Tough Choices

By Andrew B. Louis

An enterprising young man marries an unpretentious and discreet heiress. Both are determined to succeed in their respective careers, capitalizing on their skills, drives, hard work, and strong marriage which provides harmony in their lives, rather than become trust babies. Yet several issues will intrude on what would be for many other couples their tranquility. They are confronted with at least three critical choices.

The heiress's family company, currently run by her father, following in the footsteps of three prior generations, will need direction when her father wants or needs to retire. Her siblings are not in the running, having chosen fields of endeavors that do not prepare them for these responsibilities. The family hates the idea of having to entrust an outsider with the reins. Will she be willing to abandon her own promising career?

Her husband would also make a perfectly good choice. However, his career has taken him on overseas assignments. He has been very successful in each of them, but there is no apparent direct route for him to take over without abandoning his own career. To make matters more complicated, he may be the first in his industry to realize that managing the wealth of families and individuals requires a tailored approach, which his own employer does not at present utilize. Will he be able to make the right choices?

Finally, they both realize that their three children will eventually need more stability in their lives after having bounced from one place to another for ten years or so. Where will they find that stability? Will it help their parents get closer to their mother's family or will it make things harder?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684988068

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue

About the Author

cover.jpg

Tough Choices

Andrew B. Louis

Copyright © 2023 Andrew B. Louis

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

The events described here are plausible. In fact, they have been sampled from a number of different real-life situations. However, all the parties to this story are totally fictitious. If there was some resemblance with individuals or institutions, it would be purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-68498-805-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88763-385-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68498-806-8 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To friends, former colleagues, and mentors whose examples provided ample material to craft a story which, though totally fictional, comes awfully close to reality in a few instances

Prologue

Wayzata, Minnesota

1965

George and Mary Larsen were sitting with their three children in the family room of their stately home on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The oldest of their three children, Thomas, Tom, was about to go to college, while Edward, Ed, and Vanessa would eventually follow, as they were respectively one and three years behind their elder brother.

George was currently the chairman and CEO of Larsen Industries, a private company which had been started by his great-grandfather upon his arrival from Denmark. Hans Larsen believed that there had to be a way to make the food distribution business more efficient. His settling in Minneapolis had reinforced his conviction, as the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul already were the headquarters of significant food-related operations. These companies had indeed benefited from their proximity to the wealthy farm belt, which produced cereals, with the power provided by the Mississippi to transform them into flour and transport the end products to all the various end markets. Hans grew the company both from within and through regional acquisitions.

Eventually, his son took over and kept growing the business, investing in food processors, including a meat packer that capitalized on the geographical proximity to states such as Iowa and Kansas, and in the milk and milk product business given the geographical proximity to Wisconsin. Fundamental financial conservatism and the modest spending needs of the family had allowed the group to keep investing and reinvesting in the family's business, permitting quite fast growth. Additionally, the tradition that all male children had to work in the business and any female child could if she wanted to made for a substantial overlap between the family and its business.

When it came to the turn of George's father, Thomas, the strategy shifted at the margin. He worked to give the business a national dimension, still focused on food and food distribution. By the time George took over, the business had further expanded into related disciplines, including trucking, always following on the family philosophy to integrate all business activities as much as possible. He would later take a material interest in the fast-food area, creating a few large master franchises across the same geographical area, defined as the Midwest of the U.S.

Interestingly, this latter move started the creation of the holding company, which allowed each underlying business to operate on its own. Initially, the presence of family members at the head of each of these businesses had made the formality of the holding company somewhat redundant. But with the reduction in the number of children per couple and a greater proportion of girls among them, it would no longer be practical for the family to expect having blood control over all its activities. A holding company solved the problem, as specialized talent could be brought in from outside without threatening overall family control. In addition, it provided an opportunity to give each operator the freedom to lead and manage provided he or she remained within certain broad parameters, principally but not solely based on financial criteria.

*****

With Tom's impending departure for college, George and Mary felt they needed to bring the children a bit more into the secret of the family. Up until then, indeed by choice as well as by necessity, the controlling generation had not shared with its children much about the family's business, and even less about the family's emerging wealth position. It was simply not common among the wealthy in the Midwest to inform their children of their financial situation. Many such children found out, when they turned twenty-one or even twenty-five, depending upon the terms of the various trusts, that they had money in their names. Though this eventually brought many families down as the children had not been groomed to assume their status, it was still highly prevalent. While there was of course no direct relationship, a cynic might argue that the famous formula from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations was created for families such as those.

George and Mary were somewhat ahead of the crowd, feeling as they did that their children should know something, but not everything. They did not want money to be seen as something that would allow anything flashy; rather, they wanted money to be viewed as something that created opportunities. It enabled each child to be the best he or she wanted to be and could be, as the pressure to earn a living was at least partially lifted from their shoulders. Little did George and Mary know that in so doing, they were starting a process that would eventually be a significant cause of stress.

