Oral History Center University of California the Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

John Pritzker

PRESIDENT, JEWISH COMMUNITY FEDERATION OF SAN FRANCISCO, THE PENINSULA, MARIN AND SONOMA COUNTIES, 2006-2008

Interviews conducted by Shanna Farrell in 2013 and 2014

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and John Pritzker dated April 22, 2015. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

John Pritzker “John Pritzker: John Pritzker: President, Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, 2006-2008” conducted by Shanna Farrell in 2013 and 2014, Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

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John Pritzker, 2014 Photo courtesy of Paul Dyer iv

John Pritzker was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. He grew up in Glencoe, where he attended grade school. As a teen, he worked at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare and at the Hyatt Sea-Tac after graduating from high school. He moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but eventually resumed working for Hyatt. He attended Menlo College and the University of Denver. He moved from Denver to New Orleans to Dallas and back to Chicago – where he met his wife, Lisa – and to Long Beach before returning to and settling in San Francisco in 1984. He then began his involvement with the Jewish Community Federation, for which he ran the campaign in 2004 and served as president from 2006-2008. In his interview, he discusses his family and childhood in Glencoe, working for Hyatt – the family business – discovering his love for San Francisco in the 1970s, moving around to help grow Hyatt, and founding various companies – including Ticketmaster and Geolo Capital. He describes his work for the Jewish Community Federation as the head of the campaign, overseeing a number of staff changes as president, restructuring the organization, his goals and priorities, and challenges and successes he experienced during his time there. He also reflects on significant people who mentored and coached him during his tenure at the Jewish Community Federation. v

Table of Contents – John Pritzker

Interview 1: December 5, 2013

Audio File 1 1

Birth in 1953 in Chicago — 1950s childhood in Glencoe: peace and quiet after the trauma of the Depression and WWII — culturally Jewish but assimilated family — childhood memories of Chicago — great grandfather Nicholas Pritzker who immigrated from Kiev in 1881 — hardships endured in the old country: “It wasn’t so sweet to be a Jew in Kiev in the 1870s.” — great grandfather’s book Three Scores After Ten — a family ethos of gratitude and giving back to the community — loyalties in business — maternal grandparents Hugo and Sadie Friend — grandfather’s legal career and athletic achievements — paternal grandparents Abram Nicholas and Fanny Pritzker — learning from the family example of philanthropy — aunts and uncles — early memories of parents — mother’s involvement in children’s schooling, hosting bridge games — skiing with father — father’s business career: “Dad was a deal guy.” — 1957 deal to buy the first Hyatt Hotel — 1967 Atlanta deal, later named the Hyatt Regency, designed by architect John Portman — uncle Don — learning hotel management, innovation — deal with Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards to manage the Superdome in New Orleans — happenstance entry into ticketing and creating Ticketmaster with Fred Rosen

Audio File 2 14

Older sister Nancy, her work at Stanford Children’s Hospital, mental health struggles and early suicide in 1972 — older brother Tom — younger brother Danny — younger sister Gigi, her filmmaking career — special closeness with Gigi in spite of nine year age difference lingering effect of Nancy’s passing on the family — special closeness between father and his grandfather — their six month travels in Europe in 1932 or 1933 — elementary education at North School — early school difficulties and probably dyslexia resulted in well-developed problem solving skills and sense of humor — third grade move to Winnetka, a bit new house, Hubbard Woods School — New Trier High School, academic difficulties, and special attention from advisor Morrie Barefield — boarding school at Oxford Academy in New Jersey, then Colorado Academy after Oxford burned down — acing the GED and going to work at the Hyatt Seattle-Tacoma — Christmas in Acapulco with Tom and his girlfriend — seeing the Grateful Dead in San Francisco at New Years: “There wasn’t a prayer I was staying in Seattle after that.” — job in San Bruno pulling cable, membership in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — a year or so of living the life, then getting a haircut and coming back to work at Hyatt — childhood learning disorder helped to develop a sense of humor, creative problem solving skills, and people skills vi

Interview 2: January 28, 2014

Audio File 3 27

Summer work at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare as a teen: the feeling of all hands on deck, that the boss’s kid did grunt work too — reporting to professional managers rather than family members — 1971 post high school year at Hyatt Sea-Tac, the opportunities to learn presented by a small hotel — Christmas in Acapulco and visit to San Francisco — move to San Francisco and electrician work with SASCO — joining the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, growing a ponytail — work at the Grand Hyatt Union Square — uncle Don’s early death — getting a haircut and coming back into the fold — comparing solitary electrical work with customer service oriented hotel work — mailing the ponytail and repairing relations with grandfather — management training at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco under Don DePorter — brief transfer to Atlanta, decision to return to California to attend Menlo College and then University of Denver — move to New Orleans to help manage the Superdome — meeting with Governor Edwin Edwards — introduction to racism in Louisiana — coming in to purge the Superdome of corrupt management — death threats and success — return to Chicago and work at the Hyatt O’Hare in the late 1970s — move to Dallas to work at the glamorous new Hyatt — working for Seattle boss Alex Alexander — return to Chicago for rooms executive job at Hyatt Water Tower — meeting future wife Lisa Stone in an elevator — move to Hyatt Lincolnwood as general manager — a call from Lisa’s grandfather, later marriage — 1982 move to Long Beach to open new hotel — a memorable opening ceremony

Audio File 4 41

Family interest in architecture and the Pritzker Prize, founded in 1979 — first ceremony and meeting Philip Johnson — 1999 ceremony at the White House — an evening with Bill Clinton in the residence — mother’s friendship with Frank Gehry, the Millennium Park project — decision to leave Hyatt in 1988 — 1984 move from Long Beach to San Francisco to work with Peter Goldman at the Fairmont — birth of son Adam during the 1984 Democratic Convention — handling a union dispute — 1976 founding Ticketmaster — exclusive ticketing and the Pearl Jam dispute — selling Ticketmaster in 1995 — deal with Chip Conley — relationship with Tom Gottlieb — deals with Thompson Hotels, Chemdex, and Aidells Sausage — memories of the dot-com era and the birth of internet commerce — forming Geolo — work with the Bernard Osher Family Foundation — friendship with Barney Osher — the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute — philanthropy to Osher Integrative Medicine Center vii

Interview 3: March 3, 2014

Audio File 5 55

First exposure to the Jewish Community Federation in 1984 shortly after move to San Francisco, a mixer arranged by Phyllis Cook — the Federation campaign explained — differences between the campaign and endowment fund — being chosen to run the 2004 campaign — memorable breakfast with Richard Goldman — learning how to ask — believing in the product, being a good salesman — the changing focus issues for the JCF community — Adele Corvin as a boss: “The iron fist in a velvet glove.” — learning from her perseverance and patience — starting in 2004 during major personnel and leadership changes — JCF fundraising remained largely personal even in the age of internet fundraising — JCF’s financial struggles in 2004 — the Power of One — Madeleine Albright’s keynote speech at the gala — running JCF during a time of leadership transition, hiring and firing — learning about the Federation while running the campaign, later making big organizational changes as president — learning the inefficiencies of committee work — instituting fees for endowment donors, relying on people skills and humor — the joys and rewards of running the campaign

Interview 4: March 23, 2014

Audio File 6 69

Selection as JCF president — success in running the campaign — transitioning into presidency — difficult decision to fire CEO Tom Dine in 2007 — absorbing CEO duties, support from staff during transitions — searching for a new CEO — the difference between being steeped in policy and steeped in community — choosing a CEO, Danny Sokatch, who was steeped in policy and not a very good match for the organization — Danny’s quick departure for a more policy oriented job — making big changes — resistance from within the organization to charging fees for endowment donors — culture of accommodating donors — Phyllis Cook’s many contributions to and departure from the JCF — Phyllis’s resistance to forming a succession plan, her habit of keeping all the federation business in her head rather than on paper — meeting with Dick Rosenberg, Phyllis Cook’s eventual retirement — changes after her departure — updating and professionalizing the JCF — convincing the donors to accept fees, Warren Hellman’s support — the advantage of not having a long history with JCF — scaling back the unwieldy board — getting the confidential donor list from Phyllis Cook

Audio File 7 81

Leadership during the 2006 shooting at the Seattle Federation, putting the SF office on lockdown, instituting 24 hour surveillance — beginning to reach out to synagogues — Homeland Security grant and security upgrades — 2007 and 2008 themes of change and the synagogue initiative chaired by David Steirman — viii

reaching out, working past bad blood with synagogues who felt slighted by the JCF — major IT upgrades — working for better cooperation between lay people and staff — the interplay between allocation and fundraising — Super Sunday fundraising, Adele Corvin’s boundless energy — success in fundraising: “I think it was more about the spirit of the ask.” — younger, more hands-on donors

Audio File 8 91

The effects of the 2007-2008 financial crisis on the JCF — difficulties in fundraising during the recession: “We got less, which means we had less to give out.” — viewing leadership role as chief cheerleader — debates within JCF over what to fund, especially regarding Israel — historical JSF focus points: aiding Jews around the world escape persecution, and current tipping point as no clear focus emerges — modern hands-on donors — debate over funding Jewish day schools — JSF’s culture of all donors, large and small, having a voice in allocations — difficulties with an overly-large board — 2006 travel to Israel with the Israel and Overseas Consulting Committee — visiting Kiryat Shmona, the Ethiopian airlift in 1991 and settlement in Israel — eye opening experiences — visiting Arab, orthodox, and ultra-orthodox schools — developing a more complex view of the issues — pride over work at JCF, synagogue initiative, instituting donor fees, streamlining the board — study on Bay Area Jewish community informed board member selection

Audio File 9 106

The all-encompassing work of president and CEO — wife Lisa’s role — goals on entering the presidency: “Those went out the window about the second week.” — impact of family background on JCF work, feeling of gratitude — post-JCT philanthropy: SFMOMA, UCSF — connections or deepened throught JCF: Barney Osher, Dan Safier, Jim Koshland, David Friedman, Dan Lehman, Steve Fayne, Tom Kasten, David Steirman — post-presidency relationship with JCF: “the loyal opposition” — thoughts on the future of JCF: looking toward the future rather than the past — concluding thoughts, admiration and respect for JCF’s work

Interview #1 December 5, 2013 Audio File 1

01-00:00:06 Farrell: This is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker, on Thursday, December 5, in his office on the Embarcadero. John, can you tell me where and when you were born and a little bit about your early life?

01-00:00:20 Pritzker: I was born in 1953, outside of Chicago. Actually, I was born in Chicago but we lived outside of Chicago, just north, in a town called Glencoe, Illinois.

01-00:00:36 Farrell: So Glencoe is north of Michigan. I'm sorry, north of—

01-00:00:39 Pritzker: North of Chicago.

01-00:00:39 Farrell: —Chicago, on Lake Michigan. Can you tell me a little bit more about Glencoe?

01-00:00:43 Pritzker: Sure. Glencoe was a predominantly Jewish community, and because it was post-World War II—I always think of the 1950s—not that I was that cognizant in the fifties—but as a very calm, peaceful, almost numb time to grow up. I think people had gone through so much trauma between the Depression and World War II that all anybody wanted was peace and quiet. In that Jewish community as opposed, for example, to Skokie or even Highland Park—Skokie was a little to the south, and Highland Park to the north of Glencoe—I think that the Glencoe Jews just wanted to fit in and be part of American society and not be Jews in America, necessarily. We didn't grow up in a very religious family. I think culturally and traditionally we felt very Jewish. My great-grandfather came from outside of Kiev. My other grandfather came from what was Bohemia. Both came to America to escape persecution. So we were cognizant of that. But other than that it was a very peaceful mom, apple-pie existence. The beauty of it, as I got a little older, was that you could walk outside your front door and hold up a baseball and a bat and eighteen kids would appear in three minutes flat. It was kind of a very Leave it to Beaver existence. I remember it fondly. It was a good time to be a kid.

01-00:02:31 Farrell: Can you tell me about some of your prominent memories of Chicago during that period of time?

01-00:02:37 Pritzker: Yeah. When you say that, my prominent memories are probably going to see my grandparents. My mother's father, Hugo Friend, was an appellate court judge in Chicago and a Republican, which was not all that popular, but he was

a well-regarded jurist in Chicago. My other grandfather was a businessman, A.N. Pritzker, my dad's dad. We would go downtown primarily to see them. It was kind of the big adventure. It was going to the big city. There was no highway from—God, I feel like I grew up in the 1920s. There was no highway from Glencoe to Chicago, downtown, so you had to take surface streets. It was kind of much more of an adventure. We'd go downtown with great excitement. I remember landmarks. We'd drive along the lake, and you'd come around a bend at Hollywood Avenue and you could see the Palmolive building, which had the big searchlight on top of it. It ended up being the Playboy building, which was even more exciting when I was about twelve. Just, oh my God, what goes on in that building? I remember little things about the bridges you cross and the buildings that you saw. Going downtown was a big deal then.

01-00:04:19 Farrell: You mentioned your great-grandfather, Jacob Pritzker, who came—

01-00:04:23 Pritzker: Nicholas.

01-00:04:24 Farrell: Nicholas, who immigrated to the United States from Kiev. Can you tell me a little bit about him?

01-00:04:29 Pritzker: Yeah. Recently, my sister digitized all our family photos. I remember taking the picture when I was about six—actually four or five—I remember being downtown at my great-uncle's for Thanksgiving, and my great-grandfather was there, and we took a picture with all of his great-grandchildren. I'm sitting on one of his legs. He had my cousin, Linda, on one leg and me on another leg. He was a big deal in the family. He was an intellectual, unlike the rest of us, who were just kind of schleps and smart in our own ways. He wrote a book for the family, a very big book, and it began in a wood-frame, painted mud- floor house on the banks of the Dnieper River outside of Kiev, and it ends at my father's graduation from Northwestern University. So it really is an immigrant's story. Just happened to be my family. Really, the family ethos came from Nicholas. It was an all-for-one, one-for-all. That's really what formed the basis and the ethos of our family as far as business was concerned, as far as personal relationships were concerned. He was a big, big influence. In reading his book, I developed a sense that “but by the grace of God go I,” and that could have been me in Kiev, and things wouldn't have been as rosy as they turned out to be for all of us. He was, to me, really the last one in our family to understand real personal hardship. My grandfather was in the Navy in World War I. I think he protected the Great Lakes from a German invasion. My dad was a Navy pilot, but he never saw action. I think we all kind of quietly looked at my great-grandfather as somebody who really went through the ringer and came out—he came over here at nine, and education was everything. As he got older, he got a degree in Pharmacology, and then

followed it up with a law degree. The law degree is really what stuck and began the family business. He was a huge influence on all of us. I think that my work later on in the community, a lot of it was based on the “but by the grace of God” idea.

01-00:07:38 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the hardships that he faced?

01-00:07:45 Pritzker: It wasn't so sweet being a Jew in Kiev, in the Ukraine, in the 1870s. I found his passport, and they came here on September 19, 1881, is when they hit America. Prior to that he had three sons and two daughters. One son was a Marxist. As a result of their having found a printing press in the basement of their house, they were subjected to not just extreme persecution, but prosecution. Just prior to that they fled, and that's how they ended up in America. The idea that because you were a Jew made life really, really tough. I can't cite any specifics. I think about his experience. They came over here, knew no English, didn't bring anybody. It was just my great-great- grandfather—he was Jacob—and my great-grandfather, Nicholas, came over. Nicholas was nine. They didn't know anybody. They didn't speak the language. They didn't have any money. They came in September. Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, which is where I was born, had just opened, and the fourteenth entry in the log was they released from the hospital Nicholas J. Pritzker, nine years old. He had the flu, and he was so indigent, they had to give him an overcoat. It was February in Chicago. We have a copy of that page. That's tough duty when you don't know anybody and you're in a foreign country and trying to make your way. Through it, I suppose you could kind of go one of two ways. You could get an “anything goes” attitude to just get by, but they held to their moral character, to the best of my understanding and everything I read, and made their way. I'm both in awe of what they did and hugely grateful for it.

01-00:10:47 Farrell: Just to clarify, when they came from Kiev did they go straight to Chicago, or was there another path?

01-00:10:52 Pritzker: They did go straight to Chicago. For some reason—I can't remember exactly-I think they went to Stockholm on the way, and I can't remember exactly, but they only made one or two—Vienna. That's what they did. They went to Vienna, and then I think they went by train, and then boat, and went directly from New York to Chicago. No stopping in between. I can't recall if they knew somebody there or why they ended up in Chicago, but they did.

01-00:11:23 Farrell: The book that he wrote, the English title is called Three Scores After Ten?

01-00:11:27 Pritzker: Three Score After Ten, yeah.

01-00:11:28 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about the ethos that he developed or wrote about in that?

01-00:11:35 Pritzker: I've described it before. When I was a kid in school, if I had a teacher that was mean, I remember thinking, “God, if I'm ever a teacher I'll never behave that way, or I'll do something different than that.” I think that when they came over, having had the experiences they had, they were determined to live by a certain set of behaviors. I remember in the book there's a story about bringing a family in. They had nothing. They didn't have two nickels to rub together. Somebody had taken them in, and there was a newly-arrived immigrant family who, if it was possible, had less than they had, and they took them in for a meal. You almost wonder if, nowadays, anything like that would happen. But I think that was the impact of their experience, having left the Ukraine and come to America. It's really reaffirming to read a book like that and think about what America offered, and in, I'm sure, many cases, still offers to immigrants. It's easy to whine about where you are, but if you go anywhere other than the United States, we've got a pretty sweet situation here. There are a lot of people that don't have as sweet a situation, but it's a country that offered immigrants a new start, and you could be anything you wanted, and you could raise your kids any way you wanted. I think we take it for granted. I often go into grocery stores. Dan Safier, who runs the endowment at Federation now, took me to his new development. He opened a Whole Foods on Market Street. I walked in and it always strikes me how much abundance; we have everything. We don't just have an area of apples; there's twenty different types of apples. Every time I do that, I think about immigrants that come in and look at a grocery store like that, and it must be overwhelming. But we don't even think anything about it. I think that what I got out of my great-grandfather's book was that notion that America offered freedom to do and say and be whatever you wanted, and that there's a price to pay for that freedom. You have to give back. You have to be part of the community, and you owe the community. So that, and the notion that family trumps everything, and we take care of each other. It was damn near communism from the standpoint of the family. What you contribute is what you take out, and everybody gets taken care of. The book, very powerful for me, as I think it has been for everybody in our family.

01-00:14:58 Farrell: How old were you when you first read it?

01-00:15:01 Pritzker: You know, it's funny. Initially, what he did, was he only made a copy for each of his sons and each of his grandsons, so there were only like six, eight, ten, maximum ten, copies around. We had one in the house and I remember he inscribed it to my dad. My dad was his favorite. I'll tell you about that in a little while. He wrote it in green ink, and what it said was, “With respect for filial as well as professional achievement.” I remember as a kid seeing the

book on the bookshelf and knowing—I wouldn't go so far as to say it kind of vibrated on the shelf, but of all the books on the shelf, I always looked at that one and knew there was something about that book. I probably either didn't have the discipline—I remember paging through it, because there are a lot of pictures in the book, which is great, because there's pictures of Jacob, my great-great-grandfather, and you don't often get to see that far back in your family. So even as a kid, I would page through it to look at the pictures. But probably the first time I really read it and understood it, I bet I was nineteen, twenty. I've probably read it two or three times since then. It's kind of like a movie. Every time you go back, you see something different, something new, that you hadn't thought about before.

01-00:16:39 Farrell: Can you give me an example of how the ethos in that book were manifested in your family, or an activity that your family did?

01-00:16:48 Pritzker: One of the early things that happened was in the mid-1920s my great- grandfather had raised money from, I think, nine people to buy land in Florida. Got the money, bought the land. Depression happened. They lost the property, like everybody in America lost things. But he endeavored to pay all those guys back, and nobody did that. It was the Depression. You pay your money, you take your chances. Over a number of years, he paid all of them back. It was so unusual that one of the guys that had given him money for the investment, this guy named Walter Heymann—Walter Heymann subsequently became the president of the First National Bank of Chicago, and never forgot what my great-grandfather had done, and so offered him almost an unlimited line of credit over the years. That served the bank quite well and served the family quite well. As a result of my grandfather paying these guys back, the notion was that you always went out of your way to be a good partner and you take care of your partners. That came out in the book, and that's always been a really important aspect of business for all of us. Partners are partners.

There's a story, not in that book, but my dad was bidding on a timber operation in Oregon, and one day a guy showed up unannounced, a guy named Will Gonyea. Will was a lumber guy. I wouldn't go so far as to say a lumberjack, but damn near. He lived in Roseburg, Oregon, outside of Eugene. He showed up at dad's office and he went in and he sat down and he said, “I understand you're bidding on this timber company.” He said to my dad, “You have a problem.” My dad said, “What's my problem?” He said, “You don't know anything about the timber business.” He said, “But I've got a problem.” He said, “What's your problem?” He said, “I don't have any money.” The two of them struck up a deal sitting there. They shook hands. We never had a piece of paper between our two families, and the business went on for fifty- two years on a handshake. I think that's derivative of the book. That's the way you do business. If you have to have a contract, you've got big problems. If, by the time you have a disagreement, you've got to deal with a contract,

you've got bigger problems. The notion was that a handshake is a handshake, and you live up to your word. I think that was a big part of what came out of the book. And again, the family notion-- we're all in this together and we sink together or we swim together.

01-00:19:53 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit about each of your grandparents?

01-00:19:57 Pritzker: Yeah. My grandfather on my mother's side was named Hugo Friend. His wife was Sadie. Sadie was a little dumpling of a woman. Literally, I think she looked like a dumpling with legs. My grandfather, as I said, was an appellate court judge and my claim to fame as far as Chicago trivia is, in 1919, there was a famous scandal called the Black Sox Scandal, where nine of the players—sorry, seven of the players—eight—eight men out—were accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. My grandfather, Hugo, was the judge. They were found not guilty by the court, but the commissioner of baseball at the time, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, kicked them out anyway, just unilaterally. Really a travesty of justice that he did, but he did. That was my mother's dad. He also put away Big Bill Thompson, who was the mayor of Chicago, on corruption charges, and you just didn't put away a Chicago—you know, if a Chicago politician wasn't corrupt, that was the unusual situation. That was my grandfather. My grandmother, his wife, Sadie, was an unusual woman. She had a job. She was an accountant and had a full-time job, and this was in the 1920s. That was very unusual for a woman who was raising kids to be in the workforce. They lived on the South Side of Chicago. In Chicago, it was very clear. You lived on the South Side, you were a White Sox fan; you lived on the North Side, you were a Cubs fan. Because of the affiliation, the experience with the White Sox, we always grew up as White Sox fans, even having grown up in the northern suburbs.

My grandfather, Hugo, was a track star. If you think of Chariots of Fire, that was an American version of his story. He was the captain of the University of Chicago track team. His coach was a guy named Amos Alonzo Stagg, who was a very famous—Stagg was also Jim Thorpe's coach. My grandfather was in the first revised Olympics, in St. Louis—I want to say it was maybe 1898— and then was in the 1904 Olympics, I think in Athens, and he was a silver medalist in the hurdles. He also had an NC 2A record in the standing jump. It's not an event anymore. He was probably the first and last athlete in our family. But he was always a big deal to us. I remember going to court. My mother took me out of school one day. I was probably seven. We went to see him at court. To see your grandfather walk in and everybody stands up until he sits down, and then everybody sits down, that was pretty powerful stuff. He's in a black robe and everybody's calling him “Your Honor.” That was a really powerful image to me. He was a cigar-smoker, and he smoked cigars out of tubes. You asked about what it like going downtown. One of the things I would look forward to was, whenever he lit a cigar, he'd take it out of the

tube, he'd light it, and then he'd blow smoke in the tube and cap the tube and give it to me. It was like having the smoke of Zeus. I'd take the thing to school. You know, “Inside this tube is cigar smoke.” So that was Hugo. He was a pretty austere guy. He was not a back-slapping, laugh-'em-up guy; he was really a judge's judge.

My other grandparents, A.N., Abram Nicholas Pritzker, and his wife, Fanny. Fanny, her maiden name was Doppelt. She was Viennese. If the Russians were considered kind of the shtetl people, and the Germans were the intellectuals, the Viennese were even more cultured than the Germans. She had flaming red hair, and she was beautiful, and almost aristocratic. My grandfather was a short, stocky—he wasn't heavy-set, he was stocky. To see this woman of elegance with this little pug of a guy—she passed away when I was twelve, but it wasn't lost on me when I was younger this was kind of an incongruous pairing. She was very regal and I remember they had a house in Eagle River, Wisconsin, which is probably eight hours by train north of Chicago. It was an overnight train ride. She was the queen of the house, but whenever anybody said, “What do you remember of your grandmother?” it was the line, “Don't come in the house with a wet bathing suit.” I'll go to my grave remembering that about my grandmother. She was gentle, but stern. She and my dad were very tight. I knew that. I always had that understanding. We were very close. We were probably closer to that side of the family.

My grandfather, A.N., and I were very tight. He and I, it turns out, now that I'm older, we're very much alike. We both have the shpilkes. We both have an affinity for people. We love people. Talking to them, schmoozing. My nicest recollection is, when I was little, we'd go up to Eagle River in the summers, and he had this old Chris Craft, this beautiful old wooden boat. It made this really deep—God, I still remember the smell and the sound. The law was you couldn't take your boat on the lake before seven in the morning, and neither he nor I could sleep past about six. So we'd get up and he'd make me breakfast of burned bacon and bad eggs, and we'd go sit in the boathouse, literally going like this until we could get on the lake. At seven o'clock, we were gone. I would waterski. We'd go to town to get the paper. Well, the town was about five lakes over. So I would ski until my arms were about to fall off, and then I'd get out and we'd go into town and we'd get the paper. On the way back we'd visit all the altacockers, all his buddies who had places on various lakes. I can't tell you with specificity the impact it had on me, but something about the notion of the wisdom of older people, because he really exposed me to spending time with those guys. To me, those guys had skinny or fat legs and looked ridiculous in a bathing suit, but these were all really accomplished guys, but what did I know? I was seven, eight, nine years old. Some of them would pay attention to me because they liked kids. Some of them would pay attention because they thought it would garner a favor with my grandfather. But I got a lot out of that. I don't know if my grandfather thought about it or not, but that was really impactful. In fact, there was Leah Lavites who lived in

Atherton. Her husband, Bud—she and Bud had a house there. I just got to know all these older people that I would have probably never been exposed to.

My grandfather was a brilliant deal guy and a brilliant accountant and tax guy. He was able to marry that with his personality. He could schmooze anybody. I learned a huge amount from him. He was the one, I think from the family business standpoint, if my great-grandfather set the tone, my grandfather set the relationships and built the tax and trust structure that my father, who was a brilliant deal guy, could build on top of. It takes a village. People assume it was my father that built the businesses and the wealth. Really, it took all three of them to do it. You couldn't have had one without the other. So I am really fortunate to come from people who were really smart, highly ethical, highly charitable, and really set a tone for the whole family. I think some of us have taken it probably more seriously than others, but I think that the whole notion of philanthropy was pretty deeply seeded at a really early age. I've likened it to art. We collect photography. We have three boys and they grew up around all this photography. I don't think they thought about it, but it turns out all three of them ended up being very visual. My oldest has now opened a business having to do with fashion, but he draws and he used to be a photographer. My middle one is a writer/filmmaker, and my youngest one is a photographer, and that's what he's majoring in at Yale. I don't think it was conscious, but just being around it. And like that, growing up around philanthropy—and you wouldn't call it philanthropy when I was a kid; it was charity. You watch it quietly, not even meaning to. It's there in front of you, and so in later years it comes back to you that this is something that's important.

01-00:31:15 Farrell: Can you give me an example of a charitable activity or event that you remember?

01-00:31:21 Pritzker: Sure. The biggest one was in '67. My family gave a gift that created the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Now, it's interesting from two standpoints. One, as a—what was I, thirteen? Fourteen? It was hard, because, at the time, it was thirty million. That was 1967. It was a huge gift. I always had a really strong work ethic. I was a bus boy/waiter at Lenny's Delicatessen in Winnetka, where we had moved to from Glencoe. All I remember is all the guys at Lenny's—because it was in all the papers—“Hey Pritzker, why didn't your father give that to me? They don't need it.” You know. As a fourteen-year-old, it was mortifying. I had a pretty good sense of humor as a kid and it sharpened my ability to respond, to think fast on my feet, and it probably built callouses on my soul, if you will, to withstand the ribbing. But that was huge, because it was very public and it created what has been one of the great medical schools in the world for many years. None of us are doctors, and I think it was an outgrowth of the care and concern people had shown to my great-grandfather years and years earlier. Michael Reese

ended up being affiliated with the University of Chicago. As my grandfather said—we were talking about the overcoat that the hospital had given him—he said, “We repaid that jacket many times over.” I think that's how we viewed things, was that you owe it to give back to the community. That was the biggest event as far as charity as a kid.

My mother—a very different time, but there was this thing in Chicago called the Crystal Ball. There weren't that many Jewish charities. There was—I didn't even know what it was called in Chicago then--whatever the equivalent of the Federation was. It would have been the Welfare Society, maybe, which was probably the predominant Jewish charity in Chicago, but Michael Reese Hospital was the other. I remember my mother chairing what was called the Crystal Ball. That was the big annual fundraiser. It wasn't always necessarily about giving money; it was also about elbow grease. There was a cute story of the year that she chaired that. We were in the house in Glencoe, so it had to be first or second grade. She had a meeting of her committee or whatever at the house one day, and I was sick, so I stayed home from school. My wife's mother was at that meeting, was at that lunch. Who knew that I'd be marrying her daughter, whatever, twenty-five years later? But it was a small community. One of the great things in marrying somebody from that community is you have such a shared sense of history. There's a shorthand. If I say Ira, she knows exactly who I'm talking about.

01-00:35:02 Farrell: Can you tell me the names of—how many children each of your grandparents had, and their names?

01-00:35:10 Pritzker: On my mother's side, the oldest was Robert. Bob Friend was, I think, three years older than my mother. My mother's name is Marian, but her nickname was Cindy. They tell me it comes from “Cinderella.” Her just younger sister was Susie, and they had a younger brother named Skip. On my father's side, my dad was the oldest, and Bob was the middle, and my Uncle Don was the youngest. Don moved here, because I was based here for years, and Don ran the campaign at Federation sometime in the late 1960s, and was always very involved with Federation here.

01-00:35:58 Farrell: Can you tell me about your parents and some of your earliest memories of your parents?

01-00:36:03 Pritzker: Yeah. My mom, who's turning ninety next week, was absolutely, unequivocally, the disciplinarian. She was not tough, but she could be tough. She did the whole school thing, school meetings. She was a stay-at-home mom, but she was a bridge player. The great thing about her being a bridge player was she'd host the game once or twice a week and there were always brownies. So it was good she was a bridge player because we always got

brownies when you got home. She was the one that went to the school meetings. She absolutely raised the kids. We lived in the suburbs and so dad commuted downtown, which was a conscious decision. They wanted to raise kids in a bit of a more bucolic environment and not in a city, which was a burden for dad. I now think about having to schlep downtown and back twice a day. When there was good traffic, it was probably a forty-minute drive. I was the third. I had an older sister, who passed away in 1972, named Nancy, who was five years older than me. I have an older brother, Tom, who's three years older, a younger brother named Danny, who is six years younger, and a younger sister named Gigi, who's nine years younger. I was also smack in the middle. I had two above and two below. Being the middle kid, you come to expect nothing. You're thrilled with whatever scraps you get. My mom was the disciplinarian, and she was the stay-at-home mom.

My dad was kind of the knight in shining armor. He was really good-looking, had an amazingly sharp sense of humor, was as smart as anybody I ever knew, had a calculator for a mind, literally, and was a tennis player, a skier. You put a racquet in his hand, he'd kick anybody's ass. He was a great athlete. Because he was so successful in business, you put all these things together, and the guy was quite amazing. In fact, Warren Buffet, in his autobiography wrote that early in his career he—my dad did a deal with a company called Rockwood. It was based on cocoa futures. It was so brilliantly structured that Warren described that as an early influence on how he did business. Before it was ever called private equity my dad was doing private equity, and was very successful at it. I think my nicest memories of my dad are when we would all go skiing. He was an amazing athlete. But we couldn’t ski with him. You had to go to ski school. That was the deal. My dad's favorite story about me was when I was about six, I had very tight hamstrings. I was the kid in class who couldn't touch his feet. The bindings then, you would put your boot in, and there was a cable that went behind your boot, and it connected to a lever on the front of your ski and you had to push the lever down, which would lock your boot in. I couldn't reach that far over. My hamstrings were too tight. So I hated it. If you go to ski school, nobody's going to do it for you, so it was just a miserable proposition. One morning, he started to get us ready for ski school and I started crying; I wasn't going to go to ski school. He says, “You're going to go to ski school.” We just went at it, and he lost his temper and I lost my mind, and I'm screaming and he's yelling. Finally he said, “You're going to go to ski school and you're not going to cry,” and I looked him in the eye and said, “I'll go to ski school, but I'm going to cry.” I trumped him. Anyway, I went to ski school that day. But finally, when we were good enough to keep up with him, we would ski together. That, to me, was the best. That's where I probably learned as much as I learned from anybody, because when you're on a fifteen, twenty-minute lift ride, all you can do is talk, and so that's where a lot of our communications happened. But he was quite a guy. He was an amazing guy. He wasn't perfect, but he was, in our eyes, just this knight in shining armor.

