Month: January 2024

I was born in 1953 in Massachusetts.  My family lived in Carlisle and I spent summers with my grandparents in Marion. In 1972, I graduated from St. Mark’s School and made a beeline to Colorado to go to college and ski.  I received my BS in Finance in 1976 and my MBA in 1977, both from the University of Denver. 

I was a commercial banker for 44 years.  My first job, starting in 1977, was in Los Angeles with Crocker National Bank.  I then joined First Chicago in 1983 and spent the next 20 years working for them in Los Angeles, Chicago, and NY.  For the last 16 years, until retirement in 2022, I worked for Helaba (Landesbank Hessen) in NY.  Since 1992, I focused on serving the needs of clients in the insurance industry in the US, Canada, and Bermuda.

In 1980, my wife Joanna and I were married in San Diego.  Our two kids were born in the next few years in Long Beach.  Leaving Los Angeles in 1988, we lived in Chicago for 3 ½ years before a transfer to New York in 1991 brought us to Darien.  We are long time members of St Luke’s Parish and Noroton Yacht Club.  Our daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren live in Darien and our son lives in Brooklyn.  I’ve enjoyed volunteering in the communities where we’ve lived.  Among my interests are gardening and landscaping, being on the water, skiing, and traveling, with the most frequent destination being St. Croix where my wife was raised.

Ueli Morant was born (1950), educated and raised in Switzerland and moved to the US in his early twenties and he became a proud US Citizen in 1984. 

He began his career in NYC as an advertising executive serving global brands and moved to the client side later to become a marketing expert. He worked for both IBM in Europe and Philips Electronics worldwide where his responsibilities included marketing, communications and product development. In these roles he also became an expat for seven years, living with his family in both Paris and Amsterdam before returning home to Darien.

Ueli also co-founded Nano Terra, a nano technology development company in Boston, in partnership with Harvard University. The firm employed its own scientists who were deployed on projects for major US companies, when that technology was still in its infancy.

Ueli spent his last ten professional years as head of an M&A firm representing German automotive parts companies to establish and expand their US presence.

Ueli retired in 2023 and now focuses on woodworking, where he designs and builds mostly chairs and tables. He and his former wife Mary Morant have three grown children and three grand-children.

Gordon was raised in Darien and attended the Darien public schools graduating in 1975.  He went on to Washington and Lee University earning a degree in economics which he took with him upon graduation to Sun Valley, Idaho to secure bartending and dishwashing jobs as a ski bum.  Reality set in and Gordon commenced a 40-year career in finance in New York City.  During his career he worked for a number of major international banks and several boutiques focused on advising and arranging trade and project finance in the developing world.  He worked across many different industries as well as different geographies which resulted in an interesting and dynamic career for him.  The business took him to roughly 40 different countries around the world, though not as glamorous as it might sound.  The markets he was active in were developing economies i.e. those where you didn’t drink the water.  Gordon retired in 2022.

Gordon married a Darien classmate, Holly Orr in 1987 and moved from New York to Rowayton for 5 years prior to migrating across Five Mile River to Darien.  They raised two children in Darien and enjoy racquet sports, golf, skiing and hiking.  They are long time members of The Tokeneke Club, and more recently picking up golf, Silvermine Golf Club.  Gordon and Holly are ADK-46ers, having climbed all 46 peaks in the Adirondacks exceeding 4000 feet.    

Peter grew up in the UK and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Trinity College, Cambridge University. He and Bettina, a former school teacher, moved from London in 1981 to Darien and in 1984 to Rowayton, where they raised their four children and where Bettina was for many years deeply involved with Shakespeare on the Sound, including as an actor in the first production.  They have five grandchildren, three of whom they are lucky enough to have living nearby in Rowayton, plus two in Newburyport, Massachusetts and there is another on the way in Brooklyn. They now spend part of the time in Scotland, where they have a home near St Andrews. Inspired by this proximity to the home of golf, Peter has recently taken up the game on the grounds that it’s never too late. 

Peter retired in 2017 after 35 years at Russell Reynolds Associates, based in New York and, for the last five years, in Singapore. In addition to his work in leadership consulting and executive search for clients, he was involved globally over many years in the management of the firm. Earlier he was with the merchant bank Arbuthnot Latham in London and New York and with Balfour Williamson, a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank International. He is Chair of the American Patrons of the National Library and Galleries of Scotland, was formerly Chair of the University of St Andrews American Foundation and of Restless Development USA, and was a board member of British American Business and the New Canaan Country School.

Steve Govoni was born in Manhattan and raised in Rye, close to the Playland Ice Casino, but playing hockey in a junior league founded by New York Rangers General Manager Emile Francis meant shlepping to rinks all over the metropolitan area. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, Steve wrote 50 articles for true-crime magazines edited by his father and started his newspaper career at the Stamford Advocate as a reporter-photographer. At the Bergen Record, he won a Deadline Award for an investigative series on the fraudulent demise of several trucking companies in New York and New Jersey. He also won a year-long Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University, which led to positions at Financial World and The New York Times magazines.

As imminent parenthood approached, Steve joined Morgan Stanley’s global equity research department as a supervisory analyst and was eventually recruited away by SBC Warburg, which moved to Stamford in 1997 and morphed into what is now UBS.

After his wife Kate died from a botched allergy shot in a doctor’s office with her son nearby, Steve became the founding president of the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, a grassroots organization devoted to putting a human face on preventable medical error.

He also served on the board of the New York Financial Writers Association. In 2006, Steve moved to the “buy side” of financial services, first with the marketing department of Lord Abbett, then Virtus Investment Partners, where he retired in September 2023.

After 25 years in Rowayton, he sold his house to a 31-year-old cryptocurrency executive (in dollars). He and his wife Bobbi Arnold, a financial manager with Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, now live in Silvermine. In addition to hockey, Steve’s interests include golf (with a sense of humor), soccer, photography, theater, film, and art, all of which help explain why he sold the boat he moored at the Norwalk Yacht Club.

Scott grew up in Westport, CT and Winnetka, IL

He graduated from Cornell in 1980 with a BA in Economics and graduated from Northwestern in 1987 with an MBA.

Scott worked in Banking and on Wallstreet for 43 years, first as a lending officer and then in sales and trading of Convertible and High Yield bonds.  He retired August 31st of this year and now every day is a Saturday!

Scott has 3 children, Kelsey, Jay and Leigh, who have all graduated college and are launched. Karen, his wife, is a Pastor who disciples women.  

Scott loves to sail and race one-design sailboats. He is a flag officer at the Noroton Yacht Club and is working to grow adult sailing.  His second passion is skiing. He looks forward to swiping his IKON pass often this winter.

Scott often says, “my finest days are spent wearing gloves.”  This means time on the water sailing, at the mountain skiing, or in the yard working.

Scott looks forward to being active and exploring.