In her new memoir, BREAKING GLASS: Tales from the Witch of Wall Street, Patricia Walsh Chadwick explains how, after getting kicked out of a cult at the age of 17, she started on the bottom rung of the ladder in the world of business and worked her way to the top --- breaking through the glass ceiling to become a global partner at Invesco. The apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as her mother and grandmother were go-getters whose intelligence, drive and determination to succeed knew no bounds. In her Mother’s Day blog post, Patricia pays loving tribute to these two extraordinary women.
It was Mother’s Day weekend 1986, and I had left the madness of the world of investing behind in New York City to spend time with my mother in Boston. “I want to buy a house on the ocean,” she said with an air of confidence, the moment I walked into the house. It was clear she had made up her mind. “Will you go in on it with me?”
Mother seemed on top of the world. Her journey from the life of a nun --- one she had lived for close to 20 years --- to that of businesswoman had been nothing short of spectacular. A woman with a brilliant vocabulary and an immense knowledge of literature and history, she left the confines of “The Center” (a religious community-turned-cult) a couple of years after I had been kicked out.
It was her nature to view the world as full of opportunity. From housekeeper, she took on the role of nanny for the infant daughter of a brilliant couple getting their PhDs at Harvard, and then migrated to manage a branch of Cambridge Savings Bank, with responsibility for approving (or not) all personal loans. She had a sixth sense and was proud to highlight that no loan she ever made went bad.
Having honed her business skills, she became the business partner to the owner of a small company that manufactured wooden pallets. Her boss rewarded her handsomely, and by the time she was in her late 50s, Mother was making over $100,000 annually, the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million dollars today. I was honored to have inherited her business acumen, which she, in turn, credited to her own mother, Laura Miller.
Laura’s pregnant mother had succumbed to the 1918 flu epidemic, leaving behind a husband and four young daughters in Leonardtown, Maryland, a small town on the Potomac River. Laura, the eldest of the four --- and 12 years old at the time of her mother’s death --- left school in the sixth grade to raise her siblings, the youngest of whom was just two years old.
Eight years later, when Laura married Bill McKinley, a World War I veteran, and moved north to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she brought her youngest sister, then 10 years old, to live with them. Bill had been stationed in France during the last year of the war and was active in the local VFW. Laura, in turn, joined the “8 and 40,” the women’s auxiliary group, and soon began her public speaking career.
Within a few years, Laura became the organization’s parliamentarian, and in that role, she committed to memory Robert’s Rules of Order. Over the next 50 years, she traveled to each of the lower 48 states, as the lead speaker at the organization’s annual conference. She made an impression --- this woman who was about five feet tall in her high heels. Her speaking voice was strong, her diction perfect and her vocabulary sophisticated. Well into her 80s, she never lost her poise nor faltered over a word. I understood why my mother was so proud of her.
Mother had two vacation loves. One was her annual trip to Europe with Daddy, the focus of which was twofold. Ostensibly, they were visiting, over and over again, the great Catholic cathedrals of Italy, France, Germany and England. Almost as importantly, they were exploring the small towns on the outskirts of those cathedral cities. Seldom making either accommodations or restaurant reservations in advance, they would drive until they came to a village that appealed to them. Rarely were they disappointed.
When not traveling, Mother was happiest by the sea. She would reminisce about her childhood summers with her grandmother in Cohasset, a seaside town on the south shore of Massachusetts, while her own mother remained back in Cambridge with her younger sister.
“I love Maine,” she said. “I want to see the ocean from my bed. I have a place in mind.” She had done her homework as we headed north one Saturday morning to Wells Beach on the southern coastline of Maine to look at a four-unit condominium building that had been recommended to her by a real estate agent whom she trusted.
It was love at first sight, so to speak, for Mother as she stood on the balcony of the three-bedroom-apartment and scanned the Atlantic Ocean in front of her. By the end of the day, it was ours.
