Commencement Address by Jim Cramer P'18, Commencement 2018

You did it. You have gotten to an unimaginable place from just four ridiculously short years ago. You are graduating from one of our finest schools and I congratulate you and, of course, your parents for the teamwork it takes to get to the finish line.

This is a very special day for me. My fabulous stepdaughter, Charlotte Detwiler, is in our midst, graduating in the amazing class of 2018, as is my goddess of a wife, Lisa Detwiler, a grateful trustee of Bucknell. I am so proud of you both and Charlotte, stalwart graduate, I salute you as someone who embodies all that is good in this world and I am so happy for you on this glorious day. Thank you for letting me be a part of your Bucknell life, from the first drop-off to the parents' weekends and our own times together here.

I want to thank the faculty for educating these fine students to be able to handle the slings and arrows of the real world with honor and with rigor. You have once again helped produce a remarkable group of women and men destined for greatness.

And of course, I want to thank President John Bravman, who just yesterday outlined to all of us how valuable Bucknell is, what a great investment it is. Oops, wait a second, that wasn't yesterday. That was four years ago. Time doesn't fly; it's propelled at a pace that NASA or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos salivate for.

President Bravman, you have taken a great institution and made it into one of the most sought-after universities in the nation in a very short time. You have been a beacon to these amazing students and I join you in congratulating each and every one for their achievements and for their fellowship.

We just wish it could last longer, that's how much we love Bucknell. I am proud of my affiliation with your fabulous school, a relationship that started years and years ago when one of my mentors at Goldman Sachs, Professor Bill Gruver, came to teach here. A little more than a decade ago, I had the privilege of giving a speech here about how the federal government, under George W. Bush, I had felt had abdicated its role as a promoter of general welfare and that it was time for corporate America to step up in its place. I am thrilled to say that I see it now happening in so many companies and their stock-market valuations are rewarded for it.

It was a fiery speech back then, seditious both to the White House and Wall Street and I thank Bucknell's esteemed faculty and administration for giving me the opportunity to push the boundaries of free speech in such an incendiary way. May you always allow disparate voices to tell the truth as they see it.

It is such an honor to address you today. As I struggled to think about what I could impart to you, I traced my own path from college for lessons that could be applicable to you as you leave this gorgeous campus and join the scrum of the real world.

Sometimes, like in Edgar Allen Poe's Purloined Letter, the answer is right in front of you. That's why I want to tell you about what faced me on this day and give you two lessons I learned from my life that I want you to know without having to suffer through them.

The first will be palpable, the second hopefully intuitive, but if not, perhaps you will recall this speech someday if things don't pan out the way you would want, because life after graduation is rarely a straight path. There are twists and turns and roadblocks and defeats and you must know how to negotiate them and negotiate them as gracefully and earnestly as possible. College, as you will certainly learn in the ensuing moments, is not an on-ramp to the HOV success lane.

A Bumpy Start

My graduation day certainly began inauspiciously, because in truth, I didn't graduate. I had been the outgoing editor of the Crimson, my school paper and I knew I wanted to be a crusading journalist. Shortly before graduation, I heard about an injustice committed by the man who would preside over our commencement. He had deceived the faculty about a fiefdom he had been running within an elite department at school and I felt compelled to write one more article in the school paper, an article exposing his deceit. I reasoned there was no way I could possibly get in trouble because after all, I was about to leave college for good. There could be no penalty. I had all my credits. I was a magna! What could he do to me?

At Harvard there is a long tradition of the dean saying a few glowing words about each person before he or she gets his diploma. I listened to the tributes and watched the beaming parents until it was my turn. I heard my name called and as I rose to the podium the dean began to call me a liar, telling the crowd how despicable I was. By the time I got to him, my hand shaking, trembling, to try to shake his, he said there would be no diploma for me and he waved me off the stage.

Stunned, I stumbled down the stairs empty-handed into the confused but warm arms of my mother. I looked at my father, he was in tears: the only time I had ever seen him cry and the only time I would ever see him cry.

My first lesson to you? All of you will have a better day than I did back in June of 1977.

I came home to Philadelphia, tail between my legs and, while I waited for an investigation to conclude that I actually did deserve a diploma, I began the arduous process of trying to get a newspaper job in the middle of a recession when I didn't even know what the a recession was. I wrote letters to 48 newspapers asking — no, begging — for a job. You know what I have here? I have here 48 rejection letters. I kept every one of them.

