UIANTS OF FOLY VISIONARY ENGINEER Master Port BUILDER TON sea R YEGIANTS OF PoLy PAUL SOROS i as VISIONARY ENGINEER Master Port BUILDER PHILANTHROPISTINTRODUCTION * i Paul Soros at ages 14, 24 CUT Merete (oh riumphing over extraordinary challenges, overcoming daunting personal and professional risks, achieving a place among the world’s engineering visionaries—all this defines Paul Sor whose innovative port designs changed the A mechanical engineer transport of raw materials worldwide, his saga started as a teenager in Budapest, Hungary, where his accomplished family defied the terror of Nazi persecution during World War II. Then after the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1947, Soros managed to defect and eventually came to the United States. Soros’ path to success was rocky and unpredictable. He encountered personal tragedies, including serious sports-related injuries and the devastating loss of two of the 1950s. But Soros, a creative engineer and is four children in separate accidents in entrepreneur, had the abilities and fortitude to overcome obstacles and challenges, Founded in 1956, Soros’ engineering firm, Soros Associates, was involved in the engineering of ports in 90 countries, which handle a third of the world’s bulk transports. Later, after the company was sold, Soros became an insightful and successful investor in industrial and mining companies, working with his younger brother, famed international financier George Soros. Now, in semi- retirement, Paul Soros is a compassionate and inventive philanthropist who has given generously to Polytechnic University, where he earned his master’s in mechanical engineering in 1950 and serves as a trustee. “He's a big-piaure man,” explains his brother George. “He goes to the core of the matter and dispenses with the established conventions. He thinks outside the box. He and I both learned this from our father.”oros was born in 1926 in Budapest to a prosperous and cultivated family. His father, Tivadar, was an attorney. Tivadar, an officer in the Hungarian Army during World War I, was captured by the Russians in 1915 and sent to a Siberian POW camp. He escaped during the Russian revolution in 1917, barely survived, enduring terrible ordeals, including a near brush with annibalism and was marooned in Moscow until 1921 “My fathe philosophy of life was formed by his experience of survival in Russia,” wrote whole value system and Paul Soros in his unpublished auto- biography, American (Con) Quest.“"He was well-traveled, well-informed inter- nationally, well-read, spoke German, French, English and Russian, had great judgment and knowledge of the world. ..I consider myself (and my brother) chiefly a product of our family and especially our fathe Tivadar was a nonconformist. Although he was a savvy r, the elder Soros preferred traveling, playing sports, sitting in cafés, reading newspapers and discussing art and politics with his many friends rather than laboring behind a desk. It has been said that World War I sapped Tivadar's interest in material success and stoked his love of living life to the fullest. While the Soros brothers possessed more driving ambition (a trait BNC Catt ea eed Pee OC RC a kL “aePaul and George, 1934 probably passed down from their mother, Bozsi), they absorbed their father's inherent skepticism of society’s prevailing assumptions. Tivadar taught his sons to reject totalitarianism and to live according to a humanistic moral code. “My father believed that rules are not necessarily right, that by obeying the rules of a totalitarian regime you could get killed.” George Soros explains. “He taught us to go against the rules when they are wrong” Paul Soros agrees: “We grew up with a definite value system that had a strong sense of noblesse oblige. That didn’t mean you weren't supposed to have a good life, but you had a responsibility toward your fellow humans.” Soros indeed grew up with all of the upper middle-class privileges that Central Europe of the 1920s and 30s had to offer. He was one of the top junior tennis players and one of his country’ finest skiers, Summers were spent at the family’s Bauhaus-style summer home on Lupa Island, north of Budapest on the Danube. Soros was interested in how things work and how they were designed. He was good in mathematics and wanted a profession usable inter- nationally, if necessary. Engineering seemed to be a natural choice. Then his comfortable life was shattered.Nav 4 INVASION RUSSIAN OCCUPATION oros considers the Holocaust and his family’s successful efforts to avoid deportation as Jews—and certain death—as a defining experience. He refers to his father’s autobiography, Maskerado: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Hungary, to explain their extra~ ordinary saga. Tivadar wrote his book in Esperanto, an idealistic language created to enable communication among people from different nations and cultures. He embraced the language as a response to the nationalism and destruction he x World War I According to the book, published in witnessed durir 2001 in the United States and a number of other countries, Tivadar shed his characteristic bonhomie and took control of the family’s safety when the Nazis entered Budapest in 1944. His strategy was