01-00:41:12 Farrell: For future listeners who may not be familiar with your father, can you tell me a little bit more about his career and some of his specific successes?

01-00:41:20 Pritzker: Yeah. Dad was a deal guy. It wasn't that he had a passion for this business or a passion for that business; he had a passion to do a deal. Find a company that's broken, buy it on as tight a basis as you can, and turn it around. But he never sold anything. I could count on one hand, probably, companies that he sold over the span of my knowing him. The most prominent one was Hyatt. In 1957, he was on the board of Continental Airlines. Dad was a pilot since he was a kid and always loved flight, always loved planes. Went into the Navy. Cheated to become a naval aviator. He was colorblind, and I mean really colorblind, and to become a Navy pilot you had to pass this color chart test. There was no chance he would pass it, so he bought a book from Canada and he memorized it. When it came time for the test, he knew it, because he'd memorized it. He was always a pilot. He was on the board of Continental Airlines and was in LA for a meeting. Now, we think of LA with hundreds of buildings by the airport and a bus lane. It was nothing. It was orange groves and one runway and there was a motel called the Hyatt House. When it opened, the owner's name was Hyatt Von Dehn, and he had the ribbon-cutting and his friend, Conrad Hilton, came to give a little speech. The speech he gave went something like, “Hyatt screwed it up now. No one's ever going to stay at an airport hotel. What a crazy idea.” Because flight in the mid-1950s wasn't what it was today.

Dad was trying to get back to Chicago from LA, was fogged-in or something. He went to this hotel because it was the only restaurant in the area. He sat there and he was talking to the cook, and the cook said the owner wanted to sell the hotel. I can see it now. Dad must have looked at his watch thought,” I've got a couple hours, I can probably get a deal done.” The cook called the owner, the owner came in, and dad started to do the deal. He didn't have enough money. He called his friend, Jerry Wexler in Chicago, said, “Hey, Wex, you want to buy a hotel with me?” Wexler said, “What, are you out of your mind? No. Thanks anyway,” and he hung up. Dad figured out how to finance the hotel. He bought this motel by LAX called the Hyatt House, and so that was the first Hyatt Hotel. He had this idea that flight, because he was involved with Continental, was really going to, no pun, take off. So he thought “Hotels by airports, probably a pretty good idea,” and so they proceeded to build hotels at San Jose, at Burlingame, Seattle, Albany, New York. Those were some of the first ones, and they were the first airport hotels. From that, Hyatt Hotels grew.

The break came in 1967. There was a hotel in Atlanta that was being built by an architect named John Portman, and it was twenty-two stories and it had a hole in it. It had an atrium. I think since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon nobody built an atrium building, and so it was really unique. It had these glass

elevators and it had this huge bar held up by a cable from the twenty-second floor, and all the rooms were around the atrium and there was, on top of it, under a blue Plexiglas dome, was a revolving restaurant. Whatever the view was from Atlanta, Georgia in '67, you could see. The developer had gone into bankruptcy. They were trying to sell it. My dad and his brother, younger brother, Donnie, who was ten years younger, went down and looked at this thing and decided this would be a great idea, we should buy this hotel. And they did. The day that it opened, dad stayed in Chicago, Donnie went down. No one came in the door, and Donnie was totally freaked out. He lived here in San Francisco the time. He then flew back, I'm sure he thought about,” Let's see, if I drive out to the Golden Gate, I can climb out on the thing, and when my father calls to tell me what a moron I am for having bought this deal”— The next day they had to call in the Georgia state troopers. From that day, for the next seven years, it was the most successful hotel in the world. So that really brought forth hotels like the Hyatt Regency San Francisco with its atrium, Houston, Knoxville, Hyatt Regency O'Hare, and the rest is history. But that was my dad.

01-00:46:34 Farrell: Can you describe a little bit more what your Uncle Don's role was in Hyatt, within Hyatt?

01-00:46:43 Pritzker: He was in naval intelligence after World War II. Donnie was ten years younger than my dad. I think Donnie got out of the Navy, I want to say, in maybe 1957. Something like that. I remember being in a parade, in Eagle River, when Donnie came home. They had a parade down Main Street for him. Donnie got a law degree and then was looking for something to do. Dad had bought these two, three hotels. Somebody said to my father once, “What makes you think you can go in the hotel business?” He said, “I stayed in one once.” Dad knew nothing about hotels, and had no interest in operations. He was not an operating guy. Donnie said, “Can I run these hotels?” Dad said, “Sure.” It sounds like a big deal now, but there literally was two or three motels. When they got their fourth or fifth or sixth one, Donnie said to my dad, “I'd like to be president of Hyatt.” Donnie was always very heavy, and dad said, “Okay, here's the deal. You lose twenty-five pounds, you can be the president of Hyatt.” Donnie, I think, lost five, and then dad caved and said, “Fine, you can be the president of Hyatt.” Donnie, sadly, subsequently died because of his weight. But Donnie really was the first—and having worked at Hyatt for so many years, Donnie was really the spirit of the culture that developed at Hyatt. We hired GMs who had way more enthusiasm than experience. They had never, many of them, worked in a hotel. We didn't know any better. We knew marginally more than they knew. We developed this cadre of general managers who were young and energetic and really creative, and we were doing things nobody else was doing. It sounds so trite now, but we developed the salad bar. Nobody—no restaurants, no hotels—had done a salad bar. The salad bar was fifty feet long, with everything you can imagine.

We were doing fun menus. My dad, I remember, when I was fourteen, we were driving downtown and I remember the top was down. I don't know why I remember that. He said, “What do you think you want to do when you grow up?” To a fourteen-year-old. I said, “I don't think I want to go to law school.” I come from a long line of lawyers. He said, “Oh, what do you think you want to do?” I said, “Well, there's this guy that works at Hyatt named Dennis Berkowitz, and Berkowitz named a thing on the menu 'the Burgerwitz.'” A hamburger. I thought it didn't get more creative than that. Maybe Picasso could draw, but Picasso could never come up with a name like “Burgerwitz.” That was the spirit at Hyatt. We would do things that you weren't supposed to do in hotels, because it wasn't done. As a result, when you marry that enthusiasm and creativity with these crazy-designed hotels, Hyatt was probably one of the hottest companies in the 1970s and early 1980s. I don't mean just hotels. We were doing things nobody was doing. We had, at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, it was called the :ding-a-ling” cart. It was this beautiful woman in a skimpy outfit on a golf cart that was retrofitted to be a rolling bar. So all these conventioneers and traveling business guys would have their meetings, and here comes the “ding-a-ling” girl, ringing her bell, and then she'd putter off to another. It sounds so rudimentary now, but then it was a big deal. It wasn't that my dad was the visionary that came up with all this stuff, but he thought it was fun. He thought it was a good idea, and that people should keep doing that kind of stuff. So between dad's ability to finance these hotels and find owners that wanted to plant the Hyatt flag on their buildings, and Donnie, who was operating the company and hiring these crazy, fun people, it was a pretty powerful duo. For dad, that was like deal after deal after deal. He didn't care about the hotel business, per se. From 1957 to 1980, let's say, we probably did 120 hotels. That's a lot of deals for dad to do, so that kept him busy.

We did other stuff, as an outgrowth of Hyatt—this was my grandfather's idea. In New Orleans, we were building a hotel, big hotel, a thousand rooms. We, by the way, didn't own most of these hotels. We owned a number of them. For example, Prudential Insurance needed to put their money into some kind of investments and so they would buy hotels, and they'd give them to us to manage. That was one of them in New Orleans. Across the way they were building this thing called the Superdome. The Superdome preceded the hotel, but they had built the Superdome, and New Orleans probably made Chicago look naïve as far as corruption. Louisiana was as corrupt as a place as there was. Superdome was supposed to cost sixty-five million. It cost a hundred and thirty-five, and everybody knew where the money went. My grandfather had this idea that private industry can operate things much more efficiently than a municipality. He goes to the governor and he said, “I want to manage the Superdome for you.” They were losing eighteen million a year. My grandfather said, “I can get you to break even or profit. You pay me a percentage of what we save you. Not a fixed fee. We have to save you money or we don't get paid.” Governor said, “That's fine. You can bid on that.” My grandfather said, “We don't do bids.” It was Edwin Edwards, who was a piece

of work. Governor Edwards and my grandfather got to be very close, and Edwards said to my grandfather, “You have to bid. That's the law.” He said, “Let me tell you about how that law works. Let's pretend it's 1875 and you're tired of reading by kerosene lamp. The way you do things, you're going to put out a bid for somebody to invent the electric lightbulb and you'll get two bids. You'll get A.N. Pritzker and Tom Edison. I guarantee that A.N. Pritzker will win the bid and you'll never have the electric lightbulb.” Edwards just loved that, and so he figured out a way to get it around the laws, and he gave us the contract to manage the place. That became a huge business for us. We managed Moscone, we managed Nassau Coliseum, 145 arenas, because my grandfather decided to sweep the floor of a hotel, sweep the floor of an arena can't be that much different.

In the basement of the Superdome were these two ticket computers. The choice was either use them for whatever they were supposed to be used for or throw them away. Somebody got the bright idea we ought to go in the ticketing business. We didn't know anything about tickets. Hired a guy named Fred Rosen, lawyer in New York. I don't even know how we found Fred. That was the beginning of Ticketmaster. Things, in retrospect, look like they took enormous vision. It's fluke as much as anything. A lot of our business was opportunistic. It wasn't this vision that one day we could be in the ticket business, and we'll crush Pearl Jam. It's all opportunistic. You look for the black hole in an opportunity, and you try to take advantage of it.

Audio File 2

02-00:00:04 Farrell: This is tape two, Shanna Farrell interviewing John Pritzker on Thursday, December 5, 2013. John, can you tell me a little bit more about each of your siblings, and maybe some memorable family moments?

02-00:00:19 Pritzker: Sure. My oldest sister, Nancy, was not a cute baby. It's a terrible thing as the first thing to say, but she was really not a cute baby. But she grew up to be absolutely stunning, but my first recollection was, God, she wasn't a cute baby. Nancy was five years older than me. Her name was Nancy Friend Pritzker. She was beautiful, really smart, spoke French fluently, beautifully, and had a really cute sense of humor. She was kind of the second in charge at the house. She was not a disciplinarian, but she was the oldest sister. If Nancy said something, you were obligated to listen to what Nancy said. Nancy was the golden child. Because I was five years younger, the difference between thirty-five and thirty isn't much, but the difference between fifteen and ten is huge. She had boyfriends. That in itself was a big deal. But one of her boyfriends had a Jaguar XKE. That was awesome. She had all these guys that would always hang around the house. I was the bratty little brother that they

wanted to get rid of, but they were forced to pay attention to me. So I remember having a lot of fun with Nancy and she was always very careful to make sure we were included in things. Nancy went on to Stanford University. I think her major was French lit. She worked at Stanford Children's Hospital. She had an enormous amount of empathy. I'm not sure how she came by it. I think, if I think about my mother, empathy is probably not one of the first fifteen words that I'd come up with. Nancy was always a very sympathetic, empathetic woman. Went to Stanford. Started exhibiting odd behavior. We were always shielded from it, and so I can't tell you with specifics. I don't think it was depression, per se, and I'm told it wasn't bipolar, but started exhibiting some kind of psychological issues. Came back to Chicago after she graduated Stanford, got a job. Ended up taking her life on Christmas day of 1972. As a result, my parents funded a bio-neurological lab at Stanford, and they work on issues of bipolar, depression, things like that.

So that was Nancy. My next older sibling is Tom. Tom was three years older than I am. We thought Tom was born to do business. We were a very patriarchal family, and it always went to oldest son. My dad was the oldest, my brother Tom was the oldest of the male grandchildren. Tom was not a particularly good student. Always very mischievous. He was a pretty good older brother until he wasn't. I was having this conversation the other day, asking it of somebody else who had brothers. The deal was, when we fought, there was kind of this unwritten rule—I don't know where it came from, but we both adhered to it—you didn't hit in the head, and you didn't hit in the genitals, but almost everything else went. Stomach, back, arms, legs. We would get in our fair share of tussles, but nothing serious.

One of my fondest-ish memories of Tom—I went away to school. I went to boarding school. Back then, I was one of those, “What are we going to do with him? Oh, I know what we'll do. Let's send him to boarding school.” Which turned out to be great for both my mother and me. My boarding school burned down one night. I went to a place called Oxford Academy, outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey. We were supposed to go skiing. We were going on a ski trip. This was a Friday night. At three in the morning on Saturday morning, somebody was banging on my door. I don't know why, but my roommate wasn't around for some reason, and when you're a kid, you find devices that work, like if you want privacy, you take the doorknob off the outside of your door. That way, nobody can just walk in. I had done that. So somebody was banging on my door and said, “The school's on fire.” I thought they're waking me up to get ready and go on the bus, we're going skiing. I said, “Okay, I'm up.” They said, “No, no, the school's on fire.” I was in a house around the corner from the main school, but we were on Absecon Bay, and I will never forget, I turned around and I looked at the water, and the water was glowing orange, because it was reflecting the fire around the corner. I went, “Oh, wow.” I ran out, and we all ran around to the main part of the school. The school was a miniature White House, literally. It was built in the early twenties. I mean, the school was fully ablaze. The firemen had just

shown up, and it was a little comical. You know the sprinklers that stick way up out of the ground. Well, it was pitch-black, and these guys, you'd see a fireman running with a hose, and then all of a sudden he'd go down, because he hit one of the sprinklers, so it was like watching combat. Anyway, I ran back to my dorm. There was a payphone by the door. It was three in the morning where I was but Tom was at Claremont College, so it was midnight on Friday night, so they were in full-blown party mode. I got Tom on the phone and I said, “Tom, my school's on fire.” He said, “Oh, that's great.” It was pretty traumatic. That's not exactly what I wanted to hear. “Are you okay?” would have been a nice response. I said, “No, you don't understand. It's burning to the ground.” He said, “Oh, that's amazing. Everybody wants to watch their school burn.” Two words, and I hung up the phone. That's one of my prime memories of Tom.

I worked at Hyatt and Tom, at a very young age, became my boss, which didn't have much impact then because he didn't have any operational experience and he wasn't really involved in operations. It was actually kind of nice and it was a very family-oriented company. What else can I tell you about Tom? Tom was not an athlete. I would say none of us really were athletes. As I said, it pretty much stopped with my mom's dad. My father was an athlete, but an amateur athlete. Subsequently, Tom and I and a bunch of others in the family had a battle about the structure of the family businesses after my dad had died that was much more public than any of us would have cared for it to be, but it happens. So my relationship with Tom is fairly fractured. But as kids we were pretty tight because he was only three years older than I am. One of my main recollections was Tom was always very business-oriented. Always liked to go to meetings, be included in that kind of stuff, which, for me, held no interest.

My younger brother, Danny—I was deferential, Nancy was the oldest, Tom was older. I always ended up in the backseat, because one of the older ones— Danny didn't put up with any of that crap. He didn't care who was what. I remember when he was like seven, we were in Sun Valley. There was no hot water, so I was boiling water to make a bath for myself. After an hour and a half of boiling and pouring and boiling and pouring, I went back to do something and when I came back to the bathroom, Danny was in my bath. That describes Danny's view of his place in the family. Danny probably was the most spoiled in our family. But I played guitar when I was—I taught myself how to play, and Danny watched very carefully, and actually Danny turned out to be a really proficient guitarist and became a writer and had a band called Sonia Dada that achieved some prominence. They couldn't sell an album to save their life, but their live shows—it was like the Grateful Dead. The albums didn't sell, but the shows were a big deal. Danny became a musician, and he's now making a film. Danny and I were very close as he got older.

My youngest sister, Gigi—Gigi and I were probably the closest in the family. She wasn't like a daughter, but she's nine years younger than I am, so I always looked out for her. When I was eighteen I moved to California. So when I was eighteen, when she's nine. As I said, that spread, it's a big deal when you're nine and your older brother lives in San Francisco. I always used to bring her presents when I'd come home to visit. I'd bring her heishi beads or a bracelet or something, and that was a big deal for her. Nothing for me, but it was a big deal for her. So she and I have always been tight, and Gigi now is a very successful filmmaker. She just released Ender's Game, was her movie. She did the The Way Way Back earlier in the year. She and I remain very close and she's great. Ironically, Gigi thinks more like a guy and she has three daughters, and my wife is very feminine and we have three sons. We thought something got switched because it should have been the other way around. But all our kids are close, which is really nice.

02-00:11:55 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about how the closeness between you and Gigi has developed or changed over the years as you've—

02-00:12:07 Pritzker: Ever since she was a little girl, we were close. Gigi was always really cute. Gigi's famous story—she always had a salty mouth. When she was very little, she was shopping with my mother and my mother said she was tired, and Gigi dragged a chair over—I think Gigi was like five—and said, “Mom, sit your ass down here.” That was Gigi's famous line. Gigi used to sit at the table— again, I probably had more empathy for her than anybody. Because she was so young, she was a kid, but we all had lives, whether it was in school or we were all doing what she thought was more interesting than what she was doing. At dinner we would all talk about our lives and nobody really was interested in the fact that she got a new blankie or stopped sucking her thumb. One night, she got really angry because she couldn't get a word in edgewise. Everybody was talking about they were the boss of something and she slammed her hand on the table—she was in a high chair—and said, “I'm the boss of my dolls.” We were always very amused by Gigi. But she and I were very tight all along. There was a bump in the road when we did the family restructuring, because she sided with my brother Tom, for various reasons. But she and I always, more unconsciously than planned, always knew it was important not to say anything you couldn't take back. So we remained close, even through—it was strained, but even through the ten, eleven years of that. Now that's been over for a few years, two, three years. We talk about it now. Most of us aren't very psychological. I happen to be more psychological, I think, than most of my family. Nobody talked about when my sister died. Everybody went into zip-your-mouth mode. In the last few years, Gigi and I have been talking about it and so I think that's probably contributed. Because it's like, how can you not talk about it? Isn't anybody curious about—right? So I think that's contributed a lot to our closeness.

02-00:14:23 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about the effect of that, about your sister's passing, on the family?

02-00:14:35 Pritzker: It's a tough one, because everyone went into kind of freeze-frame mode, because nobody would talk about it. Adam is thirty now, so this was eighteen years ago. We were in Hawaii on Christmas break, and I was walking on the beach with Adam. He was like eleven. They knew about Nancy. They didn't know the details, but they knew I had a sister, and they'd seen pictures and asked questions. We were walking on the beach one day. Adam is really smart, so he may have actually manipulated this move. We're walking on the beach. He said, “I had a really weird, scary dream last night.” I said, “What did you dream?” He said, “I dreamt that I set myself on fire but I didn't want to. Is it possible to do that against your own will?” So we talked about it, and I thought about the notion of the genetics of Nancy's situation. When I got back to Chicago I actually called her shrink. I told him the story about Adam, and is it possible he could talk to me about Nancy? It turns out that in two weeks, a new law in Illinois was enacted, where he actually could talk to me. Heretofore, he couldn't have by law. But there was a new law that if the executive of the estate approved it, he could talk. My dad was the executor. I called dad and I told him what I wanted to do, and he was kind of curious why I wanted to do it, and I told him. He said okay. So he signed. I went and met with him and he told me some things. There was no kind of epiphany about anything. I invited all of my siblings and dad to come meet with him, and two of my siblings didn't want to do it, and my older brother Tom did. So he and I met with Wolpert, and then dad wanted to meet with him on his own. Nobody likes to talk about it, so that's why it's refreshing when Gigi and I do.

I think everybody pretends there wasn't an effect, but how can there not be an impact? I think it impacted my mother in a big way. I think she got more closed-up, and I think she got a little harder. I'm not sure how it impacted my dad. He seemed to be the same guy before and after. I think he's more concerned about himself, as a result, I think, of Nancy's death. In May of 1972, his brother, Donald, died. In December, Nancy died. In February, dad had a heart attack, and I don't think they're disassociated. I think he began to focus on his own health/mortality, so that he probably didn't think as much about—can I digress for a second? There's a boat that's passing—right, see that boat? That boat is the USS Amsterdam. I took that boat from New York to France with my mother and my sister and brother in 1959. We took the Amsterdam. Now, whether that's a new version of the Amsterdam or that's the boat—see where it says “Amsterdam”? Isn't that crazy? Anyway, that was in '59. We took a boat from New York to Le Havre. Another great memory. But there you go. Sorry. I think we were all pretty closed-off. It's only now that Gigi and I have started talking about it. When you have those, “You felt that way? Wow, that's what I thought, too.” Slowly it comes out but still, most of them don't want to talk about it. But you couldn't not be impacted by it.

02-00:19:01 Farrell: Before we move on, I want to go back to something you had mentioned earlier about your father being your great-grandfather's favorite. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

02-00:19:11 Pritzker: Yeah, sure. It was both the era and my dad's intellectual horsepower. My dad went to Northwestern when he was fourteen. He got into Harvard, but his parents wouldn't let him go. It was too far away from Chicago. That's pretty weird to get into a school like that at fourteen years old. When he was eleven, it was apparent he was moving too fast through school. My great-grandfather took him out of school and traveled with him through Europe for six months. I think it was one of my grandfather's first trips back since he had emigrated as a little boy. It was a boy and his great-grandfather by themselves for six months, and so they developed a very, very tight relationship. Dad told a story. They were in Germany. This would have been 1932, '33. They were in a beer hall in Germany. I think Munich, maybe. He remembers seeing a bunch of people doing a Nazi salute. I don't know if he made it up. I don't think he made it up, but maybe he had a mis-memory, but he remembers that vividly. He was a little boy. As a result of that trip, dad kind of determined that when he had grandchildren he would do the same thing when they turned eleven or twelve. My first one was Adam. Adam turned eleven and my dad said, “What do you want to do? Where do you want to go?” He said, “I want to go to the rainforest in Costa Rica and Peru.” So dad got Conservation International to arrange a trip to Costa Rica and Peru with my dad and Adam. The two of them got very tight. It was great. I was so thrilled. But dad came home—I was really quite shocked—and he pulled me aside one day. He said, “That's the one.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “That kid is brilliant.” I said, “Oh, that's sweet.” He goes, “No, no, no, I'm not being sweet. That kid's got enormous brainpower.” It created a bond between the two of them that wasn't necessarily a buddy-buddy bond, but they kind of—was it the Vulcan mind meld kind of thing? They could look at each other, and kind of like, “You're the man,” “No, you're the man.” That was an outgrowth of his relationship with his grandfather. My dad and my grandfather were probably very competitive. They adored each other, and my dad was the light of my grandfather's eyes, but my great-grandfather wasn't a deal guy, and so I think it was a more pure relationship. There was no competitiveness to it. I think my dad just adored Nick. I wish I had been older to see how they were together, but he was my great-grandfather, so that wasn't going to be.

02-00:22:45 Farrell: Moving on to your early education, what was the name of your elementary school, and what are some of the things that you remember about the time?

02-00:22:53 Pritzker: The first school I remember was North School. We lived in Glencoe. It was a bicycle-based economy. You could ride everywhere. It wasn't like San Francisco. There were no hills. Any hill in Glencoe was artificial. It was flat

as a pancake. But everybody rode bicycles everywhere, and that's one of my fondest recollections. I went to North School, and from kindergarten to second grade, before we moved to Winnetka. I was a guinea pig for dyslexia, because in—I don't know, it must have been 1959ish, '58ish, dyslexia, that wasn't even a term. I think at the time they thought it was probably brain damage, some kind of a brain impairment. I remember as a kid going to the University of Chicago to see a neurologist named Oscar Sugar. As a six-year-old, how can you do anything but remember a guy named Sugar? So I went and saw Dr. Sugar, and they did pins on the bottom of my feet and that whole thing to see if there were neurological issues. One of my vivid memories in first grade was I had drawn a picture, and my teacher said, “Oh wow, that's great. I'd like you to go show that to Ms. Nelson,” who was my kindergarten teacher. I got some indication—it wasn't because she had just seen a work by Miro and she had to show somebody. It must have been something about it that kind of was, “Hmm, remember what you were telling me about? Look, there it is.” I remember I went out in the hall, but I didn't go into Ms. Nelson's class, because I knew something was amiss. That was the beginning of understanding I learned differently than other kids. It's hard enough now in schools to get schools to accommodate kids with learning differences. Back then, there was a box, and you were either in the box or you were out of the box. So school for me was really tough.

The two things I remember vividly in first grade were Ms. Cyrus tied me to my seat one day because I had the shpilkes. Now, that would be like she'd do twenty years in the federal pen. Then, it was like the mother said, “Oh, I don't blame you. He's enough to make you crazy.” So I remember that, but one of my best friends, who was like six years older than me—best friends as an adult—who lived across the street, one day we were talking, as thirty-year- olds, and I told him the story. He said, “Ms. Cyrus tied me to my seat.” Which is crazy. Anyway. The other story was—which this one was really apocryphal. You know that slick textbook paper? I don't even know if they still use it. It turns out you can use an eraser and you can erase the print. Not just the pencil mark, but the whole thing. So one day I was given a math problem and there wasn't a prayer I could do this math problem. I just couldn't do it. So what do you do if you can't do it? You erase it. She asks everybody for their homework, and everybody hands it in, and she says, “John?” I said, “What?” She goes, “Where's your homework?” I said, “For what?” She said, “Problem number three.” I said, “Problem number three isn't in my book,” because I had erased it, which I thought was a brilliant solution. “I don't have that one in my book.” As an adult, she must have looked at the book and it was obvious what I had done. I thought I was clever and she's going, “WTF?” I think that was the first indication that I was not going to have a stellar school career.

As a result, I went to a learning specialist, Ms. Hartman. I remember so vividly, she gave me an envelope and turned it over so the back of the envelope was face-up. She gave me a pencil and a paper and she said, “Draw that for me.” Well, now you'd say, “All it is is a rectangle and a V.” I couldn't,

for all the tea in China, couldn't have drawn that then. It didn't compute for me. So that's how it manifest. And so geometry, that was never going to happen. I was an oral learner. Visual was really tough for me. That really marked my career in school. They do it differently now, but what they said then was, “Oh, you have a learning”—they didn't call it a learning difference. It's very sweet now. Whatever they called it then. “You can't do this, because your mind works thusly.” As a kid, you go, “Oh, that's interesting.” Then a teacher says, “Okay, so now we'd like you to do this.” Essentially what you say is, “Oh gee, I'd love to do that but see, my mind works like this.” It develops in you an excuse not to do stuff. It also developed a pretty acute sense of humor because you've got to figure out ways to get around things and humor is one of the great devices. On the other hand as I got older, it became an advantage because I thought about concepts nobody else thought about. Not because I'm brilliant, but I just think about things differently. I've talked to people—who was I talking to recently? My cousin did a film with Jamie Redford on dyslexia, on learning differences. The other thing we did when we were young, and if you were dyslexic, you clung to the notion, did you know Einstein was dyslexic? All the sudden, Rockefeller, Einstein. In pretty good company. Then you begin to claim that it's like a huge advantage. “Oh, you think like that? Anybody can think like that. Einstein had what I have.” But I was talking to somebody and I have this notion that I developed when I was younger, that as a result of this it felt like I could see around corners. I don't mean as a supernatural power, but kind of I saw things that, for whatever reason, other people didn't see. I think it turned out to be a huge advantage for me, not as a scholar by any means, because school was very tough for me, but kind of just, in life, I think it's a huge advantage.

As I've described, I took a two-year gap between high school and college, and somebody said, “Why two years?” I said, “Because my father wouldn't let me take three.” I went back to Menlo College because that was the only place that would have me. Then I went to the University of Denver. “I'll go back in a minute.” The great irony is I was invited to be the commencement speaker at the Menlo commencement for 2014. The president called me, of Menlo College, and he said—Barney Osher. I don't know if you've interviewed Barney. Barney is being given an honorary degree and he said they should ask me to give the speech, Barney's very close friend. So they did. I told President Kelly I would do it on one condition: he had to give me an honorary degree in rocket science. He laughed. He said, “You know we don't do rocketry. We don't do that stuff here.” I said, “You have to, and you have to dummy it up.” He said, “Why do you want an honorary degree in rocket science?” Because Kurt Servos, who was a professor of Geology at Menlo, one day, in front of the entire class, announced that Pritzker was no rocket scientist. I said, “So I want a degree in rocket—an honorary degree.” So they're giving me an honorary degree in rocket science from Menlo.

But high school for me—we moved. Thankfully, we moved, because I was held back in third grade. So we moved to Winnetka because my youngest

sister was born, and the house was just too small. That's really when I had my first brush with what it's like to grow up in a wealthy family. We didn't have fancier cars than anybody and our house in Glencoe wasn't bigger than anybody's. We did have a tennis court but nobody thought that was so outrageous. But when we moved to Glencoe my parents built a really big house and it was the closest house to school, so it was really obvious, and that was really hard for me. Went to Hubbard Woods School, started in third grade again. Which was fortunate because at least—they probably should have held me back a year before kindergarten, which is what we did to all three of our boys. Got to Hubbard Woods School and what was really fascinating was I didn't intellectualize the notion that I had just moved from what was a totally Jewish community to a community that had only recently allowed Jews to live there. It manifest in amazing ways. Their bread was yellow. They didn't use Hellmann's; they used Miracle Whip. It was little stuff. They were aggressive. Some of the guys, they would hit you, and Jews don't fist-fight that I was aware of. So it was really interesting. I may have come up against some anti- Semitic behavior that I just didn't know was anti-Semitic. Moving to Winnetka was really—it started out kind of rough. Then I started making friends and it was fine, but school didn't get any easier.

Then, from there, the natural move is to New Trier High School. We were all in public schools. Winnetka Public School system was one of the best in the country at the time. Unfortunately, it was also where new math had been invented, and I had a hard enough time with old math. Now we're going to do new math. Come on. They used these Cuisenaire rods. All the concepts just flew by me. So Winnetka was an interesting experience, but when I got to New Trier, New Trier was 2,800 kids. If you're not in the box, you're screwed. That's just all there is to it. I had, on top of being screwed I had, thankfully, an advisor freshman year named Morrie Barefield. Morrie Barefield was the first black teacher at New Trier. In the New Trier district was a town called Kenilworth, which was famously anti-Semitic. To have Morrie Barefield as a teacher at New Trier was a big deal. I didn't think about it at the time. Everybody knew there were no other black teachers, and he was Mr. Barefield, but he must have been both very tough, but he was—if it weren't for Mr. Barefield, I would still be a freshman in high school. He just took so much time and energy to help me. When he passed away, about three, four years ago, I wrote his wife a letter. I got the most beautiful response back. After freshman year, it was clear I couldn't continue at New Trier. I would have just drown. Curiously, I never got into drugs at New Trier. It was just moving into, so that would have been 1965ish. Everybody was starting to smoke pot.

It was decided that I would go away to this place, Oxford Academy, which had a one-on-one student-to-teacher ratio. That was a hell of an experience. I really grew up there. It turned out to be a life-saving move. I give my parents a lot of credit. Although they were so frustrated, I don't think they knew what to do anymore. I had a roommate and I never had a roommate at the house. I

lived with my little brother for a year but that—and I was dealing with kids from all over the country, but the thing we had in common is we were all crappy students. Every other weekend we could go to New York on our own. What I found was, when I would go home for visits all my friends were kind of static. They were doing the same things. There wasn't a lot of growth. They hadn't seen hookers on 42nd Street. They hadn't gone to see Hair as a play. I had gone and seen The Band at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. They weren't going to see any. I watched as I grew and they seemed not to. That was kind of a life-saving thing for me. I graduated from Oxford, without having gotten kicked out, and then I—oh, no, I didn't graduate. It burned down. So it burned down. I went to Colorado Academy. Thank God. It was a little weird. The year before, they had ended the boarding element of the school, so I lived with a family. Well, no big deal, except the father was an Episcopalian minister. They were very nice, but it was a little odd. But the brother was great, because he was full-on hippie and we would hang out together.

