They loved the story. They were really looking for a way into this sector. This was highly unusual for them; they usually moved more slowly. But this was an unusual circumstance and opportunity. Plus Cowen had okayed everything, and Cowen was as conservative as they come. And Skadden was behind it. You could trust Skadden. They’d do it. It was nuts, but they’d do it. They just needed to get their analyst to look it over.

The analyst, it turned out, was a nice young man—not too knowledgeable, in my opinion, but a nice, very scared young man who’d never done a deal before. When the commitment committee asked him if he was willing to stake his reputation on this deal, he wavered. He’d only had a few days to check it out; he didn’t know the industry yet. It seemed good, wasn’t that enough?

“Not good enough,” said the committee. “Are you ready to stake your reputation on this?”

“No,” came the reply. So much for DLJ.

Cowen was also disappointed. “Let’s see what Dean Witter does,” they said, as I pushed them to do the deal alone.

Dean Witter looked like a sure thing. The banker loved the deal. The analyst loved the deal. The analyst’s boss, the head of research, loved the deal. The banker’s boss, who was the head of investment banking and ran the commitment committee, loved the deal. “Forget about DLJ,” they told us. “This is a shoo-in. You can depend on the Dean.”

So what do you know? It seemed like someone up there liked us after all. It usually took months to find an underwriter, and here, in under two weeks (okay, true, we met on Sundays too), we’d apparently locked up one of the biggest ones in the country. If Dean came in, then Cowen would be reassured and our offering would be back on.

Prior to Dean, I’d begun to despair of Cowen’s ever going forward with the deal and had started talking to First Albany about doing it on their own. Charley told me that friends said of him, if ever they were stuck in a foxhole under fire, he’d be the one they wanted with them. He now proved as good as his word, telling me First Albany was ready to print the books and do the offering on their own. I was ready to do just that.

But Skadden told me to wait. “You’ll never get as good a valuation,” they advised, “if First Albany is able to pull this off alone. And that’s a big if. Let’s see what happens with Dean first. Anyway, Cowen’s still telling us they’re behind this deal and we believe they’ll do this with or without Dean.”

Well, that made one of us. But to wait just a little longer seemed the right thing to do. Tomorrow, my patience would be rewarded. The Dean Witter commitment committee was scheduled to rubber-stamp the deal and we’d be in the money.

I went to sleep early, confident finally that this time we were going to win. I slept soundly and well.