin … plus others on Facebook, etc.
Hong Kong these days happens to be in a big mess, with protests and riots on a daily basis. We are keeping safe!
Cheers to all ex-Chasers of the old Chase!
Bob Hunter
I was the Training Officer in Global Credit under Tony T in 1970, having just returned from my own first line assignment in Brazil. I left Chase at the time of the merger in 1996. I was with S&P for three years before returning to London in 1999 to finish my banking career with Barclays Bank.I retired from Barclays Bank in 2003 while living in London. We returned to NYC and I became chairman of NY Downtown Hospital, which was suffering financial ruin following 2001. The hospital was merged with NY Presbyterian in 2009. We purchased a home in Sarasota, FL in 2006 and moved there fulltime in 2009. We now split our year between Sarasota in the cold months and western North Carolina in the warm months.
I have been on and still engage with a number of non-profit boards. I also indulge my love of art history by serving as a docent at the Ringling Museum of Art. I am a Guardian Ad Litem as well.
I play golf a couple of times each week, living out the illusion that playing more improves my performance.
I am 76 years old with some of the health problems common to men my age. I have four grown children and seven grandchildren.
My years at Chase remain the centerpiece of my professional life. Many friends. Many wonderful experiences.
Keith Kanaga
Katherine and I moved to New York’s Columbia County in 2010 after selling our New York City apartment. We built a contemporary house in Ghent, NY, where we lived for the next six years before moving to Hudson, NY.I was appointed to the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals and to the Board of Assessment Review. The Zoning Board hears applications for variances from the zoning ordinances, and the Board of Assessment Review hears appeals from property owners concerning the assessed value of their properties. Both positions gave me a look into the lives of town residents and some of the issues our rural community deals with.
I also became a board member, and Chair of the Audit Committee, of Hudson Opera House, Inc., a 501(c)(3) formed to restore a fantastic performance space in Hudson, NY. It was particularly gratifying to see the building completely restored and operational.
I also became actively involved in political party activity, first at the town and then the county level. I am now serving my third term as Chair, Columbia County Democratic Committee. Our committee is comprised of 100 active Democrats, many of them retirees, who bring a lot of energy and skills to improving our local governments and making lives better for all the county residents.
Katherine and I continue to enjoy travel, as we find ourselves returning to favorite places, whether the UK, Italy or Mexico.
David Kuhn
I retired this past August as a credit officer with Citizens Bank working out of Manchester, NH. I supported regional middle market and not-for-profit education/healthcare business units in New England. I left Chase in 1990, followed by stints with the BankBoston affiliate in Maine, KeyBank and then Citizens, which I joined in 2001. Some of my work colleagues were Chase credit-trained, although, given my relatively advanced age, all were from a more recent post-pits vintage! We live in Bedford, NH, and have two adult children and one granddaughter. We make frequent trips to Los Angeles, visiting said granddaughter and her parents. I’m on the board of a regional YMCA and volunteer monthly at a local soup kitchen.
Tom LaMonica
The past decade or so has brought a number of changes in my life and all for the better. After marrying my second wife, Randa, 13 years ago, we lived in Connecticut, where I was acting as Finance Director for two companies (one in California and one in Florida) owned by a Kuwaiti Sheikh who had been the Chairman for the Bank I managed in Kuwait. Three to four days twice monthly in each location kept the air miles and hotel points coming.My son, Mark, has been living in Sydney for the past six years, and thus we see each other infrequently. Ten years ago, after my wife was offered a job with Corning, Inc., we moved to Corning, NY. The Finger Lakes Region is gorgeous six months a year and less so the colder months. I continued my consulting and spent some time working with a local investment advisory generating and developing new business. After four years, we both made the decision to fully retire. We departed New York and headed south to Florida.
We have lived about 30 miles north of Palm Beach for six years in a condo overlooking the South Fork of the St. Lucie River. We joined a local country club. I kept busy for a while acting as Treasurer of my Condo Association; I exercise daily and have joined a local men’s discussion group. We travel often, averaging more than 10 countries annually. We will be traveling once gain to Asia in November.
