Frederick K. Heller, Jr. – 50th Reunion Essay

Frederick K. Heller, Jr.

7268 Carrizo Drive

La Jolla, CA 92037

fheller@sandiego.edu

858-568-2277

Spouse(s): Andrea M. Heller (1969)

Child(ren): Jenny Evelyn Saghatelian (1979)

Education: Yale College BA 1969, Yale Law School JD 1973

Career: Law: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, London, 2001-2017, Partner in Charge ten years, Head of International Finance Practice; Kilpatrick Stockton, 1973-2000, Started Brussels office, Managed Brussels and London offices: Teaching: University of San Diego Law School 2017 to present. Journalism: Before Law School, Wall Street Journal, other newspapers.

Avocations: Reading; international affairs.

College: Silliman

Chance shaped my life, twice.

By chance of birth, I lived my first 18 years in upstate South Carolina. There I learned to read, to play sports on red clay, to speak with an accent that fades but never disappears. There a sense of place and people, especially endemic to the south, took root.

There, also by chance, a teacher told me that places like Yale offered financial aid based on need. Schoolmates fortunate enough to attend college did not go north, but that chance propelled me to Yale. From Yale, the rest of my life unfolded, in ways that would not have happened without those two chance occurrences.

Yale introduced me to the life of the mind. Professors, courses, our classmates—they all exuded intellect and curiosity, which I tried to emulate.

A blind date at Yale introduced me, in 1966, to Andrea Mancuso. A Bronx New Yorker and a hill country South Carolinian made an unlikely but fortuitous match. Andrea’s love of family and sensibility to places and people has guided our lives since we married in 1969.

After college, I went to the Wall Street Journal but quickly moved to the local paper in Atlanta, where Andrea was completing her masters at Emory. We lived for a year above a Gulf Oil station. For law school, we returned to New Haven, where Andrea studied child development at the Gesell Institute. On graduation, we began what we expected to be the steady and predictable life of grown-ups in the emerging metropolis of Atlanta. Our daughter, Jenny, arrived in 1979.

A bit more than 10 years after Jenny arrived, however, we left the United States for Europe. We spent most of that grown-up life there, first in Brussels and then in London. Jenny attended school in Brussels speaking French, left Europe for Harvard and then McKinsey, returned as a journalist and a student at Cambridge, and finally settled in the US My law practice ranged across Europe, Russia and the CIS, Africa and the Middle East. Andrea and I acquired British citizenship. Our home for more years than any other sits in a cobbled mews, not far from Buckingham Palace.

At 24, Jenny was diagnosed with lupus, an unpredictable chronic illness that has become progressively more severe. For a few years, she continued doing medical research at a Harvard hospital, but lupus stymied her career plans. She married Alan Saghatelian, a Harvard professor, in London in 2013. She and her husband moved to San Diego in 2014. Andrea and I retired to La Jolla in 2017, finally near Jenny and Alan. Now I teach international law and run a program for international professionals at the University of San Diego.

South Carolina gave me an appreciation for people and places. Yale gave me our family and then gave our family opportunities to live and work around the world. These two chance occurrences combined to transform our life, so far, into a series of adventures. With luck, there will be many more to come.