Paul Gaecke:  

Describe a lifetime in a few paragraphs? Impossible. But I'll give it a try. I left Cal for the University of Michigan. I was putting myself through school, so when the out-of-state tuition went up after a couple of years in Ann Arbor, I transferred back to the University of Illinois where I paid the in-state rate and got a degree in Industrial Engineering and Army officer's bars on the same day. After graduating from Illinois, I worked for The Budd Company, an auto supplier in Detroit. I later came back to Chicago to marry a Morgan Park and Drake University grad and then the adventure began. First, there was armor officer's and advanced combat training at Fort Knox. When I finished that, I began helicopter pilot's school, after which I was headed for an Armored Cavalry unit in Viet Nam. Were it not for being washed out by slight color blindness, I almost certainly wouldn't be writing this today. After completing Army active duty, we returned back to Detroit where I worked for ten years for both Budd and Chrysler. I had jobs like Quality Control Manager at Budd and Plant Superintendent at one of Chrysler's engine plants. Along the way, and with lots of late nights in the library,I also got an MBA degree at the University of Detroit. While working long hours in auto plants and going to school, I also spent my obligation of ten years in the Army Reserve. Somehow I escaped about a half dozen chances at being called back up and "deployed" as they call it today. Armed with all that experience, an MBA and the belief that I had more knowledge than I actually did, we left Detroit and the auto industry for southern Indiana where I ran a plant for Litton Industries for a couple of years. While we liked the size and calm of small-town Evansville, I was recruited back to Chicago to be a principal in an international consulting firm. We didn't opt to return to the South Side, but settled in Riverwoods a far North Shore suburb near Deerfield. By then two little boys had arrived to expand our family. Consulting was challenging, particularly the almost constant travel schedule at the same time I was trying to be a good father and coach both boys' baseball and hockey teams, even serving as the president of the hockey association for a time. When a head hunter called to recruit me to jump across the street in downtown Chicago to work for the CEO of the First National Bank of Chicago, I made the last move of my career...finally. At First Chicago, I ran several divisions over the 23 years I spent there. I managed everything from Midwest Corporate Banking to Commercial Real Estate Finance, finishing my career as Managing Director of an investment banking division which managed the relationships with the major leveraged buyout firms and the companies that they owned. Leveraged lending, high-yield investing and investment banking was challenging and exciting. I was involved first hand in many of the deals that later became the subjects for books and movies. I knew almost all the characters personally. Maybe I was even a "character" myself! By 1998 I had enough travel and late night and weekend-long negotiations of deals. Both our sons had graduated from the University of Michigan by then and had started their own families. By the time I retired from banking our oldest son had already gotten his...Expand for more