Now, I know they say that revenge is a dish best tasted cold, but I take little solace dining on the carcass of those rancid newsrooms, although I admit to being a tad gleeful when it comes to the more discouraging letters, including one particularly nasty missive from the editor of the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. Cramer one; Bulletin nothing.

As the rejection letters piled up, my situation grew dire at home. You tire of hearing that things were different back then, but I can tell you that while I hunted for a job in June, July and August, both my mother and father had grown weary of me hanging around waiting for the mail. They both had their reasons. Mom felt fiercely that you should go to work right out of school, not hang around for the next good meal. Pop didn't even believe that being a writer was a profession. We didn't have much and he wanted me to get an honest job, one that he said made money. He reminded me, at every chance, that my friends who were going into journalism — well, those were the wealthy ones. "They can afford to be a writer, Jimmy. You can't." My heart's desire meant nothing to this man who scratched out a living selling boxes and bags to mom-and-pop stores, his customers reeling from the recession and from the big-box onslaught.

Mom clarified her position two months in by throwing my bed away and redesigning my room as a den. Pop drew his line by telling me I would have to pay rent if I weren't out by October. I didn't believe him until I saw the invoice.

The Key Operator

Do not underrate relatives in a time of need. I found a sweet aunt down in Washington, D.C., who allowed me to move in rent free and I began my job hunt anew, armed at last with that diploma and a note rebuking the dean for not giving a diploma to me on that awful commencement day. Better embarrassingly late than never, I consoled myself.

A friend in Washington had told me about a job at Congressional Quarterly, a trade publication that covered politics. They were looking for a low-level candidate for an entry post in journalism. I made my introductions and shortly thereafter I found myself in front of the editor-in-chief. He must have smelled my desperation because he said he had something for me and I said, "Yes, when can I start?" How about tomorrow, he said. My, this is easy, I remember thinking — almost too easy.

So, the next morning I showed up, so excited, so ready. My excitement only grew more palpable as the editor-in-chief told me I was going to be a key operator at the publication. Right out of school and already a key operator! He handed me off to a lieutenant who ushered me into a closet — a closet of a room where there was a gigantic Xerox machine, with a flashing yellow light that said "call key operator." You, he told me, "are our new key operator. You will learn to fix the Xerox machine in addition to handling all our photocopying opportunities. You can start by fixing this paper jam."

I lasted a month, a month of doing nothing but photocopying and fixing the photocopier. No muckraking, no exposés, no crusades. Just the key operator.

Fortunately, one month in, my resume had been passed around to a bunch of newsrooms and had landed on the desk of the Tallahassee Democrat editor, who tracked me down and said he might have a job for me.

I wasted no time flying to Florida and after a day of interviews was offered a position covering Florida State University — everything from the day-to-day student life to the administration and the football programs. I told my editor that I wanted to expose any injustices I saw and correct them. He told me that's fine as long as I spelled everyone's name right.

So I moved as close as possible to the university to get the skinny, not far from the sororities and fraternity houses that dominated campus. Not long after I had settled in, the students were hit with a terrible tragedy. A serial killer, Ted Bundy, broke into Chi Omega sorority house not far from me and murdered four young women. I was the first reporter on the scene, arriving early enough to learn the names of the victims — too early, in retrospect, because I called one of the victim's relatives ahead of the police and had to explain what happened.

My firsthand articles changed the trajectory of my career. Suddenly I was the kid who knew how to cover crime. I went from someone with noble intentions of righting wrongs to someone who could cover homicide with a flair. Not long after I got a call from the executive editor of the now-defunct Los Angeles Examiner, which of course had rejected me first, saying he'd seen my Bundy clips and needed someone to cover murder in L.A.

California Crime

Goodbye, Tallahassee. Hello Los Angeles. One thing my father was right about; the $143 a week I made in Florida wasn't much, but the $30 more per week I got for moving to Los Angeles was well below the poverty subsistence line. No matter. I stubbornly clung to the idea that once in the city, covering homicide, I could rise up to expose big-city corruption. Homicide was nothing. Corruption, influence peddling, bribery, all the issues that brought me to journalism in the first place. The ideals still lived!

I took a place in a definitively less-desirable part of town and went about the task of covering everyone who died violently in the Los Angeles area.

