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bring home from the bar. Mary Anne was pregnant with her fourth child (Chris Jr.), but she was so worried about their finances that she didn’t tell her husband for the first few months, not wanting to burden him. “Chris, in high school, had been the most likely to succeed and now he couldn’t even afford to support his own children,” she recalls.
    Then in January 1977, Jim Boshart, who had known Pettit since they were on rival high school basketball teams and had heard that he and Tucker were struggling, invited them to interview at Lehman Commercial Paper Inc. ( LCPI ). Pettit happily accepted the invitation, Tucker says. Both men had realized that Finnegan’s was not a growth business, and “We learned that there was a lot of money to be made on Wall Street.”
    For their big interviews, both men bought new suits from a local department store, Abraham and Strauss—Tucker says the suits cost $49.99.
    Later that month, they met with Paul Cohen, then a partner and the chief administrative officer for LCPI , and Morton Kurzrok, the chief administrative officer for equities, before having a brief meeting with Lew Glucksman.
    At the start of Tucker’s interview, Cohen said, “New suit?”
    Tucker blushed. Quietly, he said, “Yep.”
    Cohen smiled. “You realize the price tag is still on it?”
    Neither man impressed their interviewers hugely—mainly because of their lack of financial experience. For Boshart this was hugely embarrassing, but he insisted they’d be good hires.
    “Okay, so pick one,” he was told. Boshart picked Pettit.
    Pettit refused the job out of loyalty to his friend, but Tucker insisted that he accept it, so he did. Six months later Pettit had shown he was an invaluable hire, and Tucker got another interview. He showed up for this grilling wearing the same suit he’d bought for the first session. This time the tag was cut off. This time, he was hired.
    What was it that Boshart had seen in the tall, earnest, brown-eyed Pettit and in the good-looking, fair-haired Tucker? “I just felt that they were extraordinarily high -quality people who had an element that Wall Street clearly lacked, which was a sense of how to build a team.”
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    Given his military background, the demands of a grueling Wall Street day weren’t much of a challenge for Pettit. Of all the Ponderosa Boys, he was the quickest to ascend Lehman’s ranks. In 1979 he was made head of sales in the San Francisco office. He moved his family to the West Coast without hesitation. But they weren’t there for long. By 1980 he was head of all sales in LCPI , and he made partner of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb ( LBKL ) in 1981.
    “I think because he was quite old when he started, he was in more of a hurry than the rest to succeed,” says Lara Pettit, 40, his eldest daughter. “So he got in earliest and he worked through lunch.”
    Unlike Fuld, Pettit had a charisma that people still recall with awe. He was an excellent—and often inspirational—impromptu speaker. Unlike Pete Peterson, Lehman’s CEO , Pettit offered humble, practical advice. He often liked to remind colleagues of how John F. Kennedy had once bumped into a janitor cleaning the floors of NASA’s vast corridors. “What are you doing?” JFK had asked the janitor. “Mr. President, I am helping put a man on the moon,” the janitor had replied. Pettit said he wanted every person at Lehman to have that janitor’s spirit. Every man and woman had his or her part in the firm’s business.
    Bond salesman Craig Schiffer recalls that “Chris had an ability that I have never seen”—people often walked away inspired even after he had ripped into them. “He was particularly hard on me, kind of like a tough dad. He would beat the living crap out of you. Scream at you. But he’s the only person I’ve ever met who could do that to you, and you didn’t walk out of the room going, ‘What an asshole!’ You’d walk out of the room and think, ‘ I’ve gotta do a better