Billy, Bill and William – A Tale of Dumb Blind Luck

  William Grindley, emigre from South Carolina, has lived a vivid adventure and will share some of it this Friday in a presentation called - Billy, Bill and William – A Tale of Dumb Blind Luck.

  His maternal grandparents, owned the Ford dealerships in South Carolina’s “Low Country” but managed to lose all during the Depression.  His dad left home at age 15, to support his mom and baby brother; became Master of Vessel, saved over 100 men in a Newfoundland shipwreck and spent most of Billy and Bill’s boyhood away from Beautiful-Beaufort-By-The-Sea. 

  An overachiever through his pre-teens, Billy couldn’t reconcile Jim Crow South Carolina with the ideals that Beaufort’s Episcopal Church, its Synagogue and Boy Scouts taught him.  Spending long weekends rowing his boat, fishing and hunting on Beaufort County’s deserted islands such as Hilton Head, he slowly understood the corrosiveness of institutionalized racial hate.

  At Clemson University (nee Clemson Agricultural College), Bill had the luck to study under by well-educated Yankees, have lectures from some of the world’s leading architects and philosophers, hitch-hiked through Mexico and worked a long summer in London.  But while I rode my Ducati and drove an Aston Martin, this period included an ROTC court-martial and knocking down a campus policeman.  

  After a year of practicing architecture, William joined the Peace Corps and went to Peru. Dumb blind luck prevailed and my assignment, in the Presidential Palace, was to design orphanages and day care centers. More luckily still, over her meatloaf in a squatter settlement, I fell in love with Susan. We married in Lima, then returned to Peru for three more years, I as a banker.

  When we returned to the US (1969), blind luck got me first into MIT’s Urban Planning school, then later into the World Bank. While the IBRD was prestigious and lucrative, I knew I would become a bureaucrat. Blind luck prevailed and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) offered me a job, which made me meet a ‘bottom line.’ That adventure lasted 13 years with assignments not only in Europe and Latin America, but also Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. 

  I was fired from SRI. But blind luck prevailed, and I started and ran Pacific Strategies for 20 years, keeping 3-4 employees so I could have fun – working directly with clients’ problems.

  In 1971 we bought our Atherton house that was about to be torn down, and to the best of our abilities, made it a place for our family and our hundreds of friends. Last year we sold it to a family we are convinced wants to – and has the resources to – take it to the next level.  We wish them all the luck we had in our 46 years in Fennwood.

  Over the last decade, it’s been 24/7 on high-speed rail. Episodic !

  As must be clear by now that I am not a joiner. Kathleen and Karla dragged me into PAUR.  I love it, not only because some of our best friends are here now, but because of PAUR’s work here and El Salvador.