Around the Island

Island Profile: How a worldwide adventurer wound up staying put at 399 Park

CAROL GALLIGAN PHOTO | Bill Drew at home on his deck overlooking Menantic Creek, a fine place for a catboat.

Ninety-two-year-old Bill Drew, when asked if the Reporter could profile him, pointed out that he was not an Egyptian ballerina, like another person recently covered in this space, nor had he done anything “famous or noteworthy.” He was, in fact, “ordinary.”

Told that “ordinary” was just fine, he had a further caveat: “Most of the excitement in my life happened in my earlier years and didn’t involve tremendous success in various careers … That was not the case with me.”

But with that demurer accepted, he was willing to go forward, telling the story of his early years in one boarding school after another and his eventual experience during World War II in the American Field Service. And his “uneventful” life after that.

Not only were his early years “interesting,” but so were his relatives. His father was born in Fu Zhou, China, where Bill’s grandfather was a customs official for the Chinese government prior to the Boxer Rebellion. His father came back to the United States for school, went to Harvard and then to MIT, becoming a civil engineer.

After he married, he went off to the Argentine and worked as an engineer. They lived there for a number of years, returning to the United States for the birth of their first child, Bill’s older brother. His father then went off to serve in World War I and “I was produced upon my father’s return in 1920. My early childhood was in Flushing with my brother and seven first cousins. We did everything together. We played together and got sick together, scarlet fever and mumps and all that stuff. My first memories involve Mattituck, where we stayed for the summers. The parents arrived in Model T Fords and it took all day to get there.”

When his father became ill and he and Bill’s mother traveled to Europe in search of a cure, they brought Bill along; his brother was in boarding school in Connecticut by then. Bill loved London, where they stayed at first, not realizing that the excursions to all “the sights” would soon be brought to a close when he found himself in an English boarding school. He had just turned 11, was the only American there, and for a while was truly homesick.

“It was quite a business getting adjusted. We’d get up in the morning and be dunked into a cold bath, you know, the rigorous British training. Then we’d go out in shorts, regardless of the weather, and do exercises. Then breakfast and chapel, technically oatmeal, really ugly grey stuff, then classes and homework. Lunch was the big meal. There were puddings that looked like glistening brains. You took large slices with treacle on them but there was never enough treacle so they were almost impossible to swallow. But that was the way it was.” The school, which he attended for the next three years, was called Sunnydown.

He traveled through Europe with his parents during summer vacations and, by Christmas of 1933 — his father finally cured of what Bill thinks were “probably ulcers” — the family returned to the States and Bill found himself at the Putney School in Putney, Vermont, a coeducational school that, in time, he came to love. The school had a small farm and Bill enjoyed working there. In summers, he worked other farms in Connecticut and upstate New York. After graduation, he went off to a small agricultural school, where part of the curriculum was to spend six months working on a farm. Many students chose places close to home but Bill had already been there, done that. He chose Colorado and became a cattle hand.

As Europe became increasingly embroiled in war again, Bill, “always an Anglophile,” wanted to become involved. On a vacation in Boston, he encountered an American Field Service office and enlisted. AFS was (and still is) a volunteer organization, dedicated to the cause of humanity and improved world understanding. It had run an ambulance service during World War I and remobilized in 1939. “On February 17, 1942, I boarded the Queen Mary with 12,000 American troops. We were bound for Australia.” But en route, Bill came down with a strep infection and had to leave the ship in Capetown, South Africa. After his recovery, AFS sent him to Tobruk, Libya, where the Africa campaign was in full swing. He drove an ambulance there, evacuating the wounded to the nearest rail head.

For almost all the remaining days of the war, he went wherever AFS sent him, from North Africa through the Middle East to India and what is today Bangladesh, where he and his colleagues were surrounded by Japanese forces and supplied by air until reinforcements broke through.

Having had both jaundice and malaria twice each, and having lost a lot of weight, he opted for discharge when his enlistment was up. Mustered out in Calcutta, he worked his way home as an ordinary seaman on a freighter, traveling to Sri Lanka, Melbourne and then San Francisco. He was home in time for Christmas, 1944, having circled the world. “So,” he said, smiling, “that primarily was the adventurous part of my life.”

In the years that followed, he married, had two sons and began work at Citibank. After nine years in the commercial credit department, which he hated, he went to his superiors and begged for a reassignment. Asked if he would accept placement in what sounded like “Iraq,” he said an enthusiastic “Yes!” Unfortunately, Citibank was referring to “ERAC,” for Electronic Recording Accounting, the forerunner of computerized check processing. As it turned out, “It was a wonderful department. We built models and figured out how to put computers in different spaces and got into the construction phase. I didn’t have to be a programmer, didn’t really have to know anything about computers — the technical skills, only how to house them sensibly.”

Eventually, he became manager of 111 Wall Street, the 25-story building that became the computer headquarters for Citibank. He then became the manager for world headquarters at 399 Park Avenue.

What does a building manager actually do? “You’re responsible for the running of the physical plant, not just the mechanisms but everything regarding the physical plant, ordering and managing equipment, distributing it, making the drawings for space and layouts, desks and so on. To me it was satisfying, I enjoyed it. I would have continued but when I was manager at 399 I was going through a divorce.” And in 1975, he left the bank.

Several years of misery followed as he wondered how to go about meeting women. “I hadn’t the slightest idea,” he remembered. But then he met Maxine Kass, his current wife, nine years younger, at a party. She, too, had had a previous marriage and two sons. She was a reading teacher in the Commack school system. Both avid sailors — Bill owned a catboat — they discovered Shelter Island and built a home here in 1979. They married in 1983.

After that, until Bill reached his 80s, the couple sailed, traveled, and “did have a lot of fun.” Slowing down some now, life is a bit more routine but still enjoyable. Health problems have, of course, reared their ugly heads for them both, but so far, “We’re hanging in.”