I grew up in a New Jersey orphanage with bullies, cretins, and a great baseball team. I had good grades in school, did well in school.
Robert with his sisters Pat (left) and Theresa
St. Michael’s Orphan Asylum and Industrial School Hopewell, NJ
After graduating from 8th grade I went to live with a foster family. In my junior year, I asked this family to take me to sit for a test called the SAT at Rutgers University. To me, it was a train. All of my friends were taking this test. If you don’t take that test, you can’t get into college. That was the rule. You’ve got to be on that train. I saw all of my friends doing it in school.
I asked my foster parents, “Will you take me to Rutgers so I can take this test?” They said, “No.” So I got up and left the house at 6am. I hitchhiked to Rutgers University to take that test. I had to be there, take the test, because that was the key you needed. That was the train ticket! I could sense that at 16 years old. I could sense this is an absolute requirement and if you don’t have it, the train is leaving the station and you’re not going to have a college career.
It led to a breakup between me and the foster family where I called the state of New Jersey and I said, “You got to get me out of here.” And they did. The police went into a conference of teachers at my high school and they said, “We have a kid who needs a home. He’s somewhat of a smartass, but he’s not the criminal type.” Then one of the teachers said, ”Okay, I’ll go home and talk to my wife.” He did. And the couple said, “Okay, yeah, we’ll take him.”
And that’s how I spent my senior year in high school, and all through college. That was my home of record in the Navy. And they were very supportive when I decided to join the military, because they could see the inflation, they could see the interest rates moving up, they could see employment opportunities down. The Vietnam War hung like a cloud over the economy. I went to my foster parents and said the Navy had a place for me to use my degree, to use my expertise, and they were supportive and encouraging.
I was drawn to the Navy because it was an opportunity to have a job at a time when the economy was flat out stagnant. This was 1974, early 1975. We were in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Gerald Ford was president, and he had a big campaign called WIN. The full name was “Whip Inflation Now” (WIN). Inflation was huge in the Vietnam War. The reason was that goods and services were dedicated to the troops and to the Vietnam War. The war sucked up goods and services and caused a pent up demand that couldn’t be satisfied since goods and services were going to the war effort. Consumers and businesses couldn’t buy the things they needed. Too much money chasing too few goods, you know, and there’s too few goods in the stores because everything is being shipped off for the Vietnam War effort. Demand builds up that can’t be met.
In 1981 and 1982 Fed Chairman Volcker said, “Okay, to crush inflation we have to cut down the money supply.” In short, he just cut off the money. Volcker could have controlled interest rates, but he said “I’m going to let interest rates float.” And so interest rates floated to around 16-17%. To buy a house, you took out a mortgage for 15% in 1982, and that killed inflation. Gerald Ford tried to control it in the 70s and he just couldn’t. That was one of the big reasons that I ultimately joined the Navy. There was a lack of jobs, a lack of economic opportunity overall really.
That economic opportunity peaked my interest. But I was really sold when I went into the recruiting office and they actually valued what I did; they actually valued my undergraduate degree. That was contrary to every other employer I visited. I was an English major, and everyone else I visited really didn’t see a way they could use what I’d studied. But when I went to the Navy recruiter, and told them I was an English major in college, they perked up right away. “Oh, you were an English major- we’ll send you to the Defense Language Institute (DLI) and you can be a linguist.
While civilian employers couldn’t find any value to an English degree, the Navy saw that value right away. Frankly it was shocking that the military was the employer that thought they could use what I had studied. Within five minutes, the recruiter had a career path for me. So when you combined the economic opportunity with that career path, it was a job that made sense to me.
For me, joining was a choice. Before I joined, the draft was still in effect. My school had what they called The Fishbowl on campus. This is a public spot on campus where they posted all of the important news items. They had a lottery for the draft, and on the left, they would put numbers from one to 365. Then on the right, they would put a birthday. My birthday, April 20th, came as number 320, something like that. So I had no obligation because they weren’t drafting down to 320.
People I knew thought that my decision to join was fantastic. The draft had ended and there were fewer and fewer people with military experience. It became more and more exotic to people that you were doing it. With the salary you had an even more elevated position now relative to other people in what was then a depressed economy. I saw this in the baseball park when we left boot camp, it was clear people were not as well off as we were. We went into Chicago to see a baseball game at the old Comiskey Park, and every one of us had like $2,000 cash in our pocket. The rest of the people at the park basically had enough for the ticket and that’s it. They had enough money to see the game. So here comes this group of sailors, we bought them sodas. I can personally remember saying to the hot dog guy, “Just stay here. Just stay right here.” He started putting hot dogs down and I just passed them down to people that we met, people we didn’t know, because they weren’t affluent, had no money for drinks, no money for food. We were affluent compared to them. We had steady jobs, $2,000 in our pockets, so we were buying drinks, popcorn, ice cream for people. I must have bought at least 20 hotdogs and passed them down the aisle. It was the middle of a recession and we felt like we should help out in some small way.