Went to Colorado Academy. Three weeks in, I got called into the headmaster's office, and it was explained to me that the credits I had from Oxford didn't work with their system, so I'm going to have to repeat a year. That was not going to happen. So I said, “What's the fastest way out?” They said, “GED.” I said, “Where is it? I'll take it now.” I had never scored a higher score on a test in my life. I think I got 100 percent. I wanted out. Left there, went to Seattle to work at the Hyatt Sea-Tac. I was seventeen, eighteen. I had worked summers in the hotels. I knew it's what I wanted to do, and thank God, what a life-saver that was for me. It was all a people-oriented business, and that's what I knew how to do. So I went to work in Seattle. A guy I had worked for at the Hyatt O'Hare for a summer was the general manager there. He was really tough on me, but it was okay. It was a lonesome experience because there was nobody my age working at the hotel and I didn't know anybody in town, and in the hotel business you're working long shifts and I was out by the airport. I did that for about just a little under a year, and the two events that were interesting, one was—I don't know if you know the name D.B. Cooper. D.B. Cooper hijacked an airplane and parachuted out over either Idaho or Montana. It would have been in the late 1960s. He did it from Sea- Tac airport, and because we were the closest building to the airport the FBI closed us down, made us empty the rooms, and use that as the outpost. When you get home, look up D.B. Cooper. He's turned into a mythological character. But I was the last guy to see D.B. Cooper. The plane took off and that was the end of him. He disappeared with the money. He asked for a parachute and a quarter of a million dollars. That was the end of D.B. Cooper.

But the most meaningful thing that happened was my brother, my older brother, called in and said, “We're going to go to Acapulco for Christmas vacation. Can you get Christmas off?” So I asked the GM and he said, “Yeah, it's fine.” We went to Acapulco. It was Tom and his girlfriend, and our friends, the Cummings family, and we had a cassette player with one cassette. On one side was the Grateful Dead and on the other side was the New Riders

of the Purple Sage, which was an offshoot of the Grateful Dead. We listened to it over and over and over and over. About the twenty-eighth of December, we were all getting bored of being in Acapulco and Rick Cummings said, “You know the Dead are playing on New Years in San Francisco at Winterland.” I said, “Let's go.” I'd never seen the Dead. He said, “It will be sold out.” You can always get tickets. So I called—my dad had this wacky friend named Seymour Lazar. Seymour was in Cuernavaca, outside of Mexico City. There were no cell phones invented yet, but the phone system in Mexico was in shambles. So I'm here, he's there. I get him on the phone, somehow. I'm thinking, “I have to now tutor Seymour,” who, by the way, had a ponytail in 1959. “Seymour, have you ever heard of the Grateful Dead?” “Yeah, they owe me money, the bastards.” “Oh, great. Oh, fabulous.” I said, “Here's what we need.” He calls me back. He said, “They'll be in Bill Graham’s office. You can pick them up there.” We get on the plane, we fly to San Francisco, and we go to the concert. Somebody hands me a Hawaiian Punch. It turns out it had more punch than just the Hawaiian part of it. So we go to the concert, and it was pretty amazing. Then we get in the car and we drive up to the top of Mount Tam and we watch the sunrise.

There wasn't a prayer I was staying in Seattle after that. I went back to Seattle, called my parents, and I said, “I think I'm going to go back to San Francisco and go to school.” I'm sure they were, back home, going, “Thank God, he's going to school.” They sent me some money. I drove down. I had a nuclear green Pinto. I drove down to San Francisco, got there, picked up the phone and said, “You know, I thought about the school thing. I don't think I'm ready. I have dyslexia. I just don't think I should.” And dad, he figured it out real fast. He said, “I get it. No problem. Here's the deal: I'm not willing to support the lifestyle I have a sense you're going to be living. I love you. You can home and visit anytime you want. But I'm not going to pay for you to stay out in San Francisco and do whatever you're going to do.” I said, “I get it. I don't blame you.” The only thing I had was a Union Oil credit card. I cut it in half and I sent it back to my parents and that was me on my own. I went out about three weeks later. I got a job pulling cable. It was early cable. Nobody had cable in their buildings. I was working construction in San Bruno making $11.50 an hour. That was like 1969. I never saw that much money before. And every other half Friday off, because I was in the brotherhood, I was in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. It was the best, absolute best, period of my life. Can we cut for a second?

02-00:44:08 Farrell: Sure. [pause in recording]

02-00:44:08 Pritzker: So I'm living the life. I am going to see music. Back then, in San Francisco, everybody was playing. It was great. My grandfather and I were always very, very tight. My hair was getting longer and longer, and with every inch my hair grew, the words my grandfather would exchange with me diminished until I

could finally tie my hair back and he just wouldn't talk to me. I decided I wanted to go back and work in the hotels, so the guy that opened the Hyatt Regency—that was opening it—this guy named Don DePorter, who I had worked for, he was the best. I went in to see him and I said, “Mr. DePorter, I'd like to go back to work.” He said, “I'll put you back to work, but you've got to cut your hair.” There was a barber, a beauty shop, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco called Mr. Earhart. He walked me down there and he told Earhart, “Take it off.” I said, “Hold on. Do me a favor.” I tied my ponytail at the end, and I said, “Cut the ponytail at the base for me.” So he did, so I had my ponytail, and I twisted it and I tied it off, and I put it in a shoebox and I mailed it to my grandfather, with a note. The phone rang immediately. So that was how I got back into Hyatt on a more professional, serious basis.

02-00:45:46 Farrell: This is a good place to wrap up. For just a last quick question, aside from learning to think outside of the box, or see around corners, or think differently than other people, what was the greatest lesson that you feel like you took from your childhood?

02-00:46:04 Pritzker: Wow.

02-00:46:05 Farrell: Or is that too big of a question?

02-00:46:06 Pritzker: Just a nice, light question before we go.

02-00:46:08 Farrell: It's too much?

02-00:46:08 Pritzker: Hold on, let me think about it. Well, my first glib response is I can back a car up at fifty miles an hour looking in the side-view mirror because I think my mind turns things around. I'm very comfortable literally backing up. It's crazy. So that was going to be my first answer, but that's not the biggest thing I got out of my childhood. I think I got it and it's in retrospect. I developed a very strong sense of self-sufficiency. My wife will tell you it's a total pain in the ass. If you want something done right, do it yourself kind of thing. I'd just as soon do stuff on my own. Because by the time I either articulate it to somebody or whatever is required I could have gotten it done on my own. I think that the learning issues created a sense of humor that's helped me keep a pretty even keel. I find myself laughing at myself when I do something really stupid, and I think that's been really helpful and healthy. I think it's innate, but my ability to relate to people has been a really critical element for me, professionally, personally. So I think those are the two things that come out of my childhood that I feel the strongest about.

02-00:47:51 Farrell: All right, well great. Thank you very much.

02-00:47:52 Pritzker: Great.

Interview #2 January 28, 2014 Audio File 3

03-00:00:00 Farrell: All right. Today is January 28, 2014 and this is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker in his office on the Embarcadero. John, last time we ended our interview discussing your move to San Francisco, working as an electrician here in San Francisco, and then your decision to go back to college, but I was wondering if we could move back in time a little bit.

03-00:00:28 Pritzker: My father's decision for me to go back to college. Yeah, that one.

03-00:00:33 Farrell: I was wondering if we could go back to your time during high school, when you were working for Hyatt. Maybe why you decided to work there during your summers in high school and what some of your responsibilities were.

03-00:00:47 Pritzker: I always had a pretty voracious work ethic, other than as it applied to school. I liked being around people. I don't even remember what motivated me to go to work. What happened was the Hyatt Regency O'Hare—I think it was called the Hyatt House O'Hare at the time—was opening. It was summer, and I don't know, I guess I wanted something to do, and so they put me to work. We were all vacuuming carpets and making beds and things. At the time, it was very much less corporate than it was just kind of an all hands on deck. I thought it was a ball. I thought it was just a lot of fun. The general manager and his wife, and everybody and their wives and girlfriends and whoever, were pitching in and vacuuming floors and cleaning rails and making beds. It just seemed like so much fun. That was really the spirit of Hyatt at the time. I think as I said earlier, we had a lot more enthusiasm than we did experience, or expertise, and everybody just kind of figured it out along the way. That's how I started at Hyatt. Then I think the following summer, I wanted to replicate the experience, but the hotel had been up and running for probably eight months, a year, so they knew what they were doing and they gave me a job—they decided what I was most qualified to do was paint the boiler room. I didn't know boiler rooms required paint. And they probably didn't, but they thought that was really a great thing for me to do in July and August in Chicago, when it's already about 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity. So I spent the first summer painting the hot pipes red and the cold pipes blue. I think that's what I did. It could have been the other way around. They'd let me out of the boiler room for lunch and then at the end of the day. It was a great experience. I had a ball. Unbeknownst to me, the message it sent to people that worked there was, oh, the boss's kid isn't the baby, and he's not a prima donna. He'll actually go into the boiler room and paint the damn thing. So I think I earned some bones there. I made my bones there. So every successive summer I did something different until I graduated high school, and I took, as I said earlier, two gap years, because my dad wouldn't let me take three. I went to work at

Hyatt. I was very fortunate, because I suffer from a fairly high degree of ADD, and the hotel business is the perfect business because you can be in an office doing work, and then get the shpilkes and stand up and go out and into the lobby or anywhere and it's equally productive because you're talking to guests or employees. So it just quickly became apparent to me this was the perfect business for me.

03-00:04:24 Farrell: When you were in high school and working at Hyatt, did you have to report to any of your family members?

03-00:04:29 Pritzker: No. No, because none of my family members had the first clue about operations. My dad, when he started Hyatt in '57, it was a total fluke. Now it sounds so grand; what a visionary. He was stuck at LAX and there was a motel with a restaurant, so there's really nowhere else to go in '57. LAX was in the middle of orange groves. His plane was delayed or something, and so he went and had breakfast at this little motel. It was a hundred rooms. The cook said the owner was trying to sell it. Dad looked at his watch. He said, “Got a couple hours to make a deal. What the hell?” And so he bought this little motel. Somebody said to him, “What made you think you could go into the hotel business?” and he said, “I stayed in one once.” Which is a glib answer, but that was about the breadth of his experience in the hotel industry. My brother referred to me a few years later as the only Pritzker that could actually check somebody into a hotel. So no, I didn't report to anybody. I think— knock on wood—my dad was the least mercurial guy I know, and he wasn't a control freak. Dad's view about management was, let the managers run their business. They don't need my advice. They know more than I do. So I reported to whoever they told me to report to, but it was never anybody in the family. There was nobody in the family really in the business other than my dad at the time.

03-00:06:12 Farrell: After you graduated from high school, you started working at Seattle Sea- Tac? Is that correct?

03-00:06:18 Pritzker: Yeah. I don't know what possessed me, but I decided that I wanted to go full- time into the hotel business. There was a guy I had worked with at the Hyatt O'Hare, a little Italian guy—he doesn't sound Italian, but he was—at the time, whose name was Fred Alexander. He changed it to Alex Alexander, because that's what everybody called him. Alex was running the Hyatt Sea-Tac, which was a motel at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. So I went and worked there. The beauty of working in a small hotel is you have to do everything. You don't have a large staff. The assistants don't have assistants. And so if something has to be fixed, you have to fix it. There's an engineer, but. The place was small enough, so I did the night audit, I learned about the night audit, and I worked in the bar. I did everything there. It was a great experience. My claim

to fame, there was a guy named D.B. Cooper, who has gone down in American mythology. He hijacked a plane and parachuted out. I was the last guy to see him, because it was at Sea-Tac Airport. We ended up being the FBI headquarters for that whole operation. I saw him through the windows because we were right on the runway. I watched the plane take off, so I was the last guy to see D.B. Cooper.

03-00:07:58 Farrell: Just to clarify, what year did you start working at Sea-Tac and how long were you there for?

03-00:08:06 Pritzker: I'm not great on years. I think it must have been maybe 1971. I worked there for just under a year. Then I had a life-changing experience. You want to know more about Sea-Tac, or you've heard enough?

03-00:08:25 Farrell: Sure.

03-00:08:29 Pritzker: It was a great experience. Small hotels were great. It's where you really learn things. I had other experiences I probably don't want to talk about on camera, but it was a really wonderful opportunity. It was also the depth of the depression, the economic depression, in Seattle. One of my vivid memories is when you drove downtown on I-5 you were up kind of elevated on a hill and you could look down and see the Boeing parking lots, and they were dead empty. When you talk to people in Seattle about those years, they kind of cringe because it was really a bad time for Seattle, but a good time for me. Christmastime, holiday time, must have been '71, my brother called me and said do you want to come to Acapulco with he and his girlfriend and another family, a Bay Area family at the time, the Cummings family? I had nothing to do, and Alex said I could have the time off. So we went down to Acapulco. The most vivid memory I have is we had what would be called a boombox now, and we had one cassette. On one side of it was the New Riders of the Purple Sage and on the other side was the Grateful Dead; that's all we had and we listened to it over and over and over and over. On about the 28th or 29th of December, we were all bored. We'd had enough. Our friend Rick Cummings said, “You know, the Dead play New Year's at Winterland.” He said, “But we probably can't get tickets.” I was always pretty resourceful, and my dad had a friend named Seymour Lazar. I knew Seymour had a ponytail, but I just thought he was wacky. Seymour had a house in Cuernavaca, which is outside of Mexico City. We were in Acapulco. This is 1971. The phones barely worked in Mexico. To get a call from Acapulco to Cuernavaca, and for him to then—the chances, the odds, were slim. I called Seymour. I got him. I thought I'd have to kind of baby-step him toward the solution. “Seymour, have you ever heard of the Grateful Dead?” He said, “Yeah, the bastards owe me money.” I said, “Okay, good. That's good news.” I told him what we wanted. He said, “I'll call you back.” Three hours later, he called us back and said, “I

got you tickets.” We happily boarded the plane. We flew to San Francisco—I had never spent that much time here—and we went to see the Grateful Dead on New Year's in '71. By about four o'clock in the morning it was clear to me I was not going to be staying in Seattle. I flew back to Seattle a couple days later and I cooked up a scheme to get my parents to finance me to go back to the Bay Area. I called and I said, “I'm going to go back to school.” I'm sure they were, at home, just in tears of joy, going, thank God, who'd ever thought it? Got to San Francisco, called them and said, “You know, I've thought about it. I'm not sure that I'm ready to go back to school.” My dad was no fool. He said, “Oh, I understand. I can imagine that might be tough for you, so here's the deal. I'm not willing to finance the lifestyle I think you might be intending to live. So if you want to stay in San Francisco, that's fine, but you're going to have to make your own way. We love you. You can come home any time you want to visit, or if you need to come back and live.” He said, “But I can't support what I think is about to happen.” This wasn't that many years after the Summer of Love, so he had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do, and I think I was nineteen and so he put two and two together pretty quickly. I, in a show of defiance—the only thing I had was a Union Oil credit card. I cut it in half and sent it to him. That began—my mother calls them my problem years, and I look wistfully and say, “Oh, to have those problems again.” The first thing I did was I went out to look for a job and I found a job with an electrical company, making crazy money, and every other half Friday off. I just had the best experience of my life and I learned to make my own way.

03-00:13:16 Farrell: Can you tell me how you found that job?

03-00:13:19 Pritzker: You know, I don't remember. I think I found it in the paper. I had to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. I was thinking about it this morning, apropos of not much. I think it was SASCO, which is a big electrical contractor, but back then I don't think it was a big company. They were based Santa Clara-ish. I was working construction. I had never been exposed, really, to construction people or process before. It was just an amazing time. Appropriate to the times, my hair started to get long. My grandfather and I had always had a very close relationship, but I noticed that as my hair got longer his willingness to speak to me seemed to diminish with every inch my hair grew. Finally, when I went home to visit once I had a full-on ponytail, and that pretty much did it for him. I worked at SASCO, I think, for probably a year, year and a half, and then I got hired to do furniture installation at what is now the Grand Hyatt Union Square. It was the Union Square Hyatt House at the time. I was literally putting in bed frames and couches and everything. I was really enjoying it. That, by the way, is when my Uncle Don died. I was so young and inexperienced, I remember when he died, I didn't realize the impact it had on the company. I flew back to Chicago. He was only thirty-nine. I flew back to Chicago and I called my boss, who was a guy named Ed Sullivan, who was a vice president at Hyatt, and I explained I couldn't come in to work

for a couple days because my Uncle Donnie—I didn't think about it, was his boss—had died, and he freaked out on the phone. I remember the whole process. So I did that and then I came down and did the same thing at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. A guy that turned out to be one of my mentors, named Don DePorter, was the opening general manager, and he kind of took me under his wing. He said, “It's time for you to go back to work in the hotels.” I said, “Great, I'd love to.” He said, “But you've got to cut your hair. You can't have a ponytail.” I said, “Fine.” There was a beauty salon there called Mr. Earhart’s. So I went in with an idea, and I said, “Earhart, I need you to cut the ponytail off, but I need to keep it whole.” So he cut it off and we tied it at both ends and put it in a shoebox and mailed it to my grandfather with a little note and immediately got a call, so he and I got back together. But that really began my earnest efforts in the hotel business.

03-00:16:30 Farrell: I want to ask you more about that interaction with your grandfather, but before we get there, I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the differences between working at Hyatt and then for an electrician's union--how things were different.

03-00:16:48 Pritzker: There was no customer experience as an electrician. There was me, my pail, my wire cutters, and hundreds of apartments to splice wires into. So it was pretty solitary. You were dealing with construction people, who were great guys. I learned a lot about people. But you don't have a lot of interaction with people. You pick your pail up, you bring it to the next department, you put it down, you sit down, you pull the wires, you splice the wires, you pick your pail up, and you go to the next department. It was pretty repetitive. Hyatt was all about people. To me, it was still—it still is today—it felt something close to glamorous, and it felt something close to almost show business, for me. People think people pay money just to have a bed to sleep in, but they want an experience, and they want to be treated a certain way. When you go to a hotel, you can have services like you can't have at home. Couldn't have been more different dynamic. You're dressing up and you're serving people. I think that what I learned from the early experiences was that service is actually a noble calling. A lot of people do restaurant work, hotel work, as a placeholder between where they've been and where they think they want to be. “Okay, I'll wait tables until I can figure it out.” But when you can impact somebody such that they go home or to one of their cocktail parties and say, “Wow, I stayed at this place and they did this thing with service that was really cool,” that's providing an experience that people remember. I just thought that was pretty cool.

03-00:19:02 Farrell: You had mentioned that when your uncle had passed away that your boss had freaked out. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Was he upset at you and—

03-00:19:12 Pritzker: No, no, no, no, no. I was nineteen, and I was pretty wet behind the ears. My uncle had passed away, so that was really sad for me and for my dad. It was his baby brother and they were really tight. But I never really made the connection that Donnie, who ran Hyatt at the time, was this guy's boss and they were very close. I guess what it taught me—I didn't think about it until you asked me that question—I think it brought home the notion that you can be close with the people you work with, and you can impact their lives. Clearly, Sully had felt that Don had had a major impact on his life and had given an opportunity nobody had ever given him, and they palled around together. A lot of the culture of the company may have just died. I didn't put that all together, but Sully was a big boy at the time, and clearly it impacted him.

03-00:20:16 Farrell: After you started working at Hyatt and cut your hair and sent it back to your grandfather, do you remember the conversation that you had when he first called you and—

03-00:20:25 Pritzker: Absolutely.

03-00:20:26 Farrell: —maybe what it meant to you to repair that relationship with him?

03-00:20:29 Pritzker: It was a big deal, because he and I were really close. He and I, from a personality standpoint, were the same person. I was, I guess without even knowing the meaning of the term, I was a pragmatist. I knew it wasn't forever. About two weeks after I mailed the shoebox, I got a call. By the way, at the time, my phone number—no kidding—was EAT A JEW. I could do it if I saw a phone. But somebody pointed out to me, “You realize, if you spell your phone number out, it's EAT A JEW.” He called me—and he used to call me Toots—and he said, “Hey, Toots, I got your box.” I said, “And?” He said, “I'm glad you came to your senses. Welcome back.” That was it.

03-00:21:29 Farrell: What did that mean to you?

03-00:21:23 Pritzker: It meant a couple things. I was thrilled to have the relationship back. Clearly, I felt I had to prostitute myself for it, but that's the price you pay, you want to go back to work. My dad, I remember when I was growing my hair and I was having one of these arguments only an eighteen or nineteen-year-old could have with a parent, was why is a ponytail so important? What's really important to you? Why is a ponytail such a big deal? He said, “If you get on an airplane and the pilot walks out of the cockpit and has a long ponytail, how do you feel about that?” Of course, “I wouldn't have a problem with it.” Well, I'm not nineteen anymore. I'm not sure I would have a problem with it now,

but I understood his point. So I felt I had to prostitute myself, but it wasn't the end of the world.

03-00:22:26 Farrell: What position were you working in when you started working for Hyatt again?

03-00:22:31 Pritzker: I was an assistant restaurant manager. DePorter was brilliant. No, actually I was a management trainee. That's what I was. He had this whole cadre of kids that he would call management trainee, because that meant he didn't have to pay you anything. I think I was making $650 a month, but I was a management trainee, so that was a big deal. We were working six and a half, seven days a week, minimum of twelve hours. But when you're nineteen, twenty, so what? It was cool, it was great. That hotel, the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, at the time, was like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It was not an inconsequential operation to be working in, because it was architecturally cutting edge. The irony was, at the Grand Hyatt Union Square, I installed the general manager's desk in 1972, I think, or three, and I ended up being the general manager of that hotel in 1986, so I sat at the desk that I had installed years earlier. I got a big kick out of that. But San Francisco was a lifesaver for me. It was great to be able to live here and have some separation from Chicago, both from a family standpoint and a Hyatt standpoint, because the headquarters then moved back to Chicago eventually.

03-00:24:19 Farrell: You mentioned that you went to Menlo College, is that correct? At what point did you go back to college?

03-00:24:27 Pritzker: I worked here, and then I was transferred—I'm trying to remember sequence. I was transferred to Atlanta. I don't know if you've ever spent much time in Atlanta, but no. After about eight months, I made a decision that even school was probably better than Atlanta. So I applied to Menlo College, which I figured was about the only place that would have me other than a community college, and in fact they did have me. So I went there and then transferred to the University of Denver, which is affectionately called DU. After my kids grew up, they referred to it as Duh. So I went from Menlo to University of Denver.

03-00:25:21 Farrell: What were you studying at Menlo and at Denver?

03-00:25:24 Pritzker: Menlo was just a liberal arts program. Books, language, science. Denver, I went to the hotel program. I judge them unfairly, but it turns out I probably had more experience in the hotel business than any of the professors. My famous story at the University of Denver was I had a food course, a food prep course, and this guy was working, and he was in the restaurant business, so we

had it at night. He was not a nice guy. His name was John Dent. He said to me, in a very snide tone, he said, “Pritzker, what's the pH factor of a lemon meringue pie?” I couldn't see the wisdom in why I needed to know that, and I didn't have the first clue. I went into my smart-ass routine and I said, “Well, Professor Dent, it depends if you're talking about the cookie crust or the lemon or the meringue.” Kind of, “How can I know if you're not specific?” He looked at me. He said, “The lemon, Pritzker.” I said, “I don't have the first idea.” He pointed his finger at me and said in front of everybody, “And that is why Pritzker will never be a success in the hotel business.” I thought to myself, in spite of not knowing the pH factor of a lemon meringue pie, I'm going to forge ahead in the hotel business. So I, with a quarter left to go from graduation, left. That just shows you the brilliance of a twenty-year-old. Actually, I was twenty-two. I moved from Denver to New Orleans, because my grandfather had this brilliant idea that we should manage the Louisiana Superdome. His theory went thusly. We were opening a hotel across the street from it, the Hyatt Regency New Orleans. The governor, a guy named Edwin Edwards, who recently got out of jail, as all the governors of Louisiana eventually do—made friends with the governor and said, “You should let us manage the Superdome.” They were losing eighteen million a year. I'll never forget the story. The governor said, “Mr. A.N., I can't let you manage it. You have to bid.” My grandfather said, “We don't bid. That's just not our style.” He said, “Well, that's what you have to do.” My grandfather said, “Governor, pretend it's 1875 and you're tired of reading by kerosene lamp, and you want somebody to invent the electric lightbulb. So the way you do things, you're going to invite bids and you're going to get two bids. You're going to get one from Tom Edison and you're going to get one from A.N. Pritzker. A.N. Pritzker will win the bid, and you will never have the electric lightbulb.” The governor fell in love with my grandfather. I don't know how he did it, but it's Louisiana. He negated the law, awarded us the contract. My grandfather called me as I was leaving school and said, “Why don't you go to Louisiana? I want you to work at the Superdome.” So I did.

I'll tell you an amazing story that taught me a lesson real fast. I get down there, and I'm summoned to the governor's mansion. I've never met a governor before. I'm a kid. I probably had on a twelve-piece suit. I dressed up. I was really nervous. The reason he saw me at the mansion was because we were going to let go a lot of people and he didn't want to be politically connected to it, so he didn't want me to come to the office. They usher me into his living room, and the governor of Louisiana, who was a really good-looking guy, is on the phone with his feet up on his desk in a one-piece, red Shell Oil drilling jumpsuit. It was not what I expected a governor to be wearing. I sat down and I was quiet, and he's on the phone. He hangs up the phone, he turns to me, and literally says, “What's your name, boy?” I said, “John Pritzker.” He said, “You related to A.N.?” I said, “Yes, sir, he's my grandfather.” He glared at me. He said, “That means you're a lawyer, doesn't it?” I said, “No, sir.” I said, “I'm the one that got away.” He laughed. He said, “Oh, you must be the black sheep.” I said, “That's me.” He laughed. He said, “Good, I like the black

sheep.” He said—and I'm just quoting the governor. He looked me straight in the eye and he said—he leaned forward, he said, “What I want to know is, when are you going to get rid of the niggers?” I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which was as liberal as any suburb in America. I didn't even know how to respond to him. Not my place to lecture the governor. But I learned, to him, that wasn't an epithet. That was life in Louisiana, and that was my introduction to living in Louisiana, in New Orleans. I was there for about a year, and it was really fascinating. Then, after my second death threat, because we did have to let go of a lot of people and I was the most obvious name, I left. I think I went back to Chicago to work at Hyatt, and that was really my full time from then until 1988 at Hyatt.

03-00:31:26 Farrell: Tell me more about either the racial tensions that you experienced in Louisiana, or maybe about the death threats and what that meant to you living there.

03-00:31:39 Pritzker: I grew up in Chicago. It's not that I wasn't exposed to corruption, but Chicago was cakewalk compared to Louisiana. In about, I want to say, '65, '66, after the Astrodome was built in Houston, the state of Louisiana got this idea to build a bigger, better dome. They budgeted in at 65. It came in at 140 million. You can only imagine where the gap money went. It wasn't that the girders cost more. The other thing they did was these two very enterprising African American politicians said, “You've got to give our community the jobs.” Basically, they handed them the Superdome to run. Well, these guys were thieves from the get-go. Sherman Copelin and Don Hubbard were their name. Copelin was the brains of the operation and Hubbard was the thug. They got the state to give them a cost-plus contract, which hadn't been let in a municipality since World War II. As a result, they were losing $18 million a year, but these two guys were fat and happy, as were their pals. The governor needed private enterprise to come in and clean it up, but he had to disassociate himself from all the terminations and all of the changing. There was a lot of racial tension. I didn't think about it. I was too stupid. I was too young and inexperienced. But they had me go down to their office and deliver the termination letter. What I don't think I realized at the time was that the attorney general, a guy named Billy Guste, had ordered out state patrol and they circled the dome and didn't let anybody in or out. I was in. I gave these guys the termination letter, and Copelin took it and didn't say anything. Hubbard was sitting down at the other end of a table, reading a paper, and he literally takes his fingers and he flips his jacket back, and he had a gun. I didn't think he was going to get up and shoot me, but I think he was trying to make a point. That fairly well freaked me out. So I go back up to our offices, and we proceed to watch ourselves on the evening news, being surrounded by the state patrol. It was pretty surreal. We went on, we operated the thing, and we did very well. We did well for the state, we did well for ourselves. But then we had a union dispute that we had to fight. I got a call at home one night

that somebody was going to—what they said was, “We're going to come beat the shit out of you.” That was enough for me. I didn't need to stay down there any longer. But it was a great experience. New Orleans is a country, Louisiana is a country unto itself. It was fun, and a guy took me under his wing whose dad was the president of Jefferson Parish and had been forever, a guy named Michael Yenni. I was doing the crawfish Tipitina's thing. Life is about collecting experiences and putting them in your quiver. You gather your experiences.

03-00:35:26 Farrell: Speaking of experiences, did your time in the electrical union here help you negotiate the union dispute in Louisiana? No?

03-00:35:38 Pritzker: What did I know? I was kind of an innocent bystander. I was the special assistant to the president of the Superdome. I was exposed to all of it, but I had not a lot of responsibility in that regard. I did, however, co-promote the largest indoor concert, which was the Rolling Stones and the Doobie Brothers. That was fun. The cute story was we had 82,000 people in the Superdome for the show. I had to deal with the band, which was great. For me, that was a big deal. The night of the show, we're doing the ticket count after the show, and I think we grossed something like a million-two, which back then was unheard of. I called my grandfather, I woke him, and I said, “Grandpa, last night we did the biggest show, indoor show, ever.” He said, “No kidding. What do the numbers look like?” I said, “We did 1.2 million gross,” and I walked him through the merchandising numbers. You could hear the calculator in his head going. Then there's a pause. He said, “How many nights?” I said, “One night.” He paused. He said, “Can you keep them for two weeks?” I said, “No, I don't think so.” It was fun, but that experience was just kind of a life experience, and I can't say that it helped me accomplish anything specific, and certainly not a union.

03-00:37:15 Farrell: What was it like returning to Chicago after having lived in San Francisco and Seattle and Atlanta and then New Orleans?

03-00:37:23 Pritzker: It was fine. I loved being in Chicago. It was nice being around my family. Then where did I go? God, I went a bunch of other places. But it was nice. Where are we now? Let's say we're somewhere in the late '70s. I went and worked at the Hyatt O'Hare. They put together a food and beverage program for me for a year. I worked in the kitchen, I worked in the butcher shop for a month. I did everything. Then I went down to the Hyatt Regency Dallas and opened as the assistant director of purchasing. That was a great experience. It was really hard opening. Dallas at the time was still kind of coming out of cow-towndom, and the Hyatt Regency was the beginning of the renaissance of Dallas. The Reunion Tower was a big deal. It became the landmark of Dallas. I was single, and Texas was full of really good-looking single women, and I

had the key to what was the coolest place in Dallas before it opened. There's no better line in a bar than, when they say, “Where do you work?” “Hyatt Regency Dallas.” “Oh, no kidding. I hear it's spectacular.” “Would you like to see it? Actually, I can get us in.” That was fun. The hotel opened. I had to eat a lot of humble pie there. The guy I worked with in Seattle, Alex Alexander, was the general manager, and he was this tough little Italian guy. Everywhere I went at Hyatt, my boss was going to be the one to prove that he didn't care who I was. He was going to kick my ass. Every boss I had was going to be the one to prove they didn't care who I was. I moved from purchasing to housekeeping, and I called my mother and I said, “I got a promotion.” She said, “To what?” I said, “I'm the executive housekeeper.” She started laughing hysterically. She said, “You're the biggest slob I know.” I said, “If you had given me 300 housekeepers when I was a kid, I'd have had a clean room.” One of the responsibilities we had—Alex lived in one of the suites—was I had to keep—he was a clotheshorse. We were responsible for his clothes. One day he calls me up and he hands me his car keys and a bag of dirty clothes, and he said, “I need the car washed and I want the clothes back tomorrow.” He was only doing it because he could, and he knew it. I looked at him. It was the first time I ever talked back. I looked at him, I said, “Alex, tell you what. I'm going to do it, but we're only going to do this once, you and me.” He laughed. But you know, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

So Dallas was a great experience, and then I got a call—Pat Foley ran the company at the time, and Foley called me on a Monday and said, “Hey, how would you like to be a rooms exec?” Next move after rooms exec was general manager, so this was a big deal. I said, “You bet.” He said, “Hyatt Water Tower.” So I was going back to Chicago. I said, “Yeah, I'd love it.” He said, “Great. Be there Thursday.” This was on a Monday. “Be there Thursday.” I said, “A week from Thursday?” He said, “No. Thursday.” So I packed—I think I had some clothes, a stereo, and a redwood burl table I had bought in Palo Alto years earlier. And I packed up my Pinto and I drove to Chicago and took over as the rooms exec. It was nice to be home, and the best part about that was—it's now the Park Hyatt, that piece of property. Different building. We tore it down. It was very close to where my parents and my grandfather lived, and my grandfather would come in twice a week with all his alter kaker friends. It would be my grandfather and Lester Shapiro and Moe—I can't remember his name, but he ran Sidley and Austin, which was the huge law firm. I would sit with these guys twice a week for breakfast, and that was a better education than I could have gotten anywhere. They were talking about deals, and deals they had done before, and structures, and tax, and estates. To be able to sit with guys of that vintage was just an amazing experience. So that was the best part of going back to Chicago. I went from there to—they made me a general manager at the Hyatt Lincolnwood, and that's at the Hyatt Water Tower.

