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5 Life Lessons I Learned From My Dad, Walter B. Gerken
The good, the bad and the funny.
My dad was an advice geyser so paring this down to five lessons was no small task. Everything from driving (“Never back up farther than you have to.”) to tennis (“There’s no excuse for double faulting.” More on that later.) to dealing with difficult people (“Never take shit from anybody.”)
Born in 1922, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York. The central motivating factor in his life came when his dad lost any money they had due to his gambling addiction. The resultant economic ruin humiliated my dad and planted a seed of ambition in him that sprouted quickly and never stopped growing.
A quick Walter B. bio
After stints in the Wisconsin State Budget Office and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, he took a job in 1967 at Pacific Mutual (now Pacific Life — the one with the whale commercials). He became chairman and CEO in 1975, serving in those roles until 1986.
When he died in 2015, though, the New York Times and other obituaries treated his Pacific Life work as secondary. Why? Because in 1969, when he was the CFO of Pacific Mutual, he was instrumental in creating PIMCO, currently the world’s largest bond fund investor.
