"The Long, Disorganized Life of Skip Croninger"

Dartmouth College after leaving Menlo. Why I decided to trade Stanford, four miles down the road, for four years at an all-male college where I would freeze my ass off each winter, I'll never know. Although I seem to recall that Martie, my childhood sweetheart, decided to enroll at Skidmore College in New York around the same time.

As I approached Dartmouth graduation, it occurred to me that if I didn't "do something" I would almost certainly be drafted, so I applied to the Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and my application was accepted.  With a week to go in the eighteen-week training program, my company officer took me aside, complimented me on my scholastic performance while at OCS, and described the career benefits that might accrue from an early tour of duty cruising around the Mekong Delta in a fiberglass-hulled Swift Boat, a conversation which did precipitate a few anxious moments.  However, upon graduation I was assigned to U.S.S. Courtney, a destroyer escort home ported in Newport, as a division engineering officer.  Somehow, the U.S. Navy must have found out that I was an English major, and wisely concluded that I was supremely qualified to master the intricacies of steam propulsion.  Shortly after reporting for duty, Martie and I were married, and a year and a half later Courtney's home port was shifted to Naples, Italy, so off we went to Europe for a couple years.  And, for all my whining at the time, my four years in the Navy turned out to be one of the most worthwhile and enjoyable (in a funny sort of way) experiences of my life.

At the conclusion of my Navy career, Martie and I spent 3 months driving around Europe in a small Fiat 124 Spyder, armed with a bunch of NATO gas coupons and a ridiculous amount of Skippy peanut butter (no relation) before returning to Boston for two years of graduate business school.  After graduating I joined Arthur Andersen as a staff accountant, leaving after two years for an assistant treasurer position with a small, privately-held, high-tech company.  Around that time Martie and I were divorced, mostly because, after spending four years at an all-male prep school and four years at an all-male college, I pretty much had no clue about how to build a successful marriage and was too busy with my career to spend much time thinking about the problem.  Also, as best I can remember, at the time I was about seventeen years old emotionally and intellectually.  As they say, there ain't no cure for stupid, and, while I was smart in some ways, I was pretty much off the mark in others.

Shortly thereafter, I had the good fortune to acquire a life-long business mentor who taught me a lot and forgave most of my mistakes, and my financial career progressed in a haphazard but reasonably fulfilling fashion.  It even managed to survive a three-year mid-life crisis during which I lived in unemployed splendor and uncertainty in Honolulu, Albuquerque and San Francisco before returning to New England to resume my efforts to log enough years of honest work to generate a decent monthly social security check after I retired.  Shortly after my return, I got married again, to Patti, an old flame from my single days in Boston.

So, I finally retired, I thought, around 2005. But no, the 2008 financial crisis and the impact it had on my limited financial resources encouraged me to go looking for work, and so I took a job as chief financial officer of a beleaguered regional residential real estate developer for several years.  My boss was a member of the board of trustees at a local university, and in 2011 I successfully transitioned from a business career to a job as an adjunct professor, where I spent a surprisingly rewarding ten years teaching a variety of graduate and undergraduate finance courses.

So here I am in Hudson, New Hampshire, fully retired but divorced again. (Quite amicably. I think I snore.) I'm in decent health, I play golf twice a week when there is no snow on the ground, I read a lot of books, some of them actually worthwhile, and I do my best to enjoy and appreciate what is a very simple and unstructured life at this point. Looking forward to my trip west and our Menlo class reunion!