What that stress would do to the family, and how it would transfer to the next generation, would offer a touching perspective on the power of love. George and Mary were indeed trailblazers, but would that cause unacceptable stress? If it did, would they, and their children, be able to deal with it?

Chapter 1

October 1972–June 1974

Evanston, Illinois

Jim Mitchell and Vanessa Larsen were both studying at Northwestern, in relatively similar programs. Jim was studying for his MBA at the business school. So was Vanessa. Except that she was taking classes both at the business school and at Medill, the journalism school. Vanessa wanted to get into the advertising business. She believed that the opportunity provided by having two excellent programs in one university was too good to pass. In fact, if truth be known, she chose Northwestern for her graduate work precisely because it would allow her to work on a joint degree involving both business and journalism. Jim had chosen Northwestern because his principal business interest at the time was marketing. Northwestern was then known as having the best marketing department among the premiere business schools in the U.S. Virtually all the best-known professors in the field taught there; only Columbia would have seemed a feasible alternative. However, it was in the upper west side of Manhattan. To a young man from North Carolina, the upper west side of Manhattan could not compare with a campus in Evanston, on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Meeting Vanessa changed his life in more than one way. In particular, though he ended up getting an MBA, he chose not one but two majors in marketing and finance.

While Jim's family background was modest, at least in financial terms, such was not the case for Vanessa. She was a debutante from the very fancy Wayzata suburb of Minneapolis, where her family had moved from Denmark a few generations earlier. Hers had not been the most visible or the most successful family in any single business area, as a few others in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area had been, such as the Cargills, the Daytons, the Hills, the Pillsburys, the Weyerhaeusers, or the Wintons, to name but a few. Yet her family had built several businesses into a substantial conglomerate comprising food, franchises, bottling plants, and, more recently, medical supplies. Her family surely was one of the five wealthiest in the Twin Cities, though very few if any people would have known it: discretion was the modus operandi.

Vanessa grew up in a large house on Lake Minnetonka and attended the Blake School, arguably one of the two best private schools in the Twin Cities. Though certainly from a very wealthy background, Vanessa, like the rest of her family, was quite understated. As a rule, the family preferred to avoid any form of ostentation. Originally, the family was Lutheran, which might explain the relative lack of flashiness. However, Vanessa's father, George, had married Mary, a very devout Roman Catholic girl from Edina. She was unwilling to abandon her faith. George then decided he should convert so that the whole family could worship together. Vanessa was thus brought up in a very religious Roman Catholic environment. As she left for business school, Vanessa was unattached; she had had a few boyfriends, but nothing serious other than, as always seems to be the case, her first love in her senior year of high school. This fizzled as the boyfriend went away to college and she stayed closer to home. Before sending her off to Evanston, her father had a lengthy conversation with her, repeating earlier words of caution.

Business school students can be more materialistic than others, dear…

I know, Dad. By the way, I also know where you're going.

I'm sure you do. But you know me: once a father, always a father.

I know. I know. Don't worry, Dad, I'll be even more careful than when I went to St. Benedict.

Good. I keep worrying about gold diggers. Often, you don't find out until it's too late.

George did not have to say much more. The term gold diggers was like a secret code within the family. Vanessa knew as well as her dad the story of her dear aunt Kristin, George's elder sister. Though also a devout Catholic, she had to go through a painful divorce: she had fallen for a gold digger, although the family fortune was considerably less when they got married and divorced than now. Yet Vanessa's former uncle was trying to grab as much money from the family as he could, and, to make matters worse, was mistreating his wife, her aunt. The trauma it caused to the whole family was well understood by all, though Aunt Kristin had done all she could to shelter her four children. Vanessa could still see traces of the conflicts in the behaviors of her cousins. Money can hide many things, but it cannot make up for family disruptions and the feeling of treason that certain children of divorced parents experience.

*****

When mentioning St. Benedict, Vanessa was referring to the college of St. Benedict, an all-girls private Catholic college in St. Joseph, Minnesota. It was paired with St. John University, an all-boys college run by Benedictine monks in Collegeville, Minnesota, right next door. Students at the two colleges had a shared curriculum and access to the resources of both campuses. Yet the residence halls were specific to each, as were the sports activities. It surprised no one that there was plenty of socializing across the two student bodies.

Her prior scholarly achievements would have allowed Vanessa to get into better known universities. She might in fact have chosen a different route had her mother, Mary, not had a bout with cancer when Vanessa was in her senior year of high school. It was a big shock for her; she had a particularly close relationship with her mother—her two siblings were boys who had a closer relationship with their father. She felt she needed to avoid going too far away and thus be able to come home to spend the odd weekend without anything more than an hour's drive or so. The fact that St. Ben and St. John regularly ranked among the top hundred liberal arts universities in the U.S. made it an easy and totally rational decision.

