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When Patricia M Cloherty was offered a job at a venture-capital firm in 1969, she had to ask friends what that business, little known at the time, was all about. She concluded it was a David vs Goliath affair, using small amounts of capital to fund startups that could take on corporate behemoths.
As a former Peace Corps volunteer, she had aspired to work for an international development agency but concluded that those institutions were unlikely to send a woman overseas. So she decided to accept the offer of a research job at a venture-capital firm headed by Alan Patricof.
Though she lack financial expertise, Mr Patricof said, "being [sic; B should be capitalized] smart was a pretty good credential."
Within a dew years, she was a partner of Mr Patricof's firm, later known as Apax Partners. She served as president of the firm in the 1990s. Her career also included federal government appointments from President Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. She finished her career managing a fund investing in Russian companies.
As a venture capitalist, she de;ved into businesses as diverse as lead smelting and distribution of bull semen, In the 1970s, she headed Childcraft Education Corp, a marketer of educational toys, She also invested in pharmaceutical and electronics companies.
Venture capital allowed her to travel the world and called most of her own shots. "I didn't think about it as working for someone," she said in a 2011 oral history recorded for the National Venture Capital Association, "I thought about it as painting with my own paint."
She was more interested in emerging companies than private-equity investments in established firms, which she described as "buying potato chip factories with leverage."
Ms Cloherty, whose hobbies included visiting casinos and climbing mountains, died Sept 23 at her home in Miami. She was 80 and had been under treatment for respiratory problems.
Patricia Mary Cloherty the second of four children, was born July 2, 1942, and grew mainly in Pollock Pines, Calif, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Her Father, an immigrant from Ireland, worked in construction and as a logger. Her mother born in Canada, was a real estate agent and librarian.
Patricia Cloherty recalled as a small child being taken to horse-racing tracks by one of her grandmothers. "That's my upbringing," she said in her oral history. She earned money picking pears and cooking for loggers.
At San Francisco College for Women ['acquired by the University of San Francisco (USF) in 1978,' a Jesuit school: Wikipedia] in the early 1960s, she studies Spanish literature and earned a bachelor's degree. She then served in Peace Corps in Brazil, where she recalled that her duties incuded helping farmers castrate pigs.
She later earned masters [sic; should be master's] degree in philosophy and Latin American studies at Columbia University. During those studies, she lived at International House [a non-profit organization in Manhattan unrelated to Columbia] among scholars from around the world, Thast helped her build a global network of friends, handy when she was roving the world in search entrepreneurs to finance.
President Carter lured her away from venture capital temporarily by appointing her deputy administrator of Small Business Administration. After leaving Washington, she set up an investment company with her husband, Daniel Tessler. That marriage ended in divorce. She retirmned to work for Mr Patricof.
Under President George HW Bush, she served on an advisory council on small business matters. In 1995, the Clinton administration named her as a director of the US Russia Investment Fund, a program designed to sur private enterprise in Russia. Me Cloherty later was chairman of that fund and chief executive of its management company, She kept an apartment in Moscow for years,
As an investor in Russian businesses, her strategy was to shun oil industry, agriculture and anything deemed strategic to the government. Among other things, she invested in consumer products and financial services, including mortgages and credit cards.
Ms Cloherty is survived by a brother and a sister. Before moving to Miami in 2018, she had a country house in Garrison, NY.
She was a former president of the National Venture Capital Association and served on scores of boards. "Zip" ,ay have been her favorite verb. She was always announcing plans to zip somewhere, whether the designation was across town or on the other side of the world. "I've always been kind of a busy beaver," she said.
Excerpt in the window of print: Mr Rowe said the Byzantines taught him 'to figure out who you're going to get for an ally.'
Note:
(a) Exelon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exelon
(generates revenues of approximately $33.5 billion and employs approximately 33,400 people. Exelon is the largest electric parent company in the United States by revenue * * * with approximately 10 million customers * * * Exelon was created in * * * 2000 by the merger of PECO Energy Company of Philadelphia and Unicom Corp of Chicago, which owned Commonwealth Edison" or ComEd (not to be confused with Consolidated Edison or ConEd, a company with annual revenue of 12b and serving at least New York City)
Nowhere in the Web can I find the origin or meaning of Exelon.
