Richard the Great

This is a eulogy for my father. Its goal is to honor the man for who he was and what he accomplished, but also to pass on the lessons we can learn from his life.

Richard Michael Hart was born on November 1st, 1941 in Porirua, New Zealand. Richard was not so studious. He frequently relied on his twin sister Vivien to do his homework and his proudest academic achievement of his adolescent years was building a coffin for his woodworking teacher. He boxed. Richard was captain of the rugby team, the B team, as he was always careful to point out. Bullied by an older boy, he got his revenge when the boy was at the water fountain. Richard pushed the bully’s head down and into the fountain, knocking his front two teeth out. Richard early on was not a good fit for school and at around 16 he left to become a dock worker and ultimately joined the New Zealand Merchant Marine.

By all accounts, Richard was a rascal.

The Merchant Marine took him all over the world. He later captivated us with stories of how he sailed up the Irrawaddy River to Rangoon or how he had spent a week in South African jail over a visa mix-up. He eventually realized that he needed an education after all, and boy did he embrace that with gusto. He went back to New Zealand, got his GED and then his masters in chemistry from Victoria University of Wellington. From there he applied to Ph.D. programs all over the world. He landed at McGill University in Montreal, Canada where he cranked out his Ph.D. thesis on quadrupole magnetic resonance theory in 9 months. I once asked him what it was about and he replied “just some bullshit”. Nonetheless, one of the proudest moments of his life was his thesis defense. Challenged by a skeptical professor, he successfully parried the questioning to cheers from the audience.

Unsurprisingly, despite his success, academia was not for Richard and while it greatly satisfied him to show his family that the troubled kid who couldn’t stay in school managed to get a Ph.D., he decided that business was the place for him, so he got an MBA. Unsure what to do next, he took the LSAT, before his New Zealand citizenship had disqualified him from service in the Vietnam War. He had volunteered.

While at McGill, he worked at Molson Breweries and was a student senator and president of the graduate student society, Thomson House. It was also at McGill that Richard met his wife and my mother, Marie-Louise Trudel. At an oyster party, it was love at first sight…of his cute butt. Louise was quite different from Richard, despite also having a twin sister. When Richard was campaigning to be student council head, Louise brought home a campaign poster to show her old school Quebecoise mother. “You’re dating a jew!” she exclaimed. While they were dating, Richard learned of an American Express all-expenses paid trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco - just $350 per person.

Richard Hart enjoying belly dancers in Morocco in 1973. The huge hair stage right is his wife.

“In those days, Richard was very macho.” Overcharged and threatened by a waiter at their Moroccan hotel, Richard did not back down. As the waiter chased Richard and Louise up the stairs with a berber knife, Richard rolled an Ottoman down those same stairs, giving them time to make it to their hotel room where they locked the door, relieved.

With $43 to his name at his MBA graduation, Louise lent him $8,000 she had saved as a teacher so he could move to Chicago to work for GD Searle (now Pfizer). She stayed in Montreal, but they stayed in touch and in 1975 they were married. Richard moved on and got a job at American Home Products (now Wyeth) in New York where Louise joined him. His corporate career culminated with him becoming president of the US operations of a Swedish pharmaceutical company named Kabi, which brought him and his wife to Greenwich, CT.

Ultimately, at Kabi Pharmaceuticals in 1982, he was fired, but this was a blessing in disguise. At the time of his firing, Kabi was throwing away a ton of medical reagents. He asked if he could have them. One cold call to Johnson and Johnson later, he had sold $100,000 worth of product. An entrepreneur and his new company American Diagnostica were born!

Richard Hart and his wife Louise on their wedding day. She proudly wore purple.

I was born 5 years after American Diagnostica in 1987. My brother was born 4 years after that in 1991. My principal memories of my father consisted of him working continuously (and I really mean that). As soon as he got home, he would have dinner and get right back to work, scribbling and solving the next day’s problems on his yellow legal pads. On the weekends it was the exact same thing. American Diagnostica manufactured medical devices and sold them to hospitals. He was in that laboratory and its office every weekend. As I got older, I got to go as well. You would often hear the employees say things like “he never stops” or “he never runs out of energy”. Sure, sounds like sucking up to the boss, but it was true. The man had a motor like which I’ve never seen.

Richard ingrained in me at a young age the necessity of saving money. God help anyone who left the lights on at the house. As the business grew more successful, Richard got a new car, a Bentley. However, to save money, we didn’t have garbage pickup at the house. So every Sunday, we would put the garbage from the house into the trunk of that Bentley and drive to the office where there was a dumpster.

With entrepreneurship, Richard was able to finally find his calling. He was able to pair his brains and knowledge with incessant hard work and, importantly, salesmanship. As a young kid our vacations were trips to medical conferences. They always fit the same pattern; fly in, work, give a speech on some esoteric medical reagent at the conference, then to long dinners at night with the big players, and then finally close deals. In addition to developing its own medical devices, American Diagnostica sponsored scientific research with scientists and universities all across the world. He and his generosity were a hit with the scientific community and it loved him for it.

