Tiscornia and the secretary

I was working at Bank of America in the marketing research department which I had helped found.  

I was also the president of the Young Republican Club that had 4,000 members.  The two converged.

Here is the story, which I’ve told before:

In the early 1960s I was elected president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, a large organization held together by the desire of young newly arrived single San Francisco women to meet men and vice versa.  Elected with me was a secretary, whom I didn't know, who turned out to be a beauty.  She was charming, sweet and truly innocent.  Something I had never encountered in a 22 year old beauty.  The reason turned out to be, that she had always previously been fat. After high school and the debutante ball of that era, she started seeing a shrink to lose weight.  It worked.

She fell in love with the shrink and they had an affair.  When her parents found out they drove the shrink out of town and my secretary was left to mope in love-sick pain.  She lost a lot of weight and emerged as the swan.

We both ended up at the Bank of America.  Me in the marketing research department, she as a secretary in the legal department.  At the time, the Bank was trying to buy property in the heart of San Francisco for a new headquarters.  I knew about it and knew about the completely unwilling owner of the main block the bank wanted.  The owner was an old miser named Tiscornia. He owned much of the heart of San Francisco property and left it undeveloped.  

My gossip sources told me that he was a lecher.  I went to the Executive VP in charge of the new building and suggested he send my Young Republican secretary to take notes at the meetings with Tiscornia.  The EVP later put me on the building committee in return for my brilliant suggestion.  The brand new interest in selling his land, on the part of Tiscornia, led to a final agreement (based not on a sale of land but a 99 year lease).  

The Bank of America building was and still is a major landmark in San Francisco.  My secretary married an English count within a year. Being a young man on the committee of old bankers, I had no influence.  I objected to the dark skin of the building in a city of white buildings.