Arjun K. Mathrani
Arjun is a Director of the Principal Financial Group. He has been Chair of the Audit Committee since 2007, a member of the Finance Committee since January 1, 2010, and a member of the Executive Committee since 2009.Joe Murphy
At our 40th Reunion luncheon in 2009 at Fraunces Tavern, I was experiencing the timelessness of retiring full time in 2007 from over 40 years in banking. Travel...time with our daughters...grandchildren...it was a storybook retirement. Then I found myself ‘un-retired’ by 2012, returning to what turned out to be three years of fulltime consulting with my former employer, Bank of America. And now in 2019 the door is reopening to return there. Consulting in retirement is a well-kept secret to connect us back to industry and give us a chance to mentor the next generation, all while getting paid!Retirement, travel, and technology have given me the time and the means to reconnect with old friends. CAA events, LinkedIn, Facebook and my old Rolodex have made it easier to find friends. Travel, whether across the world or on the Amtrak to NYC, have made it easier to reconnect in person. It has been particularly meaningful to find old prep school classmates who have become a renewed source of friendship and counsel. It’s difficult to kid a guy who spent high school years together. (cont.)
2020 will be a year of 50th anniversaries–college graduation, start of banking career and our golden wedding celebration.
Dona and I continue to live in Berwyn, west of Philadelphia. Our three daughters and four grandchildren live nearby, enhancing our daily lives with interaction. Large multigenerational family dinners hosted by our daughters are the highlight of our week. Retirement has given us the gift of time to travel: we have spent the last 15+ winters in Cave Creek, Arizona. with lots of friends and family visiting us for daily hikes in the Desert. We have also discovered cruising, particularly on a newfound option of a transoceanic cruise – sometimes it is better to take the longer route and slow down a little.
Alban Schuele
Until about four years ago, my wife, Pinky, and I plus an ever-present dog split our time between our homes in Crested Butte, CO, and Scottsdale, AZ. With children and grandchildren in New York City and in California, plus our love for frequent travel, we decided then to ‘downsize’ to just the one home in Scottsdale.During those past 10 years I’ve kept myself fairly busy with various kinds of personally satisfying activities.
In Crested Butte, I was very involved in various Board committees of the Crested Butte Music Festival. But it left me with enough time to ski about 60 days each winter and to be out and around those stunning mountains hiking or mountain biking in the summer.
In Scottsdale, I volunteered as a van driver for the Foothills Caring Corps in Carefree, AZ, providing transportation to homebound, mostly elderly, people. I also taught classes for Junior Achievement at a Middle School in Phoenix for several years.
For the last four years I was a member of the Arizona State University Executive Connection Program, whose members coach and mentor full-time MBA students at its W.P Carey School of Business. It was a challenging and very satisfying experience I would not have wanted to miss.
Both Pinky and I enjoy good health, and we play tennis about three times a week and try to get in a round of golf about once a week. I ride my mountain bike with some other ‘oldies’ about twice a week in this beautiful desert out here. We still love to go skiing, but it’s now only a few days at a time here or there.
If any of you ever find your way out here, please give me a shout and we’ll reminisce face-to-face. Would be fun, I’m sure.
Paul Simpson
I have been living in Fort Lauderdale since 2001. Since my retirement from Chase, I have developed an active consulting / coaching practice to support business owners, entrepreneurs and senior executives. During much of that time I have been affiliated with a business that provides a range of services to independent pharmacy owners. I have assisted over 600 of them in learning how to develop a successful company covering areas including leadership, financial management, management systems, marketing strategy and workflow. My goal is to help my clients create a company that works so they don’t have to. I continue to work with clients in most states across the country.I was one of seven organizing directors who created a new community bank in south east Florida. We were the last ones to get a state charter before the bottom fell out. The bank became successful in spite of the economy and we sold our stock for a nice gain.