Just before I went to Lincolnwood, I went home one night and I got in the elevator. It was like July, and it was hot and miserable. I remember it really

well. I didn't even know there was anybody in the elevator. I pressed my floor, and this woman's voice behind me said, “What's your name?” I didn't look. I didn't want to hear it. I was miserable, I was tired and hot. I said, “John.” She said, “John what?” Oh, God. I turned around. I said, “John Pritzker.” She said, “Oh, hi. I'm Lisa Stone.” I said, “Nice to meet you.” Well, it turned out—I lived in a building that my family had developed, and I had put dibs—it was going condo—on the two model apartments. She had seen one of them and wanted one. They said, “Sorry, it's taken.” She called her grandfather, who knew my grandfather, and said, “Can you help my granddaughter out?” He would have done anything for her. He said, “I would, but my grandson.” She knew that the guy who had the apartment lived on the floor I pushed. That's why she said, “What's your name?” I didn't pay any attention to her. About a month later, I'm with a buddy on a Saturday morning and we get in the elevator, and there she was, only she was in—she was a dancer, and she was in a leotard—you know in Flashdance, what they call leg-warmers? And she looked really good. This time, I paid attention. I'm all chatty. We get down to the lobby, and there was a grocery store in the building. We go in there, and she went in there. We're talking. She writes a check for whatever she bought and leaves. The woman who worked the counter was a buddy of mine. I said, “Do me a favor. Rip the phone number off for me, will you?” So I called her about a month later, and we met and started going out.

03-00:44:45 Farrell: How old were you when you met Lisa?

03-00:44:46 Pritzker: She picked me up in an elevator is the bottom line to that story. I was twenty- six, and she was twenty-three. We went out for a couple of years and then got married.

03-00:45:00 Farrell: And that was before you went to Lincolnwood?

03-00:45:03 Pritzker: We met and I was still at the Water Tower. My parents were taking us—my dad had weaseled his way on a tour of nine people. We were the first people allowed back in Tibet since 1959. I met Lisa, and weeks later left for Tibet. When I got back, I was moved to the Hyatt Lincolnwood as general manager.

03-00:45:34 Farrell: Can you just tell me where the Lincolnwood is?

03-00:45:37 Pritzker: Yeah. It's north of Chicago. It's a suburb. You might remember the famous Nazi marches in Skokie. It's the adjoining village to Skokie. It was 99 percent Jewish, Skokie and Lincolnwood. Which was a whole trip running a hotel in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, because one day—for breakfast, we would do fruit on a skewer, and we put five pieces of fruit on the skewer. One day, to save money, I took two pieces off the skewer, so now there's only

three pieces. It was a big deal—[break in audio] when I took two pieces of fruit off the skewer. The perils of running a hotel in Lincolnwood. But it was a 220-room—pretty much a motel. But it was mine. I was the boss, and it was my ship. It was great. It was a huge opportunity for me.

03-00:46:40 Farrell: How long did you work at Lincolnwood for, and how old were you when you and Lisa got married?

03-00:46:47 Pritzker: We got married when I was at Lincolnwood. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five. She and her grandfather were thick as thieves. He was a real Horatio Alger story. He started a paper company back in the twenties called Stone Container with his brothers, and it had grown into this behemoth. Pops was not an educated guy. His name was Norman Stone, but we called him Pops. Went through the Depression. I remember when I went to meet them, he had this, I don't know, it was a brass tree, but it had real dollar bills for leaves. His point was, having gone through the Depression, he had a song that he had written for the family. “If you've got a little bit, hold onto it. It's hard to get a little bit more.” He was in kind of that mode. I remember the first thing I saw when I walked in the apartment was the money tree. On my birthday in 1981, my secretary said, “Mr. Stone is on the phone.” I said, “Who Mr. Stone?” She said, “Norman.” I went, “Oh.” I've always been a respectful guy. Literally, I stood up, I picked up the phone. I said, “Good morning, Mr. Stone.” He had this monotone voice, and he said, “Good morning, young man. I know it's your birthday, and I called to wish you a happy birthday, everybody should get birthday greetings on their birthday, what are your intentions with my granddaughter?” No period, no comma. It was just one run-on sentence. Of course, the first thing that ran through my head was, well, I'm just going to have sex with her and then I'll be finished. I thought better of using that line, and in fact I had bought a ring and was going to propose to her the next week. I didn't tell him that. I said, “It depends if you like me or not. If you like me, then I think the outcome will be acceptable to you.” And yes, I did go to her father and ask if it was okay if I proposed to Lisa. That was August, and we got married in December.

03-00:49:14 Farrell: Was this during the time you were at Lincolnwood?

03-00:49:16 Pritzker: Yeah. It was a very pragmatic decision to get married in December. Why go on a honeymoon in the summer? Let's go when it's miserable. And in fact, we went to Hawaii and Bali. When we left Bali, it was 105. When we landed in Chicago, it was 60 below. That's why we went in December.

03-00:49:46 Farrell: Tell me about where you went after Lincolnwood.

03-00:49:50 Pritzker: After Lincolnwood, what I decided was I wanted to have an experience opening up a hotel, kind of developing it, building it, and opening it, because I hadn't opened a hotel as the general manager. Because it's not happening in a neighborhood near you, you've got to go where it's happening, and Long Beach was the next one on the list. God bless Lisa. I said, “Good news. We're moving to Long Beach.” Fortunately, she had never been, and I don't know, had visions of palm trees and sandy beaches, not oil rigs and the Spruce Goose. So we moved to Long Beach in, I want to say, April of—must have been '82. That hotel will always be my baby. I opened that up. Lisa was a great sport. We lived in Beverly Hills for the first six months until the hotel was completed, and then we took a suite in the hotel and moved in.

03-00:51:08 Farrell: You mentioned that that was your baby. What was one of the greatest challenges that you faced in developing that hotel and making it what it is today?

03-00:51:16 Pritzker: Pretty much not knowing my head from my ass. Here's a $70 million building, 500-and-some-odd rooms, and a staff of 400 people, and I'm the leader? I had done it at Lincolnwood, but that's a whole different dynamic. But it turns out I was pretty good. I would get criticized at Hyatt behind my back, and the criticism there was, he's just hiring the best people in the company. Well, of course. What kind of schmo would I be to get people that weren't great? So I assembled a great executive committee. It was also fun because my grandfather had done the deal for that hotel. When the morning of the opening came, I had my dad and my father and me up on the dais. I got a big kick out of that. That was really fun. Having responsibility for a hotel like that, and you have to be out in the community and promoting it, and you have to be part of the community. I didn't get that many gifts naturally, but connecting with people is something that I've been fortunate to be able to pull off. It went really well, and so we had a great time. What people remember most was, on the day before opening, I had a pep rally for the employees. I rode in on a white horse into the ballroom, and people got a big kick out of that. There were these things called—what were they called? UDAG grants. Urban Development—I can't remember the other rest of the acronym. But the government would give you tax breaks to build in disadvantaged areas or decaying urban areas. This was one of them, and this was the resurgence of Long Beach. The city took huge pride in this property. I had an opening lunch the day of the ribbon-cutting, and we did a thing kind of like the Olympics. We had the housekeepers in all their new uniforms, and they came in with the housekeeping sign in rows, and engineering, and the cooks in their whites and their hats. It was actually pretty moving, because the people—we invited a lot of just people from Long Beach, and the mayor, and the city council, and the police. It was a really prideful thing for the city. To have the employees come in, in their brand-new uniforms—we created three, four hundred jobs in town. So that was a really memorable thing for me.

03-00:54:25 Farrell: That's probably a good place to change the tape.

Audio File 4

04-00:00:09 Farrell: All right, today is Tuesday, January 28, 2014, and this is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker, tape number four, in his office on the Embarcadero. So during our last interview, you mentioned that—you told a story about your father and your Uncle Donnie buying a hotel in Atlanta, which would become the—

04-00:00:33 Pritzker: Hyatt Regent.

04-00:00:33 Farrell: Yeah. For which John Portman had designed the atrium. That was built in 1967, and then in 1979, your parents started the Pritzker Prize, which has been called the Nobel Prize of architecture. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit—for the historical record, you could tell me a little bit about the Pritzker Prize, and then maybe your involvement with that.

04-00:01:00 Pritzker: A guy named Carlton Smith, who lived in Switzerland, and a quirky little gnome of a guy, called my dad up—dad didn't know him—and said, “I'd like to meet you.” Dad didn't stand on ceremony. He said, “Come over the office.” So he went over, and he proposed to dad that, given the architecture of the hotels and how dramatic they were—and at that time, we probably had five Portman hotels. The one thing that didn't exist in the world was a prize for architecture, and architecture is probably the most prominent thing we look at all day, every day in urban settings, and even in suburban and rural settings. If you think about, when we talk about photography, the Bechers photographed water towers. That's architecture that can be quirky and really interesting, and grain silos are the same. I guess he peaked dad's interest, and mom and dad pursued it. It was actually quite surprising to all of us that they wanted to name it after the family, because that wasn't their style. Dad was not an ego maniac that way. He convinced him that's what they should call it, because of our association with the hotels. The first one was held at a place in Washington, D.C. called Dumbarton Oaks, and Philip Johnson was the first recipient. We went to the ceremony, and it wasn't even that big, and I remember the people that were there were people with names like Angier Biddle Duke. Talk about coming over on the Mayflower. I think his family may have built the Mayflower and then come over on it. I remember it was a very elite Washington WASPy harem and Biddle Duke. That kind of a thing. After the ceremony, Johnson came back to my parents' suite. What I knew about Philip Johnson was, I think, nothing. He was already a legend. He had done the glass house, and Philip Johnson was Philip Johnson even in '79. What I really didn't know about him was he was a fascist and, apparently, a Nazi sympathizer. Came over to my parents' suite at the Grand Hyatt. It wasn't

even the Grand Hyatt Washington; it was the Hyatt Regency Washington. It was literally my mom and dad, and I think my brother, and me. I don't know that there were that many other people. I said to Philip Johnson, “So, Mr. Johnson, when do you think a guy like John Portman will win this award?” He glared at me and he said, “That guy is a fucking whore.” Oh. I was the least armed guy to have that conversation with a guy like Philip Johnson. But I said to him, I remember I said, “But wouldn't you say that he's probably had as much impact on the American city as anybody? Peachtree Plaza, Embarcadero Center. These are whole different kind of”—and he yelled at me, and dad kind of broke it up. There was nothing to break up. I was sitting there, mortified, and this guy was screaming at a twenty-some-odd-year-old. His point was Portman owned pieces of his developments, and that is akin to prostitution in architecture, because it's like the artist creating a piece of art and then working in consultation with Sotheby's to pump up pricing. Which is not unusual now, but back in the day, there was a separation. So that was my early memory of Philip Johnson.

I think of all the things that my parents did; that's what they're most proud of. I don't have any, really, involvement other than it was my parents that started the prize, and every now and then—I used to go more regularly than I do now. My dad had a stroke in—must have been 1997. In end of May of '99, which was the twentieth anniversary of the prize, they were invited to have it at the White House by the Clintons. Dad had had a stroke. He had recovered, but his short-term memory was completely blown out. He could tell you what color his dog was when he was four, but he couldn't tell you what he had for lunch. I was in the room and I was reading his speech, and at the end of his speech, I wrote in big block letters “The End,” because I was worried he'd give the speech, and at the last card, flip it over again and start the speech all over again. And so we go to the White House, and it was—I mean, it was magical. There were a few hundred people, probably three hundred, four hundred people, and the cocktail party was in the White House, the East Room. Oh, this was great. They gathered us in the East Room. I lived here. They gathered us in the East Room with—Renzo Piano was the recipient that year. It was his family and our family, and they got us ready for the president and the first lady to come in. The president and the first lady come in, and they're working the line, greeting us all. It was pretty cool. In walks a military attaché with his epaulets and his pipes and ribbons, and he says, “Excuse me. John Pritzker.” President's right over there. He brought me this beautifully handwritten note. It was from Dianne Feinstein, who had to stay and vote on something, so couldn't come but was apologizing to me. So that was great, that, of all the people, they came to me. Anyway, we go out with the Clintons, and my most striking memory was my mom and dad, their best—what do they call it?-- maid of honor and best man were Vern and Marcia Wagner. Vern had passed away two years earlier and Marcia had cancer, and she was in a wheelchair. We were out on a tent on the South Lawn of the White House. Clinton was working the room. Wherever the president goes, there's a scrum around him. And especially Clinton, because he had such an amazing personality. I really

wanted Marcia, who was in a wheelchair, to meet the president. That would have meant everything to her. So I walked over to him and I said, “Mr. President, can I introduce you to my mother's best friend? She's in a wheelchair, so she can't get over here.” He was so sweet. He said, “Absolutely. Where is she?” I walked him over, and he got down on one knee in his tuxedo and held onto her chair, and she's staring at him like the lord had just knelt down. She said, “My grandson said if I had the chance to meet you, to ask you what it's like to be the president of the United States.” He chuckled and he said, “What's your grandson's name?” She said, “Dougie.” He said, “You tell Dougie it's about the best job you can ever imagine having.” He spent a minute or two with her, talking, and walked away, and she started crying. I get teary just thinking about Marcia meeting him. That was great. So then dinner starts. We're all worried about dad. He's going to speak, and we don't know how this is going to go. He got up and he just nailed it. It was awesome. Hillary gets up, and she comes to the microphone and she turns to my dad and said, “Jay, we're so thrilled to have you here, and I want you to know that whenever we travel, we always make a point to stay at Hilton.” We didn't think dad would put this all together. Dad laughed. He leaned forward. He said, “I think you mean Hyatt.” She got all flustered and said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” It was pretty cute.

Anyway, the PS of this whole thing was, the dinner is over, and it was a fairytale. It was special. A guy comes up to me and says, “If you gather your family, the president would like to invite you to the residence.” That's the A- ticket. Dad was talking—I'll never forget—to Frank Gehry, and I walked up and I said, “Excuse me, the president wants us in the residence.” Dad was in mid-sentence with Gehry. He said, “Frank, I'll see you later.” So they gather us, and they bring us to the elevator. They take us to the second floor. The door opens. Secret Service counts to make sure who's in there. Door closes, up we go. Door opens. There's the president of the United States, waiting for us. I'm standing in front, and I'm the gregarious one. I said, “Mr. President, thank you for having us. We're all here.” This isn't everybody. Well, it turns out he thought my sister-in-law was pretty hot. My sister-in-law had had a few drinks and walked up to him and kissed him on the cheek. What we didn't know—so my mother saw that and said to my sister-in-law, “You're excused. You can go back to the hotel.” So she didn't go up with us, but it turns out we think that's why he invited us up. Well, the best part of this story is that was two weeks before we found out about Monica Lewinsky. When we got to the residence, the doors to the bedroom were shut, and Hillary never showed her face. My mother is a tough broad. So we're in the residence for—we must have been there three, three and a half hours. It's amazing. Twice a year, I smoke a cigar. I had two cigars in my pocket, and I said, “Mr. President, can you smoke cigars up here?” He laughed. He said, “The last time I smoked a cigar was when we got our pilot back after he was shot down in Bosnia.” Okay. He said, “But I'm playing golf tomorrow.” So I pulled the cigar out and it had a Cuban band on it. He looked at it. He said, “I can't. I can't accept that. I'm sorry.” I said, “Hold on, I have another one,” and I turned around and I took the band

off. I said, “How about this one?” He said, “I can have that one.” I won't even begin to relate that one back to Monica Lewinsky either.

He says, “Would you like a tour?” We say, “Of course.” We're in his library, and he and my brother are looking at his jazz collection, his record collection. After ten minutes with the guy, you want to call him Bill. He's just that kind of guy. I excuse myself and I go to the Lincoln Bedroom, and I pick up the phone. The White House operator answers, and I said, “Is it possible I could make a phone call?” She chuckled. She said, “Sir, you're in the residence. You may call anybody you choose.” I said, “Oh, great. I want to call my son.” She said, “May I place the call for you?” I said, “Please.” I gave her the number. Noah, who was probably—I don't know, he was probably five at the time— picks up the phone, says, “Hello?” and the operator said, “Good evening, sir. This is the White House calling.” Well, now, you'd be pretty floored if you got that phone call, right? I say, “Hi, Noah.” He says, “When are you coming home?” He could have cared less where we were. I go back out. We spend a little time. He says, “Would you like a tour?” He brings us around and we get into the Lincoln Bedroom. My mother sees a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln. We're from Illinois, and my mother thinks she knows all about Mary Todd Lincoln, and says, “Oh, there's Crazy Mary.” Because she had emotional— Clinton turns to her, I mean, pissed, and he looks at her. He says, with his fingers, “Don't you talk about her.” He said, “Until you live in this house, you have no idea what pressure is. That woman had a brother that died for the South, had a brother that fought for the North, and lost a child in this house.” He said, “You have no right to talk of her that way.” My mother, without taking her eyes off of him, says, “Kids, I think the president is tired. We should go now.” That's a ballsy broad. We're all thinking, no, we don't want to go now. You can go. But that was the end of the night. Do you remember if it was The American President when Annette Bening leaves her date from the White House and she's staring dreamily? It was a pretty special experience. So the prize has brought all of us in contact with people and places and events that have been really special.

My mother has developed—her best friend, literally, is Frank Gehry. When my dad died, there was a project in Chicago that the city was doing called Millennium Park. I don't know if you know the Millennium Park. My mom decided we wanted to donate the bandshell, the money to build the bandshell. Richie Daley, the mayor at the time, wanted Frank Gehry to do it. He turned him down three times. Richie was a good friend of the family, and Richie told mom the story. Mom, in front of Richie, picks up the phone, calls Frank, and says, “Frank, I need you here on Friday. I want you to come spend the weekend with me.” She said, “Friday. I'll see you Friday.” Click. Frank shows up on Friday, and mom says, “You're going to build the bandshell.” He says, “No, I've looked at it. I've told the mayor I can't do it.” She said, “Frank, you're going to build the bandshell.” And Frank built the bandshell. The bandshell bears my dad's name. I think that's the thing we're most thrilled about. It's one thing to do an art gallery and things like that, but dad would

have loved the idea of people on a summer night going out and hanging out on the lawn and hearing music. That's what the prize has kind of been to the family.

04-00:16:49 Farrell: Going back to Hyatt a little bit, you decided to leave in 1988, is that correct?

04-00:16:54 Pritzker: Yes. What happened was, what got me back here, there was a—we called him Yoda. He looked like Yoda. There was a guy named Peter Goldman who had run Fairmont for thirty years when Ben Swig was alive. When Ben died, Pat Foley went to meet with Peter and hired him. Peter was, on pure hospitality, as a host, the best general manager in the country. But on the sales side, big group sales, there was nobody better than Peter. His relationships were second-to-none. I wanted to know what he knew, and I wanted to come work with him. So Lisa and I moved from Long Beach, here. Peter was probably seventy-two, seventy-three at the time. He wasn't a warm and fuzzy guy, and he never wanted a hotel manager. He wanted to run everything himself. I always joked that the phone call must have been Foley calling Peter and saying, “Peter, I have bad news and worse news.” “What's the bad news?” “You're getting a hotel manager.” “Oy vey, what could be worse?” He said, “It's Pritzker.” I came up here in April of '84, and it was just in time to start planning. We were the headquarter hotel for Super Bowl XIX The first thing I did was I put together a Bay Area high school field goal kickers contest in the lobby. It was a perfect thirty yards from the front of the sculpture to the end by Justin Herman Plaza, and we built goal posts. The deal was the winning kicker got two fifty-yard-line seats and his high school got $2,500 for their sports program. Peter's office was down by the field goals. Peter didn't even know what football was. Peter escaped Germany during World War II and went to Shanghai. There was a famous group of people that escaped Germany, went to Shanghai, and came over here. Michael Blumenthal, who was secretary of the Treasury. The Lewin brothers. So Peter had been there, done that, but he had never seen field goal kicking in a hotel of his. It was like Groundhog Day. The day of the first kickoff, the kid kicks a ball. It goes spiraling through the atrium. Peter walked out of his office, looked up, saw this football heading for him. It didn't hit him, but it landed and bounced all around. He looked down at me at the other end of the lobby with this look like, why did you come here? But we got along beautifully. That was my introduction to that hotel. It was an amazing experience running that hotel.

We also had gotten pregnant in Long Beach, and so we moved up here in April. Adam, our oldest, was born in the middle of the Democratic Convention in '84, and we were also the headquarter hotel. Geraldine Ferraro was staying with us when she was nominated to be Mondale's vice president, and because she was the first female ever to be nominated, the press was, I mean, literally climbing up the side of the building trying to get to her. We almost named Adam “Jesse,” because he was born while Jesse Jackson was

giving his famous speech. It was a huge experience to run that hotel. That's one of the more successful hotels in the country, and to work for Peter was huge. The city had come off the city-wide union strike the year before. A really, really ugly one. They had built cyclone fencing around that hotel and posted security and dogs. It was really damaging. My second week at the hotel, my beeper went off and they said, “There are some protestors in front of the hotel.” I saw the head of security, a grizzled old cop named Joe May, heading for the front door. He looked like he was ready to crack some skulls. That's how he handled things. I grabbed him and I said, “What do you normally do in a situation like this?” He said, “We usually call the TAC team.” I said, “Don't. Just let me deal with this.” I'm sure he had, this I got to see. I called room service and I had them bring a coffee cart out to the front. I sat on the curb and had coffee with these people. “What's the problem? What are we not doing that you need?” They went away. I got a call from Sherry Chiesa, who at the time ran Local Two. She said, “I want to take you out for a coffee.” A couple weeks later, we go out, and she said, “Why did you do that?” I said, “Because these are employees. Why should you protest? Let's talk about the problem. If I've got a problem and I'm not handling it, either I'll handle it or I'll tell you why I can't handle it.” We developed a really good relationship, and so that's, in that respect, where I made my bones at that hotel, was calming the union relationship down. It's a very tough union town, San Francisco. Then I left there to become the divisional VP, working out of the Grand Hyatt up the street. After a couple years, I'd been there, done that. I'd run enough hotels. I had had enough of people saying, “I don't like this. I don't like that. I do like that.” I just didn't want to do it anymore, and I didn't want to move back to Chicago and go into the corporate office. We had just started Ticketmaster, and so I started a couple small businesses and spent a lot of time doing Ticketmaster.

04-00:23:16 Farrell: So Ticketmaster was founded in 1976? Is that correct?

04-00:23:27 Pritzker: When we took over the contract of the Superdome, there were these computers that spit tickets out. We didn't know what to do with them. It was binary. Do we throw them out or do we plug them in? We plugged them in. The only service that existed at the time was Ticketron. Ticketron was you could only go to Sears, and you could only use a Sears credit card or cash. If you think about concerts, 80 percent, 85 percent of tickets sold are for concerts, rock and roll concerts. Are kids shopping at Sears? No, I don't think so. The better mousetrap we invented was, one, Ticketron spit out tickets that were just arbitrary. The three of us could be in line. I might get second row, you might get the last row, and he might get somewhere—it wasn't sequential. What we did was we devised a system that was next-best seating. If you got the first row, the next one may be me in the second row. The other magic bullet at Ticketmaster was our relationship was with the venues, not with the bands. We had exclusive with the venues. So if a band wanted to play

Madison Square Garden, they didn't have a choice; they had to use Ticketmaster. Then we moved the machines to the warehouse in Tower Records, because that's where the kids are. They're buying records.

04-00:25:10 Farrell: Tell me how you got involved with Ticketmaster and the founding members.

04-00:25:16 Pritzker: We owned the machines. One of the guys, an analyst in dad's office, a guy named Mark Mamolen, who just passed away, thought there might be a business here, and somehow found Fred Rosen, who is one of my best friends to this day. If you look up New York Jewish lawyer and all that entails, Fred's picture would be in that heading. We hired Fred and said, “We've got these machines. Is there a business here?” He said, “I'll bet I can make one.” He moved to LA, because that's where all the action was, and Fred built a business. When we were in Long Beach, Lisa became the first head of marketing at Ticketmaster. Which sounds like a lofty title, but there were only, like, three people at the company. Lisa's claim to fame was she sold the first pre-sale tickets for a movie. It was for Star Wars. There's this guy, Henry Plitt, who was probably eighty-eight at the time, and Lisa was great with older men. She went in, and Mr. Plitt, and batted her eyes and told him why this was a brilliant thing to do, and he said, “Fine.” I really think of Ticketmaster as really getting up to speed in about 1980. I don't know if you remember the Pearl Jam thing. Pearl Jam called us and said, “We're tired of these expensive tickets. We want to sell a tour for $18.” We said, “That's great. That's admirable.” Kelly Curtis was the manager's name. We said, “That's great.” They said, “But what that means is you guys can only get fifty cents for a service charge.” We said, “We can't operate the system at fifty cents, so we're going to charge our standard $2.50.” No, we went to $2.25. The standard was $2.50. They said, “If you don't lower it to fifty cents, we won't use you.” No point arguing, so we said, “Okay, we understand.” Because we knew what would happen. So right on time, they went to Madison Square Garden and said, “We need two dates.” They said, “That's fabulous,” and they start handing them the food and beverage concession contract, and then they handed them the ticket contract. They said, “We're not using Ticketmaster.” They said, “You can't play here if you don't. They have the exclusive ticketing.” Then they went to every other venue and found the same thing. That's why Pearl Jam ended up playing in dirt fields for a year and a half, two years, because we had tied up all the venues. It was a really successful, interesting business, and Fred was a tough hombre. It's a tough business. So that was Ticketmaster.

04-00:28:10 Farrell: Approximately what years were you involved with them?

04-00:28:15 Pritzker: I probably went on the board the year Fred came to work for us, and we sold the company in '95. We sold it to Paul Allen. So the great story was, Fred,

really difficult personality. Very difficult. I adore him, but I wouldn't want to work for him. We sold the company to Paul Allen. Fred stayed, because you couldn't run the company without Fred. One day, Paul's guy called me and said, “You have to sit down with Paul. He's livid and he wants to fire Fred.” My parents have a house in Rancho Santa Fe. I said, “Have Paul pick me up and we'll fly down. We'll have lunch with dad.” We go down, and it's my mother and my father and Paul and me. Paul is a pretty introverted guy. We spend about a minute and a half on chit-chat, and then Paul said, “Didn't I buy the company?” We said, “Yes, you did.” We kept 15 percent of it after we sold it to Paul. “Didn't I buy the company?” “Yes, you did.” “Doesn't Fred report to me?” “Yes, he does.” “Doesn't he have to listen to me?” “No.” Then he asked the crucial question: “Did he listen to you guys?” I said, “Rarely.” You see the color drain from Paul's face. He sold the company to Barry Diller six months later. He just didn't want to deal with Fred, and Paul is a totally non-confrontational guy. So that's how, and Diller is still—no, Diller then sold it to Live Nation a couple years ago. So that was Ticketmaster.

04-00:29:52 Farrell: And then in 1987, Chip Conley founded—I'm probably going to mispronounce this.

04-00:29:59 Pritzker: Go ahead, let's hear it.

04-00:30:00 Farrell: Joie de—

04-00:30:01 Pritzker: That's why I want to change the name.

04-00:30:02 Farrell: Joie de Vivre Hospitality.

04-00:30:04 Pritzker: Joie de Vivre. But yeah, right.

04-00:30:05 Farrell: Joie de Vivre, okay. And you're a majority stakeholder. How did you get involved with Chip and with that company?

04-00:30:14 Pritzker: In 2009, we bought Carmel Valley Ranch from Blackstone for twenty cents on the dollar. The closing was twelve-oh-one in July something or other, and I was sure they were going to call and say they weren't going to do the deal, because nobody would sell 500 acres in Carmel Valley that cheap. We did that, we built that, and then we wanted a platform. We thought we could build a platform out of Carmel Valley Ranch and finding like resorts, but it turns out there aren't that many 500-acre properties just waiting for us to steal them. So we wanted a platform to build a hotel company, and Chip, at the time, was selling his company, and so we did a deal with Chip.

04-00:31:06 Farrell: Then you also—

04-00:31:07 Pritzker: For Joie de Vivre. Yeah.

04-00:31:12 Farrell: You and Tom Gottlieb also became business partners when you developed Mandara Spa. Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with Tom and maybe how you met him?

04-00:31:21 Pritzker: I knew Tom at summer camp. Have you ever met Ira Hirschfield? Ira runs the Walter and Evelyn Haas Foundation. He and Tom and I went to summer camp together, so I've known Tom since I was eleven. He and I lost touch. Cut to 1987 or eight. He lived in Hong Kong, and they moved back here, and they had a son my son Adam's age, and they became best friends. Tom and I got to know each other again. Tom is really smart, whip-smart. He and I are the perfect complement, because he's whip-smart and I'm not, and he's not as good with people, and I am. So we actually make quite a great couple. I started to get to know Tom, and then they moved to Bali. He retired to Bali and started a spa business in Bali. We took three weeks and took the kids over and spent a lot of time. One night, we were just hanging out and he was telling me about the business. I said, “Well, we have a lot of hotels, and we could probably do something.” Ironically, we ended up, when we sold Mandara, with seventy-six—something like that—operations around the world, and none of them were Hyatt. It's a long story. But from there, we founded something called the Odyssey Club, which turned into exclusive resorts. Have you ever had Aidells Sausage? Aidells Sausage was our company. We basically did private equity until we came across Carmel Valley Ranch, and then Joie de Vivre. Then a year after Joie de Vivre, we needed a New York hotel. You're kind of nowhere. Chip had a California presence, but nowhere else outside of California, and we wanted to grow the company. You have to be in New York. So we merged with Thompson Hotels, which gave us five properties in New York.

04-00:33:39 Farrell: What was it like making the transition from California to New York?

04-00:33:45 Pritzker: They were up and running, so it wasn't so bad, and we knew how to run hotels, but New York is a different market. We didn't have to bootstrap it. They existed, and we just kind of moseyed into them, so it was easier than it might have been otherwise.

04-00:34:00 Farrell: You've also been involved with Chemdex as well. Can you tell me a little bit about that venture?

04-00:34:06 Pritzker: Yeah. Chemdex we got into as a family. That was part of the first, if you will, internet bubble. It was crazy. This guy, David Perry, as part of his Stanford MBA thesis or paper he wrote, talked about disintermediating the chemical companies, because you can do online sales. Long and short of it was I think we had $5 million of revenue and a market cap of $9 billion. Just stupid and insane. But we sold the shares at these ridiculous prices. It was a whole batch of companies that just people were exuberant because nobody understood the internet yet, and nobody understood emerging technologies. So people were just pouring money into this stuff without really understanding what it meant or how it would shake out.

04-00:35:14 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about what you remember of the dot-com era? We're so close to Silicon Valley. About what that was like going into e- commerce around that time.