to borrow the identities of Christians—friends, business associates and others—and disperse his family throughout Budapest under assumed names. From March 1944 until the Russians occupied Budapest in January 1945, the members of the Soros family lived a profoundly precarious existence. Their tactics included subterfuge, out- right hiding, moving about with false papers, always avoiding authorities (both German and Hungarian). Often, individual family members lived on their ial ee : 2“Thus I proposed to the men in my row and next rows that we organ- ize about a hundred people, preferably more, and at the right location, at my signal, we run away in all directions. ‘What could the guards do? A few of us could get shot, but 95 percent, or maybe more, would be sure to get away, because the guard’s main atten- tion would be directed toward keepi the rest of the column under control.” Soros’ idea “went over like a lead balloon.” No one wanted to risk getting shot. Except Soros. He tried to run and even managed to get halfway across a fence when he caught sight of a guard lifting his Kalishnikov submachine gun. Soros ran back to the column. “After maybe another hour, the highway came to a bridge over a small stream,” he continued. “I knew that after the bridge, there were no more bridges, just open country. With snow on the ground, there was no way to get away or hide. At the bridge, the guards had to come close to the column, and this time I did not look. “I saw a burned-out farmhouse about 100 yards from the road, and I simply made a run for it. 1 found a wooden ladder to the attic, climbed up, pulled up the ladder and started eating the piece of bread I saved. “Nothing happened for a few minutes. Apparently I was not seen. Then a dog came to the house and started to bark. And it barked and barked. A Russian came to investigate. I heard him moving around. He shouted, ‘Igyi suda’ (come here) and i broken Hungarian, ‘Come. He moved some furniture, trying to climb up to the attic, but could not reach. He swore and left. “I watched the column pass forabout an hour. When it was gone, I climbed down and walked to Budapest by evening.” Years later, Soros learned that young Hungarians deported this way were held in the Soviet Union as political hostages to control a fragile post-war Hungarian government. Of the 280,000 young men taken, only about a third survived to be returned to Hungary years later, after the Communists took over. On his own, without his father's advice, Soros demonstrated his remark- able ability to size up challenging—even perilous—situations and take savvy risks and actions. He could have passively remained in line as the column trudged toward the border. But he ran. “People in the column preferred to believe that we were going to a camp where we would be checked out and the non-Nazis let go,” he wrote. “My judgment told me that this was like going to Auschwitz. I just didn’t believe the official line. True, I was aware of the poor odds [on escaping], but I had a pretty good assessment of things. “Just as there was this expectation that my father would rise to the occa- sion, which he did during the war, there was the same expectation with us. It was always understood that whatever life would bring, we would respond accordingly.” RECONSTRUCTION At the end of the siege in January 1945, Budapest was in ruins; there was no government, no currency, no food, no electricity; dead bodies were piled in the shop windows of the ghetto. In the absence of authority, it was laissez faire, yet recovery to a survival level was surprisingly fast In 1946 and 1947, there were free elections in which the Communists and their allies could not achieve majority. Soros was enrolled at a technical university to study mechanical engineering. It was an accelerated program, to recover the semester lost during the siege. During his college years, Soros was a member of the Hungarian National Ski Team. He raced on the international circuit for three seasons, traveling exten- sively in Europe. As safety bindings had not yet been invented, on different occasions he broke his legs in seven places. In high school, Soros had “souped up” and bought and sold used motor- cycles, activities he now resumed to provide pocket money for trips. ‘Traveling out of the country for four months a year to ski made keeping up at the university a challenge. Soros had breezed through high school, relying Weg Zirs, Austria, 1962 0ona good memory, but there was no short-cut to mastering the material of several semesters to pass comprehensive examinations. Looking back on those years, Soros recalls the university with a mixture of distaste and pride. A European education, he says, imparted discipline and helped him master the ability to concentrate his efforts. “In the United States, graduate school was a snap,” he wrote. “It was learning made easy. There is no question I would. wish for my grandchildren the US.