Mary was treated perfectly both in Minneapolis and close by at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. When Vanessa chose St. Ben, she could not have known that Mary would make a total recovery and would recover so quickly. Yet by the time the news came out that Mary was and should remain cancer-free, Vanessa was in her freshman year at St. Ben and enjoying herself. No question of a possible transfer ever arose.

*****

Vanessa and Jim met in the class of Stuart Henderson Britt, who was concurrently professor of marketing in the Graduate School of Business and professor of advertising in the Medill School of Journalism. Dr. Britt was a very eclectic individual; some would probably even say he was eccentric. He had had at least three careers, starting as a lawyer, then working in advertising, and finally teaching advertising at Northwestern. He was a bit iconoclastic, most notably driving around campus in a Bentley convertible from the 1930s and wearing traditional Scottish plaid or British tweed as the case may be. Yet he was the one advertising professor whom everyone wanted to have had. It was a happy coincidence that Jim and Vanessa could register for the class as it often required substantial prior planning.

Every year, Dr. Britt invited his students to come to the house which he shared with his roommate—a.k.a. his wife, a well-known painter, Marion M. Hansell—for a party at the end of the quarter. The house was full of gadgets and knickknacks which he delighted demonstrating to his adoring students. That December, though Jim and Vanessa had certainly noticed each other in class, they really first chatted at Dr. Britt's home. As they loved to say, the rest is history.

They had originally talked about marketing in general and advertising in particular. Vanessa was deliberately studying the discipline, and Jim was intrigued by the subject within the broader marketing discipline and, to be honest, by Dr. Britt's reputation. His parents, both teachers, had indeed encouraged him to seek professors who were also personalities. But that evening, they started to talk about the world of finance. They were discussing a course Jim wanted to take in the spring: banking, taught by Donald Jacobs, who eventually became a revered dean of the whole business school and led it to the top of the MBA rankings in the U.S. Vanessa confessed that she did not know as much about banking and finance as she should. Jim asked why; she replied that she had some stock but paid little attention to her portfolio… She immediately kicked herself. She realized she had said something she should not have: a couple of glasses of white wine and Jim's smile and light Southern drawl had gotten her to lower her guard too much. She was determined never to talk money, following her father's advice. She managed to regain control over the story she wanted to project, saying, Oh, by the way, it's not a lot. I have a few shares of stock here or there. Mind you, whether I look at them or not probably doesn't matter…

Jim had never been terribly interested in investments, so he paid no real attention to Vanessa's declaration, other than finding in it a way to extend the conversation. He was attending Northwestern on a scholarship. He had earned it based on solid academic results at the Chapel Hill high school first and then at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received a BS in mechanical engineering. His background as the son of two full university professors had certainly also helped. Yet somehow, Vanessa's talking of investments and the conversation that followed had kindled something, maybe simply because she said that she should know more. He thought, So should I.

A few days later, as he was choosing his classes for the second quarter, Jim made sure that one of them would be in Investment Management, a 101 class taught by Professor Tolleson. Vanessa joined him when he told her of his decision.

Vanessa had perfectly played her role for the ensuing few months. She was herself, but anything that remotely touched money was downplayed and understated. There was no way anybody could guess her real background. Though Jim could see that she drove a nicer car than his Ford Capri two-door, she played the role of the average student perfectly, except with respect to studying, which she always took very seriously. To her, there was no alternative to an A grade in any class. Their dates became more and more frequent. It even included being invited to her apartment: a house she shared with a couple of other girls. Neither of them knew who Vanessa really was either. After all, this was not terribly surprising: Nordic names such as hers were not rare in students from Minnesota, as well as from most of the upper Midwest. Her flowing blond hair and blue eyes reinforced the stereotype.

By early spring, it had become clear to the two of them that their relationship had evolved to the point where meeting the parents would become a natural next step. Vanessa had had a long phone conversation with her parents. She used to speak to them at least every week and had mentioned that she had met a guy who, she thought, was different. Her father's question was very much in character:

Does he know who you are?

Well, Dad, I hope he does know who I am… But he does not know what Larsen means.

She could not see his reaction, but the fact was that George smiled. Mary, her mother, congratulated her on the distinction. George had to admit that his question was not nearly as good as her answer. He went on.

He's going to find out when he gets here, won't he?

That's true, Dad, up to a point. He'll see we're comfortable, very comfortable. But, you know, I would have invited him home earlier if it was not for the money.

What do you mean?

I really think I love him, and I've known that for some time. Without the worry of showing him the house, and what goes with it, I would have invited him at least a month ago.

