The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Read online

  His time in public school offered different lessons—mainly how education could fail those who wanted more than rote learning. For years, some of the town regulars in Medford mumbled angrily about the way the billionaire Mike Bloomberg would describe his time at Medford High. The building housing Medford’s high school in that era was a grim-looking place, dark and institutional. The lessons were keyed to the average learner, and Bloomberg admitted that he was “totally bored until my senior year.”35 That was when he took two honors courses—one in history and the other in literature. If Mike is barely recalled by most of his Medford classmates, his colleagues in the honors classes remember him well, especially because of one telling incident.

  “Those of us who did well followed the teachers, did everything they said,” said Dorothy Rubin Schepps, a classmate in the honors programs. “Michael riled the teachers.”36

  Schepps and others remembered that Miss Kathleen Sharkey, who ran the literature honors class with an iron will, required a senior thesis. When the students turned in their first drafts, they waited anxiously for a verdict from the teacher famous for terrorizing even the toughest teenagers in her class.

  The prim and straitlaced Miss Sharkey could be seen coming down the rows handing back papers and saying, “Good job, Miss Rubin, good job, Miss Davis.” Then she got to Mike Bloomberg. She stopped, frowned, and threw his draft onto his desk. “I’m not even going to read this,” she announced to a stunned class. Young Bloomberg was shaken by the encounter, his mother later told friends. He had planned to be provocative, not publicly humiliated.

  Bloomberg’s paper for Miss Sharkey described a widespread conspiracy theory in the 1950s that President Roosevelt knew the Japanese were about to bomb Pearl Harbor. FDR also knew war was inevitable and that it could help pull the country into World War II and out of the Depression. The theory was circulated for years by Roosevelt’s enemies, even though historians of the era have repeatedly argued that the president was caught off guard by the Japanese attack. Miss Sharkey was a fan of the mighty Roosevelt, and she would not hear of such calumny. Or even debate it.

  “Miss Sharkey, she was so tough. I broke my hand before midterm exam and she made me write left-handed,” said the Reverend Richard Black, a retired Methodist minister. That blowup over Roosevelt had to happen to Bloomberg, Black said. “You get two edgy people in a room and you get edges.”37

  Bloomberg does not remember being humiliated by Miss Sharkey’s furious rejection of his work. He simply recalls his plan B. He passed the rejected paper over to the honors history class, where the teacher used it to create a full and exhilarating discussion of Roosevelt and the war. Other students in that class believe that he turned young Bloomberg around on Roosevelt in a way that Miss Sharkey could not.

  Officially, in the Medford High yearbooks, Bloomberg barely rates a mention. He was president of the slide rule club and a member of the debating society. The yearbook staff winnowed each student’s whole personality into one adjective. Mike’s was “argumentative,” a simple description that many of his friends, colleagues, and competitors over the years would endorse as well.

  Marjorie Stone Glau, one of his classmates, said, “All these girls who thought he was the biggest nerd, we missed our chance. Nobody had any interest in him.” Too smart, too self-confident, too snarky—he wasn’t a first choice for prom night. When they were seniors in high school, Dorothy Rubin Schepps remembered that Mike kept asking her out. The first time, she couldn’t go. Her maternal grandfather had died, so they set another date. Then, on that day, Dorothy’s paternal grandfather died, and she called again to reschedule.

  Was he hurt? Disappointed?

  “No, no,” she laughed. Instead, he quickly recovered.

  “So, okay,” he said, “how many grandparents do you have left?”38

  2

  THE WAY UP

  “Most of us were just college kids living in the moment, Mike was living in the future.”

  —A friend from college days1

  “I was the kind of student who made the top half of the class possible.”2

  —A favorite line when speaking to student groups

  Mike Bloomberg’s ticket to Johns Hopkins came like a lot of his rewards, as he would say, through old-fashioned hard work. What he did not say was that it also took a certain amount of old-fashioned good luck.

