That’s poverty.īrady Huggett: The absence of a real future. It’s the loss of dreams, it’s the absence of hope. I mean, poverty is not the loss of money - though of course that’s sad.

And just the whole idea of having no hope, no aspirations. Stan Crooke: So, mostly desperation, and anger. An “ugly place,” as he called it, and as we talked I asked him how he managed to overcome that neighborhood and his hard upbringing and get himself to college, and then beyond. Stan grew up destitute, in downtown Indianapolis in the ’40s and ’50s. He was in San Francisco to attend a biotech conference, as CEO of a company he founded in 1989. He is forthright, sometimes sharp in tone, but he also laughs easily, and he can be very funny. His voice, then and now, has a pinched tone to it at times, which he attributes to allergies and “an Indiana nasal twang.” He has a damaged ring finger on his right hand, the middle joint dislocated so many times playing basketball in his youth that the top half juts at an angle. Stan was 69 years old then, gray hair, maybe a little less than 6 feet tall. This was back in 2015, when I was interviewing him in a Hilton hotel, in San Francisco near Union Square. Stan Crooke told me something once that I've never forgotten.

Pocket family dreams