Mary and George exchanged a glance, though Vanessa could obviously not see anything. They both thought that a couple of months, three at most, was not a lot, but their daughter's thought process reassured them. No one could be sure that love would last, though. So they suggested that a first meeting could easily take place in Evanston. They could meet Jim over dinner and make up their own minds. Vanessa was not terribly happy at her parents' reaction but agreed that their caution made sense.

That first dinner with Mary and George had been very pleasant. Vanessa had chosen Hackney's, an upmarket hamburger place in Wilmette, the suburb just north of Evanston where the campus was. She and her parents had indeed wanted to make sure that they played the middle-class background as faithfully as they could. George was particularly impressed by Jim. He thought he was much more mature than his age would have suggested, and he liked the Southern manners very much. Mary found him charming, but, above all, she could not believe the way Vanessa was looking at him and interacting with him. She was clearly smitten, and he did seem to reciprocate these feelings too.

They had agreed to meet at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston for brunch the next day, after attending Mass at the Sheil Chapel Center on campus. The brunch confirmed Mary and George in the feeling that Jim was indeed special and sufficiently different from other boyfriends. They themselves extended the invitation for Vanessa and Jim to visit them for a weekend in Wayzata. Vanessa was beaming.

*****

Jim was absolutely bowled over when he drove to Wayzata with her for the Easter weekend in April. He had never been in a house of that size, though it remained quite understated relative to what the family could afford.

It was a great and impressive house right on the shore of the lake, with a lot of land around it. It was located on Ferndale Road South, arguably one of the top addresses in an already fancy suburb. But Jim did not know any of these details… Up close, the house was quite large and imposing. Yet the landscaping had been designed in a way such that the only good view one could get of the house was from the lake. No one could guess what the house was from the road.

It had six bedrooms, though what Jim noticed most was the suite of five reception rooms on the ground floor. Each of these rooms was decorated with taste and in a European style, with antique furniture mixed in with comfortable modern couches. Jim noted only some hint at the Danish background of the family. It probably reflected the fact that the fashion for antique Danish furniture would not appear until a few decades later. Persian carpets covered the floors and nice classical paintings adorned the walls, ranging in style from old portraits to a few impressionists and even fauve works. Jim noted that he did not see any contemporary art.

The dining room was quite large, although the table, which could be substantially extended, was more intimate, with two large armchairs at each end and three armless chairs along each side. He could not fail to notice the fact that there was domestic help, although it remained quite discreet. In fact, George Larsen barbecued the steaks himself for the Saturday dinner, and everyone pitched in to bring the dishes to the kitchen and load the dishwasher with Mary. The help had the weekend off.

It was too early in the year for him to benefit from the pool, but he had had a chance to play a solid game of tennis with Mary on the court, which stood to the side of the house and had a bubble over it for the winter. Vanessa explained that her mother had been a ranked tennis player in her younger days. Unfortunately, the lake was still frozen, and they were not able to go for a boat ride. Yet Jim had seen that the family's covered dock had space for two boats, which were still in their winter clothing. One was ostensibly a pontoon, or party boat, while the other looked like a cabin cruiser, though, covered as it was, Jim could not tell whether it was a bowrider or not.

As they were driving back to Evanston in her electric-blue BMW 2002 sedan, Jim first whistled and then made a joke that she had played her cards pretty close to the vest:

Surely didn't expect what I saw, honey!

She first smiled and then apologized for having been so cagey beforehand. Yet telling the story of her Aunt Kristin, she explained that she wanted to be sure that Jim would love her for herself. She was surprised when Jim told her that it made her more lovable. He explained that he was well aware that she was what he thought was solid middle class. She really did not seem to worry about money, though she was not throwing it away. He added, It made me appreciate that you wanted a serious relationship.

You're so sensitive.

Thanks. Got to tell you, though, that I've fallen flat on my face a few times before…

What do you mean?

I think I've been ready to think of marriage probably before many others.

Really?

Yeah! Being away from home, I've felt ready to share my life with someone. Naturally, I'd let myself too deep into relationships before it became clear that the girl was just looking for fun.

Oh… Hope the hurt went away. Anyway, I understand… With a wry smile, she added, Well, now you know. Please, no word to anyone.

She extended her right arm and placed her hand at the base of his neck.

They both proudly graduated together in June 1974. By that time, they had been married a bit less than six months.

*****

A wedding in Minnesota in mid-January is not the most common practice, but the two of them wanted to get married as soon as they could. Vanessa's strict Catholic upbringing led her to reject sex before marriage. Yet they both wanted that experience: the sooner the better!

When they made the decision to get married, it was too late to organize what they would have preferred: a marriage in early fall, when the leaves turn yellow and red. However, in her typical direct and