Charles Elias:  

School I did not come out of the closet until my 49th year. But I don’t want to skip too far ahead of the chronology of my life’s story. MIT was exactly the college I didn’t want. It was much too hard and required much too much work for a dilettante student. My dad pushed me to go there from when I was a young kid. After I did so well on the SATs I actually and amazingly got in. I joined a fraternity and graduated 4 years later with my degree, having again avoided participation, as much as possible, in my life. I enjoyed thinking I belonged to something important although I never felt really part of it. For me, I was always the outsider. No matter how well I did it was never good enough to counteract my own feelings that I was bad, because of my sexual feelings. I met a lot of really bright people at MIT. Larry Seligman was one of them. He graduated when I did, but with a Masters in Electrical Engineering. He went to work for a computer manufacturer, Digital Equipment Corporation. He later left with 4 guys to start Data General Corporation. I met him in 1969 in Las Vegas at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. He was worth, then, in excess of $60,000,000. His success made me feel very depressed about what a failure I was. Later, I visited Larry and his wife, Dee, on a trip to Boston with my wife and kids. He had this “farm” just outside of Boston. His house was gigantic. His multi-car garage had a lower level, which was actually a barn with many horses, which let out to his immense pasture behind his house. His living room was about 1,500 square feet. I graduated MIT in 1964 and told my dad I wanted to go to Harvard Business School, which seemed particularly attractive since it was easy to get into those days (at least for an MIT grad) and would keep me out of...Expand for more