EMPLOYEE BENEFIT FUNDS – PART X – SOMEONE FROM THE GREATEST GENERATION
INTRODUCTION
This post carries a double message. It is about an investment industry consultant, Morton ‘Bud’ Watnik, but his story is more important as a member of the Greatest Generation.
INVESTMENT WORK
When I joined the pension area at RJR, Bud was already consulting on the pension fund. His mathematical models helped us better understand the individual securities that our managers owned. Bud’s approach to dealing with the investment managers was sometimes demanding and unappreciated, but he was respected. (His military background may have contributed to his aggressive demeanor, although he was always a gentleman to me.)
Each year he organized several meetings, domestic and international, that brought together people who ran institutional funds – corporate pensions, endowments, or public funds. Attendees included investment officers of pension funds such as AT&T, General Motors, Hughes Aircraft, John Deere, and Eastern Airlines and endowments like the Getty Museum and the Ford Foundation. The meetings were an excellent forum to exchange ideas with peers and learn from top people in the industry. Bud acted as a moderator and facilitator, but the participants designed their own program for each event.
ONE OF THE GREATEST GENERATION
During ten years working with Bud, he shared with me some of his personal history. Other parts, I learned from research into his background.
He was born and raised in Philadelphia. He apparently was a child prodigy showing promise in both piano and mathematics. While still in his mid-teens he worked at the University of Pennsylvania on the first computer, the forerunner of the “ENIAC.”[i] He said the early model had about the same computing capacity as a hand-held HP12C.
Before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away and joined the Merchant Marines, but his family had him returned home, being under-aged. On his sixteenth birthday he joined the Marine Corps. He said the people at Penn tried to dissuade him, “Anyone can carry a rifle, but not everyone can do the math that you do.” I asked Budd why he joined, and he said, “They weren’t going to give a war and not invite me.”
He had basic training at Parris Island with many young men whose culture was very different from a Yankee Jewish boy from a big city. Most of these lads were farm boys from the Protestant South. He said they were all brave beyond belief. Bud had a number of anecdotes about his time with them.
In a discussion about religion, Bud told them he was Jewish. One of the Southern boys put his arm around Bud’s shoulders and said, “That’s aw’right Bud. A man can’t he’p what he’s born.” Later on liberty, Bud had too much to drink. He awoke with the sensation that he was drowning. His Christian fellow Marines were dunking him in a tub to give him a proper baptism by emersion.
Bud became a sergeant in Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson's 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, made famous by the Hollywood movie “Gung Ho,” starring Randolph Scott. Decades later, Bud visited Parris Island, and he got a hero’s welcome, which he certainly deserved. Bud was remembered by a fellow Marine in a personal memoir.[ii]
After World War II, Bud had one other amusing experience related to the Marines. He had returned to Philadelphia and was working for a company that consulted with defense contractors. He was scheduled for a client field assignment, but his employer received a call from the client saying that Bud’s security clearance had been denied, and he could not come to their office. Bud’s boss asked Bud if he knew any reason why he was a security risk, and Bud did not. The boss told Bud to go to the local FBI office and straighten out the problem.
When Bud arrived, an FBI agent reviewed Bud’s file. He said there was something strange in the file – and asked Bud to verify that he was indeed Morton Watnik, born and raised in Philadelphia, and of Jewish origin. Bud said this was correct. The agent said the problem was that a man of the same name and address was on the role of the Klu Klux Klan Klavern in Picayune, Mississippi. He wondered if Bud could explain this contradiction.
Bud could. He placed a call to an old Marine Corps buddy, a dairy farmer in Mississippi – with whom Bud had ben in combat in the Pacific. Bud asked his friend if he knew anything about the matter, and his friend said, “Bud. I just thought so much of you that I wanted to make you an honorary member of our Klavern down here.”
[i] Project PX, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC, was started in mid-1943. Perhaps it was a little ambitious. It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 manual switches, and 5 million solder joints. It weighed 30 tons, filled a 40x40 foot room, and consumed 174,000 watts of power. Literally, lights would dim when this puppy fired up. Initially, it was primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory its first program was a study of the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.
[ii] One demarcation at a time when the average Marine had only gone through the tenth grade was education. Those of us with a year or so of college tended to come together whether the Jewish Morton Watnik of Penn and Jordan Muchnik of Penn State or the WASP Frederick Van Lieuw Brokaw of Princeton and an old New York family. [Link ] “Of Wars and Rumors of Wars: A Memoir.”