One night, after staggering in from a particularly grueling homicide shift, I sensed that something was awry in my place. I am not a clean freak, but apparently, I hadn't flushed the toilet before going to work. I hadn't put the utensils away, either. Not like me at all.

The next day, I got back from work and my bathroom was a mess, my fridge had been cleaned out and someone had cooked a chicken in a pot and left the nasty remains on the shelf. An intruder, I correctly surmised.

Outraged, I called the police. They came within a couple of hours and seemed to wonder why I bothered them, given the crime-ridden area I lived in. They told me to change the locks.

The very next day I arrived home and my television, record player, albums and most of my kitchenware had vanished. I called the police again. The same guys showed up and told me there wasn't much they can do. I covered crime, I knew the lingo. I said there's no sign of forced entry and shouldn't they dust for prints?

These two grizzled veterans of a down-and-out neighborhood looked at each other and started laughing like I had told the funniest joke in the world. "Listen, kid, here's my advice. This isn't TV. I am not Kojak. Get yourself the hell out of this neighborhood. You don't belong here. And buy yourself a gun, for heaven's sake, because we are not your personal bodyguards."

The next day I came home and this time everything was gone, including my checkbook. The place was broom clean. I had no clothes beyond what was on my back and no way to pay my rent. I didn't bother to call the cops; they'd never catch the perp.

And that's how, a little more than a year after not receiving my diploma from Harvard, I was evicted from my apartment and suddenly found myself homeless, with just the clothes on my back, living in my 1978 Ford Fairmont.

You know what I should have done right then? I should have gotten in that car and gone straight back to Philadelphia. But to what end? My father hated the career I had chosen. I was not going to be chased out of my dream to be the best damned journalist I could be.

But as the days went on and the weeks and the months ticked off and I couldn't save any money, I found myself repeatedly curled up in the back of that Ford Fairmont parked at the best freeway exits I could find. I took the patrolmen's dictum to heart and got myself an unlicensed .22-caliber pistol, along with some underwear and a couple of shirts and pants from some closeout store and I discovered the wonders of shivering at night, kept warm by an ever-present bottle of Jack Daniels. Memo to that great poet Kesha: you would never waste Old Number Seven on brushing your teeth.

Pity's not easy to come by when you are youthful. But one of my editors recognized that after months of wearing the same corduroy jacket to work, I had to be in a jam. When he asked me why I was so sartorially challenged, I told him my travails. He showed mercy and said he could put me on an expense account for at least weekends so I could grab an occasional shower and a hotel room — that is, if I were willing to move to California's capital, Sacramento, to cover yes, statewide homicide. I was eager for a change in venue even if my beat stayed the same. No political muckraking for me; my job was to sell papers. The gorier the homicide, the better.

So, I "moved" up to the state capital and found the best place to park on I-5 interstate where the cops wouldn't roust me — that's a homeless necessity, people — and I broadened my geographical range of violent obituaries. Yes, living in my car took a toll on me, but I believed in myself, I believed in my ability to conquer anything — characteristics that you must share with me, regardless of your travails. I was no quitter.

But when you are homeless, bad things happen — bad things like what happened to me when I decided to camp out in my car in Ukiah, California, a few months after I arrived in Sacramento. I was exploring the town, stopping to get some cookies at a sweet shop, then soon after, I hit the highway and spied a Colusa County sheriff's car with the rooftop cherries rounding lazily behind me. I pulled over and an officer, a bear of a man with one of those menacing campaign hats and sunglasses, got out. He approached the car, an unholstered gun in hand. I instinctively reached for the glove compartment to fish out my registration.

"Stop it right there," he barked and in one swift motion the gun was nestled tightly to my temple. Maybe he just had a sixth sense that there wasn't just a registration, there was also an unlicensed .22-caliber in the glove box. He had me slowly step out of the car and place myself spread eagle on the Fairmont's hood as he read my rights, that steel barrel never leaving my cranium. We waited two hours like that and any attempt by me to ask what was happening met with a kick.

Turns out we were waiting for the proprietor of Grandma's cookies, the store I had stopped at earlier in the afternoon. When Grandma at last arrived, another office yanked my ear lobes hard while the first officer kept that revolver on my ear and then said I could be dismissed.

I demanded to know what had happened and I wanted an apology for the false arrest. The new deputy on the scene barked, "Robber had an earring," and that I was lucky they didn't arrest me for the unlicensed handgun. He told me to get the hell out of Colusa County and stay out.

