From the very beginning, it was obvious that baby Suze had an Emmy-Award winning smile. There were my three best friends in the first three seats of the first row, while I was banished to the last seat in the sixth row. If I always secretly felt dumb, it was now officially confirmed for everyone to see. Talk about feeling ashamed.

This feeling that I couldn’t make it scholastically continued to haunt me throughout high school and on into college. I knew I would never amount to anything, so why even bother to try? Nevertheless, in my family and in the families of my friends, it was a given that we’d all go to college. In my case, I knew that I would have to pay for college myself, because my parents were having a hard time with money. The only options for me were community college or a state school. I applied to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to my amazement, even though I did not score well on my SATs, I was accepted. When I arrived, I met with a guidance

counselor who asked me what I wanted to study. I told him that I wanted to become a brain surgeon. He looked at my grades and said, "I don’t think so. You don’t have what it takes. Why not try something easier?" I did a little investigation and found out that the easiest major was social work, so I signed up for that. Why not take the easy way out? Why try harder?

During my first year at the University of Illinois, I lived in the Florida Avenue Residences in room 222 and worked in the dormitory’s dish room seven days a week to pay the bills. In my second year, I shared a one-bedroom apartment off campus with two friends I had met in the dorm, Carole Morgan and Judy Jacklin. Judy had a hilarious boyfriend named John Belushi, and the four of us had quite the adventure for the next three years. (Yes, this is the very same John Belushi who went on to superstardom on Saturday Night Live. Judy and John got married and the rest is history, but that’s a story for another book.)

I was supposed to graduate in 1973, but my degree was withheld because I hadn’t fulfilled the language requirement. Once again, it was the shame of my grade-school years holding me back. If I had trouble with English, what made me think I could learn a foreign language? I decided to leave school without my degree. I wanted to see America. I wanted to see what a hill looked like... a mountain... the Grand Canyon!

I borrowed $1,500 from my brother to buy a Ford Econoline van and, with the help of my friend Mary Corlin (a great friend to this day), converted the van into a place I could sleep during the drive across country. I convinced three friends-Laurie, Sherry, and Vicky-to come with me; I was way too scared to try this on my own. With $300 and a converted van to my name, we set out to see America.

Sherry and Vicky jumped out in Los Angeles, but Laurie and I continued on to Berkeley, California. As we drove through the hills on the day of our arrival, we were stopped by a man with a red flag who held up traffic so trees that had been cut down could be cleared. That year a frost in the Berkeley Hills killed many of the eucalyptus trees. I got out of the van to watch and walked up to the man with the red flag and asked him if they needed any help. He pointed me to the boss, and before we knew it Laurie and I had landed our first jobs-working for Coley Tree Service for $3.50 an hour. We worked as tree clearers for two months, living out of the van and using a friend’s home nearby to shower. When it was time to move on, I applied for a job as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery, a great little place where we used to get our coffee. To my delight, I got the job. While I worked at the Buttercup, I faced up to my shame of not having finished college and took Spanish classes at Hayward State University. Finally, in 1976, I got my degree from the University of Illinois. I was an official college graduate, working as a waitress. I stayed at the Buttercup Bakery, where I made about $400 a month, until 1980, when I was twenty-nine years old.

After seven years of waitressing, I had this thought that I could be more than just a waitress. I wanted to own my own restaurant. I called up my parents and asked to borrow $20,000. My mom said, "Honey, where do you expect us to come up with this? We don’t have that kind of money to give you." I should have known better than to ask for something I knew my parents didn’t have to give away. There’s nothing a parent wants more than to help a child realize a dream; I knew my mother would have done anything to help me, but she was powerless. I felt awful.

Buttercup Cafe in Berkeley, California, where Suze spent 7 years as a waitress earning $400 a month.