04-00:35:26 Pritzker: Ticketmaster was actually one of the first commercial sites, online sites. It was pretty amazing, because what happened was people started bitching about our service fees. If a ticket to the Stones cost $50, what entitled us to $3? The deal we always had was you could always buy tickets at the box office. So the way we explained it was you can buy a ticket online and pay whatever it was, or you can get in your car, you can drive to the Oakland Coliseum, you can wait in line, you can buy your ticket, you can drive back to the city, and you'll save $3.50. It costs you $12 in gas. It's going to cost you half a day of awful work or whatever, because you want to be there before tickets sell out. There was a lot of getting accustomed to what the dynamics of it were. Because before, you didn't have a choice. You go to the record store and buy the ticket, or like Amazon. I was listening to Howard Stern this morning. He's exactly like I am. He says, “I spend half a day on Amazon. I'm buying stuff I don't even need. I've got books I'm never going to read. I've got gadgets. I've got doodads.” And that's what it was then, was people weren't accustomed to sitting in their living room and clicking on getting fourth-row center tickets. And how do you bitch about having to pay $7, and you didn't have to stand up to do it? There was a lot of getting accustomed to the technology and what it meant. I was in a group called YPO, Young Presidents' Organization, and we did a big university here. One of the cool things we did was we gave everybody—if you remember the PalmPilot. It was really one of the first PDAs. What we were going to do was put the days' activities on your PalmPilot, and every day you'd come down to breakfast and you could synch it so that if schedules changed or there were different ways, the buses or assignments—and Palm had never done anything like that before. That was very different, and that introduced a lot of pretty savvy corporate executives from around the world to the potential of what technology can do, because now they're in the heart of Silicon Valley with their own piece of technology synching it with everybody else. Now it sounds like the Stone Age. When you think that this is 2014, we've only been shopping online for twelve years, fifteen years. It's relatively

new even still. So back then, it was really a point of pride, as I think it is now, that we live in the middle of—I had a debate. We're doing a hotel in Chicago, and my two partners live there, and they were talking about how great Chicago is, and kind of making fun of San Francisco. I said, “Well, it's interesting you sent me this message on a box that was designed in California, from a technology that was designed in California, made by a company that's the largest company in the world, Apple, and the most successful company.” We kind of take it for granted, and we read in the paper, oh, the Google buses are causing such—what would our economy be like, locally? I get that rents are a problem, but that's the free market. If you don't want to live in a free market society, we better have that conversation. When I come to work every day, I go by one of the Google stops. I see a line of twenty-five people. These are some of the smartest people in the world standing there waiting to get on the bus, and they live here. How amazing is that? So from a Ticketmaster standpoint, it was all new and it was unchartered territory. It sounds funny now, but you think about scalpers. They all accused us of scalping tickets. We didn't. The artists scalped, because when an artist puts on a concert, let's say they get fifty tickets. They'll give away ten of them and they'll sell the rest. What we said to the bands was, “You guys are schmoes. If you're charging $50 and somebody will pay $250 for that ticket, why aren't you getting that money? Don't complain.” No one wanted to be the first one, and finally Barbara Streisand and the Eagles were the first ones to say, yeah, that makes sense. So now, any of these huge concerts—the Stones are building condominiums on the side of the stage and putting 500 people there for $1,000. It was all new, and it was all unchartered territory. So it was exciting.

04-00:40:50 Farrell: And then tell me a little bit about forming Geolo, which is your current venture.

04-00:41:00 Pritzker: I don't know. We figured out we should do private equity. I think it was a placeholder. We didn't really know what we wanted to do when we grew up, and so we figured we'd do private equity. I think I looked up private equity, see what that meant, and then I'd go do that. So we formed Geolo and we invested in some companies, and actually did pretty well. Once we did Carmel Valley, we really knew we wanted to be in hospitality. Geolo really morphed into a hospitality-focused private equity company. We're now thirty-eight hotels. We have nine we'll be opening in the next eighteen months. Our CFO is in Asia now. We're negotiating for a high-end Asian platform, so that would give us a presence in Asia. I was skiing last week with my sister in Vail, and we got on a chairlift, and the couple next to us were from Beijing. They're Chinese. You have any idea how unusual that is? But it's not going to be unusual. They say this year alone, 200 million Chinese are going to come out of China and start traveling. And so we need a presence there. We're really focused on hospitality now. We're out of the sausage business.

04-00:42:25 Farrell: You've also been involved, or a board member, with the Bernard Osher Family Foundation. Can you tell me a little bit about the foundation, and how you got involved with them, and when you got involved?

04-00:42:37 Pritzker: My office was at 909 Montgomery, and Barney officed two floors below me. Will Weinstein, who worked with Barney on his investments, introduced me to Barney one day. I can be kind of a wise guy. Barney and I just kind of immediately hit it off. I think I take a Chinese view to older people. I think our society quickly dismisses older people. Here's a guy, been there, done that, smart as hell, and ridiculously philanthropic, and I wanted to get to know this guy. I don't need his money. I just want to get to know him and learn from him. Barney and I got to be buddies, and one day Barney invited me onto the board of the foundation. Barney needs my input about how to give away his money like he needs a fifth leg. Barney's view was, Pritzker's got capacity; I got to teach him how to do it so he doesn't screw it up. He didn't need me on his board. He's better known than I am. He's hugely well-respected. But he thinks he can teach me something, and he's right. I've learned incredible amounts. I had lunch with him yesterday, and I kind of am in awe of the fact that he even tolerates spending time with me. So I've learned a huge amount from Barney and from Barbara, his wife. I collect photographs, as you know, and various other kinds of art, and Barney owned Butterfield and Butterfield, so he knows art well. Yves Saint Laurent died, and his partner put everything on the auction block in Paris. There was this piece I wanted, and I thought, let's go to Paris. So I called Barney. Lisa couldn't go. She was getting her master's degree. I said, “Barney, want to go on a field trip together?” He said, “Where do you want to go?” I said, “Paris for the auction.” He said, “Yeah, sure, let's go.” Barney and I head over to Paris. We were there for four days together. Barney at the time was, I think, only eighty-one. He embarrassed me. I was ready to pass out. He'd drag me with him. We'd go on three-hour walks. He's an amazing guy. I think Barney must be eighty-six now. I had lunch with him yesterday. He is sharp as a tack. So that's been one of the great, great opportunities, has been to get to know Barney. He's a great man.

04-00:45:35 Farrell: What have been some of the projects that they've worked on while you've been on the board?

04-00:45:39 Pritzker: The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is just amazing. I think there's 110, 115 of them now. It's designed for people fifty-five and older, and he affiliates with major universities, and people that either couldn't get an education before, or didn't, or want to continue learning, have the opportunity to go take wide-ranging courses at major universities because of Barney's funding. He also basically bootstrapped the state of—he's from Maine—the state of Maine's community college system. He does the Osher Scholars Program for disadvantaged people. You read these letters from people that, without these

programs, they never could have gone back and gotten a degree. Because they could do that, they've changed the trajectory of their lives, their families' lives. Barney is the most self-effacing—he's got no ego. If you ask him to speak at one of his events, he'll get up and say hi, but there's no glory for Barney. He doesn't care. So Barney is being honored at Menlo College, and they said to him, “We're looking for a commencement speaker,” so he said, “Call Pritzker and have him do it.” I got a call from the president of Menlo and said, “We're honoring Barney, and Barney wants you to be the commencement speaker.” I said I'd do it, but on one condition. Jim Kelly, the president of Menlo, said, “What's that?” I said, “I want an honorary degree in rocket science.” He laughed. He said, “We don't do it.” I said, “You asked me, and I told you. That's the deal.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because my geology professor at Menlo, Kurt Servos, got up in front of the whole class one day and pointed at me and said, 'Pritzker, you're no rocket scientist.' So I want an honorary degree.” Barney thinks about people and tries to put people—he's a convener. He's a great guy.

04-00:47:46 Farrell: What have been some of the biggest lessons that you've learned from him?

04-00:47:54 Pritzker: God, what did he tell me yesterday? Every time I talk to him, I learn four or five new things. We're hiring a new executive director for our foundation, and he was telling me about how to think about the priority-setting for an executive director, what qualities we want to consider. It's all conversational, so it's not like, “Okay, Pritzker, get a piece of paper out and write this down.” It's in the scope of conversation. He'll say twenty little nuggets, and either you pick them out or you don't. Just every time I'm with Barney, I learn stuff that I wouldn't have thought about before. We were in the Ferry Building. We moved from 909 to the Ferry Building, and the office, like the Ferry Building, had this long bowling alley-like hallway, and he was at one end and I was at the other. He would just mosey down every now and then, and he'd just kind of plop down in a chair and start pontificating. I consider that probably one of the most fortunate relationships I've ever had.

04-00:49:06 Farrell: How has he influenced your involvement in San Francisco philanthropy?

04-00:49:17 Pritzker: I'm not sure he has that specifically. But, for example, he built the Osher Integrative Medicine Center. Lisa and I work—one of the things we focus on is the emotional and physical well-being of underserved youth. In honoring Barney, we gave money to the center, to Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, and then realized nobody thinks about kids with integrative medicine, and mindfulness. So we've started to fund programs at his center, and I think just by accident he influenced us that way. I feel strongly that you give back to where you are. So I'm staring past you at the Bay Bridge. Are you familiar with the Bay Lights? The way they've lit the bridge. Ssh, nobody

knows; we're the ones that funded it. We did it anonymously. The notion that you can create a piece of art out of a three-mile bridge. Have you ever come out to see it? It's magical. It's spectacular. With America's Cup coming, and just the notion that you can turn a bridge into a piece of art—and that bridge is kind of the stepchild to that bridge. It feels good to be able to give back to where you live. I told them the first image that they ought to put up there when they flipped the lights was—you know the Facebook—this? Was a message to the Golden Gate Bridge. They should just do one of these running across the—they didn't. Anyway, I don't think Barney had to teach me that. Little things. I ought to think about things that has been really fabulous. And his example-setting. He quietly gives to things you don't even know he's—I know, because I'm on the foundation board. But just the subtle moves is what I've learned from Barney.

04-00:51:53 Farrell: This actually might be a good place to wrap up, because I think next time we'll probably get to your—

04-00:51:58 Pritzker: Next time?

04-00:52:00 Farrell: —time at the JCF.

04-00:52:01 Pritzker: Oh my God. Yeah, okay. Oh, well that could be three next times, JCF. Okay.

04-00:52:08 Farrell: And as far as this interview session, do you have anything that you want to kind of end with or maybe include before we move to the next chapter?

04-00:52:24 Pritzker: No. No. Anything else, I can probably do the next chapter. When do you do Phyllis again? I may come. That will be a spectator sport.

Interview #3 March 7, 2014 Audio File 5

05-00:00:05 Farrell: All right. Today is Friday, March 7, 2014, and this is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker on the Embarcadero and this is tape number five. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about your time running the campaign for the JCF in 2004. Can you start by telling me how you first learned of the JCF?

05-00:00:31 Pritzker: I’m pretty sure it was Phyllis Cook, probably around the time we moved here. Phyllis doesn’t let a lot of grass grow under new people’s feet before she contacts them. Phyllis is an old, old friend of our family’s, and so she knew Lisa and I. We moved here in approximately 1984 and Phyllis put together a group of young couples. Was the CLAL group, and it was great for us. Adam was a baby, so he wasn’t in school yet, so we didn’t really know that many people. It was a great way to meet other couples who were young and starting to have kids. That’s how I began to learn about Federation.

05-00:01:31 Farrell: Aside from Phyllis, who were some of the first people that you interacted with there?

05-00:01:37 Pritzker: Yikes. Probably Brian Lurie. It was probably more from the standpoint of we were the new meat in town. I say that lovingly. But we were the new kids with some capacity and energy and so I think they wanted to conscript us for Federation, both from a development standpoint and from a lay leader standpoint, to develop us. As a result, Lisa went into the Wexner program, which was really great for her. She loved it and it was great to meet really smart, dedicated people. I really didn’t do that much. I didn’t get involved in Federation for a number of years after that. But that’s when I was exposed for the first time to Federation.

05-00:02:38 Farrell: In what capacity did you first get involved when you had that lapse?

05-00:02:42 Pritzker: We were donors and so had some exposure to Federation that way. Phyllis is really smart. She wasn’t a hammer to the head approach, which is not necessarily what you would think if you know Phyllis well, but she was really discreet and she was very careful with us and brought us along very nicely and discreetly. I think I really didn’t get involved in Federation until—I think I went on the board, and I don’t remember what year, but I wasn’t on the board that long before they asked me to run campaign. That’s really the main part of my involvement, was quickly after I went on the board of Federation.

05-00:03:41 Farrell: So you ran the campaign in 2004. Just for the historical record, can you explain what the campaign is?

05-00:03:47 Pritzker: Yeah. Federation campaign is an annual campaign that raises money in support of—then, I think it was twenty-eight agencies. Various social service, education, health and welfare agencies around the Bay Area. The campaign supported those agency efforts and emergency issues, like if something was going on in Israel, or, at the time, getting Jews out of Russia. Things like that.

05-00:04:21 Farrell: How does that differ from the endowment fund?

05-00:04:27 Pritzker: Endowment fund was more personal. The endowment was really more directed by the donors. Campaign isn’t directed by the donor. It’s, I guess, board initiative, but it had been the same for years and years. When I got there, there was a pretty distinct line between endowment and federation. Endowment was really the powerhouse that Phyllis had developed over a twenty-five year period. I think when I got there, there was something on the order of three billion dollars. When I ran campaign, I think we raised something on the order of twenty-seven-and-a-half million. So the annual campaign, it’s tough. It’s round up the usual suspects, but it’s making different arguments for the same thing year after year. So it was a tough go, but very necessary. Shockingly, I enjoyed doing it. Prior to that, I would much rather have given money than have to ask for money. Federation taught me a lot about the ask.

05-00:05:57 Farrell: Can you walk me through how you were selected to run the campaign and maybe what your reaction was when you found out that you were selected?

05-00:06:08 Pritzker: There’s nothing very scientific about it. It comes down to who can we get to do it and who is the most compelling person that we can get to do it? I was in a very unique position for a few reasons. One, by dint of my personality, I tend to be pretty people-oriented. Because I was in the fortunate person of having capacity, I could approach people—the Barney Oshers, Warren Hellman—probably more readily and easily than other people that might have run the campaign. Turnabout is fair play. So if I’m going to hit people up for money, they’re pretty confident that, when it comes their turn to do it for another organization, they’re happy to pick the phone up to call me. So from that standpoint, I think I was the likely candidate. I didn’t know how many different ways I could say no, and so finally I agreed to do it. I really enjoyed it, actually, which was a real surprise to me.

05-00:07:26 Farrell: What were some of your roles in running the campaign?

05-00:07:33 Pritzker: Asking for money. It was really going out and soliciting. Federation has never had a deep developmental organization function as part of the organization. It’s always been really a person-to-person thing. It’s not like a lot of organizations where development is really a well-organized, oiled machine where the person that runs campaign really is a figurehead. There’s an element where, if the person running the campaign doesn’t go out and get it, it’s just not going to come in. I think I knew that when I accepted the position. Phyllis is very helpful. Phyllis knows where all the bodies are buried. Phyllis knows everybody’s capacity. When you have a Phyllis in her prime, you really don’t need a development organization. It’s Phyllis grabbing you by the shoulders, pointing you in a direction and saying, “Go get them.”

05-00:08:42 Farrell: You said that before you had never been on the asking end of the ask. Can you explain, maybe, or tell me about your first ask or your most successful ask?

05-00:08:56 Pritzker: I’ll tell you about my most memorable ask, and it was Richard Goldman. He couldn’t have been more gracious. Dick had a reputation. He could be gruff and more straightforward than maybe you’d like him to be. I remember my phone rang one day. He lived just up the block from us. I knew Doug and Lisa, and I had known Richard. I didn’t know Rhoda that well. Lisa had started to get to know Rhoda, and she made it clear she was happy to mentor Lisa, and Lisa was really excited about that, and then, sadly, she passed away. But I remember it was announced that I was going to run campaign. My phone rang, and it was Richard, and he said, “I’d like to invite you to breakfast at my house.” I said, “I’d love to do that.” He said, “You’re going to solicit me.” I laughed. I said, “Okay.” I went over there. I remember it was a beautiful day and I remember he served berries. I don't know why I remember that. We sat down and he basically walked me through the process of how best to solicit him. It was so fabulous. It was just great. Now that I think, at the time, he gave the largest gift to the annual campaign. I remember the number. The year before, he had given—I think it was a million one. I’m thinking to myself, oh my God, how am I going to, in good conscience, raise that gift? We talked. I spent a couple hours there and he walked me through soliciting him. He basically said, “Okay, now here’s what you’re going to say to me.” I’d say, “Okay,” and I’d say it. He’d go, “Great. Yeah, let’s do that.” He just literally held my hand through the process. At one point, I probably got a little head of steam up and I said—I think I chuckled and I said, “Okay, and now we’re going to work on a 10 percent increase.” He laughed and he basically said, “Hold your horses there, son.” This was before we allowed donors to direct, but all men are created equal, some more equal than others. I said, “What if you chose some organizations to give to on an increase, a 10 percent increase?” He said, “We could do that,” and we talked about it, and that’s what he did. So that was my most memorable. As you can see, when I think about doing it, I still get a big kick out of it.

Barney Osher was probably my toughest, but not because he’s difficult. Barney is a cream puff. But I think he liked putzing me. He and I have that relationship. Barney has been a mentor for years to me, and I adore him. But he wasn’t going to make it easy. He wasn’t going to give me an increase. Barney starts out with the premise, “Why am I doing this? Why am I giving you anything?” That gets you, if you’re running full speed and really thinking that you’ll get back to what he gave last year. Then your perception is an increase is just an impossibility. But I can give as good as I get, so I went right back at him. Finally, he came around and helped me out. But a lot of the solicitation is personal relationship and making a compelling case for why somebody needs to give. What I learned from the whole experience is the only thing that can make somebody a great salesperson, and that’s what this is, is if you believe in the product. Federation did great work, and so it wasn’t a hard sell for me.

05-00:13:19 Farrell: What were some of the programs that, when you were making the ask, that you highlighted or that you cared the most about so you chose to talk about when you were soliciting?

05-00:13:31 Pritzker: I think things like the home. Some of the senior programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum was some of the school programs. At the time, when I was doing it, Jewish Family and Children’s Services wasn’t as independent as they are now. Anita does now amazing work, but then she did remarkable work. That was really our social services organization that we supported. We just talked about both what was interesting to the donor, what are their areas of focus, and why Federation was important. The interesting thing to me about Federation is it’s been iterative. In the beginning, in the late 1800s, it was immigration. It was Jews are coming over; how do we care for them? How do we get them on their feet and started on their way to America? Then it moved to the Holocaust and the state of Israel, and then the Russians. There’s always been a rallying cry in the community. It became more of a challenge, and I think it’s a challenge now because there isn’t that cohesive, sticky thing that allows you to stick your hand out and say, “We need the money now. Here’s why.” That was the compelling case then. It’s harder now I think.

05-00:15:13 Farrell: That actually is a good segue into the survey that was done in 2004, which was the first, I believe, survey that had been done in eighteen years.

05-00:15:25 Pritzker: On the community.

05-00:15:26 Farrell: Yeah. Volunteers and staff people called members of the Jewish community in the Bay Area and asked them what their concerns were, what the issues were. Can you tell me about maybe your involvement with that or what—

05-00:15:40 Pritzker: I wasn’t. I was kind of the beneficiary of it. I don’t, frankly, remember it all that well, but it made some compelling arguments for where the community needed to be, who was involved in the community. I think I recall that there were 250,000 Jews. I think it was from Sacramento to San Jose, the really Greater Bay Area. But only something on the order of 85,000 were really engaged, and that was a really interesting statistic. I just recall using pieces of it to make a case for the campaign.

05-00:16:28 Farrell: Do you remember what pieces you used?

05-00:16:30 Pritzker: I don’t. What I can say about the campaign generally is—what’s that phrase? All boats rise and fall on the same tide. When the economy is good, you can raise money. When the economy is not good, you can’t raise money. It’s harder to raise money. In a good economy, compelling things like the study are helpful, but even if you hadn’t had the study—and I’m not arguing the study was a waste of time by any means. I recall it being great to have that information. It’s just easier when you’re in a good economy and tougher when you’re not.

05-00:17:18 Farrell: Adele Corvin was the president in 2004. Can you tell me to the extent to which you both worked together?

05-00:17:26 Pritzker: I still call her “boss” when I see her. I’m a huge Adele fan. Both the singer and the Federation Adele. Adele was just a flat-out great leader. She is the consummate iron fist in the velvet glove. When you meet her, she is always available. If you were lagging somehow, she would bring us in, not in a scolding way but, “How can I help, because I’m concerned that”—and I just loved working with Adele. I think the year I ran campaign we may have set a record. It’s not because I’m a genius, but again, people—the large donors— saw me coming and they thought, next year it’s going to be my turn to hit him up. The best Adele story I remember—I don’t even know how old Adele was then, but she was not a kid. I remember, at Super Sunday, I did a breakfast at 7:30 in the morning for the lead donors. I got there probably 6:30, 7:00 in the morning. I think it was at the JCC. No. No, it was at the Hyatt Union Square. We did a breakfast and then we did the whole day and that entailed sitting down one on one with donors and working the phones and keeping people’s morale up and being a cheerleader. I think campaign went something like 9:00 to 9:00, and we had two or three shifts on the phones. At about 7:30, 8:00, I really couldn’t stand up anymore and I couldn’t talk to anybody anymore. I think I had run out of smiles. I was done. I wanted to go home. I remember Adele standing at the door of the ballroom like this, with her legs apart, her arms crossed, with a smile on her face. The look on her face was, I’m older than you. I’m here. You’re not going anywhere. I just remember I was like a

kid in a classroom. I kept looking at the clock and looking at the door, hoping Adele wasn’t there and I could run out. But that’s what kind of leader she was. She wasn’t going to ask anybody to do anything she wasn’t willing to do. I think Adele was a stellar president of the organization.

05-00:20:33 Farrell: Were there any changes that she made that affected your time later as the president?

05-00:20:43 Pritzker: Not that I recall. She just ran a really solid operation. By nature, I tend to be a troublemaker. I probably was more “let’s shake it up” than anybody—not anybody before me, but than a lot of people that preceded me as president, or that after me have been president. I just think about the time as Adele having run a really solid ship and people having enormous confidence in the organization, and we raised a lot of money. To some degree, Adele’s error was kind of one of the golden ages of Federation.

05-00:21:38 Farrell: Aside from her being available and ready to stand in and step up when she needed to, what were some of the biggest lessons that you learned from her that you later applied to your time as president?

05-00:21:48 Pritzker: I think perseverance. Adele was wise. There’s nothing much that recommends getting older other than you’ve been around longer, you’ve seen more, and so you’re a little bit wiser. I think about it in terms—when I was a kid, I used to play racquetball with my dad. My dad was great, great. If you put a racquet in his hand, he could play anything. He would stand in the middle of the court. He wouldn’t sweat, he wouldn’t breathe hard. I was this young kid trying to prove myself, and I would be running up walls and running around. By the time a game was over, I could barely stand up. He hadn’t moved, and he just beat me terribly. Adele could get a lot more done with a lot less kinetic energy. I think I learned that from her, that you don’t have to arm wave. She’s very calm, she was very gracious. You get as much done that way as you do running around with your hair on fire. I think I learned a lot of calmness and patience from Adele.

05-00:23:02 Farrell: There was a bit of a staff shake-up in 2004 when Sam Salkin, the CFO, retired—or resigned—and Phyllis Cook stepped in as acting director. That’s also been noted as a difficult transition time for the JCF. Can you tell me about what you remember of this transition?

05-00:23:20 Pritzker: I came after that. I really came when Tom Dine was hired. I think when I ran campaign, maybe Tom had just been hired, and he started with me. I think our terms might have started concurrently. The odd thing about my tenure at Federation was I didn’t have a many years run up to running campaign. I had

no involvement other than as a donor, and then, boom, I was running campaign. I had views about Sam, just by my lack of communications with him. Phyllis, I had known. There was a lot of subtext there. Phyllis does not suffer fools gladly. I think Phyllis was just as happy running the organization as not. After Sam had left they hired Tom and he and I, I think, started about the same time. Pretty close together. So I wasn’t really around for that whole Sam/Phyllis thing. I can easily imagine what happened, but I wasn’t around for it.

05-00:24:45 Farrell: What was it like when Tom Dine started? Did that affect you on the campaign at all?

05-00:24:52 Pritzker: Yeah. Tom, by his resume, was compelling. He had been around. He was a Washington guy. I think he had been State Department. So he had a big name, a big reputation. I knew of the Dine name because his brother is a very famous artist named Jim Dine, and as an art collector, I knew Jim Dine’s work. So I was really enamored of the fact that this was Jim’s brothers. Tom, it turned out, was less enamored of being Jim’s brother, but who knew. Tom was happy to be the face of Federation, but he didn’t really want to pick up the shovel, and so it made it more difficult for me, but I didn’t know that for about the first three to six months. Then it became pretty clear. It became pretty clear, actually, that Tom was not going to work out as president of Federation.

05-00:26:04 Farrell: How did that manifest itself?

05-00:26:09 Pritzker: It turned out that when Tom spoke—there was a guy named Norm Crosby, who was the king of the malaprops. Tom would get up and he’d speak, and it was sometimes nonsensical. He didn’t have a grasp of the community. I think he was viewed as a carpetbagger, that he came in and was trading on his name, and that he thought he was here and he was just going to coast into retirement. Tom wasn’t a bad guy. Tom’s a nice guy. But it became clear, I think to everybody, that uh-oh, this isn’t going to work out.

05-00:26:58 Farrell: Also, when I was preparing for this, I was reading the board minutes, and there’s some mention of a changing media environment. This is also during the time when the internet is getting bigger and social media is around, and there was some talk of the JCF having to change their approach and having to respond to this changing media environment. How did that affect you on the campaign, and maybe what were some of your strategies for adjusting?

05-00:27:26 Pritzker: To be honest with you, I don’t remember that being the case. I’m not saying it wasn’t. To me, campaign was really—campaign is about a 90-10 proposition. Ninety percent of the money comes from 10 percent of the donors. It was, as I

said, round up the usual suspects. I could sit here and name who the 10 percent are. You could probably sit here and name who the 10 percent are. So it was really head down, go get that money. Once you had that money, the rest—it wasn’t superfluous by any means, but that money would come. It didn’t matter how fast you ran on the treadmill. It wasn’t going to generate dramatically more money. So even if we had an internet strategy, or we had a new media strategy, I don’t think you can make a compelling case for something like Federation over the internet. I think it’s really almost a one-on- one. I’ve said it for years. The further away you get from the curb on Steuart Street, the less people know about it. You can put everything you want out on the internet. You’ve got to touch people. They have to be engaged, they have to come to events, they have to see the organizations. To me, it’s more visceral than just putting something out and having somebody—it catches their eye. So the answer is, I don’t even remember that we had an internet strategy. Marketing and development has never been a strength of Federation. It really was the roll up your sleeves and send the troops out to go touch people. That’s really the way it’s worked for Federation, I think forever.

05-00:29:41 Farrell: There was a report that Dick Rosenberg wrote in 2004 about a period of financial difficulty for the endowment fund. I know that there’s a differentiation between the endowment fund and the campaign, but I’m wondering if you remember this, and why this was considered a period of financial difficulty.

05-00:30:00 Pritzker: I can’t get into fine details about why. I can tell you that how that manifested when I showed up was, for example, we were three billion dollar endowment, but none of the donors paid fees, and we had a big organization to manage the endowment. As a result, we had to take money from the unrestricted side of Federation to pay the overhead to accommodate endowment and that took money away that we could give to the community. So we had to loan money to endowment and it created not a healthy financial environment. I don’t remember specifically what Dick’s issues were, because as I said, really I had just shown up and I didn’t delve into the five, ten years of history that led up to me being there. I just did what I had to do as I saw it. But this whole notion, then of donors not paying fees was like a neon sign to me. That really informed my role as president after campaign. Campaign was really—it’s almost tunnel vision. Here’s the need; go get the money. Here’s the need; go get the money. There weren’t politics around it. There wasn’t subtext. There wasn’t peripheral issues. It was here’s campaign, here’s the donors, here’s the need; go get the money.

05-00:31:49 Farrell: How much time, or what percentage of your time, did you spend working on the campaign?

05-00:31:55 Pritzker: Huge. It was a big effort. Because you have to go spend the time with the donors. It may be lunch, it may be breakfast, it may be coffee, it may be dinner, it may be nighttime because you want the wife and the husband. I would say it took 60 percent of my time. To do it right, you really have to put the time in. You can’t phone it in. It just doesn’t work that way. Donors want to be spoken to. The big donors don’t want the third person in the chain of the organization or the campaign. They want the president or the person running the campaign. Oftentimes, it’s a function of you go in, you know they’re going to do it, but first they want you to hear their views on Federation, good, bad, or indifferent. So there is some psychiatric element to raising the money, because you go, you take abuse on behalf of the Federation, you get patted on the back on behalf of Federation. It’s never just as clean as walking in and taking twenty minutes to make the case and get the money and go home. It takes a lot of time if you’re going to do it properly.

05-00:33:16 Farrell: You were also involved in a few other events, maybe not directly as campaign, but as part of the JCF community, with the Power of One Gala and the Anti-Defamation League’s Annual Gala, where Marcia and John Goldman were honored. Can you tell me a little bit about those events and what impact they have on the larger Jewish community?

05-00:33:41 Pritzker: ADL. I don’t remember that I was involved in ADL. I might have been, just as president of Federation. Power of One was both really fun and really mortifying, because I was generally the only guy in the room. When you’ve got a room full of women, that’s not the worst thing in the world. Although a room full of Jewish women is a different issue. Power of One was a really important element in the campaign and to Federation. It’s not that I’m insensitive to it. I’m probably not as sensitive to it as my wife would be. It’s about empowerment. It’s about women making a difference. For campaign, oftentimes you’re talking about a big donation. Even then, it was kind of the guy’s domain, the husband’s domain, to determine and to make the gift. I think Power of One was a really empowering environment for women. I really enjoyed going to it. I don’t remember anything particularly different about it, but Power of One is and was a really important element to the campaign and to Federation. It made women feel that they had control over the gifts and that they had a voice in the organization, so it was important from that standpoint. ADL, I don’t remember that I had that much to do with it. I’ll take any credit people want to give me for it, but…

05-00:35:32 Farrell: For the Power of One Gala, Madeleine Albright was the keynote speaker. Can you remember her speech at all or what the reaction to her speaking was?

05-00:35:40 Pritzker: Madeleine had just come out as having been a Jew. Ironically, I’ve gotten to know her daughter, Katie, pretty well as a result of other philanthropic things that we do in the community. I think she had just written her book, and it was a really compelling and moving speech that talked about the impact of one day not having any connection to the Jewish community and literally the next day finding out that, in fact, you’re a Jew. I thought that was really compelling and moving. She was one of the great speakers that we had. I think she had maybe just completed her stint as secretary of state. I don’t think she was secretary of state anymore.

05-00:36:41 Farrell: Also, speaking of impact on the Jewish community, Jesse Feldman, who was a former JCF president, had passed away in March of 2004. Can you tell me what impact this had?

05-00:36:54 Pritzker: I didn’t really know Jesse. I knew of him and that he had been president, but I wasn’t—I have to say, I wasn’t really steeped in Federation history. My Uncle Don and my Aunt Sue, who lived out here and were very close to Phyllis and David Cook—Donnie chaired the campaign, I don't know, in the late sixties, early seventies. So from that standpoint, there felt there was a connection to Federation. But I was kind of—not a hired gun. There’s that phrase about when you’re a hammer, everything looks like nails. They told me I had a job to do, here’s the job you do, and I went and did it. It wasn’t a function of what was the history, who had done it, what was the wisdom they could impart to me. It was, we’ve got to get as much money as we can. You have from September until June to do it. Go do it. So I went and did it, and apparently did a pretty good job of it. But it wasn’t a function of knowing the history of Federation. I knew it generally. I probably knew it more from a Chicago standpoint, having grown up there. I will tell you that the basis for my wanting to do it and what I thought about almost every day, both in campaign and as president, was “But by the grace of God go I,” because my great-grandfather came out of Kiev. When he showed up as a nine-year-old in Chicago, it was the welfare society federation then that took care of him and got him on a road. But for organizations like that, God knows what would have happened to me or if I would even have existed. So that, to me, was really the anchor point for Federation. I think I had met Jesse, but I didn’t really know him and I didn’t know what the hallmarks were for his stint as president. As I said, I’m a bit of a troublemaker. I think that I might have taken my role more literally than a lot of people before me did. I didn’t view my role as to simply caretake the organization. Because I had to let Tom Dine go, I actually had to run the organization. It wasn’t just walking around and doing that. I had to hire people, I had to fire people. I had to run the organization every day. I was in a bit of a different position than a lot of people before me.

05-00:40:06 Farrell: I know that you’re pressed for time, so last question.

05-00:40:08 Pritzker: We can go for a few more. Go for another fifteen.

05-00:40:11 Farrell: Okay. When you said that you had to hire and fire people, who were some of the people that you had to hire?