- and not the Budapest-style university experience. And yet... .if one judges school on the basis of how well it prepares a young person for life, the Budapest-type experience is superior. “After the Communist takeover in 1947, as an engineer and a ski champion, I was in a relatively privileged position. But eventually I would be considered a class enemy, even if I could keep my nose clean and my mouth shut. As for myself, T hated the totalitarian system too much to even consider becoming an oppor- tunist. Thus if I did not want to waste my life, I had to get out?” Soros planned his escape in 1947. He would defect as a member of the Hungarian ski team at the 1948 Winter Olympics in Switzerland, Soros, however, could not compete because of an unhealed injury, which he had to hide to effect his escape. He packed one suitcase, said goodbye to his family and girlfriend and boarded the Arlburg Express ahead of the team—a schedule that would be difficult to explain if someone stopped him at the border. Soon, he was out of Hungary and in Salzburg, in the American-occupied zone of Austria. It was an extraordinarily tense time, filled with sadness at leaving his family and country, and fear of being taken off the train at the border. He was not to see his parents again until they, too, fled Hungary after the Revolution in 1956. George was luckier: He had left Hungary in 1946 and was safe in an English boarding school, even though he was cut off from further financial support from home. “The months of worry and the feeling of being trapped must have had a deep impact,’ Soros wrote. “For years, I had a nightmare dream in which I went back to Hungary on a visit for some reason and was trapped with no way out. I found out that this type of dream was not uncommon for people with similar experiences. It was more than 10 years later, in the United States, before I stopped having this dream.” During 1948, Soros, who also excelled at tennis, lived modestly but had a good time as a star on the Austrian tennis scene. At the end of 1948, with help from his father’s contacts, he received a student visa from the U.S. embassy in Vienna. Amateur tennis, New Canaan, Conn. 1960POLYTECHNIC & A NEW LIFE ial UNITED STATES oros was 22 years old and nearly penniless when he debarked from a former American troop ship at a pier in midtown Manhattan. “I had $17 and a Leica and a Contax camera,” he wrote. “Maybe I should have been, but I was not worried; hardly even concerned After my experiences during the war, where it really was life-and-death stake: I felt that once I was out of Hungary, my life was not in danger, so how tough an it be. Finally arriving in the United States was an accomplishment involving such risks and struggles that, once in the states, it could be only much easier To this day, I think that the most serious challenges were behind me at After staying for a week with old friends of his parents, Soros realized they could not afford to provide him room and board. He went to the New York Public Library to look up the colleges with ski teams and write to them asking for an athletic scholarship. The best offe was from St. Lawrence University in upstate Canton, N.Y. He was to be a guest of a different frat house every month, get pocket money, take any course free and ski with the team as course setter and forerunner, This time, oros suffered the first of several sport related injuries that have imperiled his“The room did not do much for me and I led a very lonely existence,” he says. “I usually went to Bronxville, N.Y. for the weekends to stay with family friends. Otherwise, I hardly had a chance to talk to anybody, as my fellow students were all working and taking only one course, or at most, two. Thus there was little chance to establish contact.”The second semester he moved to International House in upper Manhattan, at a special rent of $4 a week, and his life became much more pleasant. Classes were easy compared with the rigors of the Hungarian university system, confirming his expectation that life in America would prove far easier than survival in Eastern Europe. Soros enjoyed classes in engineering economics and vividly remembers one teacher, a Professor Arias. Arias counseled his students that if they did not have a strong career path by the age of 30, they would never be successful. “Wise advice, I thought,” Soros remembers. Around this time, Soros met a tall, vivacious Hungarian girl living at International House. Daisy Schlenger had arrived in the United States in 1950 to be a student at Columbia University. She shared with Soros a youth disrupted by hardship and war. By Soros’ own admission, the couple's first date was not a success. Daisy was elegant, interested in people and a charming extrovert who possessed great style and exquisite manners. Soros was an introvert, intellectual and penniless, But Daisy remembers being impressed. “My husband emphasizes perseverance, sticking with things, the right ideas and principles,” she says. “He has a creative mind. He sees things very clearly.”Hanging out with Daisy, International House, 1951UCT eT Clogs a Cambridge, 1955 MARRIAGE, FAMILY & CAREER In 1950, Soros completed his master’s thesis at Polytechnic. Its subject was how utilities should best divide the load between plants with different efficiencies and characteristics. While the theory behind this process was well established, the calculations were extremely cumbersome. So Soros conceived, designed and built an analog computer. “With my industrial high school and machine-shop background, it was easier