For the first time in their lives, my parents had money. They had both been raised in very modest homes, but with their first entrepreneurial success and newfound capacity to buy what they wanted, they started to spend. In 1996 the booming business was embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit in Australia. I remember being traumatized by the conversation at the dinner table every night. Superficially, everything was going so well. We had a nice big house and a fancy car. The reality was that the business was heavily indebted, the house was mortgaged to the hilt to support the business, and the Bentley was a lease. We thought we would lose it all. That had a very profound effect on me and does to this day. I wish his employees knew the soul and stress he poured into that business. On the surface, it looked like it was all just party time.

Richard worked a lot harder and took a lot more risk than he ever let on.

As the business wobbled in the mid-90s, Richard took it personally and this put a strain on the relationship between my mother and father. He called her “cat” and she called him “dog” and they fought like cats and dogs, but they needed each other. Things at home were stressful and there was chaos, but mom and dad complemented each other perfectly as parents. Louise wouldn’t let her sons get their drivers’ licenses at 16 for fear that they’d crash. Richard wanted to send his sons to Iraq. When I was 6 years old, my mother flew to Montreal and Richard and I went to pick her up at the airport. Not wanting to pay for parking he sent me into Laguardia myself to find my mom. Overwhelmed, I broke down in tears, finding a security guard to explain my predicament. It was cold, but character building.

As my brother Hilton and I grew older, Richard encouraged the natural competitiveness between us. If one of us had achieved something recently, it was that brother that night who should expect to receive “the gold watch”. When Hilton and I reached physical maturity, he watched us play one-on-one basketball. It was the perfect metaphor for his approach to parenting. Whenever one brother scored over the other, only then would he clap. It was fair, honest, and direct - just like he was. While he never verbalized his love for us, he was always showing it through his sacrifices. In retrospect, he loved us more than he loved himself.

In the year 2000, we learned that he couldn’t raise one of his feet. He called it his “drop foot”. He kept his usual energy; he would dash around the house fixing this or that, but he did so hobbled. An MRI showed a tumor in his spinal cord pressing against the nerves there, preventing him from using one legs. A routine exploratory surgery meant to last an hour ended up lasting 12. Steroids ultimately shrunk the tumor and he was able to move his leg once again, but he kept a 7 inch long, inch wide gash on his back as a memento of the botched surgery. Worse, after 12 plus hours of intense surgery, he was not the same. The energy and courage that embodied him were still there, but he had lost a step.

Not long after recovering, still with a cane, he went to India for a medical conference with an employee 30 years his junior. The idea was that the junior employee could take care of Richard. Instead, Richard chugged along while his junior associate was immobilized in the hotel room with diarrhea. Just a few years after his surgery, we were locked out of the house. Richard couldn’t wait. He wedged his feet into the mortar between the bricks and climbed up to the 2nd floor of our house and climbed through a window. I was 15. He was 62. I couldn’t do that.

Meanwhile, American Diagnostica had grown to 50 employees, with an ISO and FDA approved medical manufacturing facility in Connecticut, sales offices in Canada, France, and Germany, and distributors all over. But, the writing was on the wall. It was time for Richard to retire. A Japanese conglomerate named Sekisui signed a letter of intent to purchase American Diagnostica in 2009. Though he had slowed down, the man who had made a coffin for his woodworking teacher brought up Iwo Jima to his Japanese buyers while my mother furiously kicked him under the table to shut up. The sale went through and besides a mostly figurehead role, my father could finally retire.

Richard with Ricky and Snowy, our beloved cats. Just a few years earlier he had climbed the bricks behind him to get through that second floor window.

After he sold the business, he continued the generosity which had characterized his career. He bought his relatives in Australia and New Zealand homes. He founded a scholarship at McGill University so that future immigrants could get the education he got. It was a significant portion of his net worth. He was quoted “Do your giving while you’re living.”

A portion of the money that Richard and Louise were owed as part of the sale was held in escrow, to be released a few years after the purchase. My parents were counting on that money, but ultimately the buyers declined to pay it out and sued my parents for breach of contract and fraud. Overnight, their lives turned upside down. They had gone from celebrating my father’s legacy of hard work and business success to needing money for lawyers. Worse still, as time had gone on, his medical condition, perhaps the lingering effects of that surgery gone wrong, had worsened and he lacked the ability to defend himself. He couldn’t remember.

It took years for the case to work its way through the court system and it even went to trial. Ultimately, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the court had made a final determination of the merits of the case and that the plaintiff was forbidden for bringing it again. Richard and Louise were awarded legal fees for the ordeal, but by this time, Richard was gone. He had been vindicated, but he couldn’t enjoy it.

And just a few years after that he died. He worked like a dog for decades but never took a rest. Highly leveraged until the sale went through, he was never able to relax and enjoy his success. A Kiwi immigrated to Canada, and then to the United States with $43 and then turned it into a fortune through determination, hard work, and hard-fought wisdom. That wisdom was all lost. By the time I grew old enough to appreciate what he had accomplished, he couldn’t explain how he did it. What a loss for the world. “Squeaky wheel gets the grease”, “Never go into a regulated industry”, and “To make money, you need to spend money”; these were the sayings I can remember him saying repeatedly as a boy, but because I was so young, we never got to learn what they meant and what they meant to him. Don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t wait until you have time or its convenient to cherish and learn from your parents and loved ones, because that day may never come. I love you, Dad.

Richard Hart, M.S., Ph.D., M.B.A.
Businessman, Fighter, Father.
November 1st, 1941 - May 12th, 2018.