  He got into the respected Baltimore university in part because during high school he had a part-time job working—hard, of course—for a small electronics company in Cambridge. The company’s “technical genius,” as Bloomberg described the MIT graduate and engineer who was his boss, contacted people she knew at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Hopkins and recommended Mike.3 His grades were middling, but his test scores were far better. Bloomberg says he doesn’t remember exactly why he went there, at one point suggesting that maybe it was the best school he got into.4 Johns Hopkins took a chance on a bright, unchallenged teenager, and years later, after Bloomberg had given his first $1 billion to the school, he usually got a good laugh when he suggested the elders erect three statues on campus—one for Johns Hopkins, one for Mike Bloomberg, and a third for the admissions director who okayed his application.

  When Bloomberg arrived in Baltimore in 1960, he had never seen the campus except in brochures. His college interview had been in Boston because “nobody had the money to go down and visit schools.”5 So Bloomberg took the train and, at Baltimore’s Penn Station, he shared a cab, a luxury for a youth who would have to work his way through college.

  As the car pulled into the school, eighteen-year-old Mike Bloomberg fell in love.

  “I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. The sun was shining. The flowers were out. In those days, people spent a lot of money on the grounds, and then over the years that went away and now I suppose it’s back,” he said in 1999.6 “The campus looks a lot better,” he said. “It became a real pig sty [a few years later] . . . but those days, it was beautiful . . . It was everything that Norman Rockwell would have painted in a picture of an American campus.”7

  The undergraduate school was all male (a few nurses, but coeds did not arrive until 1970), and it was like a cloistered academy that nurtured science and engineering for a small, roisterous band of young men. There were rules, of course, to keep these randy boys in line. Sports was there to help let off steam. Suits and ties were the uniform of the day. Fraternities thrived, and girls were often imported usually from nearby Goucher College for parties or events. It was an uncomplicated existence, largely isolated from the growing upheaval over civil rights and Vietnam at other campuses, or even from the urban decay affecting Baltimore.

  While Bloomberg and his classmates studied or partied or worked in the college labs, Baltimore was becoming a desolate place as whites deserted the city for the suburbs. Racial turmoil would soon erupt into full-blown riots with the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968,8 but while Bloomberg was at Hopkins, the problems for African Americans festered outside the school gates. Inside it was about getting grades good enough to go to graduate school or med school, and about partying as many hours as possible in between.

  Bloomberg planned to study physics. That didn’t last a week.

  “After three days of German, I decided I was never going to learn German, and it was mandatory. And in those days, remember 1960, it wasn’t that long after the period when everybody came from Germany in physics. Everything was written in German.

  “So, I became an engineering student.”9

  And, as it turned out, most of the time he was not even a particularly good engineering student. “I was a C student,” he always admitted freely. “I’ve always been a C student.” Years later, he would often say that “I was one of those students who made the top half of the class possible.”10 That usually drew a delayed laugh, depending on how long it took for people to catch on, but it was not just a joke, at least in his first years at Hopkins.

  If most young Americans were starting t
o enjoy the roaring, marching, dope-smoking 1960s, the Johns Hopkins of Bloomberg’s day still sat comfortably in the 1950s. Bloomberg liked to depict his early college years as a local version of John Belushi’s Animal House—toga parties, drunks, the whole disgusting frat boy bit. His friends from that era challenge that view, at least for Bloomberg. They describe a guy who could pretend to be just another drunken lout but who really wanted to stay sober, or at least sober enough to run things.

  John Galotto, who became a physician and one of Bloomberg’s closest friends over the years, recalled fraternity rush week, when somebody suggested he go check out this Bloomberg kid. Unlike most eighteen-year-olds, the boy from Medford had a dorm room that was spotless and organized, Galotto recalled. There were notes lined up on the wall. There was a chart his mother made for him, coded to show which shirt went with which jacket, tie, and trousers.11

  Galotto was impressed with the young man from Medford, and he proudly helped him become the first Jewish member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. As revolutionary as that was, it didn’t seem to make much difference to his new brothers. And before long, young Bloomberg moved into the fraternity house and took command—cleaning up the kind of disorder only a few dozen college boys could create. Bloomberg found a local woman who could cook. He hired someone who would clean, and then he divided the expenses among his fraternity brothers.