for me to conceive a solution based on the...graphic representations of the equations describing each power plant’s behavior,” Soros wrote, proud of his work. “It is too bad that it was the digital computers, not the analog ones, which took over the world.” After graduating, Soros could land only a temporary job with Drilled-In-Caisson Corp., a heavy- foundation contractor, where he remained for a year. After marrying Daisy in 1951, he used his language capability to get a job as sales engineer in the export department of Hewitt-Robins Inc., an international manufacturer of material-handling equipment, at a salary of $400 a month. At Hewitt-Robins, Soros learned the fundamentals of sales, business and material-handling engineering. “One of the things I learned was not to show that I was blessed with a very good hand, as I could be stuck all my life as a designer,” explains Soros. “In a corporate set- up,” he says, “financial rewards were clearly in sales or management.” In fact, Soros was doing well in a corporate setting, doubling his salary every two and a half years, but he was frustrated because he could not see how he would meet his own expecta- tions. Hewitt-Robins valued him highly, sending him around the world as a top sales engineer. On one of these trips, to South America, Soros’ life suddenly brightened. A group of Hungarian businessmen wanted to develop an iron- ore mine in Chile and asked him to design a screening plant—for a fee of $2,800. It was the first time Soros had $2,800. He was exhilarated. “With $2,800 in the bank, I resigned from Hewitt-Robins,” says Soros, “when I got a disappointing $80-a-month ——raise.” The company came back with a sweeter offer—$400 a month The same year, Hewitt-Robins offered him a major opportunity—to move to Amsterdam and become president of Hewitt-Robins Europe. The position would nearly double his salary and offer stock options. He, at first, was gratified. Yet, he was 30) years old and nagged by knowing that he was near that point of no return about which his former Polytechnic instructor, Professor Arias, had warned. He concluded that in a free-enterprise system it is better to employ executives than to be one. In searching for ways to become an entrepreneur without capital or connections, he recalled a conversation in Chile a year earlier with the Hungarian iron-ore miners, who needed an ore-loading port but could not afford its $4-million estimated cost. More as a itr) Ce al ed) multiple ship orientation, Patagonia, Argentina, 1969 joke they had said to Soros, “Come back to us, if you figure out a way to do it for $1 million.” Soros saw a need and applied the old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. He figured out how to save the capital cost of a pier by tying the ship to buoys and moving it in front of a fixed conveyor. The Hungarians were interested. Daisy was wholeheartedly willing to face the uncertainty even though the couple had only $1,500 in the bank. Soros surprised his employer and resigned. He was now on his own. “Basically, I felt like when I had the last chance to run away from the Russian prisoner column,” he wrote. “Not that being a big shot in Europe was a hardship prospect, but I knew if I did not try it, all my life it would bug me, and I'd always ask, ‘What if?” By now I had enough confidence that if it did not work out, I couldalways fall back on becoming an aspiring corporate executive.” SOROS ASSOCIATES “To my surprise, I now became very interested in engineering,” Soros wrote. “Heretofore, I had looked at engineering as a skill that could help me to get ahead in the world, But now, when I was responsible for the total results, instead of doing some of the tasks that go into making up the total, I became challenged and fascinated.” The first year, Soros, working out of a playroom in his house, made the drawings and typed the letters himself. With no overhead, he cleared more than double the salary of the presidency of Hewitt-Robins Europe he had rejected. More important, even before a port at Huasco, Chile, was built, word spread that he could build ports for less, and he quickly got two more iron-ore projects. The second year, the operation continued in the playroom, but Soros added a civil engineer and a secretary. “Two basic ideas were driving Soros Associates: that bulk ports could be designed to create a better transport system and that an organization specializing in the design of bulk ports could develop ports and terminals that cost less and operate better. Soros’ ideas were based on his observation of bulk ports worldwide during his trips for Hewitt-Robins. He noticed large variations in the capital cost of terminals that had similar capacity and performance. This variation was different from most other systems, such as power plants, buildings and bridges, where the unit cost per megawatt, or per square foot, or per span length vary within a much smaller range. Capital costs varied so much because, according to Soros’ analysis, building bulk ports requires knowledge about material handling and marine- civil engineering. Material- handling engineers, or the companies that hire them, have little interest or experience in designing and building marine structures (hence the