(b)
(i) Oral History: John Rowe. George L Mosse Program in History, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, posted on Jan 6 2022 ("Narrator: John Rowe, Interviewer: John Tortorice, Date: 13 July 2021") https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/2022/01/06/rowe/
("My parents were Welsh and Cornish. Where I grew up in Dodgeville at the time, there were three kinds of people: Irish Catholic, Welsh and Cornish Methodists, and Norwegian Lutherans. And nearly everybody fit in one of those three boxes. And there was no color [ie, blacks] to discriminate about. So we discriminated about religion with great glee. But it was fascinating because the whole family was upset when one of my cousins wanted to marry a Catholic boy. It turns out she’d have been a lot better off if she had, than if she’d married the guy she did. But it took forty years for the older folks to accept that. * * * My wife and I left Pompeii. I said, 'Isn't this an amazing ruin?' And she said, 'Yes, John. But since I married you, I've seen so many ruins that my capability for amazement isn't what it used to be.' * * * And that's [history is] a source of value. I used to say, the Byzantines used to say that you used the Kipchaks to offset the Bulgars. Well, that's part of running a utility. You've got to figure out who you're going to get for an ally to offset the people who are inherently against you. The other thing I think is very important is history teaches you to take all of your fundamental beliefs with a little bit of salt. Like there's a great [US Supreme Court justice] Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) statement is 'be sure to fight for your beliefs. But remember, you may be wrong.' And both halves of that were important to Holmes")
(ii) I fail to find when the three groups of peoples -- Byzantines, Kipchaks and Bulgars -- co-existed.
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As a student at a one-room country school in southwestern Wisconsin in the 1950s, John Rowe nourished a love of history.
Escaping life on the family farm, he took that interest with him to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a Goldwater Republican who could happily mingle with radicals on marches for civil rights. He majored in history and stayed on for a law degree.
As a lawyer, he helped salvage troubled companies, which caught the eye of people needing executives for healthier ones. That led to a career of running electric utilities and culminating with the top job at Exelon Corp, which owns Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison and other power providers.
Success in business allowed Mr Rowe to endow history professorships at his alma mater and the University of Chicago. He cofounded schools for children from low-income families in Chicago. He also volunteered to teach history courses at those schools. At one of them, he told a pupil that he had been a nerd at her age. "Mr Rowe," she assured him, "You're still a nerd."
Mr Rowe, who died Sept 24 at the age of 77, acknowledged that history was of little use in getting a first job outside of academia. For bosses, though, historical knowledge was an advantage, he said. "The Byzantines used to say that you used the Kipchaks to offset the Bulgars," he said in an oral history. "Well, that's part of running a utility. You've got to figure out who you're going to get for an ally to offset the people who are inherently against you."
History also got him into hot water. At Exelon's headquarters in Chicago, he displayed an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. When an official of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities learned about that artifact in 2006 he threatened to banish Exelon from the list of sponsors for a highly popular exhibition of objects related to King Tutankhamen. Mr Rowe resolved the controversy by offering to lend the sarcophagus to Chicago's Field Museum.
John William Rowe was born May 18, 1945, and grew up on a farm near Dodgeville, Wis. In the oral history recorded at the University of Wisconsin, he recalled: "Where I grew up in Dodgeville at the time, there were three kinds of people: Irish Catholic, Welsh and Cornish Methodists, and Norwegian Lutherans. * * * [omission original, appearing in WSJ] There was no color [ie, blacks] to discriminate about. So we discriminated about religion with great glee."
After law school, he joined the Chicago law firm of Isham, Lincoln & Beale, which still owned chairs that once belonged to one of its founders, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln. Mr Rowe became a partner and did work for utilities and railroads. In the late 1970s, he advised the bankruptcy trustee for Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul & Pacific Railroad Co, known as the Milwaukee Road. "That work was a great boost to my career," he told the Chicago Tribune later.
Mr Rowe is survived by his wife, Jeanne Rowe, a son and two brothers.
He collected Greek and Roman coins and never tired of history. After a visit to Pompeii, he asked his wife, "Isn't this an amazing ruin?" Her response, as he recalled it: "Yes, John. But since I married you, I've seen so many ruins that my capability for amazement isn't what it used to be."