Peter Taylor still lives half a mile from where he lived as a 10 year old boy. After spending his earlier youth in Leimart Park, his family moved to Silver Lake, still his home and his favorite Los Angeles neighborhood. Read more about Taylor, a managing director in the public finance department of Barclays Capital, below, and check out his discussion of California’s cash crisis here.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. The classical music station, every morning at 5:15.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. Just that classical music station for 10 minutes before I pull myself out of bed. Otherwise I listen to Bloomberg or CNBC.
Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Consensus.
Q. What comforts you?
A. When things work well.
Q. What inspires you?
A. When I see examples of democracy working.
Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Hard-working, pragmatic, committed, athletic, and a believer.
Q. If you could live in any time, past, present or future, when would it be?
A. The Italian renaissance…. when great thinkers and artists were the rock stars.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A gin and tonic because it’s easy. I do like an occasional martini.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. When my kids were younger, my one extravagance was to try to take nice vacations with them.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I think I’d like to work in the higher education arena. I don’t know if I’d be a professor or an administrator.
Q. Whose talent would you like to have?
A. I would like to have the consensus-building skills of Ralph Bunche.
Q. What is your favorite holiday?
A. Memorial Day. Not to be selfish, but it’s the day that typically my family can all get together…. My father owns a very old and frankly very rickety cabin up in Big Bear and we all converge on that. I barbeque for everybody.
Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. The freedom I had, at a time in this city’s history, where you could be a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old and get on your bike at nine in the morning and tell your parents you’d be back at five. We thought nothing of riding to the beach, 20 miles each way. Or we’d ride around downtown and go over the hill into the San Fernando Valley and explore.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. My house…. It’s not a big place but it’s a nice little retreat.
Q. What is the most unusual time, place or situation in which you had a brilliant idea?
A. I had the misfortune of being in New York on Sept 11, 2001…. We were staying in a hotel between the towers. The brilliant idea was to run very fast, go to our offices across the street, gather up our colleagues and clients, jump in a car and drive straight across the country. We were home in just a couple of days, and the country was still in shock, all things considered. Rather than being 3000 miles away from home we were all there, with our families.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to have a beer with?
A. Benvenuto Cellini, a renaissance man in the true sense of the word.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.