cost), and vice versa for port engineering and construction companies. The owners’ engineers, however, must put the project together, relying on Loading a 250,000 DWT ship at the rate of 16,000 tons per hour, Tubarao, Brazil, 1972 aConstruction of an artificial island transshipment terminal for salt at the edge of the Brazilian continental shelf information from equipment suppliers and from civil engi- neers or contractors. Few owners’ engineers have oppor- tunities to do many port projects and gain experience. Having stumbled into the engineering of bulk ports, Soros became convinced it was a field with great potential for a new engineering specialty—if he could only overcome the resistance of owners to pay for outside expertise in preference over their own engineers. To reduce capital costs at Chilean iron-ore ports, ships were tied to buoys rather than to piers. Soros thought that the same system could work in the open sea, where waves would create too much movement to allow a ship to be tied to fixed structures Soros presented technical papers and published articles on this new type of offhore terminal, pointing out that while it could not work as many days a year as a conventional protected harbor, the cost of demurrage for lost days at such a terminal could be much less than the cost of capital for conventional designs. The first successful installation and operation of this type of offshore terminal was at the end of a mile-long bridge off Port Latta on the stormy coast of Tasmania near Australia. From this point, Soros Associates became the dominant source for this technology. A different breakthrough occurred when CVRD, the national mining company of Brazil, engaged Soros Associates to engineer the expansion of the iron-ore port at Tubarao from an annual capacity of 14-million tons to 24 million. The largest ore carriers at the time were 100,000-deadweight ton (DWT), and the largest iron-ore port was a U.S. Steel operation in Venezuela, with an annual capacity of 18-million tons. Soros submitted an unsolicited study on how Brazil could become the world’s No. 1 iron-ore producer if it could match or lower transport costs to Japan, the world’ largest importer, compared with the shipping of Australian iron ore in 100,000 DWT ore carriers. Soros proposed to carry the ore to Japan in 250,000 DWT OBO (ore-bulk-oil) ships, go a short leg in ballast to the EEEPersian Gulf, carry oil to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and go in ballast another short leg to Tubarao. He also proposed that Tubarao be designed for an annual capacity of 100-million tons, realized in stages, to match the theore- tical capacity of the existing railroad. Even though no such ships or receiving ports existed, nor was there proven technology for a 500 percent increase in port capacity, Eliezer Batista, chairman of CVRD, who became a life- long professional friend of Paul Soros, was a visionary and courageously gave the go-ahead to Soros Associates. The test is history: Brazil became the No. 1 iron-ore producer. Tubarao, with a system capacity of 24,000 tons an hour, worked like a charm, loading as much as 83-million tons in a year. And the world saw the construction of a namber of high capacity bulk ports. Most of. these were engineered by Soros Associates, including the highest- capacity installations for iron ore, coal, bauxite and aluminum. In the beginning, Soros did all the engineering and also chased new business. It soon became clear that something had to give. Soros decided to remain fully involved with engi- neering and delegated marketing, personnel, administration and finance as much as possible. Soros’ engineering imagination and creativity are reflected in a steady stream of innovations and firsts, the subjects of more than 100 technical articles. The academic and professional engineering community has long recognized Soros’ contributions. From 1968 to 1990, his firm’s projects won 17 Engineering Excellence Awards in annual competitions sponsored by the Consulting Engineers Council and open to all types of projects. In 2000, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) awarded him the coveted Henry Laurence Gantt Medal, which honored his extraordinary management contributions to the engineering profession. In 1989, Soros Associates received the Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers. And in 1983, ASME lauded him with its Award of Outstanding Materials Handling Engineer for his accomplishments in port development and systems for handling bulk materials. In 2002, the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities elected Soros to its Hall of Distinction, which honors. noteworthy alumni of private colleges or universities in New York State. The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic presented him with its Outstanding Alumnus Award in 1996 and the University gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1997. Soros Associates was sold in 1989 to Snamprogetti, a division of ENI, owned by the Italian government. When the chairmanship of Snamprogetti changed, a well-connected but inept Italian bureaucrat was put in charge of Soros Associates and mistreated and alienated company engineers and important clients. Observing the