About seven years ago I was elected to the board of the second largest life plan community in Florida. Since then I have had a number of committee assignments as well as serving as treasurer and vice chairman. I have held the position of chairman for the past four years and was chosen by Leading Age to receive its award of Trustee of the Year in 2016. We are proud of the fact that the organization has a bond rating of A-, which is rare for enterprises in this industry.
During much of the past ten years I was an active member in a choir. In 2015 we were invited to perform a holiday concert with the Symphony of the Americas in the Performing Arts Center.
I am currently in the process of updating my open water SCUBA diving certification.
Ted Stevens (trainer)
My story is pretty simple.
After leaving Chase in 1979, I went to Fidelity Bank in Philadelphia, my hometown, to run a trade finance division. Learned a lot about the ins and outs of trade. Enjoyed that, but wanted to change focus and get into the securities industry. Lucky for me, I joined BlackRock Inc. in 1989 during its early formative years. As an example, when I joined BLK had $22 billion in AUM.
As I write that, it still amazes me what I was fortunate enough to witness. I was something like the 64th employee in the firm, which at that time had a single corporate account, the rest being mortgages, with which the firm’s founders had been heavily involved. During my time at BLK, I was an analyst and PM in a variety of markets, including ABS and emerging markets as well as mainstream corporate credit.
Can’t begin to tell how much joy and education I got as an early player in both markets; fortunate that brighter, more experienced players were to come later on. At the end of my time at the firm, I went back to my beginnings as group credit officer for front-end fixed income credit. A more wonderful time I could not imagine. The only thing I don’t miss was the daily train ride to and from NYC. Retired six months ago.
I have been married for 48 years to a wonderful woman I met on the Upper East Side when in global credit. We have two daughters and six grandchildren. I have truly been blessed.
Barry Sullivan
My past 10 years have been spent entirely and happily in retirement as I left Armstrong World Industries as VP andTreasurer in 2008. My wife, Betty, and I spend the colder half the year in our home in Lititz, PA (just North of Lancaster), and the warmer, nicer half in Franklin, NY, at our “summer home”, a former dairy farm. Our life in Lititz seems to revolve around our stable of doctors, dentists and specialists, as well as gym time and other exercise. Time at the farm as always is more active, tending to a 140-year-old farmhouse and an older barn, mowing lawns, brush hogging meadows and trails, gathering firewood in the woods and splitting the wood, and much gardening (both floral and vegetable). Fly fishing for trout in our creek and bass in our ponds is a pleasant sideline, as is weekly yoga.
Travel and family gatherings are our other primary activities. France and the UK were our favored European destinations. We travel at least once a year to the Caribbean (St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, St. Lucia, Barbados, U.S. Virgins, etc.), with our favorite spot Palm Island in the Grenadines.
The highlight of family related travel was in late 2017, as Betty and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in Boulder, CO, with our two sons, Scott and David, their lovely wives and our four grandkids. Our farm is also a great place for frequent family get-togethers. A holiday family gathering is planned for December in Lititz.
My health remains good but not without “age-appropriate” issues: bladder cancer (successfully surgically removed with no recurrence) and more recently cardiac ablation, also successful, to deal with occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation. Prostate issues have also been recently addressed.
Rick Trepp
After leaving Chase, I spent 40 years in the world of structured finance, founding, building and selling several “Fintech” companies.For the last 10 years I have been working (I forgot to retire), volunteering, traveling and (most importantly) spending time with family.
During these 10 years, I have founded and am building with one of my sons (the other is an emergency medicine physician at Columbia Presbyterian) two firms in the world of Commercial Real Estate technology (a combination of Fintech and CREtech in today’s parlance), in order to complete a vision I had many years ago. My free time is spent playing squash, hiking and rebuilding old wooden sail boats.
I sit on several not-for-profit boards, including the National Scholastic Chess Foundation and Avenues for Justice ( a very successful alternative to incarceration program in NYC, which I actually got involved with as a result of the Chase mentoring program over 40 years ago).
The most fun comes from a growing family with Karen, my wife of 50+ years, and our two sons and their families, each with two sons who are sponges for learning and all of whom live within two miles of us.