"Just sign here on the dotted line and we’ll see what we can do," he said. I did exactly what he asked, never thinking that it was stupid or dangerous for me to sign blank papers. Randy worked for Merrill Lynch, after all, and Fred said it was a great place to do business. (Now, before I go any further, I just want to say that this is not a commentary on Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch is a fine, upstanding, and honest brokerage firm, but the bosses in the Oakland office had hired someone who didn’t uphold their standards. If you have an account with Merrill or want to open up an account with Merrill, go right ahead; this particular bad seed is long gone. But more on that later...)

It turned out that after I left that day, Randy had filled out the papers I had signed to make it look as if I could afford to risk the money I had deposited into the Merrill Lynch account. He got me into one of the more speculative investing strategies-buying options. At first, I was making great money. I was amazed. I found the perfect location for my restaurant and was having plans drawn up by an architect. My dream was within reach. Other people believed in me and lent me more money. We were off and running-that is, until the markets turned. Within three months, I’d lost all the money in the account. All of it. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I owed a lot of money, and I knew I had no way to pay it back. I was still making only $400 a month!

During this time, I had been following what Randy was doing and was trying to learn as much as possible. I watched Wall Street Week on PBS every Friday night, I read Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal. I taped the pages with the stock and option prices to my bedroom walls. After all the money was lost, I said to myself," Hey, if Randy can be a broker, I can be a broker, too-after all, it seems like they just make people broker!" I got dressed in my best red-and-white-striped Sassoon pants, tucked them into my white cowboy boots, and put on a blue silk top. I thought I looked great! So did my friends at the Buttercup, who wished me luck as I set off for my job interview to become a stockbroker at the very office that had lost me all my money.

Five men interviewed me that day, and all of them asked me why I had dressed that way. I told them I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to dress this way. It wasn’t as if there were lots of female role models I could learn from. Before I knew it, I was sitting before the branch manager, who looked as shocked as all the other brokers who’d just interviewed me. During the interview, he actually shared his belief that women belonged barefoot and pregnant. Seeing that I had nothing to lose, I asked him how much he’d pay me to get pregnant. He said, "Fifteen hundred dollars a month," and to my astonishment he hired me, though he also said that he figured I’d be out of there in six months. To this day, I am convinced I got the job only because he had a women’s quota to fill. Before I left the office, I was handed a book on dressing for success. I took the book and went straight to Macy’s, opened an account, and charged $3,000 worth of clothes.

I was never so scared in my life as that first day on the job. I knew I didn’t belong there. All the stockbrokers drove Mercedeses, BMWs, and Jaguars. I drove a 1967 Volvo station wagon that I bought when I sold the van. They parked their cars in the parking lot; for the first six months, I parked my car o n the street because I couldn’t afford the lot. I would get tickets knowing that I’d go to court and ask to work the tickets off with community service. The other brokers would eat out at fancy restaurants after the market closed; I got in my car and went to Taco Bell every single day and ate by myself. Still, I felt so lucky and blessed, for even though I was terrified, I was also excited. Every day I was learning new words and concepts-a

whole world was opening up to me. It was while studying to take my Series 7 exam, a test all brokers have to pass in order to sell stocks, that I read a rule that stated that a broker needed to know his or her customer-meaning, a broker could not invest a person’s money speculatively or risk their money if the customer could not afford to lose it. I had told Randy that I couldn’t afford to lose my money, that I was saving up to open a business, that all the money was loaned to me. I realized that Randy had broken this "know your customer" rule.

I marched into the manager’s office and told him that he had a crook working for him. He told me that I was a college graduate and I had to know what I was doing when I signed those papers. Besides, he said, that crook made him a lot of money. He told me to sit down, shut my mouth, and keep studying. I went back to my desk. I remembered that when I was hired, the manager had told me I wouldn’t last six months. That was just three months away. What did I have to lose? What had happened to me was not right. I had time to make that money back-I was still young-but what if Randy had done this to my mother or my grandmother or any older person? My conscience wouldn’t let me keep quiet; I had to do something, for I knew it was better to do what was right than what was easy.