subsequent decline in the company’s fortunes was one of the most painful disappointments in Soros’ business career. Since selling Soros Associates, Soros has maintained a busy life. Weekends are usually spent in New Canaan, Conn.; he and Daisy also have residences in Manhattan, Nantucket and Jamaica in the West Indies. They travel frequently, ski and play golf and CTactively participate in New York’s cultural life. Their son Peter lives in London and helps manage the family’s investments. Their younger son, Jeffrey, lives in Los Angeles and is a screen- writer and philanthropist. Soros’ sons each have two children, who are their grandparents’ pride and joy. (Their first- born, Stevie, died in a playground accident when he was 18 months old. Their daughter, Linda, died in an auto- mobile accident, also at a young age.) In his lifetime, Soros has had to deal with personal injuries, including the loss of an eye in a golfing accident and complications from his earlier skiing injuries. Now semi-retired, he works out of his Manhattan office. Head of Paul Soros Investments and on the Advisory Board of Quantum Industrial Holdings. Soros is mainly interested in port, power and mining projects and companies worldwide. Soros has been a trustee of Poly- technic University since 1977. “Poly is BUT e a) ceo Da CO er a C1} Pete en Western Canada, 1980a subway university,” he says. “It gives the sons of janitors who possess a work ethic a chance to move into the middle class. That's a very necessary and worthy institution. That's why I’m involved.” Soros’ philanthropic emphasis at Polytechnic has been to provide seed money to develop plans that attract other sources of support. In 1997, he made a $525,000 seed grant to the Department of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Materials Science. The fanding has encouraged new ideas and provided resources that allowed the department to compete successfully for federal funding to create a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, He also provided major support for establishing a graduate program in financial engineering. Soros also conceived and under- wrote Polytechnic’s Exec 21 graduate program to prepare the next generation of leaders in the construction industry. The program embodies Soros’ belief that the careers of engineers are often limited by their knowledge of law, finance and economics. He has attracted top lawyers and leaders of industry and Wall Street to serve as faculty in the program. “Paul Soros is a philanthropist in the best sense of the term,” says Polytechnic President David C. Chang. “He genuinely cares about Polytechnic University, our mission, our programs and our students. And he invests his money wisely: contributing to excellence in a way that fosters further innova- tion and creativity. We are proud to call him one of Poly’s own.” Outside of Polytechnic, Soros and Daisy serve on behalf of a broad range of philanthropies. Daisy is on the boards of Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic, Collegiate Chorale, Venetian Heritage, International House and Weill Cornell Medical College and is a member of the Executive Council of Rockefeller University and of the Society Board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The couple has also under- written Lincoln Center's popular “Midsummer Night Swing” since 1993. The Paul and Daisy Soros Poster for Soros Fellowships SE SVENEENWith grandchildren, Preston, 3'/2, Simon, 3'/2, Tommy, 2'/2, Sabrina, 2'/2, Nantucket, 2001 Fellowships for New Americans, established with a $50-million grant, annually appoints 30 fellows, chosen from more than 1,000 applicants, and provides a stipend of $20,000 a year and half the cost of graduate-school tuition for two years. The selection is based on talent, accomplishment and commit- ment to the values of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. “This country would not be what it is today without contributions from immigrants,” Soros says. “The United States has great opportunities. If you have what it takes and are willing to work, you will be a success.” Soros is on the Executive Committee of TechnoServe Inc., an organization that helps the rural poor of the Third World to lift themselves out of poverty by their own efforts. A passionate civil libertarian, Soros supports the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way. He has served on the Review Panel of the President's Office of Science and Technology, was a delegate to the U.S./Japan Natural Resources Commission, served as a special U.N. ambassador to Morocco and Jordan and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999, he received the Fulbright Award for Contributions to International Understanding. Looking back at an adventurous life that has encompassed a wide variety of human experiences, Soros is certain that he has chosen the right career. “‘I drifted into something I enjoyed doing,” he says. “And I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do it. My story is riches to rags to riches again. I was lucky to survive. The rest was relatively easy.” EEEPolytechnic www.poly.edu Writer: Peter West Editor: Stuart Dim, Executive Director of Communications and External Relations Art Director: Cenon Advincula