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way. He received rejection letter after rejection letter. According to Mary Anne, it

crushed him.

"This was a man who was always the captain of every sports team," she said later.

"President of every class. He had never lost, never failed. It was a reality check."

By now, Chris and Mary Anne had two daughters, Lara and Kari, and Chris needed to do

whatever he could to pay the bills. The young family lived in his late grandmother's

house, which was owned by his father, a window salesman. Chris got hired to teach

science and math to seventh and eighth graders at his old high school and coach the

football team.

"When he came back [from the war] he was very troubled, and I found him crying so

many nights, just sobbing, trying to understand the ludicrous business of war," Mary

Anne says.

He planned to write a book about his troubles, but didn't get very far. He read Aristotle

and Plato, and tried to make sense of his experience.

Pettit's childhood best friend, Tom Tucker, had heard from his mother that Pettit was

home, and having trouble. Tucker hadn't seen Pettit for years, and was eager to reconnect

with his old buddy. He invited Chris to join him in Chicago, where he was working with

Greg Marotz, a Colgate University fraternity brother, in sales for the Northern Screw

Company, a small importer and distributor of industrial fasteners used by farm implement

manufacturers in the Midwest.

"When I called him in January 1973, he told me no--that Mary Anne was pregnant with

their third child, Suzanne, and moving from Huntington was out of the question," recalls

Tucker.

But Tucker didn't give up, and after a week Chris relented enough to go to Chicago for an

interview. He was hired, and six months later so was his brother, Rusty. The trio spent

two years there, and more than tripled the productivity of the company; but they had a

falling out with the owner, who they claimed cheated them on their compensation. They

swore that they "would never work for a jerk again," says Mary Anne.

They came home to Huntington in 1975. With help from Chris's father, they purchased

Finnegan's Restaurant and Tap Room, the oldest bar-restaurant in town. On the wall they

hung a picture of Fiver, the runt rabbit in Richard Adams's epic allegory, Watership

Down. They incorporated a company under the same name.

But the revenue from Finnegan's was not enough to support three families. The Pettits

were so hard up that Mary Anne was denied a Woolworth's credit card that she needed to

buy blinds for her bedroom. By 1977, the Pettits and their three children often ate

whatever food Chris could bring home from the bar. Mary Anne was pregnant with her

fourth child (Chris Jr.), but she was so worried about their finances that she didn't tell her

husband for the first few months, not wanting to burden him. "Chris, in high school, had

been the most likely to succeed and now he couldn't even afford to support his own

children," she recalls.

Then in January 1977, Jim Boshart, who had known Pettit since they were on rival high

school basketball teams and had heard that he and Tucker were struggling, invited them

to interview at Lehman Commercial Paper Inc. (LCPI). Pettit happily accepted the

invitation, Tucker says. Both men had realized that Finnegan's was not a growth business,

and "We learned that there was a lot of money to be made on Wall Street."

For their big interviews, both men bought new suits from a local department store,

Abraham and Strauss--Tucker says the suits cost $49.99.

Later that month, they met with Paul Cohen, then a partner and the chief administrative

officer for LCPI, and Morton Kurzrok, the chief administrative officer for equities, before

having a brief meeting with Lew Glucksman.

At the start of Tucker's interview, Cohen said, "New suit?"

Tucker blushed. Quietly, he said, "Yep."

Cohen smiled. "You realize the price tag is still on it?"

Neither man impressed their interviewers hugely--mainly