Ringside Stories by Richard A. Corbett

Author:Richard A. Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118899038
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-10-22T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Life Partnering

On February 26, 1970, my 32nd birthday, I received the best birthday present ever—the woman I loved agreed to marry me.

Just three months later, we said our I do’s.

We’d met in September 1968, after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, when I was working long hours at the Kennedy office. A friend, Jonathan Smith, invited me over to his apartment for a cocktail party. I turned him down, but he called me around eight o’clock that evening and said to get the hell out of the office and come to the party. There was a musician playing a violin in his living room, great wine, and prep school classmates. Cornie was one of them. She had just come in from Aspen, where she was working as a skiing instructor. When we met, it was like electricity. She was down to earth, not hoity-toity, and when I heard her say, “Oh, shit!” I thought to myself, “My God, here is a real person.”

When everyone else left the party, we went to a burger place on Madison Avenue. That’s where I learned that we loved the same things—hunting, skiing, and photography. Later that Fall, we bought rose-colored glasses and walked up and down Madison Avenue. She was wide-open, happy, and fun to be with. Yet, she was clear about having to go back to Aspen later in the fall, and I couldn’t believe she was going to leave. It felt like a divorce. She returned in the summer of 1969 and we’ve been together ever since.

By 1970 I was a millionaire due to owning numerous brownstones, but I was only a paper millionaire. My investments on bank statements are what declared me rich. But I did not have enough in the bank to keep me afloat if my investments failed. That reality slapped me in the face during my honeymoon.

For our honeymoon, Cornie and I visited Hawaii, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, Bali, and Bangkok. It wasn’t until we’d been away three months that I finally checked in with Lew Sarasy, whom I’d asked to keep an eye on my investments while I was gone.

The news was not good.

“Everything is going down the tubes!” he said. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve been looking for you. Things began falling apart over a month ago! Get home right now. You’re almost broke!”

Clearly, the honeymoon was over.

I returned from the trip to find I was in financial disarray. My entire portfolio was in trouble. For a while, my real estate scheme had been working. I would take out a loan that enabled me to make the down payment on a new property and pay for renovations while leaving me enough money to cover loan payments on my other properties. I would then sell one of the properties and use some of the profit to pay back an entire outstanding loan.

However, while I was off wandering the mountains of Nepal, the economy back home had taken a downturn. Recession reared its ugly head, and people stopped

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