I am a career-long non-profiteer and following two years’ active duty in the US Army, I started my career in 1956 in Paterson NJ, as a public relations scut for the local Community Chest. I really wanted to be a reporter, so I signed on as a stringer for both the Paterson Evening News and the Paterson Morning Call. Both newsrooms were populated largely by near alcoholics and gruff career failures. There were just a few older guys on the up elevator. Most were going down, literally. To me, those two dailies were an inauspicious start for a Pulitzer Prize-destined journalist. 
 
After a mercifully short stint, I went to the Greater New York Fund, now United Way of New York, and then, in 1964, to my final career resting place at The Oram Group, which I bought from Harold L. Oram in 1978. That’s another story. But to lift the veil just a bit, when I washed up there, among a fluctuating staff of maybe fifteen people, the two top execs were women. One — who was over 100 when she passed a few years ago — was married to a British novelist who fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, wrote about it, and it was all he ever talked about; the other was an unassuming, courageous Vassar alumna who schlepped her Jewish husband out of Nazi Germany just in time; among the others were two African Americans (one who was part Cherokee), a couple of odd duck Mensa members and assorted unpaid hangers-on who needed a desk, a phone and gainful employment. 
 
Two men influenced my professional development profoundly: Lee Tracy was executive director of the Paterson Community Chest; the other was Harold. These two guys were just a point or two off brilliant; they were anti-establishment visionaries, gifted writers and accomplished daytime drinkers. I learned more from them lightly inebriated (or worse) than from anyone else sober. Lee was tossed out of town after offending what passed for enlightened corporate leaders.   
 
But before he left Lee made sure to take me to lunch in New York where I met the head of the Fund, another two-martinis-at-lunch character and busy chaser of women in the office. With neither of these gentlemen did I ever submit a resume (and I still don’t have one). I had heard of the Oram firm because it was in the news occasionally. Then I answered a blind ad in the NY Times and in a two-hour interview Harold Oram explained a client situation, and then ask me to write what he described as an “appreciation”. He offered me an assignment almost immediately, on site, in Fulton MO as a fundraiser at Westminster College. Its claim to fame was as the forum for Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. I declined. 
 
Some months later, he invited me to work in NY as the number two man on a large bricks-and-mortar campaign for Hampton Institute (now University, an eminent HBCU.) The putative number one was the former CIA station chief in Hong Kong, ex-chaplain to the Flying Tigers and a Lutheran minister, pushed out of the government in Senator McCarthy’s red hunt. Because he didn’t show up for several weeks, I was by then firmly ensconced as the lead guy and wouldn’t budge. He infarcted a few years later over his lawn mower; he wouldn’t buy a gas-powered one.   
 
Harold was a World Federalist, an anti-Stalinist socialist, and not much of a businessman. Making money was not a driver. Yet he built the company as the first to undertake large direct mail campaigns for leftist and liberal causes like the ACLU and the NAACP. Each afternoon after 5pm, anyone who was around could smoke whatever they brought and drink Harold’s Dewars in his large, crappy office with a half-keys-worked-half-keys-didn’t sprung typewriter and a few apparently abandoned leather chairs with the horsehair falling out — to yak about clients, people, world affairs, global and US politics, race and racism — and anything else on which they wished to discourse. It was far better than any grad school seminar I ever sat in. 
 
When I took over in 1978, I gently pushed out the moochers and shrunk the compassionate payroll. I kept as much of the old company as I could, but also realized there was much more we could do. The outside directors who banked the purchase, and I, wanted more strategy and a plan for growth. I met many rich trustees and major donors along the way. I was often asked for advice about gift-making and philanthropy, and one day in 2013, after a nice Saturday brunch, one of them said “you ought to make this a business.” On the Monday morning following I incorporated Family Foundation Management Counsel. Unfortunately, not much came of it. I got in too late and didn’t spend enough to market it. Nonetheless, I am glad I did it. I had a few clients over a decade, made many more friends, and had some great food.