I started out as an associate in Manhattan for a small firm in an office right across Forty-Second Street from the entrance to Grand Central Station. In the beginning, I worked for a partner whose principal client was New American Library, which had many best selling authors in the 1960s. After a few years, I went to work for a different partner who was a litigator. There ensued a series of litigations involving prominent figures or companies, particularly the duPont company, whose CEO was a personal friend of my boss, as well as AMF, W.T. Grant and others.

I eventually left the small firm and became an in-house attorney at Revere Copper and Brass Incorporated, at the time a Fortune 500 publicly owned diversified industrial company. It turned out that the company was on the brink of the downward spiral that ended in a chapter 11 bankruptcy case followed by a going private transaction and liquidation. In the interim there were many high stakes matters I was called upon to manage, prominently including matters involving the environmental laws which began to emerge just as I started with Revere.

The end of Revere left me unemployed and on the street near the age of 50 in the midst of what was characterized at the time as merger mania in which the cascade of leveraged buy outs of public companies was creating a hoard of unemployed middle managers, including lawyers. The final section of the book describes how I coped with and recovered from that situation, going on to manage a practice exclusively devoted to environmental cases until I retired