Where We Belong (20 page)

When Lindley DeGarmo was a boy, he wanted to become a United States senator or maybe even the president. An avid reader, Lindley enriched his daydreams with every turn of the page. He devoured biographies about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy. Lindley imagined how he too would one day do great things in Washington, DC. What he never dreamed was that loss would devastate him, twice, by the time he turned thirteen years old.

Lindley was born in Pine Plains, New York, a small town one hundred miles directly north of New York City. His parents, Lindley and Elsie, met at the local high school, where he worked as a math teacher, she as a nurse. Before both were thirty, the couple was raising four children: Lindley was the oldest at six, followed by his four- and two-year-old brothers, Mark and Todd, and newborn sister, Susan. The family and most of their neighbors attended one of the community’s four churches. The DeGarmos worshipped at United Methodist, where the kids’ Sunday school classmates were also friends from school. Lindley enjoyed learning Bible stories and singing in the children’s choir.

“It never occurred to me not to believe in God when I was that age,” says Lindley. “It was just sort of part of the fabric of the world at that age.”

Lindley’s dad had grown up on a farm in upstate New York and wanted his children to experience the fun of watching things grow, as well as the work that goes into successful gardening.

“There was always a good hour of pulling weeds,” Lindley jokingly grumbles.

His father planted an extensive vegetable garden in the backyard: peas, string beans, squash, tomatoes, corn, and eggplant. Every fall, young Lindley would enter potential prizewinners in competitions at the local agricultural fair.

“I won first place from time to time,” he recalls, and jokes, “I think they were generous with the ribbons.”

Pine Plains was the perfect launching point to visit relatives on both sides of the family. His mother’s extended family lived two and a half hours south in Long Island, his father’s two hours north in Schuylerville. Summers always meant a road trip to the DeGarmo family farm. From the time he was five, Lindley spent anywhere from two weeks to a month at the farm, playing with cousins and helping his uncle with daily chores.

“We’d go out on the hay wagons and catch bales and pile them up,” he describes, “and then take the wagons back to the barn and unload the bales. My uncle had a herd of Guernsey cows and those had to be milked twice a day.”

Sometimes, only Lindley and his father visited the farm. They fished for bluegills and sunfish in a meandering creek that ran beside a series of pastures, serving as both a watering hole and boundary for the dairy cows.

“I can remember a number of trips we would take. The two of us drove there before the New York State Thruway,” he says, “so it was a long drive up through country roads to get there. I remember ours being a close relationship.”

Tragically, in 1959, Lindley’s dad was diagnosed with cancer. The cells were discovered quite late and had metastasized. A year later, he died at age thirty-one, leaving behind his wife, four small children, and no life insurance. Lindley, age seven, had abruptly lost his beloved father—and his childhood.

Lindley and his father, Schuylerville, New York, 1955
(Courtesy of Lindley DeGarmo)

“I think it made me more introverted than I would have been,” he says. “I developed a certain chronic depression. As the oldest kid, I think early on I felt that I now had to be the man of the family, and that tended to make me a little more serious, more contemplative.”

A widow with seven-, five-, three-, and one-year-olds, Elsie rejoined the workforce as a school guidance counselor. Housekeepers doubled as babysitters for the kids. Lindley says that, as a child, even with the stress of adjustment following his father’s death, he never felt that a dark cloud had descended on the house; if it had, it was hovering behind a closed door.

“My mother was, and still is, a stiff-upper-lip type of person, and I think her way of coping with all that was to be strong. I don’t know what her private grief was, but we never saw a lot of it,” he explains. “I think the sentiment at that time was that you protect the kids from a lot of it, so for example, we didn’t go to the funeral. I’ve spoken to my mother about that since, and we sort of agree that if we had it to do over we’d have done that part differently.”

Within eighteen months, Elsie began dating Jim Smith, a business education teacher in the high school where they both worked. He was seven years her junior and had had a difficult childhood of his own. He was born to young, absentee parents and ultimately had to move in with his aunt and uncle. He also suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was in remission when he met Elsie. Now, at twenty-seven, he was dating a woman with children ranging from eight to two years old. Lindley was torn between wanting a father figure and feeling that Jim was a threat to their reestablished family.

“I had felt like the man of the family and then suddenly, obviously, I never really was,” Lindley explains. “It became more obvious with a man around, and then more so when he started to want to exercise some discipline. He had been in the army and always wore a crew cut, and he was one of these guys who kept his shoes immaculately shined, so he had a side to him that was”—Lindley pauses—“ ‘macho’ is probably too strong of a word—but something like that, and so we butted heads to a certain extent.”

Elsie and Jim married barely a year after they met, in November 1962, on her thirty-fourth birthday. She gave birth to a son the next year. Baby Jim made seven, and the family was on a razor-thin budget. Elsie gave the kids haircuts and made many of their clothes. Jim took a higher-paying job as a professor at a business college an hour away in Albany.

“You just didn’t count on very much,” says Lindley.

Along with household chores (they kept Dad’s garden going), Lindley was a busy eight-year-old working on his own. He mowed lawns, gardened for neighbors, and sold vegetables in a farmers’ market he and a friend set up in a rented garage. He also had a knack for door-to-door sales.

“I sent away for Christmas cards to sell. Wallace Brown was the name of the company. You could either take money, or for so many boxes sold you’d get a prize. So I worked all summer and I got myself a three-speed bike. The nice thing about living in a small town was you could easily go door to door.”

