I snorted at that. The only thing I did with that was to point out to Bill, who was notoriously non-user friendly in his coding, that somebody other than us geeks had to use the stuff. This was a big difference from my first time through, when I had to do that just for Lefleur Homes and our network. Still, the story went on.
That he could do such a thing came as no surprise to the people who know him. Carl Buckman is considered by most to be a mathematical prodigy. At the age of 14 he entered his junior high school's science fair. Rather than get one of his teachers to help, his faculty adviser was a professor at nearby Towson State College, and the project resulted in his first two published papers. By 16 he was spending half the school day at Towson State. At 17 he was valedictorian of his high school class. At 21 he had earned his doctorate in applied mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His thesis adviser, Dr. John Rhineburg, explained that Buckman's work provided a theoretical underpinning for advanced computer networking. Rhineburg reported that both MIT and Stanford had contacted him about offering a position to Buckman upon his graduation.
Interesting! John Rhineburg had never told me about any job offers, but maybe he just told them I was already taken.
And then he walked away from it all. When he graduated from high school he had turned down every scholarship but one. He had applied for an ROTC scholarship. Buckman has frequently commented that his family has a tradition of military service going back to the War of 1812. Every generation has produced soldiers and sailors, and it was now his turn. Even more so, rather than select the Signal Corps, where his mathematical skills would be most useful, he went through parachute and artillery training and joined the elite 82nd Airborne Division as an airborne artillery officer.
By all accounts, Buckman was as successful an Army officer as he was as a mathematician. Within three years he was commanding an artillery battery that was reportedly the finest in the division, and he was promoted twice, both times earlier than expected. Then on his final mission, now classified Top Secret, he earned a Bronze Star, very unusual during peacetime, and was injured badly enough to force his exit from the Army. He still has a limp that gets worse as the day gets longer. By the end of the day he needs a cane. He has never been heard to complain once.
How the hell did Colvin get this stuff?! Did he somehow get his hands on a copy of my DD-201 service record?
When asked where his initial funding came from, Buckman looked surprisingly sheepish and John Steiner, the Chairman of the Buckman Group laughed. Most of the other principals were laughing at this as well. According to Buckman and Steiner, it all started after a schoolyard fight on his 13th birthday, when three bullies tried to take his lunch money. When the fight was over, Buckman had a black eye, but the bullies were crippled and in the hospital. The laughter was over two related items, that either Carl Buckman could be intimidated or that the three attackers thought they could beat him up. Among his friends, Buckman is considered both fearless and lethal. He has multiple black belts in the martial arts.
Buckman escaped the fight with a black eye, but it didn't end there. He was arrested and expelled from school. That was when he met Steiner, then his father's attorney. Between the two of them, and each gives the other the credit, they got the police to investigate, the charges to be dropped, Buckman to be reinstated in school, the three bullies to be arrested, and then capped it all off by suing them for damages. He got $15,000 for his efforts, and immediately began investing in the market. He was a millionaire by the time he turned 18.
There was a section recounting our lunchtime conversation about how we set up the company.
Buckman built the Buckman Group around what he refers to as his 'brain trust.' The first member of the group was his lawyer, John Steiner, who had helped him get his seed money originally. The second and third members were Melissa Talmadge, his stockbroker, and Jake Eisenstein, Sr., who was his accountant. The newest member is Eisenstein's son, Jake Eisenstein, Jr., a tax lawyer who had recently graduated from law school and was working at his father's accounting firm.
"None of us had a clue what we were doing.", commented Buckman, over lunch with the group at a local eatery. "Jake Junior was green and ambitious, I was just out of the Army and clueless, the grownups had never done anything like this either. I think we succeeded because we didn't know we weren't supposed to."
"Carl is really loyal, and that's a very nice feeling. It makes you want to justify that faith.", said Talmadge. "By all rights, I was a mistake. I was a stockbroker, basically a salesman, and what Carl needed was really a stock analyst. He thought I could do the job." The others all nodded at this, including Buckman, but they also commented that Talmadge earned her paycheck from Day One. Certainly the Group's latest effort, creating and marketing investment pools, owes much of its success to her efforts.
A lot of the story was puffery. I am nowhere near as interesting as Colvin must have found me. Still, portions were surprisingly painful.
If Carl Buckman's public life is an unending stream of successes, first academic, then military, and now financial, his personal life has been anything but. It wasn't supposed to be like that.
The oldest son of upper middle class professionals in Baltimore's wealthy northern suburbs, Carl Buckman was destined for a similar future. That was only the surface picture. His mother was a cold and abusive perfectionist who doted on his younger brother. His father was a weak man who loved his wife more than his children. His younger brother, Hamilton, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was fixated on destroying Carl. Only his younger sister, Suzanna, was at all normal, and her only goal was surviving the family and escaping.
Buckman's mother had an idealized dream of her eldest son as a corporate drone, with detailed plans for him. Carl's life was planned from the moment he was born - the schools he would attend, the Ivy League college he would graduate from, the type of girl he would marry, the job he would take, the home he would live in. Buckman's successes meant nothing to his parents, since they were not the successes they had planned for him. He rebelled by becoming even more successful.
Worst of all was his psychotic brother, the favored child. The older Hamilton got, the more aggressive and dangerous he became towards Carl. By 16 Carl was living with his possessions under lock and key, and sleeping in a locked room, just to survive. At that point his parents solved the problem by evicting the troublesome son - Carl! He moved into an apartment that he paid for himself with his trading profits.
If there is one constant to Carl Buckman's life, it seems to be his wife Marilyn. They met freshman year at a fraternity party, where various accounts have him winning her in a drinking contest. Regardless, they have been together ever since. They were married in 1978 shortly after she graduated from college. Unfortunately, Marilyn was not the woman his parents wanted him to marry. A few weeks after the wedding they secretly disowned him.