Keith Jones:  

Dear classmates and friends: There was nothing special about me in high school. Frightfully skinny and painfully shy, I excelled at nothing-- as reflected by a GPA around 2.7. What's worse, none of the dozen colleges to which I applied accepted me. Panic!! As the fall of 1963 approached I made a last-ditch effort to get into the nearest local college, Pacific Lutheran University. Yes!!!! After freshman year my family moved to Denver and went to work there at the May Department Store as a salesman in budget luggage. The pay was $1.25 an hour and I felt glad to have it. Next thing you know,I was drafted for military service as Viet Nam turned seriously deadly. Fortunately I failed the physical (scenes of Arlo Guthrie in the movie "Alice's Restaurant"), then quickly enrolled at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1968 with a BA in Political Science. I found a job in St. Louis at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace just when the Gemini and Apollo programs were in the hardware stage. What a great, uplifting experience watching America's first moon landing and knowing I was part of the team that pulled it off. After two years I knew that a non-technical person like me had little future at McDonnell, so on a grand throw of the dice I applied to the Harvard Business School. Still don't know why they accepted me since I was no...Expand for more