Page 45 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

A discount on ducks

After he had passed his orals, Wash went to work for his professor’s firm, Byrnes and
Baker. This was his first real job in New York, and it was as junior auditor of a duck
cooperative. “They raised Long Island ducks, a descendant of the original Peking
duck.” Like Wash himself, these ducks had come a long way from China to New
York, their forebears having been brought over from Peking by a merchant in 1873.
These ducks were bred for the dinner table, and as a member of the audit staff, Wash
was allowed a discount on ducks. He would make a present of one of these to a friend.

Wash’s landing this junior auditor position was no small feat. African-Americans or
Asians were practically unheard of in the accounting profession in those days, but
Professor Byrnes knew he had a gem on his hands, and was willing to take the risk—
as long as his clients agreed. “He told me that as far as he knew, I was the first Asian
on the professional staff. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I have to call the company first
before I send you,’ he said. Blacks didn’t even get clerical jobs. There was this black
guy who had an MBA from Harvard who couldn’t even get a bookkeeper position—
what he could do was teach at a university for blacks. So Byrnes told me he would call
up the client first to be sure he wouldn’t object to an Asian. In fairness, no one ever
said no. And most of them asked for ‘that young man’ to be sent back again.”

Wash doesn’t remember ever having met any Filipino in New York during his stay in
Columbia, aside from his brother. His social circle included his classmates, some of
whom were women.

Among them was Frances “Frankie” Cornwall (later Hutner), who would later be
known for her work on women’s issues. Frankie met Wash in the fall of 1940, when
she was in her first year as an economics student at Columbia’s Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences. They met through a mutual friend named Ed Brunstead, and the
three—aside from taking some of the same courses—became good friends. Frankie
and Ed played tennis, went skiing in her dad’s place in Vermont, and sometimes
went dancing in John Jay Hall or in a midtown hotel. “Wash sometimes joined in
the walking and, at least once, in the dancing,” Frankie recalls. Skiing, however, was
something else.

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