  “He was very fussy about cleaning up. He used to get furious at us,” Galotto recalled with a laugh. “Every so often you would see him bustle around with garbage bags and cleaning up and cursing us and making everything look shipshape.”

  Mostly, it was in good fun, but once, when a frat brother left too many beer cans and dirty athletic gear around the frat house living room, Bloomberg raged at him about being a slob. The boy bellowed back, at one point calling him a “spindly-legged little Jew.” Bloomberg dashed up the stairs in a fury, grabbed his ice skates, and pinned the frat boy to the ground with his skates at the offender’s neck. “I went up there and got him and calmed him down,” Galotto said. The slur was indeed disgusting, but Galotto told him, “ ‘I just made sure you didn’t ruin your life over whether someone was cleaning up enough.’ He laughed. Finally.”12

  As he emerged as a campus leader, Bloomberg soon would have to clean up more than his own fraternity house. Midway through his senior year, the Baltimore Sun reported that a sanitation officer gave two fraternities at Johns Hopkins a deadline of thirty days to clean up “their backyards of rat infestation and accumulated trash and debris.”13 It was a perfect mission for Bloomberg, who by then was president of the Interfraternity Council. He got the two negligent fraternities to clean up and pushed to create an entire system for keeping fraternity row from being a public health hazard.

  Bloomberg later told the judge that his council had instituted new rules. There would be a weekly inspection of each of the fourteen fraternity houses by the vice president of the council. And each fraternity had to appoint someone responsible for upkeep during the summer. Also, Bloomberg promised that they would enforce the cleanliness code with fines of up to $200 and would even prohibit functions (i.e., girls and beer kegs) and outlaw the pledging of new members. Serious business, and if Bloomberg’s brethren were irritated, the judge was impressed.

  “I’m delighted and pleased, not only about the physical work, but because a line of thinking and a method of action has been adopted to ensure, to a great extent, that the action over the past several weeks will be sustained,” Baltimore City judge Robert Hammerman concluded.14

  Four months later, Bloomberg was again in the local news after police were called early one morning to the Phi Sigma Delta house. Neighbors accused the fraternity of “holding some bacchanalian affairs,” and they were threatening to sue. The fraternity didn’t help. The brothers had responded to a police visit by building a makeshift fort on the front lawn. Enough, Bloomberg’s council decreed. They fined the Phi Sigma Deltas $200 and imposed two weeks social probation. As Bloomberg explained to the Baltimore Sun reporter, “This means that neither parties nor visits from girls will be allowed during this time.” And the money would go to charity, he decided.

  Pictures of Bloomberg in his senior yearbook show a very serious, even stern young man. The yearbook writers described his “omnipresent smirk”—more a half smile, an expression that Bloomberg would use to his advantage over the years because it gave away nothing about what was really happening inside. But the serious Bloomberg had a less forbidding side; he designed the college logo—a stylized bright blue jay. Years later, he would appear to dress up like a blue jay as part of an elaborate video holiday card from Johns Hopkins. “The things I do for this university,” he would say as he stripped off a huge birdlike shoe for the cameras.

  A boy like Michael Bloomberg could not easily afford Johns Hopkins—tuition was $1,600 a year, a lot of money to him and his family. Scholarships didn’t exist for C students (and especially those with an occasional D). So Mike got loans from his family and worked and worked and worked.

  His main job was managing the faculty club parking lot at night. He earned $35 a week plus dinner. His task was to keep students out of the parking lot reserved for professors. “I would sit there on a chair, sometimes under the street light so I could read,” as he explained years later.15 “Holding an umbrella and my slide rule, which was hard to do with one hand, working on physics problems. And they’d drive down the driveway, and they’d see me, and they’d back out. Most times, you didn’t even have to get up.”