05-00:40:24 Pritzker: I brought on Bethany Hornthal to run marketing. We had no budget to either produce things or pay people, and so I had to do it on a volunteer lay basis. I remember bringing Bethany on. I was the one, for better or for worse—I was running the organization when we brought Danny Sokatch in. I don’t remember everybody. Oh, I brought in Afshin Afshar. Now we’re moving to my presidency, because as campaign chair, I didn’t hire or fire.

05-00:41:02 Farrell: Okay, so this was after.

05-00:41:04 Pritzker: This was after campaign. I went immediately from campaign to president.

05-00:41:08 Farrell: Okay. During the time that you were running the campaign, what were some of the changes that you saw occur organizationally, if there were any?

05-00:41:20 Pritzker: Tom had just come on. No. No, Phyllis was running it, I think. No, Tom had come on when I was running campaign. So that was a change. As you remember, Tom wasn’t very helpful in raising money. When I’d have him do group events, I would sit in the wings and cringe because he was not a great speaker and he would say things off the cuff that were more about psychological projection. There wasn’t anything that new. It was just a bit of turmoil when I was running campaign. But as I said, my job was head down, go meet the people, get the money. So I didn’t really let anything on the periphery distract me. Nobody tended to get in my way. We were raising money at a pretty good clip, so it wasn’t like anybody needed to do or say anything to move me one way or another.

05-00:42:30 Farrell: I know that during your time as president, which we’ll get to next time, you made a lot of organizational changes. When you were running the campaign did you identify changes that you saw needed to be made?

05-00:42:43 Pritzker: I thought about issues. The issue of why am I raising money and we’re shipping it over to endowment? Why is endowment almost a separate organization from Federation? Shouldn’t there be a closer alignment? So I think that I began to understand underlying issues when I was running campaign. But I wasn’t running campaign, lobbying to be the president of the organization. I was going to run campaign and that was going to be the end of

that. It informed my understanding of Federation, but it wasn’t like, well, one day when I’m president of Federation, this is what I’m going to try to do. I just was exposed to the organization and to issues.

05-00:43:28 Farrell: And then what were some of the things, as you were running the campaign, that you took and applied to your work? Your paid work, not volunteer work.

05-00:43:52 Pritzker: I guess the theme I developed was democracy’s not all it’s cracked up to be. At the time, the board, I think, was seventy-eight people. There’s a saying, a camel is a racehorse designed by a committee. You can’t move left or right very quickly with that many people, because seventy-eight Jews, and you end up with ninety-three opinions. When I need to do something, I tend to want to just do it. There were a handful of people who I really respected. It’s not that I didn’t respect everybody, but there were some people I really relied on and respected to give me their honest, unvarnished opinions. I don’t require a lot of coddling, and I don’t require a lot of stroking. What I do require is somebody to be brutally honest and give me their unvarnished opinion. I think, during campaign, I had identified issues that were, I think, vexing, and people who I developed a lot of respect for and were kind of go-to people if I needed something.

05-00:45:23 Farrell: What were some of the most important things that you learned during your time running the campaign that you later applied to your time as president?

05-00:45:32 Pritzker: The issue of fees and endowment. For example, I remember thinking when I was running campaign—because it was Phyllis who developed this notion, and she may have been right at the time, but I’d say, “There’s expense to running endowment. Why aren’t we charging fees for our donors?” “Because they’ll go somewhere else.” I remember thinking, okay, where are they going to go? Phyllis would say, “They’ll go to Fidelity or Schwab.” I’d say, “Are they going to do it for free?” They’d say, “No, they’ll charge 3 percent, whatever they charge.” Say, “Even if we charged a point less, we cover our expense, we give it to them cheaper than—how come that doesn’t work?” Eventually, that’s what we ended up doing things like that, I developed the thought process for when I was running campaign. But not then with the intention of being president. Just you think these things out.

05-00:46:50 Farrell: Did you have any conversations with donors in which you kind of talked about these?

05-00:46:57 Pritzker: Yeah, because my way is I tend to use humor to make a point. Because on one hand you get to get a laugh out of it. On the other hand, when you walk out the door, the general reaction is, hmm. I remember, as I got to know Herb and

Marion Sandler, who were the biggest donors to endowment, I would say to Herb, “You’ve got a lot of money. Why are we doing this for free?” It was kind of the big wink with Herb. He knew I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew. It was only a matter of time before we were going to charge fees. Herb is a smart guy. It’s a twofer. If I can help the Jews, and I can get a free service out of it, wow, what’s wrong with that? Again, I was in a really unique position because financially I was on equal footing with a lot of the top donors to the Federation and I could talk to them differently than somebody that wasn’t or didn’t have—I’m not assigning gravitas to myself, but perception is reality and people perceive that when you have certain capacity, it kind of assigns some element of gravitas to you. Whether it’s cartoonish or not, people tend to take you more seriously, and so I could get away with things that other people couldn’t get away with. I would take advantage of that on a regular basis.

05-00:48:53 Farrell: My last question is, what was your favorite thing about running the campaign?

05-00:49:02 Pritzker: The win. When you sit down with somebody and you have a goal of walking out of the room with a commitment, that’s awesome. That’s fun. You get to go back. I would run over to Steuart Street with the kind of imaginary bag of money over my shoulder and everybody would celebrate. We were ahead of our timeline, and that’s great. That feels good. I had never done anything like this before. I still laugh. My dad had passed away, and we were not raised—I grew up in Glencoe. In Glencoe, everybody just wanted to be an American. Nobody needed to be a Jew, necessarily. If my dad—I used to laugh—if my dad could see me doing this, he would be both awestruck and laughing hysterically. But it felt good. I was helping the community. I was helping our people. It was fun, and I was having success at it. That was really fun. Both as campaign chair and president, I loved it. I had a ball. Now, would I have taken on another year or two of it? No. But for the time that I did it, I loved it. I had a ball. I hope I did good work for the community, and I know it was great for me. I really enjoyed it, and I grew enormously. It gave me a different sense of confidence in things I could do that I—fundraising. Who knew? I never would have asked for money. So that was the best part for me.

05-00:50:53 Farrell: Anything else you want to add about your time there?

05-00:50:57 Pritzker: At campaign? No. It takes a village. I remember, really fondly, a lot of the people I worked with who were enthusiastic and were fun to work with. I got a lot out of it, and I hope that people did too. I think we had fun doing it. When you ask most of the people involved in campaign, most of them probably wouldn’t say, “Oh, God, it was really fun.” But I think we had fun doing it. Again, I had the benefit of a pretty good economy, so that was a lot easier for me than it was for a lot of other people. That’s it.

05-00:51:41 Farrell: Thank you.

05-00:51:41 Pritzker: Sure.

Interview #4 March 24, 2014 Audio File 6

06-00:00:05 Pritzker: Does this sweater make me look fat? No? Go ahead. Does this microphone make me look fat? Yeah, go ahead. [laughter]

06-00:00:23 Farrell: This is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker on Monday, March 24, 2014. This is tape number six, and we are in San Francisco on the Embarcadero. John, when we left off last time, we were talking about your time running the campaign for the JCF. You went immediately from running the campaign into the presidency, but you had mentioned that you weren’t thinking that you were going to continue. So I’m wondering how this—

06-00:00:40 Pritzker: I would say that’s an understatement, but yeah.

06-00:00:42 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit about how you were selected to be president and what the transition was like?

06-00:00:53 Pritzker: How I was selected to be president. Everybody take a step back who doesn’t want to be. Not so fast, Pritzker. I think that because of my success in campaign, they thought it would be a good idea if I would become president. There’s not really a formal process. It’s kind of one of those you’ll know it when you see it, having been on the other side when Jim became president. It becomes fairly evident over a period of time who the candidates might be. I think that as we moved from the previous generation to mine—and thank God there is a generation ahead of me—what you need is somebody who can fundraise, who will put in the elbow grease, and, if it exists, some sense of gravitas. I don’t mean to heap self-importance on me, but the perception that the president has the wherewithal. Because if you’ve got to go ask people for it, there is this dance that happens where the unspoken is okay, but turnabout is fair play. So if you’re going to ask me at some point for some other reason, maybe I’m going to be able to come ask you. So I think I fit. I checked all the boxes, and that’s how they decided I should become president.

06-00:02:36 Farrell: What went into your decision into accepting, since you weren’t planning on staying?

06-00:02:43 Pritzker: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed doing campaign. I probably did the organization a bit of a disservice. The development function at Federation, at least since I’ve been around Federation, really was never well-executed or defined. The development function was really a function more of who was running campaign. There was a number of people to support that person, but it

wasn’t like there was a director of development, an SVP of development, who walked you through the process and really ran the function. And so I focused more on—as is my wont—just getting it done rather than building an organization. Which, as I said, may have been a disservice, because the organization needs the function. But given the timeframe of campaign and the lack of support—and I don’t mean that as a pejorative; just there wasn’t a lot of people—you can either spend your time creating a process in an organization, or you can just go get the money. I chose just to go make the solicitations.

06-00:04:09 Farrell: Can you describe what your transition was like, and maybe how some of your roles differed?

06-00:04:22 Pritzker: It’s not really much of an acclimation. The major function of the president really is the fundraising element. It was just now I had the support in the form—I think it was Jim Koshland succeeded me at campaign. And so if you subscribe to the notion that it all rolls downhill, I had Jim. So the transition was not really a big deal, other than when I actually got there and saw what I had to work with. Tom Dine was the CEO, and Tom was a nice guy. I think he had been at AIPAC before Federation and had done, I guess, a great job there, and that’s how they decided. It predates me, the selection of Tom. I think he had been there—I don’t recall. Because I don’t think I was in on the decision. If I was, I didn’t have a strong hand in it. But when I got there, it was clear that Tom was not the leader that we needed on the staff side. Tom was kind of more of a figurehead. He was an older guy; he was probably my age, now, then. Maybe even a little older. Tom had come from an organization that had pretty deep support, operational staff support. When he got there, there was kind of no “there” there, and Tom was not the kind of guy who could build an organization. My perception was that Tom kind of flailed. When I would do major solicitations with him, Tom just didn’t know—he didn’t have the patter, he didn’t have the conviction, he didn’t have the fire in his belly. He didn’t really understand the mission all that well, and so he spoke in platitudes. We have some pretty savvy donors, and they weren’t buying the story. That was the startling part of my transition, was the realization that I probably was going to have to let Tom go. The ramifications of that were many, many, many, not the least of which was going to wreak havoc on my life. I’m the kind of person who I can talk to you about the process or I can just go do it, and it’s probably easier and more efficient for me just to go do it. I think that I might have been much, much more proactive and much less process-oriented than the executive committee bargained for or hoped for. The first three months I was there, I carried a couple of keys in my pocket, purely for effect, because when people came to complain about something I had done, I would pull the keys out and I’d say, “Here you go. All yours.” Of course, everybody would recoil in horror, and that was the end of the conversation. If you want me to do the job, I’ll do it, but sometimes democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up

to be, and I just couldn’t wait around to take votes on everything that I needed to do. Plus, Tom deserved respect. He has a life. He had a wife. He had moved out here. I just had to deal with it the best I could. So that, for me, was the most stunning aspect of the transition.

06-00:08:33 Farrell: Can you describe some of the ramifications that the staff people experienced by having a weaker CEO?

06-00:08:42 Pritzker: Yeah. Like any organization where there’s not strong leadership, it kind of slowly devolves into complacency, whining, a more political environment, because people think then they should jostle for position. Kind of just a general malaise. I didn’t let a lot of grass grow under my feet, and I really thought of myself as the president/CEO at that point, and pretty quickly started a process to identify a successor. Any time you’ve got to do that in the not-for-profit world or the corporate world, you probably should plan on eight months to a year to identify somebody, go through the process, and onboard them. That’s how it impacted the staff. I think they wanted leadership. I think I provided leadership. I don't know what anybody else would say, but I tried to be available. The good news was I’m only five blocks away from Federation, and it was a lovely walk over there, and I probably made the walk twice a day, three times a day. I was present, and they knew where I was, and we could have meetings here. It was easy for them to come over here. I was in pretty close touch with everybody I needed to be in touch with. And I was fortunate, because I think the people who thought it was a good idea to make me the president felt so badly that it would have been a missed opportunity not to trade on their sense of guilt, so I did. I was supported pretty strongly.

06-00:10:53 Farrell: Who were some of your biggest supporters, and who were some of the people who helped you ease into the role of president?

06-00:11:00 Pritzker: I would say Adele Corvin couldn’t have been nicer. Jim Koshland. Mike Jacobs never turned a request down. Tom Kasten never turned a request down, and I made plenty of them. Jim Koshland was great. As I said, Adele. Steve Fayne. Dan Safier was just coming into Federation. Anybody with good sense could see Dan coming from a mile away. He’s smart, he’s well-connected, he’s sincere, he’s devoted. Good-looking, well-spoken. Those are the people. I’m sure I’m missing some people. Oh, Warren. Warren. Warren Hellman was just the best, and easily guilted. I’m in a fortunate position, because either by dint of my lack of intelligence or the perception that I can stand up to these guys, I wasn’t intimidated by a guy like Warren. And he could be intimidating, as can Barney. Until you get to know that Barney is an absolute cream puff, Barney appears to be pretty gruff and tough. But Warren couldn’t have been more wonderful on the endowment side. He chaired the endowment

committee. When you have a guy with that kind of gravitas and humor—he was just great. So I was well-supported by that group.

06-00:12:48 Farrell: You had talked about having—the staff, there was a sense of complacency and things were kind of lulling. But you also mentioned in our last interview that the further you get from the curb of 121 Steuart Street, the less you know about the Federation. I’m wondering what you did to try to engage people and bring them in and share the story of the JCF to get people excited.

06-00:13:18 Pritzker: I don't know that I invented any new events, but, for example, when we had Super Sunday, I did an early morning breakfast for the largest donors. We tried to make it as interesting and exciting and fun as we could. I have an ability—let me invoke. I don’t even know if it’s the right word. To schmeichel people. I can goose people into good humor, fun, a bit of a lighter atmosphere. One of the things about Federation that I noticed was there’s a lot of handwringing, and I guess that comes with being a Jewish organization. But, you know, we were doing pretty amazing work, and we were helping a lot of people. I kept saying to people, “We’re doing great stuff. I don’t understand why everybody is handwringing around here.” A lot of people would kill to be in a position to be able to help this many people and to do the work we do. It was my job to keep the organization light and as nimble as I could. It was a daily grind. You go in, and you’re a bit of the manager of a team, and you do a lot of clapping and back-slapping. That’s how I kept it moving and as light as I could. The search process, what I didn’t want to do was kick the can down the road. I think we discussed this in an earlier session. Federation is born of a handful of events. Immigration in the late 1800s, the Holocaust, the state of Israel. Certain emergencies. But there were generational imperatives that occurred, and it allowed the—and there wasn’t the competition for the donor dollar. There weren’t other organizations with their hands out. It was United Way and us and a handful of others. When there was one of those generational imperatives or an emergency, the organization would put their hand out and people would fill it with money, because there wasn’t a question about it. That’s what you did. But as generations moved forward, people want to have more control over the money they give. It was clear there was a big change that had been occurring, and a bigger one that would occur with generational change. In looking for a leader, I didn’t want to go to another Federation, frankly, because the Federation model isn’t really at its peak. Just to get somebody that was going to keep doing what we had been doing, it wasn’t sustainable in this form. We were looking for somebody who was young and smart and would appeal to a different generation of donors. I don't know if that was apropos, but that was how we moved into the search process. Now that I’ve thrown you a curve. Look at her shuffle those papers.

06-00:16:58 Farrell: Tom Dine left as CEO in 2007, and then there was an absence of the CEO. I’m wondering what some of the challenges were in running the JCF without the CEO. I know you had to step in a little bit, but.

06-00:17:09 Pritzker: Everything. It was keeping things going when there wasn’t a general for people to report to. I became that. Not that I was so great at it, necessarily, but I knew I had to do it, and so I filled that role as ably as I could. At the time, I had Phyllis, and Phyllis was very, very helpful in a number of ways, and not as helpful in a number of ways. But it wasn’t like I was totally bereft of anybody that knew what they were doing there. That’s not the case at all.

06-00:17:51 Farrell: When you started the search, what were some of the things that you were looking for, aside from not being affiliated with another Jewish organization?

06-00:18:004 Pritzker: I was looking for somebody younger. Thirties, forties being younger. I was looking for somebody—it wasn’t I; it was we. It was the executive committee. Were looking for somebody who understood what Federation was and what Federation wasn’t, and who had the ability to withstand the people who didn’t want it to change. Who were willing to go down with the ship, so to speak. That’s pretty much what we were looking for. I think what I didn’t understand at the time was the difference between somebody who’s steeped in policy and somebody who’s steeped in community. What we ended up with with Danny Sokatch was a guy involved in policy and not community.

06-00:19:05 Farrell: Can you explain the difference between the two? What you mean by that.

06-00:19:10 Pritzker: Community is what Federation does. It engages the community in the organizations that it supports, in initiatives. The Home. JFCS. Bureau of Education. All the local organizations that cater to the community. Federation is really a convener of the community. Policy is more about the state of Israel. I think of it, in the Jewish world, as being more about Israel than almost anything. That’s where Danny’s interest was. In retrospect, it’s one of those “I could have had a V8” moments. It was interesting, because as I look back, no one on the executive committee—and Dick Rosenberg was on the committee—none of us thought about the delineation of those two things. It turns out, in retrospect, Danny was a policy guy, and that’s when I realized, oh, wow, there’s policy people and there’s community people. But none of us figured it out going into the search.

06-00:20:30 Farrell: When you hired Danny, how did the tone of the JCF change?

06-00:20:45 Pritzker: A lot of hopes were pinned on Danny. Danny was young, and good-looking, and adorable, and really engaging, and fun, and funny. Danny was like a big old breath of fresh air. I remember the most stunning thing to me on the executive committee, the search committee, was Dick Rosenberg, who is as conservative as anybody I know, was so excited about Danny, and that was really unusual to me. I was surprised. Danny appealed to everybody. He was the great hope.

06-00:21:34 Farrell: At what point did it become clear that he was more policy-driven than community-oriented?

06-00:21:44 Pritzker: Danny isn’t a good poker player, and he wears it on his face. When we were doing solicitations—“Do I have to? Really? Pritzker, are you going to make me, really?” Danny and I got to be really good friends, and it was really fun to be able to work with him, because we could talk very straight to one another. He’d start whining about solicitations. It wasn’t glaring, it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t, oh my God, what have we done? But I knew I had a problem—I remember it vividly. We were walking—I’m pretty sure it was back from Warren Hellman’s office. We were walking. There is a hill. It’s a little park by, maybe, Drumm, by the Embarcadero. There’s one big park on the Embarcadero and Washington Street, and then there’s a smaller park across the street. I remember we were standing on the hill and I said something to Danny like, “If you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?” He said, “I don’t know. I supposed I’d work for somebody”—I can’t even remember the name of the organization he works for now, but, “That’s who I’d work for.” I said, “Why?” He said, “The work they do on Israel,” and bah, bah, bah, bah. I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I think he might have said he’d love to work in the Obama administration, because I think that was the beginning of Obama’s first term. “Interesting, okay. See you later.” He took a right and I took a left to come back here. Then, about three months later, he said, “I’ve got to see you.” I said, “Okay, how about tomorrow?” He said, “No, no, no. I mean in the next twenty minutes.” I said, “Okay, come on over.” So he came over, and he told me he’d been offered the job. Can we edit in the name of the organization? Because I must have emotionally blocked it out. “I’ve been offered the executive director job.” He told me all about it. I looked at him and I said, “Wow, it sounds really exciting. That’s such a shame you can’t take it.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “You rolled into town. You’ve got a whole community’s hopes staked in you.” He had been here six months. You can’t leave. For your own sake. Forget about me, forget about the organization. You’re going to look like you came here on our nickel and then decided to do what you really, secretly wanted to do. It’s going to look terrible. Bad idea. He turned it down. Then, I think just at the tail end of my term, they offered it to him again. I couldn’t do it a second time. That’s how that went. But Danny, I think he was only with us maybe a little over a year.

06-00:25:07 Farrell: During this period of transition with a CEO leaving, and then going through the hiring process, and then having a new person, do you feel like your history in business, or your experience, helped you balance?

06-00:25:22 Pritzker: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

06-00:25:23 Farrell: Can you tell me a little more about that?

06-00:25:24 Pritzker: I don't know about balance.

06-00:25:26 Farrell: Or negotiate that circumstance.

06-00:25:29 Pritzker: With Danny? Or just generally operating in the context of Federation? For sure. Because I was in the business of running hotels and companies, it’s really no different. It’s about people, and it’s what do people respond to, what do they expect of you as a leader, how do you motivate people. Being genuine and caring about the people you work with. From that standpoint, it was fun because, as I’ve described, the higher up you get—I can only speak for the hotel business. Loved it as a kid. Ever since I was a kid, loved the hotel business. But as you progress and as you get promoted through the ranks, that which you started to do because you loved it, you don’t really do as much anymore. I loved working at the front desk, but by the time I became a divisional vice president, I’d go behind the front desk five minutes every three, four, five months, just to say hi to people. This was more of a getting back to a hands-on operating role. From that standpoint, it was kind of fun. But there’s a direct correlation between operating a not-for-profit organization and—I will tell you the difference is the mindset of the employees of the staff is very different in a not-for-profit. It’s not malicious, but they don’t feel as obligated to hew to the expense side. We’re doing God’s work. Well, how can you put a number on that? Well, I can. Here’s how much we have, here’s how much it costs. That’s what supporting God looks like. That was really the biggest difference, was the mindset of the staff.

06-00:27:40 Farrell: Moving to some of the—I guess maybe to restructuring. I know that you had a large hand in restructuring the JCF, and one of your biggest accomplishments was to change the structure. I know when you were running for campaign, you had mentioned that—or you were running the campaign—you had mentioned that you had identified some issues, including charging fees, because it became necessary for the endowment to borrow from the unrestricted side of the JCF. Can you tell me about when you first started thinking about what the solution to this was?

06-00:28:25 Pritzker: It didn’t take Warren Buffett to figure out this model. We didn’t take in any fees, and it costs a lot of money to operate the endowment, so shouldn’t we be taking in fees to offset the expense? It was literally that simple. But because the organization, the mother’s milk of the organization, was contributions, anything was done to not upset donors. It made no sense. I don't know if we covered this in a previous discussion. Phyllis Cook, who ran endowment, really created the endowment, had convinced everybody that if we charged fees, they wouldn’t come to Federation with their money for endowment. It was such a simple line of logic for me. People want to leave their money here, right? Right. We can’t charge them a fee. Why? Because if we do, they’ll go somewhere else. Okay, if they go somewhere else, where will they go? Well, Fidelity or Schwab. Right, and if they go to Fidelity and Schwab, are they going to give them the services free? Well, of course not. Well, okay. So then all we have to do is charge less than they do, right? And people will still be doing a great thing, and theoretically nobody should leave, because they’re getting a better deal, but we can cover our expenses. Everybody threw their hands over their eyes and put their hands over their ears and go, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s not that simple.” In fact, it is that simple. It happened just after I left, but they charged fees. I think now, today, 2014, they’re taking in something like six and a half million in fees. Nobody’s left. Nobody departed the organization as a result. Tad Taube took his money, but that’s because he’s Tad. And we’re covering our expenses, and so we can give more away out of the unrestricted. It really didn’t take a genius. I think it took somebody with dogged persistence, and I was probably the third largest donor. Forget about the fact I was president; I was also a donor. One day I wasn’t going to be president and they didn’t have to listen to me, but they did because I gave a lot of money. It’s the problem with the organization, is that anybody who gives some money can have a major voice. What happens is you’re motoring along the way, and a major donor says, “I don’t like that; I like this.” So the whole organization takes a hard left to accommodate the donor, and so you end up, as an organization, kind of driving this drunken path. That’s what I tried to calm. But again, I, and Jim after me, was in a position, with our names and the size of our financial involvement, people weren’t going to mess with us, and so we could make that headway.

06-00:32:01 Farrell: What did it take to finally convince Phyllis that that was a good idea? Was it just breaking that down to her? Or even the other staff members, too. Trying to convince them.

06-00:32:10 Pritzker: Phyllis probably has done more with and in this community than anybody in the last, I could argue, fifty years. There are donors that have given a lot of money, and good for them, and thanks to them. But I don’t think anybody has put in the elbow grease or the mindset. Phyllis is really, really, really smart, and really energetic, and really dogged. There was nobody that could keep up with her over the span of about thirty years, and so Phyllis really ran the

organization. It was one of the problems for the CEOs, because where Brian Lurie could stand up to Phyllis and garner Phyllis’s respect, Phyllis would test each of the CEOs, and that’s a lovely way of putting it. Phyllis would beat the crap out of the incoming CEO. Most of them withered under it.

06-00:33:25 Farrell: Can you describe how she would do that? Or do you not want to—

06-00:33:31 Pritzker: You’re going to get Phyllis in an interview. She’ll be interviewing you by the time it’s over. Phyllis talks a mile a minute. She has absolute conviction, and she is really smart, and she deals in facts. Unless you can keep up with her on that basis, you’re just—the other thing is, it comes down to a—she never said it, but it really is that, “You want me to do this or you want to do this?” “Oh, no, I don’t want to do it. Phyllis, thank God you’re here.” Her view is then, “Let me do it, please.” Phyllis had the relationship with the donors. I happen to be watching “House of Cards.” A little word here with the donor, a little word there with the donor, and pretty soon the CEO’s credibility was slowly failing under his feet. Once that starts, that’s the road to hell for the CEO. That’s how it happened.

06-00:34:50 Farrell: What was the process of Phyllis leaving like? Because she had been there for so long.

06-00:35:02 Pritzker: It was hard, and it was exacerbated by Phyllis was my aunt and uncle’s—one of their closest friends, and I had known Phyllis for years. The ultimate irony was Phyllis was the one that got Lisa and I involved in the community when we moved here. You asked the difference between a not-for-profit and a commercial venture. Succession is critical. You can’t just leave it to chance. Phyllis, when I got to Federation, I think, was seventy. Had just turned seventy or was just turning seventy. There was this—it was like an annual game, and it went like this. “Phyllis, you have to create a succession plan, because the organization, if you get hit by the proverbial bus”—and her immediate response was the Jewish response, which was, “Maybe it’s time I should retire. Maybe you guys don’t want me around.” The response was always, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, don’t worry. We didn’t mean it that—don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about it.” And that was the end of the conversation. And it worked for years. She never had a succession plan. Then I rolled in and I said, “Phyllis, we’ve got to have a succession plan.” “Well, maybe it’s time for”—“Phyllis, come on. Cut the bullshit. It’s not time for you to leave, but it’s time for you to have a succession plan.” See, her problem was I had a relationship with Herb and Marion Sandler. Barney was a close friend. Most of the people before me, both CEOs and presidents, didn’t necessarily have those relationships. I said to her, I remember, I said, “Phyllis, do you think Herb and Marion don’t have a succession plan at the bank? Should we call them and ask them?” No, let’s not call them and ask them,

because we know the answer. It was that game for a while. I think it was the recession hit, our numbers took a hit, and the books were abysmal. Phyllis, for her brilliance, never writes anything down. The best example was, in the lobby of Federation is this—I never thought about it. There was this huge chunk of some kind of sculpture, lump of a sculpture, opposite the elevators. It was dark. It wasn’t lit. It was just this kind of dark mess of metal. I never thought much about it until one day I was going to a meeting and I thought, I wonder what that is. I walked over and I looked at the thing, and it said Jacques Lipchitz. I mean, oh my God. That’s not third-rate material. I collect art, and I have a guy work within New York, and I called Gabe and I said, “Gabe, here’s the name, here’s the year. Give me an approximate value. Call Christie’s and Sotheby’s, will you?” He called me back. He said, “It’s worth about a million four.” This was 2000, whenever I was president. I said, “Thanks.” I went to Phyllis. Said, “Phyllis, I’m curious about the paperwork on the Lipchitz in the lobby.” “We don’t have the paperwork.” “Who was the donor?” “Phyllis and Stuart Moldaw gave it, but when they gave it, they said that the contemporary museum could—but Federation owns—they can use it and they have a twenty-five {inaudible}” I said, “No, you’re hurting my brain. Can I just see the piece of paper?” “We don’t have it.” “It’s a million—how can you not have a”—“Well, because Phyllis”—bah, bah, bah, bah. And that’s how everything was in the Federation. It was all somewhere in filing cabinets. Our computer systems were abysmal. And so I started getting very close to Deena Soulon, who was the CFO. Deena was aging fast, because Phyllis would go on, shut the door, put her brass knuckles on, beat the crap out of Deena until I showed up and I started championing Deena’s work.

It turned out, at one point, we almost lost our 501(k). It became apparent that we had to grow up as an organization. It was fine before, but we were moving into the day of really tough regulation, and we just couldn’t pave this way anymore. And so I went to Dick Rosenberg, who had become the chair of the endowment committee. Did you interview Dick? He’s been interviewed. I assume he’s been. Dick makes me look like Gulliver. Dick is probably 5'1", 5'2", but in strength he’s about 6'5". I said, “Dick, the books are a catastrophe. You were the CEO of Bank of America. People are going to expect more. And by the way, when it hits the fan, you’re the chairman of the endowment committee. Guess who they’re going to come talk to?” He immediately started screaming at me. It was like the picture of John Glenn taking off, where his cheeks were just pushed back, and you could see my teeth and my hair was flying back. I said, “You can get mad at me, but this is the case. Then he calmed down then. I said, “We need to sit down with Phyllis. She’s got to give us a succession plan. We can’t leave this to chance anymore.” Dick arranged lunch with me and Phyllis, and we went to One Market, and we were sitting by the windows. I said to Dick before the lunch, “All right, here’s how this is going to work. You’re going to say we need a succession plan. She’s going to say, ‘Well, maybe it’s time for me to go.’ Then you’re supposed to go, ‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean that.’ But you can’t do that this time.” He said, “Okay.” We sat down. A little small talk. Finally, I said, “Phyllis, we’ve got to discuss a

succession plan.” Right on cue, “Well, you know, I’ve turned seventy. Maybe it’s time for me to go.” Dick looked at her. He said, “Fine, give me a date.” That was it. I mean, that was it. Phyllis looked at him, looked away. You could see her tearing up. The first thing she said was, “I’ve always wanted to get an advanced degree.” I’m no Sigmund Freud, but what that said to me was, oh my God, she’s accepting the notion she might not be there anymore. I couldn’t believe it. Sure enough, she said, “I will come up with a date and I’ll let you know.” My guess is this was probably December, January, and we agreed that in June, at the annual meeting, she’d step down. That’s what happened. That was how Phyllis ended up leaving Federation.

06-00:43:08 Farrell: Because she had such a presence there and had done so much, what was it like after she left? What changed?

06-00:43:16 Pritzker: It was like the charging fees with endowment. Oh my God, we’ll never survive this. This is the end as we know it. It may have changed the complexion of Federation a little, but it may have been a confluence of Phyllis leaving and the times. If you look around the country, New York Federation is still important, critical, but New York is four billion people, so it’s a whole different thing. But as you go East to West, Federations are all having a hard time, because people aren’t—when I say people, younger people don’t buy the notion of an umbrella organization. They’re smarter than that, they’re engaged, and they want to steward their philanthropy, and they want to have impact, and they want to create metrics about what is successful and what isn’t successful, and they want the option of not giving it. Giving it and then not giving it. I just think Federation was changing anyway. When Phyllis left, it probably was a line of demarcation for her generation. But it also was a time when I left, when my term was up. I think the only thing between guys like Barney—the only thing keeping Barney engaged really was my ability to schmeichel Barney. I think it was all a confluence. I don’t think you can attribute it, any of it, to any one thing. I think there was a lot. It was just the time. I think endowments got much more professionalized. I started an initiative to upgrade our IT, and Afshin Afshar came in and was very serious and very involved and very engaged. I think the organization got professionalized. I have to say, when we announced Phyllis’s departure, I think I remember getting maybe two calls or emails. Everybody thought there would be this flood of, “How could you let this happen?” I don’t think anybody was that, A, shocked, or, B, dismayed about it. Phyllis could be tough, and Phyllis panders to the people who have the wherewithal to make the organization go.

06-00:46:21 Farrell: During this time of Phyllis leaving and that whole process, you were starting to plant the seeds within the organization of changing the structure and implementing the fees. I’m wondering what that process looked like and what it took on your end to make that happen.

