Superman goes nowhere without his cape; the Lone Ranger nowhere without his mask; Zorro nowhere without his sword; and my new director of marketing nowhere without his bed. (And to think I sometimes still complain about personnel problems!) Not only did we have to spend hours wrapping the maestro’s mattress and bed before tying it triple to the roof of my car, but on the way down from Cambridge, when it began to rain, we had to spend hours in a Howard Johnson’s as the car (and bed) sat dryly under an overhang waiting for the downpour to pass.

My only high point during this summer came during the Great Blackout of ’77. As darkness fell (all of New York City was without power for close to twenty-four hours), rioting broke out in some deprived areas of the city. Some of this looting even extended to the Upper West Side, where Casanova and his bed were spending the summer.

Apparently the thought of rioting hordes scared him far more than Boston mutual fund managers returning home unexpectedly from the office, and he called me repeatedly. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Come save me!” he first demanded, later screamed, then cried.

“Listen, you’re in a perfectly safe neighborhood,” I assured him. “Okay, so some stores are being looted. The only thing you need to do is push your bed against the wall and pile all your furniture on it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll do that,” he panted.

I grinned all through the blackout.

As the summer drew to a close, we’d accomplished nothing but to seriously diminish my mail-order savings. All the Harvard men seemed to know how to do was have meetings and send memos. Boy, did they send memos. Only problem was they never landed any accounts, even with their great Harvard creative campaigns. They were always on the verge, while I was on the verge of wasting all my savings. At the end of the summer we went back to Cambridge with nothing to show for our efforts.

At first I was depressed, but I had my whole life ahead of me, and Harvard was almost behind me. And this time I was going to do it my way. No more double life. I was going back to New York in June and I was going into business. Which one? I didn’t know. Just into business.

One last word on the problem of living in two worlds at the same time. Toward the end of my first year at Harvard, the Crimson (the official school newspaper) decided to do a story on student entrepreneurs attending the college. They were able to identify three. One was me.

Another student, who had gone into the stock brokerage business, was doing it the Harvard way. Football team jocks were selling his stock, economy majors were doing the analysis. English lit people were turning out the sales literature, and everyone was maintaining a full academic schedule. This was a pure Harvard operation. I mean, even when you went into his beautiful offices overlooking Harvard Square, the receptionist who greeted you was a Harvard cheerleader.

I heard from the guy years later. Things hadn’t turned out so well for him at Harvard, and now he was down on his luck again, trying to sell salvage rights for abandoned oil wells.

Oh, what about the third guy? Well, he was smart. He realized you couldn’t live in two worlds. He forgot about his Harvard degree and what that and all the Harvard contacts could mean to his career, and just dropped out. I knew some of his friends, but I never met him. I heard he was trying to get some of them to be partners and leave school with him. Maybe if he’d asked me, I would have gone. Too bad. Oh, his name? Bill Gates.