  After work, he went inside the faculty club, where the woman running the place provided a meager peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Bloomberg quickly found a way around such a paltry offering. He went to the club’s kitchen and charmed the three women cooks. “You’d walk in, and there were these three big, fat cooks. I think they were sisters, but they all looked alike, enormous women. They loved me and gave me sirloin steaks and slices of roast beef.”16

  Through the undergraduate years, Dr. Galotto recalled, one image of Bloomberg at Hopkins seemed to say it all. “He always acted like he wasn’t doing anything, like he wasn’t studying, that he was out late partying,” Galotto said.17 Colleagues remembered how one night around 2:00 a.m., Mike’s friends saw him carrying something large with great effort as he was crossing the campus. As he got closer, they saw it was a gigantic stack of the big, wide printouts that came from the copiers of the day. “He was doing all this stuff sub-rosa so we wouldn’t think he was a nerd,” one associate recalled.

  In an era when many students across America were marching on Washington or protesting in the streets, Bloomberg steered clear of those who wanted to upend the establishment. He gave a small contribution to the NAACP, a poor student’s tribute to his father. But he did not march. The only protest involved the dress code at the dining hall. Bloomberg’s group, almost certainly led by Bloomberg, followed the dress code all too precisely. They came to dinner shirtless. But they were dutifully wearing coats and ties.18

  Bloomberg’s real talent, his friends and fellow students soon realized, was his ability to get along with anybody, to make even disagreeable people agree. He used those skills to become president of his fraternity, head of the Interfraternity Council, a squabbling group of egos, and then president of the senior class. Or, as Bloomberg boasted years later, “an all-around big man on campus.”19

  Learning how to get consensus would certainly serve him well in business and politics. He was a natural negotiator who could easily figure out how to soften the opponent’s resolve, and humor was always a part of the repertoire. He could make people laugh—making jokes about others but also himself, about being so short that he agreed to dress up like a leprechaun to tend the bar at a campus Saint Patrick’s Day party.

  For a college student, Bloomberg had a lot of poise. He would occasionally joke that he would be America’s first Jewish president. “How can you talk that way to the first Jewish president? Or, you’re going to challenge the word of the first
Jewish president?” Mary Kay Shartle, wife of Dr. Galotto and also a longtime friend from college days, remembered. It was always good for a laugh, but later, it became clear that it wasn’t just part of Bloomberg’s routine. “Most of us were just college kids living in the moment, Mike was living in the future,” she said. “I’m not sure even he knew exactly what future.”20

  * * *

  Bloomberg, the fake frat boy, changed on April 28, 1963. His father, the softer parent, the one who thought young Mike could do little wrong, died suddenly of heart failure at age fifty-seven. To friends, Bloomberg said only that he had to go away for a few days to Boston. When he returned, he showed no sign of the personal torment he would only talk about later and about how he overcame it, how he got back to work. But colleagues at Hopkins suddenly saw a different Mike Bloomberg. Serious. Busy. Maniacally pursuing the serious business of college, grades, leadership, no more nonsense.

  He had been known in Medford as a guy who kept his distance with rough jokes and smart-ass commentary. That toughness hardened after his father died. He would soon start telling people not to dwell on tragedy, not to mourn. “Get over it” was like an automatic reaction when there was something awful to get over. That later distance from an openly emotional response, even to national tragedies, was true even at Johns Hopkins. When President Kennedy was assassinated in Bloomberg’s senior year, many students were so devastated that they took to the streets or went to Washington to watch the cortege. Bloomberg saw it differently.

  “I remember in November I had planned a big fraternity dance in the gym, and we had spent all our budget hiring James Brown and the Flames to play, and then Kennedy got shot and we canceled the dance and couldn’t get our deposit back. Never got the deposit back,” he said nearly three decades later.