06-00:46:44 Pritzker: I just kept harping on it. I don’t have specific recollection about turning points, but I think it was Warren’s support, because Warren was going to have to pay fees. To have money there and not pay fees, and for us to shine a light on it, kind of made people look like {inaudible} if they were going to argue about the fees. Herb whined, and Marion whined, but we have overhead. We’ve got people administrating around your funds. They’re not free. In many cases, certainly Herb and Marion’s, the funds were all restricted, so it wasn’t like we could give the money away. We were just holding it. That was the misnomer. On one hand—I think we went over this, maybe—people at Federation would say, “We have a three-billion-dollar endowment,” and some poor schmoe in the community would say, “Can I have $1,500 to fix the mikveh?” The organization would say, “That’s not our money to give you.” “You’ve got three billion dollars. You beat us over the head with your three billion, but you can’t give me any?” That was the problem within the community. I think people saw Federation as a bit wedded to the old way of doing things, and a bit disingenuous. Phyllis was the iron fist in the iron glove. Not everybody in the community adored working with Phyllis. If you weren’t one of her darlings, she could hammer you pretty good.

06-00:48:35 Farrell: Do you think that the fact that you were new to the JCF, that you didn’t have this long history with them, helped you see these things objectively?

06-00:48:46 Pritzker: Oh. Yeah, I think so. I was also younger. If I did it now—I wouldn’t do it now. It was kind of a moment in time for me where I had the bandwidth to do it. I wasn’t between gigs, but it was before we bought the hotel company and I had the time. I wasn’t going to be defeated. I wasn’t going to take no. The solution seemed pretty clear to me. I kind of had the political capital and the donor capital to do it. I know there are people that wanted me to be more— what’s the word I’m looking for? I used it before. Process-driven. But I can’t. Just, if there’s a problem, let’s fix the problem. Let’s not sit and debate the problem. If we all agree it’s a problem, let’s go fix it.

06-00:49:55 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about the push-back that you received for not being as process-driven?

06-00:50:05 Pritzker: People tended not to want to hammer me. I’m a big boy. I don’t have a problem hearing it. But I think people, like they were with any of the large donors, were kind of scared of me. It wasn’t that I was draconian or dictatorial. It’s just I had a pretty clear view of what I needed to do and what I wanted to do, and I thought what the organization needed, and I set about doing it. I think people were afraid to hammer me about it. They joke about it. I think it’s seventy-eight people on the board. How do you possibly get anything done with seventy-eight people on a board? Seventy-eight Jews.

That means 123 opinions. I think I scaled down the size of the board. We went from seventy-eight to forty-something, which is still too big.

06-00:51:21 Farrell: Can you talk a little bit more about that scaling-down process of the board? How you were able to implement that.

06-00:51:32 Pritzker: I don’t remember. I remember knowing it was just unwieldy and unproductive. I think I left it to the executive committee. I think they agreed and they helped me push it through. But I don’t remember any specific events around it. I was just thinking of that thing with Phyllis, to go back to Phyllis for a minute. Before Phyllis left, I said to her, “Phyllis, can I get the list of major donors, please?” Endowment donors. Phyllis said, “I can’t. It’s confidential.” I said, “Well, good news. I’m the president of the organization. You can give it to me.” “No, I can’t give it to you.” Okay. So I figured I’d skin the cat a different way. I called a meeting. I made up a meeting. I called a meeting that would require Phyllis to bring the list of donors. It was a lot of data. I was sitting here, and Phyllis was sitting here. Phyllis’s mind works so fast. She was talking. [mumbles] While she was talking, I literally slowly edged the pile from here to here, and then at some point, I put it on the floor and pushed it forward with my feet so that it was under the table and she couldn’t see it. The meeting was over. We stood up. She left. I stayed. I got the stuff from under the table, and I walked back to my office and xeroxed it. I don’t remember how I got it back to her without her knowing about it. She was moving so fast. I think very few presidents before me were willing to do things like that.

06-00:53:45 Farrell: Do you know what her reasoning was for not wanting to share the donor list?

06-00:53:50 Pritzker: Yeah, knowledge is power.

06-00:53:55 Farrell: This is probably a good time to change the tape.

Audio File 7

07-00:00:06 Farrell: This is Shanna Farrell interviewing John Pritzker on Monday, March 24, 2014, in his office on the Embarcadero, and this is tape number seven.

07-00:00:17 Pritzker: Something occurred to me. You asked a question as to what’s the difference between leaving a business versus a not-for-profit. Literally just as I had become president, there was a shooting, I think, at the Federation in Seattle. I

think one or two people were killed. Somebody called me or I heard it, and I went right to Federation. We put it on lockdown. Because I was here, it took me a minute and a half to get over there, and we put it in lockdown, and we gathered everybody to talk about how we communicate to the staff and how we communicate to the donors and the community. That’s where I think leadership in a corporate environment really translated, and especially in the hotel business. Running a hotel is like running a city. You’ve got different departments, you’ve got people 24/7, and things happen. Emergencies happen. Suicides happen. Everything happens. Everybody was shocked that I showed up. What else would you do if you run an organization? I think that that might have also earned me some points with the staff, that I showed up, and I was engaged, and I had ideas, and led.

07-00:02:05 Farrell: Speaking of that, that was actually one of the topics that I wanted to cover, was issues of security. That shooting happened on July 28, 2006. You had implemented a twenty-four-hour surveillance, 421 Steuart Street, right after. You briefly mentioned it, but can you tell me a little bit more about that day and what it was like to implement that surveillance?

07-00:02:30 Pritzker: Yeah. As I recall, it happened in the afternoon. I think it was late afternoon. I can’t remember the head of security. Levine. Alan. Alan Levine? Nobody is watching this, right, for another hundred years? But he’s a good guy, and he was Johnny-on-the-spot. So I got Alan and we came up with procedures for lockdown and communicating to the agencies that we were engaged with, so JCC. JCC may have been under construction. I can’t remember exactly. But JFCS and all of them. Because you never know. You just don’t know. I don’t remember too many specifics, other than being there and fielding calls. I have sympathy for Alexander Haig, who was excoriated when Reagan was shot, for being in the White House and saying, “I’m in charge of the White House.” I actually was on a board with him, so I got to ask him. We took a long car ride together. His point was, “I wanted to show people somebody here was responsible for the operation of the White House. I wasn’t suggesting I was the president.” I think people just wanted to know that leadership was at Federation and thinking about next steps and how to keep things as safe as we could. As I recall, we had the police come over. I don’t remember if it was the police commissioner, but the police came over and discussed it with us, and I think Alan was in touch with the FBI as well. Sometimes it’s not actually what you do as much as it is the view of your constituents that somebody is on top of it, and that’s what they want confidence in.

07-00:04:42 Farrell: After that, you held staff meetings and toured rooftops on nearby buildings, and also explored security options with Tom Dine. What were some of the things that you discussed during those staff meetings?

07-00:04:54 Pritzker: I think it was just access to the building. How do we respond to the community and to synagogues. One of the problems with Federation at the time was we weren’t really engaged with synagogues. They were obviously a potential target. That was kind of the beginning of the synagogue initiative, was when we started dealing with them on that basis. To stick on security, that was really all we could do. You can’t become an armed camp. You can’t cower behind your doors. We didn’t have security doors at the time on 121, and they had been ordered. Like, for two years they had been ordered, and they were being manufactured, and I pushed that issue. This isn’t brain science; they’re doors. They may be thick doors, but they’re doors. So I think we sped that up, and I think people, on one hand, were depressed seeing that you have to do that. On the other hand, I think they were glad to see that at least something was being done. We talked about entrance and exit protocol. What kind of security do we need? How do we react in the event of an attack? Kind of thing. Again, we didn’t have guns, so it’s not like we could respond in kind, and so the police were more involved in making sure that we understood appropriate steps.

07-00:06:44 Farrell: Then Homeland Security gave the JCF a $100,000 grant for an upgrade in the security system.

07-00:06:50 Pritzker: I think that’s what paid for the doors. I think that might have been it.

07-00:06:54 Farrell: Okay. You had blast-resistant doors, keycard entry badges, metal detectors, and more security booths with more security personnel.

07-00:07:04 Pritzker: There was a security booth to the left of the metal detector.

07-00:07:10 Farrell: Oh, you didn’t add new ones?

07-00:07:13 Pritzker: No, I think that was the only one. The building is kind of a pillbox anyway. I don’t think there are windows until the second or third floor, and I think those are blast-resistant also.

07-00:07:30 Farrell: After this infrastructure was added, how did the tone change of the office?

07-00:07:41 Pritzker: It was kind of a pain in the ass to have to go in and out of the door. Now everybody had to have their swipe card. The door wasn’t going to open if you didn’t have your swipe card. We were probably late to the party. A lot of other organizations had security procedures. Security did not become a big part of

what happened there. It was kind of a fact of life, as, unfortunately, it is everywhere now.

07-00:08:19 Farrell: Speaking of changes and different things, we just were talking about a series of changes, and then also with infrastructure changes, but the themes of the 2007 and the 2008 annual meetings were—2007 was Changing Times, Changing Federation, and 2008 was Implementing Change. Can you tell me about what sorts of change—I know that we talked about organizational change, but what bigger changes that these themes were referring to, and how they were addressed at the meetings?

07-00:08:53 Pritzker: I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night. I remember I gave a great speech at one of them. I don’t remember which one. The synagogue initiative was one of them. I guess if I can take credit for anything, it’s—well, a couple of things I have talked about, but I wouldn’t call a momentous occasion of my presidency. I think the synagogue initiative was an important one. I don't know the state of it now, but I think it’s progressed pretty far. There was no relationship between the synagogues and Federation, which seemed insane to me. There was an us and them, us-versus-them mentality at Federation, almost as if to suggest, oh, you’re talking about those Gonifs over in the synagogue? Oh, you asked me who was instrumental in supporting me. David Steirman was. I can’t say enough. He was the best. David chaired the original synagogue initiative. I remember we had the first meeting at Temple Emanu- El, and it was downright hostile. I went in smiling, and Wolf Peretz who was the associate rabbi at Emanu-El was aggressive. Lavey Derby, I think, from Marin, was likewise aggressive, because they felt Federation never did anything for them, ever. Phyllis’s view was, let them go raise their own money. There was just bad blood. We hammered away on that, and I think today there’s actually good relationships, and Federation leaks some money, if not a lot, to the synagogues. That was an important initiative.

07-00:11:04 Farrell: Do you remember about some of the strategies that you used to sort of hammer away at the hostility and cultivate those good relationships?

07-00:11:11 Pritzker: I have to be honest with you. The only thing I remember is humor. I think just making fun of our organization for being—you know, how could we every—it was wrong, and they didn’t have to be as aggressive, and we needed to be more conciliatory and inclusive. We’re not dealing in cancer here. We’re trying to help people. So let’s not hand-wring. Let’s figure out a way to do it the best way we can. You try to make it productive and fun and interesting, and don’t get too heavy about it. People will come along eventually. That’s all I remember about it.

07-00:11:52 Farrell: How long did it take from that initial meeting to get to where it is now?

07-00:11:58 Pritzker: Oh, past me. I think Jim really shepherded. I may have gotten it going, but I think Jim probably was the one that got it flattened out and more operative. All these things are ongoing. I keep thinking of The Ed Sullivan Show and the guy that was this plate-spinner. He’d have eight plates spinning, and he’d get to the eighth one and he’d have to run back and start spinning the first one. That’s like any organization or operation you lead. It’s never any one thing. There’s a whole set of initiatives, and you’ve got to keep every plate spinning.

07-00:12:43 Farrell: After the annual meetings about change, there was the synagogue initiative. Do you remember any of the other changes that were made? Were there more—

07-00:12:53 Pritzker: A lot of them were internal that were critical to the organization, but you wouldn’t see it from the outside. IT. Our technology changed dramatically. We had—I can’t remember what it was called. Blackbaud? I can’t remember. It was a piece of software that had been bastardized into in-operation. We loaded so much custom stuff on it, it didn’t work. And so we couldn’t record- keep, we couldn’t talk to each other. The building also was problematic, physically. It’s seven floors. Two elevators with small floor plates, so everybody, all day, is trying to go up and down to meet and see and be. I think the technology now is infinitely better. So it was initiatives like that that you wouldn’t see, necessarily, that were important.

07-00:13:54 Farrell: How did you start that initiative?

07-00:14:00 Pritzker: If I can be blunt, it was with something like, “We don’t have any fucking technology here.” Everyone went, “Right, uh-huh, we know.” You can’t do anything. You can’t account. You can’t deal with donor gifts. You can’t do anything. It was one of those things where we can’t do it; we don’t have the money. Well, we don’t have a choice. That’s what happened. I got me and Warren, and maybe Barney, and one or two other people, Jim, to kick in a bunch of money to start paying for technology upgrades. Now I remember that. That’s the kind of stuff you had to do.

07-00:14:56 Farrell: Another one of your goals that you had talked about, one of the speeches that you gave, was that you were trying to create symbiosis between lay and staff people. Oh, and you were quoted in an article as saying you can’t just deal with a campaign; you have to plan allocations, and you can’t deal with one without the other. So can you tell me a little bit more about what you meant by this, and why you felt that was important?

07-00:15:19 Pritzker: Well, because you’ve got to raise it to allocate it. If you don’t know how you’re going to raise it, or where you’re going to get it from, or how much you think you might get, you can’t begin to plan allocations. And so we had to create a process for how we were going to raise the money, and some sense of how much we would raise so we knew what kind of commitments we could make. That’s the alignment. It had to be more sophisticated than just, “I’ll let you know in July how much we’ve got to give away.” A lot of those moving parts things. I don’t have huge recollection. It’s a bit like Whac-A-Mole. Something pops up, you smack it, and you deal with it, and you move on. It’s just a series of stuff. So I don’t have really deep recollection about some of it. Or I’ve blocked it from my memory, it was so traumatic.

07-00:16:30 Farrell: When you were implementing this, did you find that that was successful? Did you find that when you left that there was more of a cooperation between lay people and professional staff?

07-00:16:47 Pritzker: Yeah. It’s not that there hadn’t been. I think that they saw me as a more active advocate on behalf of the staff. I wasn’t this amorphous guy that showed up for the big meetings. “Oh, he’s the president.” I was there. If they had birthday celebrations, I’d go over and have cupcakes with the gang. I was present, and I think that was—I mean, Adele was, but I had to be in a different way, because I didn’t have a CEO. Everybody else had a CEO. I didn’t. It was a different environment for me. I think because I was both a big donor and I was having cupcakes with them at the parties, it created a mellower tone between staff and the lay people. I didn’t brook, like I wouldn’t in a hotel. Guests can be upset and can complain; you don’t get to abuse. You just don’t. You’ve got to be a human being about things. Same thing—just because you’re a donor doesn’t give you the right to be difficult. I think they saw that I would advocate on their behalf. I think that created a better mood.

07-00:18:24 Farrell: Speaking of donor-professional staff relationships, your first Super Sunday at the JCF was on November 19, 2006, and this was following a four-year lapse of Super Sundays?

07-00:18:37 Pritzker: I don’t think so.

07-00:18:38 Farrell: No?

07-00:18:39 Pritzker: No, because I remember, when I was campaign chair, we had one. It must have been the first one at the JCC. Hold on. No, I don’t think there was a lapse when I was—because when I ran the campaign, the story I was going to tell you is Adele, who was no kid back then, was the president, and I remember I

was there at like eight in the morning, and at about five thirty, six o’clock that night, it was enough. I’d had enough of the Jews and I wanted to go home. I remember Adele standing at the doorway like this, with her legs spread apart. You just weren’t leaving. No one was leaving. If Adele, who was 130 then, wasn’t going to leave, how could I leave? That’s why I remember there was no lapse. There may have been. I think there was a lapse before Adele. Who preceded her? Did Adele precede me or did David Steirman?

07-00:20:03 Meeker: Steirman.

07-00:20:04 Pritzker: Steirman did. Maybe there was a lapse between Adele and Steirman.

07-00:20:08 Farrell: Yeah, I think, because I actually read it on the website this morning, but I don’t—

07-00:20:11 Pritzker: Maybe. Then maybe I re-instituted it. I don’t remember. I worked there, right?

07-00:20:17 Farrell: Yeah.

07-00:20:18 Pritzker: Yeah, okay, thanks. [laughter]

07-00:20:19 Farrell: Just for the historical record, can you explain what Super Sunday is?

07-00:20:24 Pritzker: Yeah. Super Sunday was a Sunday in the spring, I recall, I think, when the community really gathered to fundraise for Federation. We set up a huge phone bank and people would volunteer to work the phone bank, to work shifts, and we trained them on how to say, what to say, when to say, how to respond. It was a nice event. All the donors would roll in to work the phones or just schmooze or come eat. You would schedule with the big donors. As president, I would schedule sit-down times at Super Sunday. I’d have a private room, and I’d solicit them. Super Sunday was just a huge fundraising day. We raised a lot of money. I mean, millions. I can’t remember specifically numbers, but we raised a lot of money. Not Jerry Lewis money, but a lot of money.

07-00:21:33 Farrell: There were two locations for Super Sunday in 2006, and over 150 volunteers. What was it like to kind of manage that crowd, following your experience with Adele Corvin?

07-00:21:45 Pritzker: Are you kidding me? I was a ringmaster. It was a ball. I think my first as president was at the Hyatt Union Square. I have a picture of my son and I, of Sam, my youngest. It was like death on wheels. “Really, I have to go to this?” It was fun. I enjoyed it. Ninety percent of stuff is attitude, I think. If you can make it fun and you can gauge people, you can make it really productive. I remember having fun. That’s about all I remember. I remember having to sit people down and solicit their gift, and then push them for an increase and all of that. I was surprised at how good I was at it. I was always the guy that said, “Please just let me be a donor. Don’t make me go raise any money.” But if you believe in the mission and—I actually really enjoyed it, which is probably really sick. You sit down with people who are really smart, and really, deep down, care. But you’re making them part with their money, so you better have your act together.

07-00:23:13 Farrell: How are we on time?

07-00:23:15 Meeker: About five more minutes until we get to thirty.

07-00:23:17 Farrell: Okay. In that case, so you—

07-00:23:22 Meeker: Do you mind if I actually ask a question?

07-00:23:24 Farrell: Sure. [pause in audio]

07-00:23:26 Pritzker: Am I on?

07-00:23:27 Meeker: Yeah, you’re on. Just to ask a question, you had mentioned that the CEO that you played an instrumental role in hiring, his name was, again—

07-00:23:38 Pritzker: Wait, the CEO what?

07-00:23:38 Meeker: That you played an instrumental role in hiring. What was his—

07-00:23:41 Pritzker: Oh, Danny Sokatch.

07-00:23:42 Meeker: Danny Sokatch. You said that he maybe didn’t have the clearest understanding of the mission and he wasn’t able to communicate that. Or maybe that was the previous—

07-00:23:0053 Pritzker: Oh, no, that was Tom Dine.

07-00:23:56 Meeker: Okay, that was Tom Dine.

07-00:23:58 Pritzker: Danny knew the mission. He just didn’t want to do it.

07-00:24:00 Meeker: Okay. When you talk about going into these meetings with the big donors on Super Sunday, how were you communicating the mission? What were you telling these donors that resulted in a successful ask?

07-00:24:0019 Pritzker: I think it was more about the spirit of the ask. They had been around a lot longer than I had. They had heard every iteration of why it’s their duty, and how come it’s important, and why they need to step up. It was really only in the packaging, frankly. But I guess there was also an element of here’s where the organization is heading. It was the allure of that new car smell, that we were going to build something different. It wasn’t going to happen overnight. I’ve described it as changing the tire when you’re doing seventy miles an hour. We’re running the organization, and the organization is the one you’ve always known. But if we want to stay vibrant, we have to acclimate to the times. Technology was coming on, and these kids weren’t the same kind of donors as our parents were. They don’t just give you the money and say, “Good luck. Go do great work.” How are you going to do it? What are you going to do? Why am I giving you my money? Why don’t I give it directly to the organization? What kind of metrics are you going to work with me on so that I know you—it was never like that before. It was kind of a parallel ask, where it was, “We still are operating the organization, but here’s where we need to go, and I need you guys to come with us, because you have an obligation to the succeeding generation to bring them along.”

07-00:25:0851 Meeker: What was the substance of the message then? How did it change?

07-00:25:56 Pritzker: From the previous generation to the new one?

07-00:26:00 Mekker: Correct.

07-00:26:03 Pritzker: I kind of wasn’t responsible for that, because that was moving into Jim, and I think now it’s really in full bloom. Because you’ve got Jason and Matthew Goldman, and Adam Swig, and these kids are in their twenties, who are now engaged. It’s really going to be their responsibility to get their piece in. I think we just said, “We’ve got to head that way, because we’re not going to succeed going the way we’ve always gone.” I guess I set the stage for recognizing that

we better change or we’re not going to survive. Then it was somebody else’s problem. The problem, thank God, there’s only a two-year term to the presidency. It really ought to be three, because the first year, you’re figuring out what’s going on. The second year, you can get stuff done, and by a two- year term, you’re done. But by the third year, you’re actually getting pretty good at this. So by the time my second year came, I had done what I had done and that was it for me.

07-00:27:12 Meeker: Maybe now is a good time to stop for today.

07-00:27:14 Farrell: All right. So yeah.

07-00:27:15 Pritzker: That’s it?

07-00:27:16 Meeker: Yup.

Interview #5 April 8, 2014 Audio File 8

08-00:00:10 Farrell: Okay, today is April 8, 2014, and this is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker. This is tape number eight, session number five. I thought today that we would start with talking about the financial crisis that happened between 2008 and 2012, which affected your time as JCF president.

08-00:00:32 Pritzker: You’re saying so it wasn’t my fault. Thank you. I have been trying to tell everybody that.

08-00:00:42 Farrell: The financial crisis from 2007 to 2008 was what led to the recession, and it was considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Between 2007 and 2008, the JCF lost over $450 million. During one of our interviews, you said that it’s harder to raise money during bad financial times. So I was wondering if you could tell me how that crisis affected fundraising at the JCF.

08-00:01:23 Pritzker: When that happened, effectively, everybody that was invested in the markets one way or another lost 20 to 30ish percent of their holdings, and same held true for the endowment fund. There is both the reasonable notion that people just have less to spend, and in the pecking order of priorities, not everybody thinks philanthropy comes before certain other of their own needs. So there’s that. There’s the notion that people can use it almost as an excuse not to have to give, and there are those. All of the nonprofits are making the same plea. We have people in greater need, and we have greater needs in the organization to help them. The confluence of the economy and the loss of funds in the endowment had a big impact on the monies we could put into the community, the monies we could pay to staff. That was a big deal, but it was a big deal for everybody everywhere. I didn’t have any special call on complaining or worrying about it. We had to nose to the grindstone to do the best we could.

08-00:02:55 Farrell: Did you have to make cutbacks at all? And if so, do you remember what they were?

08-00:03:02 Pritzker: I’m not a great one for attaching dates to events. I know I was born in ’53. I think we were scaling back the organization some anyway. I don’t have a recollection that we panicked and said, “We’ve got to cut 30 percent of our staff.” There were some things that were so badly in need of repair. Our IT. We had no technology. I can make an argument that improved technology probably would save us a lot of money in the end. Some initiatives, we kept moving forward on. It didn’t paralyze the organization. It impacted the

organization, but it impacted everybody. But there weren’t mass layoffs, and we didn’t put this building up for sale. It was impactful.

08-00:04:00 Farrell: Given that there was this impact, how did the JCF try to reassert their message or reinvent their message to encourage people to keep giving?

08-00:04:11 Pritzker: The thing about JCF is that there isn’t a direct correlation between the volume of messaging, or the seriousness of messaging, and raising money. To me, raising money at Federation was purely a function of elbow grease. The combination of, I suppose, my last name, my financial wherewithal, and my many years in the hotel business, which allowed me to schmeichel people, to be able to schmooze and develop a relationship, allowed me to get into doors that probably a lot of other people couldn’t get into. It wasn’t just based on my brilliance and good looks. The people that had money, I had to work harder to get, to try to make up for the people that didn’t have as much to give to the organization. Trying to explain to somebody who had lost 30 percent of their investments a stronger, harder message—believe me, they got it. They were living what we were trying to express. And so really, it was a function of trying to go to people that had more capacity to make up for the people that had less. I think at Federation, messaging hasn’t really been a strong suit. I’ve long held the belief that the further away from the curb you get at Steuart Street, the less you know about Federation. Marketing has never been really the strong suit of Federation.

08-00:06:08 Farrell: Did you lose any major donors?

08-00:06:16 Pritzker: It wasn’t binary, either we had them or we didn’t have them. It was people scaled back. On the other hand, it’s hard for Richard Goldman to plead poor. It’s hard for Barney Osher to say, “Gee, I’d love to help, but I just can’t anymore.” I had a sense of who I could push a little harder and who I couldn’t. Everybody was sensitive at the time, and so you couldn’t just go barging around, “Please give me your money.” You had to have a sensitivity about it, and believe me, everybody was feeling sensitive about it. It wasn’t just about Federation. It wasn’t just about me being able to do this or that. The whole world was in this crisis.

08-00:07:05 Farrell: How did you see this affect the campaign, or what was the impact on the campaign, different from the endowment?

08-00:07:13 Pritzker: We got less. That’s really all there is to it. We got less, which means we had less to give out. One of the things—and I may have said it earlier—if there was a really impactful aspect to my presidency, it was pushing us to institute fees at endowment, because it was a trickle-down effect. What happened was

we didn’t charge fees for endowment, and yet one of our largest endowment donors didn’t give anything to Federation. So let’s see. Their money is at Federation. We’re investing it successfully. They’re not putting it into the community, and we’re not charging fees. Something’s not right with this picture. And, additionally, in order to pay for the staff that handled these endowments that we weren’t getting fees for, the money had to come from somewhere, so it came from the unrestricted fund at Federation. That meant Federation had less to put out to the community. That just didn’t make any sense to me, and so I pushed for fees, for endowment-holders to pay fees.

08-00:08:36 Farrell: Can you tell me about the cultural climate of the JCF during that period?

08-00:08:40 Pritzker: I’m sorry, the?

08-00:08:41 Farrell: The cultural climate. What it was like for staff people or the board members.

08-00:08:48 Pritzker: Yeah. It’s a Jewish organization. It was built on hand-wringing, and the sky is falling, because that’s what we do. I viewed my job as chief cheerleader. Almost every meeting, when people would start the, “But we can’t do it” or “We have to do this” or “Why can’t we do that?” What I would say to them is, “Why are we hand-wringing? We’re doing great work. We’re helping people in the community. Why are we complaining about things?” Growing up in operations in the hotel business, I worked for a guy named Don DePorter, and I swear to God, if the hotel were on fire and he had some terminal disease, and the world just looked like it was bleak and ending, you’d say, “Don, how are you doing?” “Fantastic. Things are just great.” He was the leader, and as long as they were great with him, that’s great. Let’s go get them. So I saw my job as cheerleading. As a leader, if you’re a hand-wringer and worrying, everybody under you is going to be the same way. When I was there, I think it was a little lighter. I tried to infuse humor. There was a financial crisis. We didn’t have a CEO. But gosh, aren’t we having fun? You’d have to ask somebody else what the environment was like. I had a ball. I don't know about anybody else.

08-00:10:32 Farrell: That leads me, actually, to a couple questions about your funding streams. There’s been a debate, in particular in the Bay Area Jewish community, about where you should fund. If you should fund the state of Israel versus if you should fund the people of Israel. I was wondering, when you were president, did you see this manifesting in your funding choices or conversations?

08-00:11:07 Pritzker: Yeah. What’s that saying? Seven Jews, nine opinions. What I thought then, and how the Federation operated then, is very different than what I think now and how I believe the Federation ought to operate. Thirty percent of our

donors wanted to support Israel. Thirty didn’t care. Thirty wanted to do something else. It was really a balance. I don’t think it’s either we should support this or that. Initially, when I think it was the Welfare Society was founded, there was always a clarion call for what Federation had to do. In the late 1800s, it was the immigrant experience. We had to get immigrants over here and settled and integrated into the community. Then it was the war and displaced persons. Then it was the state of Israel. Then it was getting the Russian Jews out. There really wasn’t debate. I wasn’t around for it, so I can’t say there wasn’t, but I think it was a more defined need. Nobody was arguing that we shouldn’t get the Russians out of Russia. Nobody was arguing that we shouldn’t deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the war. Nobody was arguing Israel doesn’t need to be a state. So it was really a very clear call. As time has gone on, that’s really changed, because there isn’t a central raison d'être for what Federation is. When I was there, for example, we did a fair amount of funding to Jewish day schools. A lot of people thought that was wrong, we shouldn’t be doing that. For those people old enough to remember “The Ed Sullivan Show,” I remember the guy that spun the plants. You’ve got five plates spinning, and you’ve got to always reassess when it’s time to deal with one of the plates that starts to wobble. Now, I think Federation is at a tipping point, and I think not in a good way. I think the community has to really think about this. There’s a new generation of donors who are in their thirties and forties and don’t really view it the same way their parents did. And, as I said, there isn’t that central need anymore, and umbrella giving isn’t really their bailiwick. It’s not what they’re interested in. I remember, when I was president, a friend of mine, Larry Brilliant, worked at Google. He ran their google.org. One day, I went down to visit him, and he was about to get on a call, and he said, “Come here, I want to introduce you to somebody.” What’s Sheryl’s last name? Facebook.

08-00:14:34 Meeker: Sandberg.

08-00:14:35 Pritzker: Sheryl Sandberg. This was 2000. Sheryl Sandberg wasn’t Sheryl Sandberg then. I didn’t even know who she was or what she did. Nobody did. He walked me over. He said, “Sheryl, I want you to meet my friend John. John is president of the San Francisco Federation.” I sat there and we talked. She couldn’t have been nicer. She said, “Oh, you run Federation?” I said yeah. She said, “I grew up in Miami and my parents are big Federation people, so I grew up around Federation. It was a big deal for us.” I said, “What about now?” She said, “You know, I’ll tell you. I am just getting to the point where I have some capacity to do philanthropic work, and I really like doing it myself. I don’t want to just give it over to somebody who’s going to determine where it goes.” That, now, is the prevailing view. I kind of think it’s a fool’s errand to do things the way we’ve done them historically. We better reassess where we are as an organization and where our community is as far as the needs and what are the realities of doing annual campaigns anymore. The last thing I’ll

say about that is the problem with the annual campaign of Federation is it was the be-all end-all activity. As a result, if there was a $10,000 donor who didn’t like something we were doing, or wanted to do something different, the whole organization seemed to move in an effort to avoid losing that $10,000 donor. You can’t run an organization that way. It’s very different now than it was then.

08-00:16:18 Farrell: I have a few follow-up questions, but the first, going back to the Jewish day schools, you had mentioned that a lot of people thought that that was wrong. Can you tell me more about that and why they thought it was wrong?

08-00:16:28 Pritzker: I think they thought the education was the purview of the parents, of the school community, and not of the entire community. I think it was as simple as that.

08-00:16:38 Farrell: What was the reaction when the JCF was funding these schools, with people who didn’t think that it was the JCF’s responsibility?

08-00:16:49 Pritzker: There wasn’t revolution. It was just a point of controversy, and I frankly don’t know where it’s come out. I think Federation still does fund a number of the schools. Again, it’s a function of—what’s that line? The golden ruled. He who has the gold rules. So if there was a large donor—Laura Lauder for example, with—I can’t remember the school in Palo Alto that her kids went to. She held a lot of sway at Federation. It was more a function of who had the big stick at the moment.

08-00:17:25 Farrell: As far as how things have changed, now there’s the younger generation that seems to want more control, and wants to know that their money is going to something specific. How did—or do you remember the JCF negotiating that or trying to deal with that?

08-00:17:42 Pritzker: Oh, that was always an angst-ridden process. My own view is, if somebody wants to work with your organization and want to give you money, but they want to have a hand in where it goes, you accommodate. But the Federation was never accustomed to doing that. So I instituted a—I think it was a dollar limit. If you were—I think it was 50,000—you could determine where a portion of your gift went. I remember sitting with Dick Goldman. God, he couldn’t have been nicer. He called me one day and said, “Come have breakfast with me,” and he basically taught me how to solicit and how to be the president of Federation. It was great. But one of the things I realized in talking to him was—I think he was our first million-dollar giver. The year before—and I had not solicited him. No, I was running campaign. Went to him, and the previous year’s gift was a $1,050,000. I remember that. I wanted

to get a 10 percent increase, and I said to him, “I’ve got to talk you into increasing it by 10 percent.” He said, “No.” I said, “No, no, you can’t say no so quickly. I’m the new kid. You’ve got to work with me here.” I said, “How about if you give 10 percent and you determine where it goes?” It just kind of fell out of my mouth. That’s what desperation will do. He said, “Oh, well that’s different. Maybe we can do that.” You grope for ways to accommodate. I don’t remember your original question, but that’s the answer to it.

