Harvard Business School

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I don't know how much you know about Cunningham.  It's a very simple story, but an impressive one.

He was born, I think, in family of very little money.  I don't think he finished high school.  That can be found out some way.  He may have finished high school—I'm pretty sure he didn't.  He didn't go to college.  He got a job as a clerk at St. John's, New Brunswick, with the Canadian Pacific.  And somehow he brightly got ahead.

Somehow he shifted there to become an assistant to the president of Lackawanna Railroad, whose headquarters were in Scranton.  A guy named Eustis.  Never having been to college, but Scranton being the headquarters of the International Correspondence Schools—which you don't hear about now, but was a very widespread and successful correspondence school.  It was centered in Scranton, and it gave night courses to the Scrantonians.

And he went and he did everything he could get there.  And during my tenure, as a young man, he was more respected by the Economics Department at Harvard than any other professor over there.  They would have him over, and take part in the Ph.D. exam—just like that.

And Mr. Eustis was asked by the Boston & Maine—which was very prosperous, a fine old railroad—to come and be president.  And Gay had just asked Eustis to come over and give some lectures on the course, just on the side as being president.  He said, "I can't.  I am too busy, but I have a bright young man in my office that I think he would like."

And he did that on a part-time basis for maybe four years, like that, and then was asked to do it on a full-time basis.