The family’s income stream was intermittently dammed up by Jim’s illness, which would advance and then retreat. When the Hodgkin’s lymphoma was so severe that Jim couldn’t work, Elsie took jobs as a private-duty nurse. By 1966, four years into the marriage, Elsie was also serving as nurse to her very sick husband.

“I’m not sure I was a particularly sensitive thirteen-year-old,” Lindley recalls of that year. “My stepfather hated hospitals, where he had spent so much time, and toward the end of his life, I guess he had made it clear to my mom that he would prefer to die at home. There were a few months where he was basically bedridden and she was taking care of him and administering morphine and those sorts of things. I can remember one night having to help her to move him in the bed. He was quite ill at that point, and I just couldn’t wait to get done with that and leave the house and go do something with my friends. I’ve often looked back at that and thought,
Boy, you just were really doing everything you could to get out of there
. It was not a comfortable environment.”

For Lindley, there were few places to find comfort. Mom was exhausted, loss was waiting to pounce yet again, and money was scarce.

“I remember during the last Christmas that he was alive, neighbors and people from the church came by with food and, ‘Here’s a little something for the kids.’ It was pretty hand-to-mouth there for a while.”

Jim died in March 1967. At thirteen, Lindley experienced death for the second time in seven years.

“I think I went into some sort of emotional denial for a while,” Lindley says. “You go through it once, and here it is again.”

What would the future hold for Lindley and how much control did he have over the journey? In the many biographies he’d read about learned men who’d made a difference in the world, attending preparatory school was a common bond among the young future leaders. Lindley spoke with his school guidance counselor and mother about leaving Pine Plains’s small public school system for a more rigorous education.

In September 1967, six months after his stepfather died, Lindley enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in Western Massachusetts. A scholarship paid for all but one hundred dollars of the tuition.

Elsie, too, had taken steps to better her and her family’s future, based on a recommendation from her husband. Before he died, knowing his illness was fatal, Jim made Elsie promise to give book sales a try. For about a year before his death, Jim earned extra money selling World Book Encyclopedias. He knew his wife’s exceptional work ethic, strong communication skills, and faith in God’s plan would take her far. He was right.

“In the months after Jim died,” Lindley explains, “she got going with that and she had phenomenal success. He died in March, and by that summer she won the award for top sales in the entire country.”

In the fall of Lindley’s freshman year at NMH, his mom embarked on a several-week tour of Europe, the prize for her sales accomplishments. Elsie continued to rise through the ranks at World Book and served as a trainer at the home office in Chicago. She lived and trained in Chicago for a year, and also flew around the country giving motivational speeches to the sales force. During that year, Lindley’s younger brothers and sister lived with their grandparents in Kissimmee, Florida.

“We never became rich,” Lindley says, “but the financial situation eased considerably because of that.”

By then, Lindley and his brother Mark were both enrolled in NMH. World Book requested that Elsie live permanently in Chicago and work in senior management. She declined, not wanting to uproot the family yet again. They stayed in Pine Plains and Elsie commuted to Westchester County, where World Book had a branch organization. Several days during the week she stayed overnight in Yonkers; once again, housekeepers cared for Lindley’s siblings.

“Family life with us,” he says, “was never very ordinary.”

NMH proved to be a good experience for Lindley and an effective launching pad for his academic goals. In September 1971, Lindley enrolled in Princeton University in New Jersey. He paid the tuition with financial aid, contributions by Elsie, and student loans. He also worked twenty hours per week in food services throughout college.

“I was on the hot line as a freshman, and then I got a job in the faculty club and became a bartender and catered a lot of special events. In those days I had long hair and a goatee and looked very French, so they put me in a chef’s hat and I would do the flambéed desserts. Cherries jubilee,” he says with a laugh. “Those were the days.”

In 1974, during his junior year at Princeton, Lindley took a leave to work in Washington, DC, as a personnel clerk for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. When he returned to school, he also began coursework for a master’s degree in public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During his summer break in 1976, Lindley worked as an economist intern at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in DC.

By summer 1977, Lindley was ready for the real world, armed with the right degrees and some on-the-job experience. In August, he moved to New York City to work for the Exxon Corporation.

“I worked as a financial analyst in the treasurer’s department, one of about a dozen mostly MBAs who were in that year’s hiring class. I remember those early days as being quite exhilarating,” he says. “I was young, well paid, living on my own in the greatest city in the world, with friends all around, and a challenging new professional world opened up before me.”

Lindley recognized right away at Exxon that his college studies had prepared him more for economics than finance. He enrolled in night classes at the Graduate School of Business at New York University (now NYU Stern) and received an advanced professional certificate in finance in 1979.

After two years of work with Exxon in New York City, Lindley was moved to Houston, Texas, to work for one of its subsidiaries, Esso Eastern Inc., as a senior staff financial analyst. Two years later, there was yet another move. In 1982, the company relocated Lindley to Tokyo, Japan, to work as an assistant manager in Esso’s finance and planning department. His next move, two years later, would allow him to put down some roots back in the States.

In June 1984, Lindley moved back to New York City to work for Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank. He was hired as a vice president in the corporate finance department. The head of the company was John Gutfreund, a take-no-prisoners leader who was dubbed in a 1985
BusinessWeek
magazine article “the King of Wall Street.” The high-stakes pressure of investment banking was both enticing and exhausting for those who chose to work in the field. Lindley discovered early on that he could calm and center himself by sharing in an hour of worship at First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village, just a block from his apartment.