08-00:19:32 Farrell: In terms of when a $10,000 donor wants things done differently and the whole organization seems to shift, can you give me an example of a time that you remember that happening?

08-00:19:48 Pritzker: No, but it happened a hundred times. I just can’t remember a time. It’s whoever has the big stick. It happened once with Nancy Grand. It was interesting. Nancy comes from Detroit, which is a much more old-world Federation model. We were going to try something edgy, having to do with the notion of people determining where their gifts go. She was vehemently against it. This is when they had just gotten to San Francisco, and it was clear they were going to be leaders in Federation. Eventually, I think I got around the issue. But it’s things like that. If it’s a reasonable thing, it’s fine, but if it’s, “I’m a big donor and this is what I want, so you’re going to—this is what we’re jolly well going to do,” that, to me, is different. It’s been a problem with Federation forever. I think when I got there—I could be wrong plus or minus five people, but I think there were seventy-two board members. That’s just pure insanity.

08-00:21:06 Farrell: When that would happen and things would shift, did you see that alienate other donors?

08-00:21:11 Pritzker: What aspect?

08-00:21:12 Farrell: When a big donor would come in with something in mind.

08-00:21:14 Pritzker: Oh, sure. Yeah. Because you want to think that, in an organization like that, all people are created equal. But everybody knew Phyllis would pander to the big donors. I’m not even being critical about it, but everybody saw it. It was a pretty hierarchical organization. I think that put a lot of people off. Back in the day, there weren’t that many Jewish organization that you’d be involved with. So to some extent, there was no choice but to either play at Federation or not play in a Jewish organization.

08-00:22:01 Farrell: You just brought up the board, and there were seventy-two members. Speaking of board diversity, because seventy-two people is a lot, a lot of criteria for nonprofit organizations is that there has to be some sort of diversity quota. So making sure that their constituents—

08-00:22:19 Pritzker: You mean some people should have blonde hair, some people should have dark—was there diversity? You mean economic diversity? Social diversity?

08-00:22:29 Farrell: Social, economic, and—

08-00:22:30 Pritzker: There wasn’t going to be any ethnic diversity.

08-00:22:30 Farrell: Well, and religious. Okay.

08-00:22:32 Pritzker: Well, there wouldn’t be any religious in the Jewish Community Federation. There wasn’t religious diversity. There wasn’t ethnic diversity. There wasn’t financial diversity, really. We probably spanned the upper-middle-class to the upper-upper-class. So there wasn’t really a lot of diversity.

08-00:23:00 Farrell: Was there any conversation about changing that, or any consciousness of that fact?

08-00:23:08 Pritzker: No. My guess is the Catholic Charities don’t have a lot of Jews on the board. The Jews don’t have a lot of Catholics on the board, or any. But it’s an interesting question, because I was talking to the acting CEO today, and the notion that we give to non-Jewish organizations is an important one, because part of our responsibility, I think, is to present the best Jewish face to the community, and that we are part of the community, that we’re not insular. So it’s funny. As you ask me that question, it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, that we should have some diversity. My goal before anything was to get the board down to a workable number, because seventy-two ain’t it. I was just trying to get this behemoth to start acting like a real organization.

08-00:24:16 Farrell: With that number of people, did you see times when people on the board were interacting with staff people and talking to them about where do you see the needs, what should we address, because of that lack of even just financial diversity? There was not maybe the best representation of constituents’ needs.

08-00:24:41 Pritzker: Yeah. It ran the gamut. There were people on the board who really didn’t have time to be on the board, but they felt it was their obligation to the community,

and so they made the time. Warren Hellman. I mean, my God. Warren was everything to everybody. He was a big deal. But Warren gave a lot to the community. He was in it for the right reason. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who were bored and thought, oh, this will be fun. This will give me something to do. So they would talk to staff, and it wasn’t very productive. The staff can either be staff and do their work, or they can talk to twelve board members a day about what they want, what they don’t want. It’s a problem, both to have that many people in a position of responsibility, and just organizationally. I’m the chairman of a company, but I make it a point not to reach past the CEO and talk to staff. That’s disrespectful to her, and it’s not productive, because then they think they can just come to me; why do they have to go to the CEO? It was just trying to get my arms around the organization and have it behave like a real organization.

08-00:26:06 Farrell: How did you go about trying to whittle down that seventy-two membership?

08-00:26:14 Pritzker: One of the first things I had to do was find a CEO. That took me longer than I thought it would. But eventually, I did handle it, and that’s when I could begin to whittle down the board, find a CEO. We found a great CEO. Unfortunately, he wasn’t into what the job turned out to be. I don't know if that answered your question, but.

08-00:27:13 Farrell: Moving on to some programming things that you were involved in, you went to Israel in 2006 with forty other people. It was part of the Israel and Overseas Consultation Committee. You went to take an in-depth look at the country. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the trip and maybe some of the things that you saw.

08-00:27:33 Pritzker: One of the things we did, we brought Gavin Newsom with us, who was mayor at the time. That was very exciting for everybody, especially the women. They’d say, “Oh, what a cutie he is.” I’m not sure I knew what I thought I was supposed to be accomplishing. But we had a great group. It was a large group. We were looking primarily at the programs that Federation supported. From that standpoint, it was really instructive. It was interesting to me. I hadn’t had that much experience in Israel. It was interesting to me how highly valued the San Francisco community was in Israel—is in Israel. So that was a real eye- opener for me, and made me think that we could have more and deeper impact in Israel. We had an office in Israel. I can’t remember the woman’s name who ran it, but she was tough. As I said, it was an instructive trip. I don’t remember specifically what came out of it, other than everybody came back a whole lot smarter about where we give. I think we pulled two gifts as a result of that trip, because we were underwhelmed with what we found. Federation had raised a lot of money for the resettlement of the Ethiopian Jews, and that was really interesting going to Kiryat Shmona to see the impact that bringing the

people out of Ethiopia and trying to get them settled in Israel had been. I don't know if it’s fair to say it was an amazing experiment in human relocation. If you don’t know, the Ethiopian airlift, I think the government of Ethiopia said we had seventy-two hours to get anybody out, any Jews out that we wanted. Israel took every aircraft it had, pulled all the seats out of all of them, and literally sent an armada of aircraft. I can’t remember the numbers, but it was a really stunning operation, and you couldn’t help but be moved by the commitment of a country to resettle people. No country in the world would ever spend that kind of money, apply those kind of resources, for people they were just going to have to clothe and feed for some period of time. But I think, in the long run, it was an amazing outcome for the state. San Francisco had raised a lot of money around that. So that was gratifying to see those kind of programs. It was fascinating to take both the mayor and a committed Catholic to see Israel. Things like—what’s the—the Golan Heights. Intellectually, people sit here and they have opinions about, “Oh, Israel shouldn’t. They should give it back to Syria.” Until you go see it and understand, the Golan Heights is a bit like standing on somebody’s rooftop and looking right down at people who they hate. It was interesting for me to see it and to take somebody that had no investment in the state of Israel to Israel, and see them, in the same day, go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the impact that had on him—that was very moving for him—and then to take him to the Golan Heights the next day, and see the political issues within the same state. I think it was a real eye-opener for a lot of people. That’s what Federation does. It’s a convener that way.

08-00:31:10 Farrell: Can you tell me a little bit more about that? About why it was an eye-opener, or what maybe people expected and what they actually encountered.

08-00:32:18 Pritzker: I think a lot of people had a fair amount of experience with Israel. I don’t think for everybody it was that surprising. It may have been me and a handful of others, but we spent a lot of time. There was also the confluence of the burgeoning technology industry in Israel. The mayor, Nir Barkat, I think, had founded a company called Check Point, which was a huge success, and he was now the mayor of Jerusalem. It was a period of the changing of the guard. I remember I was invited to go meet with—not Sharon—Peres. It was the last of the old guards’ tenure, and it was moving into a younger generation. It was just a lot of moving parts. It was a period where things were copacetic. I remember going to the Wall. Not the Wailing Wall; to the barrier. It was a little like the Golan Heights. You can have intellectual conversations about whether the barrier is a good thing, a bad thing, an effective thing. When you sit in San Francisco and you think about the barrier, you think, that’s a great idea, because pizzerias aren’t getting blown up. There aren’t bombs going off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But then when you go there and you see thousands of Palestinians lined up, trying to get through this one opening to go to work to make money to feed their families, it becomes a whole different experience.

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It’s very hard to go over there and then come back and say, “Yeah, but you have to understand.” I think, for me, the sum and substance of the issue that I came away with, it’s an economic issue. I don’t think the Palestinians hate the Jews because we’re Jews. I think they hate them for being subjugated and for being occupied. I’m a parent. How humiliating would it be to have to get searched by the Israeli military every day before you can go to work, and have your kids watch you treated like a criminal? On the other hand, there were very few terrorist acts in Israel. It’s a really confusing place. The more you see it, almost the less you understand. It almost defies logic. That’s what I came away with. I think that’s what a lot of people come away with. Gavin, on one hand, was nourished by the religious experiences he had there, and totally confounded and sympathetic with everybody’s plight. Now it’s 2014, and the process isn’t any further along than it was then. So we’re not the only ones confounded by all of this.

08-00:36:00 Farrell: After Gavin Newsom came back, did you see anything in San Francisco, politically or maybe culturally, change after that?

08-00:36:09 Pritzker: No, because the political realities when he gets back here are all the same. He can’t be out front about supporting Israel. It’s all a balancing act. As I said, it’s 2014, 2007, 1995. Other than if there’s an intifada going on or there isn’t, that seems to be the determining factor of how people view things. One of the most stunning things to me was going to East Jerusalem. We went to some Arab schools. I walked in. It’s like any other school you go to anywhere, except you walk in and you see a map. On the map, it’s not Israel, it’s Palestine. If it’s on the map at all. You walk away scratching your head, going, how are they ever going to figure this out? I continue to believe that. I just think it’s intractable. That doesn’t mean you can’t try or you shouldn’t try. It’s almost like contemplating space. It just boggles the mind, and where does it all end?

08-00:37:31 Farrell: I had read that, during the trip, you had met with different children and different adults. I think some were probably the Ethiopian Jews that were resettled, and then other people who had been part of the fighting and violence that had occurred. Can you tell me about some of the conversations that you had?

08-00:37:53 Pritzker: I remember going to a couple schools. As I said, we went to one in East Jerusalem. As a parent and as a human being, you walk around a school and you smile at kids. Kids are great. There’s the innocence, there’s the whole thing. But you go into some schools—and I’m not being judgmental. I understand why. Kids are both not smiling, and they’re certainly not smiling at us. That was really striking to me. What struck me was these kids are inculcated with a culture of mistrust and disdain from the beginning of their

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lives. Again, that’s not a judgment. I can understand how there would be the bitterness. The other end of the spectrum is you go to some of the orthodox and ultra-orthodox schools, and I might as well be Episcopalian as far as they’re concerned. There seemed like there was only a thin sliver of where I could be me in Israel. We went there once. We took our kids. There’s a part of Jerusalem where you can walk on the rooftops without being considered a criminal. Our guide took our kids and put them back to back and said, “What do you see?” I may have told you this story. Our kids were young, and one of them said, “I see a cross, and I see a church steeple,” and another said, “I see the Star of David, and I can see the top of the Wailing Wall,” and another one said, “What’s that crescent thing on the flag?” Which was Islamic. You stand back to back on a rooftop in Israel and you can see so many different cultures crammed into the old city. It’s a microcosm of Israel in a four or five-block area, and somehow they all get along. Again, it’s like contemplating space. You almost can’t figure out how this place works.

08-00:40:27 Farrell: When you came back, you wrote in a JCF newsletter that the trip had given you a renewed and stronger commitment to Israel, and that you came back with a deepened sense of pride and responsibility. Can you tell me how you wove that into your work as president?

08-00:40:41 Pritzker: Sounds like somebody in marketing wrote that for me. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Like anything else, it informed some aspect of how I viewed the organization and our responsibilities. While I’ve never been—how do I say this?—I’ve never been that steeped in Israel, my responsibility was to make sure that the organization viewed it in a balanced way, and fairly, and that it got its fair share of our resources. You can’t have a favorite child as the president of any organization or any corporation. Those things that I even wasn’t that familiar with or felt a strong bond to, you have to be open-minded and give each issue its fair shake.

08-00:41:47 Farrell: Did you have to renegotiate your personal funding priorities?

08-00:41:52 Pritzker: As president?

08-00:41:53 Farrell: Yeah, after the trip, in trying to not have a favorite child?

08-00:41:56 Pritzker: No, because I had to be the good solider. So I didn’t direct any of my gift, because how could I go ask for unrestricted gifts if I was restricting mine? So no. We gave. I had to give more, because I had set the example. The thing about my stint at Federation was, if you’re going to be a salesperson, you better believe in the product. While the product wasn’t perfect, we were pretty good, and we did a lot of good for a lot of people. San Francisco Federation

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has always been held in very high regard. I give Phyllis a lot of credit for that. I just tried to uphold my end of the bargain.

08-00:42:52 Farrell: You had also mentioned, I think in your farewell speech, the Israel @ 60 Mission, who provides a week-long trip to Israel and focuses on different areas, like business, arts and culture, and history and archaeology. You had also mentioned during your speech that this was collaboration at its best. Can you tell me what you meant by that?

08-00:43:13 Pritzker: No. What was collaboration at its best?

08-00:43:19 Farrell: The partnership between Israel @ 60 Mission and the JCF. Working on those trips together.

08-00:43:28 Pritzker: Israel @ 60 Mission, was that the mission I led? Is that what we called it?

08-00:43:31 Farrell: It wasn’t. No, it was something similar to what you did, but it wasn’t the same thing. The 60 Mission was—I’m pretty sure it’s a third-party organization that works with the JCF, and your trip was part of the JCF. It was like a community group.

08-00:43:50 Pritzker: You don’t mean Birthright?

08-00:43:52 Farrell: No, it wasn’t Birthright.

08-00:43:54 Pritzker: I don’t remember. I have to plead the fifth. I don’t remember.

08-00:43:59 Farrell: When you were president, were there any third-party organizations that you remember working with that were particularly successful?

08-00:44:09 Pritzker: Third party, not Federation?

08-00:44:10 Farrell: Not Federation, but people that—like the Power of One gala you’re working with with them.

08-00:44:16 Pritzker: Oh, but that’s not third party. That was Federation. That was a committee of Federation. Power of One is the women’s.

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08-00:44:24 Farrell: Right. Do you remember if there were third-party organizations that you were working with?

08-00:44:29 Pritzker: To me, third party would be if United Way did a project with us.

08-00:44:32 Farrell: Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

08-00:44:37 Pritzker: I don’t recall that there were third party. But our definition of third party may be different. Power of One, for example, is a committee of Federation. That’s internal. That’s just a committee. But I don’t remember third party not Federation organizations. There’s something lurking in the back of my mind that says there was something, I just don’t remember what it was. This is why you should interview people when they’re younger. That? No. Was I there? No.

08-00:45:10 Farrell: Were there any programs that you were particularly proud of that you were involved with during your time as president?

08-00:45:17 Pritzker: Yeah. Programs or initiatives. The synagogue initiative was really important. There was a view that Federation shouldn’t be involved in synagogues, and that was a long-held view. Purely as a function of being a commercial guy, the thought occurred to me, okay, our biggest responsibility is the annual campaign. Annual campaign is about raising money. Where’s the money? Somebody once said—Machine Gun Kelly, some gangster. A reporter said, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “That’s where the money is.” I was thinking about our own synagogue, Emanu-El. Had 1,800 families. So that meant that there were probably, I don't know, 3,000, 4,000 members. Well, there’s a lot of money there, and that’s a pretty high-end synagogue. But the synagogues wouldn’t even talk to us. There was disdain between Federation— and that was also a Phyllis function. Phyllis believed that synagogues should have nothing to do with Federation. But it seemed to me, if there were so many Jews in these synagogues, and so much money and so much potential participation, how could we not be talking to the synagogues? So I started the synagogue initiative. Synagogue initiative? Yeah. I can’t tell you where it is today, but I think that was an important initiative. The fee issue at endowment, I think, was also important. I think today—I asked somebody recently—I think we raise something like five million, six million in fees. Did we talk about this earlier?

08-00:47:14 Farrell: Yeah, a little bit.

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08-00:47:15 Pritzker: So I would say that is a really important one, because that freed money up to the community. Also, it wasn’t fair that people were getting free services, and that donors were footing the bill for wealthy people who weren’t giving back to the community. To me, that was really an issue of fairness. So I was really proud of that. I did cut the board down. I don’t remember the number. I think it was in the forties. And just that I kept the place open and running. Because effectively, I was also the CEO for quite a long time.

08-00:48:02 Farrell: How much time do we have left on tape?

08-00:48:03 ?: About ten minutes on this tape.

08-00:48:10 Farrell: So going back to the board member—

08-00:48:13 Pritzker: Has anybody told you this is a bit like being a deposition?

08-00:48:17 Farrell: I’ve never been in a deposition before.

08-00:48:19 Pritzker: Well, now you have. Think of it just like this.

08-00:48:21 Farrell: We had, I think a couple sessions—[break in audio]—study that was done while you were running the campaign.

08-00:48:30 Pritzker: No, it happened two years before I became president.

08-00:48:33 Farrell: Right. Okay, so this was before you were running the campaign.

08-00:48:36 Pritzker: Oh, no. Actually, you’re right. It was two years before I ran campaign. You’re right.

08-00:48:42 Farrell: I think we had talked about how you weren’t really a part of that, but it did—

08-00:48:46 Pritzker: Inform some of what we did.

08-00:48:47 Farrell: Exactly. I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how maybe that informed what you were doing, and then board member selection. If that was factored into how you selected board members, or tried to whittle the board down.

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08-00:49:03 Pritzker: The study informed how we viewed the different regions of Federation. One of the mistakes is, I think early on, long, long before me, it became something of a land grab. It was also, in some respects, crippling to federation. For example, the demographics in the peninsula are very different than the demographics in Sonoma, and yet they’re all in your group, including San Francisco. So the people in the peninsula have this natural—not really—but disdain for the city, and the city doesn’t understand the peninsula. What Palo Alto wants and needs and does is very different than what the city here, Sonoma, does. So it gave us a little better, a little more granular information about those areas. I think the biggest missed opportunity on the board side— there wasn’t stringent criteria for who sat on the board. Because it’s a community organization, the view historically had always been, the more, the merrier. If you had loaded up the board with a hundred people, that was probably going to be a hundred donors, but that didn’t necessarily hold true. In a lot of organizations, there is a minimum requirement that you have to give to be on the board. We never did that, and we should have. There were always a handful of people on the board that never gave anything, which to me was outrageous and bad example-setting. It was a pretty arbitrary process. One of the problems in being such a huge board was it’s not such an honor to be asked on a board of seventy-two people. There’s like only eighty Jews in the Bay Area, and seventy-two of them are on the board. That was another issue, was, what makes it so special to sit on the board? My own experience— and it’s one thing running a board, because you can move things. When you’re just sitting on a board, oftentimes it’s a function of raising your hand or lowering your hand, and there’s not a lot of input. I’m not sure I, in retrospect, see what the upside was at all. They weren’t required to give a gift of any amount, and yet they were happy to complain when something didn’t go their way. I would handle the board very differently today than I did then.

08-00:52:05 Farrell: How would you handle it now?

08-00:52:09 Pritzker: I would have made demands of what I was willing to accept and not accept. In other words, if you want me to be the president of the organization, these are the things I’m going to work on, and if that’s not agreeable to you guys, I have to back off. I can’t do it. Because then you have the permission to do it and then say, “Remember? We talked about this. That was the deal.” I just was younger and brasher then, and I just kind of bullied my way through what I had to bully my way through.

08-00:52:45 Farrell: This is probably a good place to—[break in audio]

08-00:52:48 Pritzker: Is that it?

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08-00:52:48 Meeker: No.

08-00:52:49 Pritzker: Oh.

Audio File 9

09-00:00:24 Farrell: This is Shanna Farrell with John Pritzker on April 8th on the Embarcadero, and this is tape number nine, session number five. During one of our previous interviews, we had talked about how much time the campaign took, and how you said that that was essentially another full-time job. I’m wondering how your time running the campaign compared to your time as board president in terms of time commitment.

09-00:00:54 Pritzker: Being president was much more time-consuming, because I didn’t have a CEO. I was juggling a bunch of different balls as president. I was doing the search committee, I was running Federation as CEO, and I was doing campaign on top of everything else. Effectively, it was full-time.

09-00:01:20 Farrell: How did that affect maybe your business and also family as well?

09-00:01:33 Pritzker: I was kind of between jobs, kind of, sort of. We were doing a family restructure, which is a polite name for what we were doing. I had that going, so I could do the two at the same time. So it was okay from that standpoint. It was a big time synch from a family standpoint. All I remember is the biggest laugh I ever got in my life, and I know why standup comedians are hooked on it, at my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, there comes a point where the parents say something to their children. I got up and I looked at him and I said, “Sam, I’d like to talk to you about your gift to Federation.” I think I got about a three-minute laugh out of that one. But that was kind of just emblematic of what was going on with me at the time. I was jokingly soliciting my thirteen- year-old. That’s kind of what my life had come down to. When I was a kid, I worked one summer in accounting at one of the hotels. You deal with numbers all day. I would get in my car and go home, and every license plate I saw, I’d kind of add them up. The numbers, you’d add them, you’d subtract them, you’d multiply them. I’d go to a party, or I’d go to some Federation function, and I’d—where normally you’d look at somebody and go, “Oh, there’s Jeff,” I’d go, “Oh, there’s Jeff. Fifteen thousand last year. Oh, there’s Bob. Forty-three thousand. Got to get him up to sixty.” It, in some way, warps your sense of reality. I was a man on a mission. So from that standpoint, it was fun, because there was some immediate gratification to it. You’d sit down with somebody, and you’d close the sale or you wouldn’t.

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09-00:03:41 Farrell: How involved was your wife, Lisa, during the time that you were both running the campaign and president?

09-00:03:47 Pritzker: She was very gracious about the whole thing. She would go to events. She wouldn’t go to every event. She had her own life and she was doing her own stuff. But she was great about it.

09-00:03:59 Farrell: Did she get involved with the JCF at all?

09-00:04:02 Pritzker: No, not really. She went on the endowment committee, having nothing to do with me. She wasn’t a Power of One kind of gal. She’s not really a joiner that way. While she runs our foundation, and while Jewish causes are an element of what we do, she had a lot of other things she was involved in. She was entitled to a life, and she was raising the kids. Who was home? I think Sam was home, and maybe Noah was on the tail end of being home. Sam was twelve.

09-00:04:56 Farrell: I’m also wondering about some of your personal goals that you had set when you started as president, and how you achieved them.

09-00:05:04 Pritzker: I would say those went out the window about the second week. Because once I realized I didn’t have a CEO to work with, really all bets—but that wasn’t anathema to me. When you work in hotel operations, you can, the night before, write down your list of what you’re going to accomplish the next day. Pretty much, by eight in the morning, that’s out the window. Somebody jumped out the window. Somebody threw a plate. Somebody did something, and you’ve got to go deal with that, and then everything backs up from there. So to me, that was actually one of the attractive elements, was the need and ability to go left to right very quickly. And I don’t think I knew enough, deeply enough, about some of the issues that had to be dealt with. Because really, I think what they didn’t bargain for with me was I actually wanted to run the organization. I think a lot of people have been figureheads. I think that maybe since me, Jim and Tom and Nancy have been more aggressive presidents than before me. When I really began to grasp the ramifications of no fees at endowment and how that impacted the entire organization, that became a goal for me, was we’re going to institute fees here, and accounting had to be fixed, and we had no IT. But some of these things I just didn’t know until I got there. If I may, one of the reasons is, Phyllis had such a tight rein on the place that it was on a need-to-know basis, and really, nobody needed to know. So nobody did know. I think I may have told you the story about how I got a hold of the donor list. How could a president not know who the donors were? Again, until you’re there, I didn’t understand what the issues were that had to be dealt with.

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09-00:07:29 Farrell: I guess, when you went into the presidency, and you said that your goals had gone out the window, what were some of the original ones that you had before they were changed once you got there?

09-00:07:42 Pritzker: Really, I assumed campaign was really what you dealt with. But I was probably—I’m trying to think. I was probably one of the only presidents that had actually run operationally. Not run a business, but run almost a like organization. A hotel is like a city. You’ve got engineering food and beverage rooms, housekeeping, catering. Federation is like that. You have marketing, you have campaign, you have IT, you have accounting. So I think they didn’t bargain for the fact that I would be an activist president. I think people just didn’t have much information about the place. It was hard to set goals, other than make campaign take in more.

09-00:09:04 Farrell: Was there anything that was accomplished after you left that you had set into motion, that maybe you were a little bit disappointed that you weren’t there? That’s sort of a leading question, but.

09-00:09:16 Pritzker: Once I was gone, there’s nothing that made me want to do it again. I said to somebody the other day, “There’s no sweeter title than past president.” I put in a lot of work in that place, and I was really proud of what we did. I loved it. I had a ball doing it. I wouldn’t do it again. It’s a different time in my life. A lot of what happens there is iterative. It’s like chipping away at things over time. I’m proud of the fee issue at endowment. I’m proud of the synagogue initiative. There are things that I could probably take credit for that are happening even now, but I did my deal and it’s up to other people to do what they’re going to do for the place. No, I don’t have a whole lot of remorse about anything.

09-00:10:17 Farrell: Our first interview, we had spent a lot of time talking about your family and the family ethos that you were raised with. Can you tell me about how you tried to integrate that into your work, or how you saw those ethos manifested in things that you did, like the synagogue mission?

09-00:10:35 Pritzker: I think it was more attitudinal and a reflection of how I view things. The notion of, why are you guys wringing your hands? We’re doing great things here. There aren’t many organizations you can run that you can, at the end of the day, go home and say, “I contributed to things being a little better,” or lightening somebody’s load or something like that. I think I mentioned my great-grandfather wrote a book for the family. One of the things that it made me realize is, but by the grace of God go I. You read about the riots in Kiev. I could be there. There were very few days that went by that I didn’t think about how fortunate I was, which really kind of fueled my desire to put a little more

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elbow grease into that. I think that things like, when we did go to Israel and we met with people who were impacted by gifts, or some action that we took at Federation, that’s pretty gratifying. I would think back to my great- grandfather, literally in the shtetl. You have to imagine that he would have been really proud that, four generations later, he had begat somebody that would be continuing to try to make the world better, like he did when he came over. I think it was that connection with doing something positive in the community that made me feel connected in a family way, and as though I were propagating the family ethos.

09-00:12:42 Farrell: Since you’ve left—well, you’re now a former president—how have you tried to continue to honor your family’s ethos?

09-00:12:53 Pritzker: Through our philanthropy. It’s funny. There’s a press release going out tomorrow from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We funded the photo center. The museum is currently being demolished and rebuilt, and Lisa and I are funding that, the photo center. One of my kids, my middle son, is mortified and thinks it’s vacuous, because he doesn’t see the social good that comes from it. He thinks it’s just a fancy museum with a lot of expensive art on the wall. But I look forward to the day when I take him there as public school kids who have had no exposure to art go through the place and their jaws drop and they see really cool stuff. That feels good. I’m glad we have the capacity to do that. The work we do at UCSF with child and adolescent emotional behaviors. It’s continuing to do stuff in the community.

09-00:14:16 Farrell: Who were some of the people that you connected with through the JCF that you feel the most strongly about?

09-00:14:23 Pritzker: There were a lot of people. Prior to Federation, really Barney Osher. I’ve talked about Barney here. What happens is you go through a period where Federation is—you’re active, but after a while, you want to support them, but you don’t have the horsepower, or you’ve moved on to other things. Barney, probably on my behalf, reengaged with Federation, which was great. Some of the names that come to mind: Dan Safier who is going to be one—you’ll be interviewing Dan at some point. Young, smart, good-looking, sweet, funny. I met Dan. Jim Koshland, I really didn’t know very well. David Friedman. Dan Lehman. I could go on and on. Steve Fayne. Tom Kasten. David Steirman. I loved going into Federation, because I got to see friends and hang out. That meant a lot. I really expanded the base of people I felt strongly about and liked working with.

09-00:15:47 Farrell: Since you’ve left your time as president, do you continue to be involved with the JCF?

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09-00:15:55 Pritzker: I think they would refer to me as the loyal opposition. I’m trying to—and I’ve spent a couple hours in the last two days taking about it with—they’ve hired a search firm to replace Jennifer. I’m trying to get them to see a different way for the Federation to move, because somebody said it was Einstein who said—was it insanity is doing something the same way repeatedly, hoping for different results? I don’t think Federation is a model for the future, but I do think the San Francisco Jewish endowment fund could be. It’s complicated to get into, but there is a way to morph this into something that’s not campaign- based. That’s my involvement now, is to try to get them to see that this is not a sustainable model. They know it, but they’re paralyzed, and I think they don’t see how to move the thing forward. It’s going to become a conundrum, because—I said to Jim Offel today, who’s the acting CEO, “What are you looking for in a new CEO?” But they can’t even say because they don’t know where they’re going yet. And so that’s how I’m engaged.

09-00:17:25 Farrell: What are your hopes for the JCF, and what direction—

09-00:17:28 Pritzker: That they’ll listen to me. [laughter]

09-00:17:31 Farrell: In what direction would you like to see them move?

09-00:17:33 Pritzker: I think it has to become a community endowment, where we don’t—we can still do a smaller campaign, but where—because it’s built on the 90/10 rule— 90 percent of the money comes from 10 percent of the donors—I think we have to stop funding agencies. For example, the SFJCF, Jewish Children and Families. Anita—

09-00:18:07 ?: Family and Children Services.

09-00:18:08 Pritzker: Exactly. Anita Friedman has built a powerhouse of an organization. She’s brilliant. I think they raise $32 million a year, and yet Federation still funds them. If we cut funding tomorrow, Anita could find that money in about three hours. Why are we funding it? Why are we funding San Francisco Jewish Community Center? Barry is brilliant. Barry’s got that thing on great footing. And yet we do it because we’ve always done it. That’s the challenge, is to wean them from what’s always been done to something that’s a little more dynamic, a little more acknowledgement of current realities of the age of our donors and the wants of our donors. Somebody said—it was a French general. I always thought it was Gandhi. “There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” I don’t think we’re looking at what the rest of the world is really moving towards. We’re just kind of looking at what we’ve always done and trying to do it a little faster and a little harder, and maybe that will work

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better. That’s my role, is to try to be the voice of—and I can still have a voice, because unfortunately we’re still campaign-based, and they still rely on the big donors, and we’re still a big donor. So they kind of have to listen. One day somebody’s going to figure me out and they’ll stop listening.

09-00:19:41 Farrell: From during your time being involved with the JCF, what was the biggest personal lesson that you learned, or your biggest takeaway from the experience?

09-00:19:50 Pritzker: Wow. I think that as long as you’re doing it for the right reasons, and you’re doing it respectfully, and you’re treating the people you work with and the people you’re trying to help with respect, you can’t really do anything wrong. I have huge admiration for people that make not-for-profit work what they do all day, every day. It’s hard. Giving away money is hard if you do it properly, and running these organizations is really difficult, and nobody should diminish how hard people work and the heart, they have it. At Federation, there are some people there that are—maybe a bad metaphor—are saints. When I think about a not-for-profit, when I interact with a not-for-profit, I’m always somewhat in awe of the people that do it and can do it every day, day after day. It’s hard, because you’re dealing, on one hand, with people in need, and on the other hand, with people that have huge resources. I feel sometimes almost embarrassed when I whine about stuff. When I was at Federation, the whole, why are we wringing our hands? We’re blessed to have what we have. We’re blessed to do what we do. It can only be good. I learned a lot of respect for people that do that work, organizations, and how hard it really is.

09-00:21:50 Farrell: Was there anything that you thought? Is there anything else that you, before we wrap up, that you want to add, or anything that you’d like to say?

09-00:22:00 Pritzker: We must have covered all of it at least twice. No, I don’t think so. I think that’s it.

09-00:22:09 Farrell: Yeah, I think that’s it.

09-00:22:10 Pritzker: Yay.

[End of Interview]