Hartwick To Wall Street, Back To Otsego County

By JIM KEVLIN

When Bob Hanft was a Hartwick College senior in 1968-69, he met a fetching freshman, his future wife Patricia.

A memorable courtship followed, much of it in Cooperstown: Friday excursions to “The Pit,” the Tunnicliff Inn’s basement hot-spot, sunny weekend trips to Glimmerglass State Park, the spring formal of Tau Kappa Epsilon, Bob’s fraternity, at The Otesaga.

“We loved Upstate New York,” he recalled the other day.

By 2006, when the Hanfts were deciding on retirement, Cooperstown and Otsego County were the natural choice. “I have a foot in Oneonta and a foot in Cooperstown,” said Hanft in an Independence Day interview. “I go back and forth frequently. I have good friends in both.”

In between, there were adventures aplenty.

An economics major and son of a banker, Bob graduated from Hartwick on a Friday and the following Monday he started as a trainee at J.P. Morgan, where he worked for the next 30 years, retiring as managing director/global equity research.

“I did everything” – M&A, lending, private equity. He was one of four senior managing directors who started Morgan’s global equity business in the early 1990s. “It went from zero people to more than 2,000 in 5-6 years.”

One memorable night in 1980, the phone rang. He was directed to go with his bank’s president to Washington, D.C., where they “snuck in the back door” at the Office of the Controller of the Currency, joining a half-dozen of the most powerful bankers in the U.S.

First Pennsylvania Bank was in trouble. “And the controller of the currency said, ‘You’re going to save this bank’.” The result was the first major bailout of a national bank. After that, Hanft, still in his 30s, worked on a number of rescue packages. “Highly confidential,” he said. “You’d read about it four weeks later in the paper.”

As Hanft was moving up the ladder, Morgan’s reputation was “top notch. It was one of the leading financial institutions in the world. One of our biggest problems was vetting people who wanted to do business with us, to protect our reputation,” the executive said.

He traveled a lot, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Latin America. “I spent a lot of time in Europe,” he said, recalling one four-month project in London, working seven days a week.

He and Pat raised a family in Ridgewood, N.J., Rebecca, who recently opened law offices in Cooperstown (she is engaged to Josh Truman, Friend of Bassett executive director); David, in Boston, and Cameron, in Connecticut. Cameron has two 15-month-old twins, Mack and Robbie, and David and his wife recently presented his parents with a new baby boy, Henry.