Friday, May 26, 2006

Rambling Memories Of A Lifetime of Adaptation And Learning

I had a completely wonderful childhood in spite of it occurring during the Great Depression. My father made a modest salary based on having a 10-week summer vacation when school was out. He was a teacher at the Allen-Stevenson School, a prestigious, private boys school in Manhattan. In those days, teachers at the school were expected to hold summer jobs approved by the school. Many of the younger teachers accepted jobs as camp counselors, an employment encouraged by the school. My father’s annual salary was sufficient for our needs.

To earn extra money, my father offered to take the young and energetic students out their parents Manhattan apartments for a full day. He called it The Saturday Club. For a fee, he would hire a bus and, on each Saturday during the school year, he took twenty to thirty, pre-adolescent, Allen Stevenson boys on tours of interesting places in and around New York, such as the Statue of Liberty, the, then new, Empire State building, the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Grand Central Station, and even West Point.

As soon as I was old enough, I was allowed to join the group. But in so doing, I had to adapt. For these boys were different than the boys from my neighborhood. They wore different clothes, they spoke differently, and, above all, as sons of very wealthy parents, they were, generally, very self assured. I adjusted as best I could to fit in, and was accepted by most of the boys. This was my first adaptation.

The second adaptation came during the last years of World War II, when my father retired from Allen-Stevenson and both my parents took war work at General Electric in Schenectady in upstate New York. My parents bought a farm outside the tiny village of Galway, a few miles west of Saratoga Springs. This move required a very large adjustment on my part. I had been attending The Scarborough School, a private school in Westchester County and was a typical teenage preppy. Oxford shirt with button-down collar, gray flannel slacks, navy-blue blazer, and rep-striped tie from Rogers Peet store in Manhattan. Now I was a country boy in jeans. All my classmates and friends were children of dairy farmers. Once again I adapted, fit in, and was accepted.

I believe that these painless adaptations during the most formative period of my youth were the foundation of my later successful international consulting career. For I learned to accept different peoples and their cultures simply as I found them without judgment or prejudice.

With this series of anecdotal postings, I intend to share what I learned from working from within different cultures.

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