Nissue #20: Gloria Duffy, President & CEO of the Commonwealth Club.
My first time going to the Commonwealth Club was in 1999 to listen to legendary author Paul Auster. Years later, I volunteered at the Club and at some point became a board member, and that’s when I first really got to know Gloria. A personal career highlight for me came from working on a gigantic fundraising campaign that she led to help build the Club’s stunning new San Francisco headquarters.
Gloria is used to being the one asking the questions, typically on the main stage with luminaries like Condoleezza Rice and Nancy Pelosi, but she was more than happy to let me do the asking this time around! In many ways, my time working with the Club — getting to meet people like James Franco, Chuck Palahniuk, and Sheryl Sandberg — is what inspired me to start In Search Of Lost Answers.
Nish: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Gloria: Being able to improve a situation for my friends, family, colleagues, HUMANITY, the environment.
Nish: What was your worst job ever?
Gloria: Raking manure from a barn. Cleaning glass shelves in a bakery. Collecting snails in our yard, for my mom, for “relocation.” Cleaning frogs out of an underground water cistern, from the inside. Cleaning algae out of a stagnant swimming pool. I could name a dozen of them – all when I was a kid and teenager.
Nish: What was your first job ever?
Gloria: For pay, outside my family, writing for Contra Costa County local newspapers, covering political events like a national governor’s conference in Palm Springs in 1968 (age 15).
Nish: What was your best job ever?
Gloria: Dismantling nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, while serving in the Clinton Administration.
Nish: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Gloria: Taking too long to review my communications and to press “send.”
Nish: What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Gloria: Bigotry, discrimination, prejudice.
Nish: What’s some advice you’d give to yourself at 23?
Gloria: Be patient waiting in that trailer in the RAND Corporation parking lot for your security clearance to come through. Remember that the clearance will be helpful in your work for the next 45+ years . . . in the meantime, enjoy the beach in Santa Monica!
Nish: What is your greatest extravagance?
Gloria: Comfy socks from Ozone and Bombas.
Nish: You have exclusive dinner reservations for 4, excluding family and close friends, who are the three people (alive, dead, or imaginary) you’d invite?
Gloria: Songwriter/singer Jackson Browne (had lunch with him once but not enough time to talk), Barak Obama (attended my college but I’ve never met him), my great-grandmother Hannah Redinger who moved her large family from Pennsylvania to Pasadena in 1895.
Nish: What is the theme song of your professional life?
Gloria: Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Nish: What is your motto?
Gloria: Live in the Light.
Nish: What is something you’re really excited about right now?
Gloria: Adapting to the COVID-caused shifts in society so the Commonwealth Club can do an even better job helping our citizens communicate with one another in respectful, fact-based ways.
End Interview.
P.S. If you go up to the roof of the Club for an event, there’s a bench with my son Dash’s name on it. He came up with the inscription. The view from up there is something to behold.