It's OK to Fail, But Not to Quit

The arrest brought to home, though, that perhaps a man often thought to be one of the most likely to succeed from the Class of 1977 may actually have been a real screw-up. There initially had been a romantic, maybe even courageous aspect to living in my car. I was stubborn and tough and fearless in my pursuit of my idealized career and wouldn't let these reversals stop me.

But as I was able to use that expense account to grab a room and a shower at a Best Western, I could see a yellow stain developing on my stomach. It freaked me out. I had no healthcare insurance and there was no HMO; that was left downstate in L.A. Who could afford to see a doctor? There were no doctors for me. I didn't have the money.

At the time I had been covering a serial killer of farm workers and I found myself at a migrant clinic, asking for information about the victims. When I finished asking my questions I inquired whether I, too, could see a doctor. Within two and a half hours I got the nod. I went in with tremendous trepidation. I knew I had been doing some serious abuse to my body.

But I wasn't ready for the diagnosis. The doctor, a young idealist himself, asked first if I drank. "Occasionally," I answered. That is the requisite response anyone who drinks all day must give. "Well, listen, Mr. Occasional drinker, you've got a yellow patch of skin the size of Greenland on a Mercator projector and if you don't give up drinking, you won't live through another year."

I had weathered everything then from being the key operator to living where Ted Bundy killed those girls to being robbed of everything to being homeless to being arrested. And that was the straw that broke this fighter's back.

But what could I do? I never lost the dream of being that reporter that could bring down the crooked establishment. Still, going home would be a defeat. I would not allow it. I was not a quitter. But I was too alone to go on.

As I sat in my car taking stock outside a migrant clinic, I recognized that I had, indeed, been defeated whether I owned up to it or not. I had endured 18 months of abject failure. The well of my pride, which had sustained me for so long, had at last run dry. Embarrassed, dejected, finished.

What could I do, how could I get a job, one that could give me four walls, maybe give me health care, maybe get rid of my stain.

Reluctantly I knew I had to own to the only sustenance I had. I had to let my classmates know, especially my friends from the Crimson. I needed to let them know that I was beaten. I was the loser of the litter, the one that couldn't make good. I sent SOS letters to the only lifelines I knew.

It was in failure that I begot success because rather than derision, rather than disgust, rather than snickering, which somehow I thought would be their reaction, I received an outpouring of support and graciousness from my classmates. My embarrassment was misplaced. Almost to a person, my classmates took pity on me without ruining the pride I had left and one of my friends who had made good let me have an opportunity. And then another and then another and then another and then another. They let me crash at their places everywhere I interviewed. They helped me get writing assignments, maybe get some money to dress better and afford a meal.

When I finally won a job, it was to do just the kind of reporting I wanted to do. It was a muckrake position examining the foibles of the justice system. My defeat had yielded to victory. First lesson: it's OK to fail, but it is not OK to quit. You have more strength within you, both physical and mental, than you know, but use it more wisely than I did, please.

Now, though, I need you to learn about the other important takeaway from the arc of my distinctly suboptimal 18 months after school, one that I should have known the day I was robbed of my diploma, but I was too prideful. I want you, right now, to look at the student to the left and the student to the right. Look at the young adult soon to graduate who are in front of you and the one behind you. Take it from a down-but-not-out, once-22-year-old. Your classmates are your safety net, these warm souls of the Class of 2018 surrounding you, those who shared classes, or dorms or sororities, or fraternities or service work or clubs and teams with you. Remember there your stumble is just a pothole in the road for your seated neighbors to help you fill.

Four years ago, President Bravman told you and your parents how the price of a Bucknell education seemed spectacularly high. I remember parents nodding all over the place. He went on to say, though, that Bucknell offered so much more than just classrooms. It would be the friendships of the students, the shared skills of the academic and the extracurricular activities that gave you a return on investment far in excess of tuition.

I can tell you, as someone who truly failed starting from the moment I was denied my diploma, that President Bravman could not have been more right. Those classmates who are sharing this moment with you are the ones who protect you. They are the ones who serve you when you most need them. They and the education at Bucknell are priceless. They are your true sources of sustenance. While I hope you don't need them, remember my story, swallow that pride and jump in to the Bison safety net with both feet. With both feet! I urge you and I promise you will never regret it.

Thank you very much.