Can you briefly share your professional journey?
I am over 70 as of this writing, so if I am going to “briefly” share my professional journey, I will have to leave a lot of things out. I plan to write an autobiography one of these days, so if you want to learn more about my journey, buy my book.
My first job out of college was teaching algebra at Aurora High School in Aurora, Ohio, which was a few miles from Cleveland. I loved algebra, but didn’t like teaching it to high school students who didn’t want to learn. I had trouble keeping order in the class. It got to the point where I didn’t want to get up in the morning. I left after a year.
My next job was as an assistant manager of a small, family-owned bank in Wyndham, Ohio. I didn’t know much about banking, but I had a lot of economics classes and a few accounting courses, so I was able to function. Since it was a small bank, I got to do a little bit of everything. One thing I can’t forget was repossessing a tv set on Christmas Eve. I remember unplugging it on a Saturday morning while the kids were watching cartoons in their pajamas. The boss told me not to come back without it, and I needed the job, so I did it.
I left the bank after about a year, and got a job at a much larger bank in Youngstown, Ohio. I went to work in the auditing department, even though I never had a course in auditing. The vice president who interviewed me was an undergraduate English major. He said, “You’ve had a lot of accounting, haven’t you?” and of course I said “yes,” even though I had just two courses. He never checked my transcript, and I got the job. I spend the next three years faking it, not knowing what I was doing. I looked at last year’s work papers, tried to figure out how to replicate them using current information. I took some master’s degree classes in economics at night, but left Youngstown before completing the program.
I wanted to go to law school and there weren’t any in Youngstown, so I applied to schools in other cities and got accepted at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. So I picked up my family, moved out of the house in my father-in-law’s junk yard where we were living, and moved to Chicago. [Yes, I lived in a junk yard for three years, and went out on the garbage trucks from time to time to help my father-in-law].
We rented a place 30 miles south of Chicago. I commuted to work by train and went to law school four nights a week while working full-time in the city. I dropped out of law school after one week because my wife was having trouble with her pregnancy and needed me home at a decent hour. I was sort of relieved to drop out because I wasn’t getting home until 10pm, and I couldn’t see myself continuing to do that for four years.
My first job in Chicago was working as the chief auditor for a commodity brokerage firm. It was a partnership, and six weeks after I started, the partners decided to dissolve the partnership and go their separate ways, so I was out on the street looking for a job. I landed one at a large multinational corporation, in the tax department. The problem was that I had never taken a tax class. They hired me because of my auditing experience, and just assumed that I had taken some tax classes. So I faked it, looked at last year’s tax return, figured out where the numbers came from, and tried to replicate what they did last year using current information. I started taking night classes in DePaul University’s MST program in taxation. I finished the degree, and they never found out that I didn’t know what I was doing.
I wanted to go back to law school, and wanted to be closer to my wife’s family in Ohio, so I enrolled in Cleveland State University’s law school and got a job teaching accounting at a small, private college. The president of the college interviewed me. He had no background in accounting and assumed that I was qualified for the job because of my auditing and tax experience. However, at that time I had taken just two undergraduate accounting courses, so I had to teach courses I had never taken. I learned accounting by keeping one chapter ahead of my students. I solved every exercise and problem in every chapter and looked at the solutions manuals, then taught the material to my students. The law school allowed me to take two courses in the business school, so I took an auditing class and a CPA review class for law school credit. After about a year, I was able to answer any question a student asked with a high degree of confidence.
While going to law school evenings and teaching during the day, I took a second job as the initial director of the Cleveland area Miller CPA Review course. I had to recruit students, find faculty to teach parts of the course, and teach other parts of the course myself. I took the CPA exam and passed on the first attempt.
The Cleveland district had the highest growth rate in the country, so the company’s president invited me to New York to join the headquarters staff. He lured me by saying that he planned to retire in two or three years, and that I could become president after he retired. So I picked up and moved the family to New Jersey and took the bus into Manhattan every day. It wasn’t long before I discovered that he had made the same promise (to become president) to two other people in the organization. I had to drop out of law school to take the job, so I took a year off from law school, worked long hours in Manhattan, and transferred to New York Law School’s evening program after a year on the job.
Working long hours plus going to law school at night was exhausting, so I decided to go back into college teaching, which would require less time and energy. I transferred the credits I had earned at New York Law School back to Cleveland State university and earned my law degree from Cleveland State. I took and passed the New York bar exam.
During the next 18 years or so I continued to teach accounting at various universities in the New York metropolitan area, and had a tax and consulting practice in Manhattan and New Jersey. I had an office in Manhattan, but didn’t have to pay rent or hire staff or pay for a law library because I worked out a deal with a publishing company. They would pay me to be a consultant and would let me use their facilities for my private clients.
While teaching at Seton Hall University, I had an opportunity to go on sabbatical, which meant I would be paid 75 percent of full salary, but I wouldn’t have to show up at the university for a year. During my year off, I was supposed to do something to enhance my professional development, so I got a job as a consultant, went to Armenia and helped their Finance Ministry convert the country to International Financial Reporting Standards. The problem was that I didn’t know anything about international accounting standards. The USA doesn’t use them. But I took the job anyway. I got a book about them, read it on the plane, and by the time I arrived in Armenia I knew more about international accounting standards than anyone at the Finance Ministry. Luckily for me, no one at the Finance Ministry knew anything about them. The standards hadn’t been translated into Armenian or Russian at that time, and none of them could read English, so I was able to fake it. I went through the standards with them one paragraph at a time. I learned the relevant standard a day or two before I went over it with them. They never knew that I wasn’t an expert.
I spent 13 months at the Finance Ministry, then returned to the university. That project went well, so I started getting offers to do the same thing for other Finance Ministries. So I resigned from the university and spent 13 months in Bosnia doing the same thing. Toward the end of my assignment in Bosnia, I started sending out resumes to universities in the United States because I would need to find another job. I landed in Miami, where I got a series of jobs working for one university, then another. I was untenured, and after 10 years, when it was time for my contract to be renewed, it wasn’t. I had more than a year’s advance notice, so I had time to look for another teaching job.
I landed a university teaching position in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I had started writing novels in Miami. I finished my first novel two years after arriving in Fayetteville. I also started taking martial arts again. I had studied karate while in New Jersey, but stopped training shortly before the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and didn’t resume training after the Act became law. I was 65 and didn’t know if I could still do martial arts, so they gave me 30 days of free lessons. At the end of the 30 days, I had to decide whether to continue or quit. I hadn’t had a heart attack, so I decided to keep it up.
My instructors encouraged me to compete in a local tournament. I hesitated, but they kept encouraging me to do it, so I did. It went well, so I started competing in regional tournaments. Things continued to go well, so I started competing in national championship tournaments, then world championships. After a few years of training in taekwondo, I branched out into kung fu and tai chi, while continuing to train in taekwondo. I also continued to write scholarly books and articles and novels. That’s what I’m doing now.