Thanks to LinkedIn, I’ve heard from two more friends from LaSalle. My very first college roommate, Dennis O’Dowd, sent me a hilarious letter. “I was just using you as an example the other day. My mother sent me an email which detailed all of Obama‘s past foreign and/or suspicious associations and how this proved he is someone who can’t be trusted. I responded with a list of my past associates to show how anyone can be made to look suspicious if shaded the wrong way. You were included in my list because my parents were convinced you were a campus radical (this based on the fact that when they dropped me of at the dorms on my first day at LaSalle they saw you had long hair, wore an army hat, and your suitcase was an army duffel bag.) So, I was able to show that you are now an upstanding member of the establishment and a bestselling author. Probably won’t make any difference to my mother . . .Of course it didn’t help that one of the other examples I used was Phil Leonetti, a high school classmate I was friendly with. He later gained fame as ‘Crazy Phil’ Leonetti working as a hit man for his uncle, Little Nicky Scarfo of the Atlantic City mob.” Dennis has had an interesting career in business, during the course of which he spent eleven years living in Singapore, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. He and his wife have three kids and now live in Havertown, Pennsylvania. I also heard from Sallyanne Harper, who was a very good friend of Ginny’s and mine. Her husband Francis Nathans was also a good friend, and they now live in Virginia. Sallyanne has a major job with the government–she’s like the COO of the GAO, or something like that–a title so exalted that it has no words, only letters–and she’s hard at work on the bailout and bank liquidity issues. Sallyanne was kind enough to mention one of our teachers, John Grady, the head of La Salle’s Honors Program, and the man who recruited us to La Salle, who died this summer. “I wanted to pass on to you how very proud he was of you. I saw him whenever I went to La Salle and he always mentioned your latest publication and how wonderful he thought it was. He frequently used you as a positive example of a LaSalle honors program graduate when discussing the honors program.” What a nice thought. And that’s me–something between a role model and mobster-like. It was great to hear from Dennis and Sallyanne.
