Sixteen fun facts about me

I grew up in suburban St. Louis. I spent a lot of my childhood upside down. I discovered handstands, and something called the pony kick. I practiced all the time. Whenever there was a handstand contest in gym in elementary school, I won.

I skipped first grade because I already knew how to read. This, along with my natural makeup, meant that I was socially backward until my mid-twenties (some people might say beyond that).

My parents were both Jewish, but they were very secular. We had a Christmas tree. I never saw the inside of a synagogue until I was in my twenties. My father took a sabbatical when I was in 6th grade, which meant I was away when my Jewish friends were having bar or bat mitzvahs, so I was never invited to one.

From 1966 through 1967, when I was in 8th and 9th grade, at age 12 through 14, I played a lot of Strat-O-Matic baseball, a simulation game based on actual player statistics. I played by myself and kept records of the games. The game used dice, and I worked out the probabilities for two dice in order to better compare the players.

I liked the stars of the 1967 psychedelic era, including Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Jefferson Airplane. But a few years later I was into the singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. Neil Young’s songs were fairly easy to play on guitar. Joni Mitchell’s were not.

One course that I took in high school was called “computer math.” We used a time-share system. When our teacher warned us that we were spending too much money, we tried guessing how to log into the system without using our account. We managed to find the demonstrator account. So we got a lot of free usage of the system.

I got into Swarthmore College because of the interview. I was interviewed by a local alumnus, and I guessed that he was the father of a boy I had seen wrestle in the state championships. The boy’s opponent was the most spectacular wrestler in the tournament. I talked about the match during the interview. When I arrived at Swarthmore, the admissions director told me that the wrestling coach was looking forward to having me on the team. I never did meet the wrestling coach.

My freshman year, all of my closest friends, including my girlfriend, were into folk dancing. I was not. Maybe I did not see the appeal. Maybe I was afraid of trying to start a hobby I would not be good at.

What my friends and I had in common is that we did not drink, or try any drugs. So although I was in high school and college during the peak of the hippie era, I have never tried marijuana.

My sophomore year, early in the second semester I was an intern in the office of Senator Hubert Humphrey. He had been Vice President and subsequently lost to Richard Nixon in 1968. I was there in 1973, as the Watergate scandal was heating up. I rented a room in Southeast DC for $125 a month. Today, every house in that part of town would cost over $1 million.

My economics professor knew Alice Rivlin, the first director of the Congressional Budget Office, which launched in 1975. That was the year I graduated, and my professor prevailed on Alice to give me a job at CBO as a research assistant. CBO was housed a few blocks from the Capitol in temporary quarters, where it is housed to this day. After several months I switched to a job as a research assistant at the Fed, in a section that was housed in the Watergate building. Every day I came in through a basement entrance, and later this entrance was used for the opening scene of “All the President’s Men.”

After one year as a research assistant, I went to graduate school in economics at MIT. I gave up my sedentary hobbies, such as tournament bridge, and took up, of all things…international folk dancing. Ken Rogoff suggested that at Israeli folk dancing the dances were more energetic and the women were more attractive, so I took up Israeli dancing, which international folk dancers pooh-poohed as “Israeli rock ‘n’ roll.” I met my future wife dancing.

On New Year’s Eve, 1980-1981, my wife got together with her closest friends. To occupy me, they showed me a shelf of games. I picked out the board game Othello, and I tried figuring out the best strategy. About a year later, there was an article in the Washington Post about a tournament put on by the U.S. Othello Association. I bought the game and joined the association, and when I received an issue of their quarterly journal I realized that my ideas on strategy were wrong. I took up tournament Othello, and I kept working on openings and other aspects of the game. I peaked in 1987, when I joined with two outstanding American players to play in the international championships in Milan. We won, but only because Japan was kind enough to send just one of their best players. He won the individual trophy.

After graduate school, I took a job at the Fed. After 6 years of not being able to find a niche there, I went to Freddie Mac. This was in 1986, at age 32. The years that I spent at Freddie were the most educational of my life. One unusual introduction was to “New Age” ideas. This came from above, as senior management assigned us to attend “teambuilding” training. It also came from below, when a project manager that I hired lent me her “relaxation tapes” to listen to during my long commute. These included “Who are you?” by LSD guru Richard Alpert, who now called himself Baba Ram Dass.

Other than “relaxation tapes,” I listened to 10,000 Maniacs, Clive Gregson and Christine Collister, and Indigo Girls. My wife and I saw all of them in concert. Michael Stipe showed up at the 10,000 Maniacs concert, and he jumped out of the audience onto the stage to sing his part to “A Campfire Song.” Our babysitter thought we were the coolest for going to that concert. Indigo Girls I saw in two small arenas, because they were not yet big. Our daughters later became fans, and one of them went to see Indigo Girls again this August. My wife went along, but I passed.

I left Freddie a month before my 40th birthday in order to start a business on the Web. At the time, there were only about 1000 Web sites, and most of those were not commercial. I included a comment form on the site, and one visitor wrote, “Congratulations. You’ve set up your lemonade stand on the moon. You just have to wait for the astronauts to get there.”