Shootings. Shootings. Good afternoon. And welcome to todays distinguished speakers series. A proud superintendent of the Windsor School district and the chair. And out to Community Members for this very special event where we c can to highlight Dicks Sporting Goods in his new book which i could get a little early to read its a great story. And we are thrilled to have you here today to share your w story. And then to draw attention to the Business Academy students and we are thrilled to have them here today in particular. And with that forum is a Membership Organization of how they share a commitment then to strengthen the bond between the two. And then to enrich the university as we work to establish the premier university we welcome only those that are interested to that Incredible Organization that brings people together for events just like this. For those Staff Members that are happy to tell you more information if you would like to join. As a courtesy check to be sure your phones are silent. And then to ask some questions at the microphone that will be available if you raise your hand staff will come over with the microphone. It is my pleasure to introduce ourde great president of the university. [applause] thank you to all our members. And of the big and tom area but what he has done for us over the course of his career and of those investments the corporation has made in this area and the belief that they deserve the Distribution Center thank you for all of that. [applause]ll i bet a lot of you have read through it my dog enjoyed mine. But it is an exciting semester. But did you hear a faculty member won the nobel prize . [applause] chemistry. And to be of faculty 51 31 years after he left exxon. He said i had to leave to find a place that would support me. He couldve gone anywhere. And with a humble man we had an event for him last friday. And the chairman but what is reallyaf wonderful are those students that came up to him he did not leave until he signed autographs and took adpictures with every single student that we had it taken to another event to another performance that night but again he gave remarks and stayed on stage a after pictures and shook hands at everybody there. He was a last one to leave. And a great ambassador in the future. 2900 freshman, 1600 new graduate students thats a record for us we are working really hard to increase the graduate enrollment. Ninetyone students in the doctor of Pharmacy Program which was one student over our goal now we have 231 students in the program. In that cohort next year then they will graduate their first class in the spring of 2021. Little more than 14000 undergraduates really smart kids the average store score 1370 so its a great group of students. And then to bring their money from long island to spend it here. [laughter] also a new school of nursing is change to the college of nursing now the Decker College i noticed some Board Members from decker are here today. Thank you so much. [applause] and with that are physical therapy programs with speech and language pathology and the construction is still ongoing if you are a construction geek like im. And then to be a stateoftheart facility one of the original buildings and then to construct that r d building and the pharmacy and also the old yellow building with those Industry Partners with those Co Working Spaces with the rest of the university. And then to open the elder claire on older care clinic a supporter of all the activities there but if you look at 4246 that building is gone now it is a parking lot for now but we are holding it in case industry would like to partner with us sparkle thats all i have to say today. All stand all the time so we will talk a lot about it to see those great achievements so thank you for being here at first i like to introduce his sister. [applause] first of all thank you so much for coming here today as well to introduce my fathe father, author of the book. And new york yankee new york yankee pitcher yogi berra. Thank you. S [laughter] you will not be disappointed about the history of a bait and tackle shop just a few blocks up the road from the very location someone more than anybody else i will briefly tell you a few sentences. Like back when he only had two stores in my stepmom sister died of cancer decided to do something. And had a bass Fishing Contest he will not tell you when the charities are trying to feed the families to donate over 100 turkeys when word got out there was not enough he donated more. Keep inn mind this is when we were robbing peter to pay paul. He wont tell you about his laser focus in the Incredible Mission to expand the store with manifest destiny. And Dicks Sporting Goods thats how we referred to it growing up. And also on the betterment to recognize the life lessons the team can instill in the individual. And then to have Sports Matters Foundation which i will tell you aboutmo later. He also wont tell you about the phone call he got from me in 2011 when we were hit with a flood and said what do they need i said anything and everythingy we got. He said how do you distribute it i said through the school because they know the families in need. The next day truck after truck after truck came rolling into our area hundreds of thousands of dollars in backpacks and clothing to help those who had lost everything he also wont tell you that when the company needed a new Fulfillment Center or Distribution Center to service the northeast corridor binghamton was his first choice of those 400 jobs created with the new stateoftheart Distribution Center0 now open 10 miles up the road. One of theul cliches is never forget where you came from. He never forgot. This is where we came from. Yet another School Shooting happened in parkland florida. For what he called me to tell me of his commitment to do something, what i will tell you his voice was not that as a ceo of a milliondollar corporation. He was just my brother, a kid from binghamton angry and wanting to do something. Ks spod stack. [applause] in queue. Thank you. Thank you everyone for allowing me to be here thank you to my sister, president stenger, everyone else that is here and to transport university the nobel prize is like us so congratulations. That is a terrific. When my sister again, kim, thank you for that introduction so for all of us who had siblings, brothers or sisters, how many . If they said they would introduce you anything like this and you thought about all the things you did to them when you are a kid they would probably make you pretty nervous. Come all the things i did to my poor sister was just terrible. I remember one time she always told me she would get me back for it and she hasnt yet. I thought this would be it. [laughter] there are two things i did to her that were all of you brothers here if you would understand this so she made fun of me one day we had a cottage at the lake and she wanted to go water skiing but she had been busting me just like a little sister who can be a pain in the neck and i said yeah, ill take you waterskiing. Sure. We got waterskiing and we used to go around the leg twice a week go around the lake the second time and if she went around the lake there was this huge thing of lily pads. You dont want to go swimming in the lily pads so i took my sister right through these lily pads and as she got the middle of the lily pads i went [laughter] and drop that engine and dropped my poor sister in the lily pads. She was yelling and screaming and i had not heard the words she was screaming off back then i pulled her back out. I thought that was one thing she do and tell that story and get back at me. Another thing i thought she might say is that we were at a event and our kids were little and she looked at me and i was always playing tricks on my sister and she looked at me and said that woman over there, her son goes to school with timmy, whats her name . I said thats mary. She said okay, great. Goes running over and talk to her and she comes back and she punches me as hard as she could and said you are such an hole. Ive never seen a woman before in my life. [laughter] thank you for that. I thought you could have been you could have busted me and you wouldve had every right to do so. I thank you for allowing me to be here today to talk about basically three things. How that got started and how we grow our business and then around sports and whats happening and you sports day and how important that is and about our what we did for a firearms standpoint and why i wrote the book but first of all i like to talk about how this business originally started not far from where we are right now in binghamington but this was the original store my father started paid the he started this business he was a kid working at burgers not far from here and he was an avid fisherman. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was young so we spent time fishing in the rivers with his grandfather and so the army surplus was starting to dry up in 1948 or so and [inaudible] said my father and said i know youre a big fisherman so can you put together an order for us to get into the tackle business so my father went home and put this order together to get into the tackle business and as he told the story and i talked from the book every year he told this story he stayed up later. By the time he told the story to my kids he stayed up all night long and it was only like two yellow sheets of paper so i have no idea what he was doing all night long but he said he stayed up all night and went back in the next day and gave the order to [inaudible] and he was in a bad mood that day and told my father he was a dumb kid did not know what he was joined by my father grabbed a piece of paper, walked out the story and never went back it went to his grandmothers house and talked to his grandmother about it and he was upset and this was a depression written family bird they really had nothing but daddy script and scrape for every thing they had. His grandmother finally said what would it take for you to do this yourself and he said 300. She got up and walked to the back of his old kitchen into this cookie jar and reached into this cookie jar and took out 300 and gave it to him and said go start your own business. He went to start this business and it started really small and we always used to tease him about this about how small it was because if you look right here this business was so small the post office did not give it a full Mailing Address because it was 453 and a half court street. Thats a pretty small place. He ran his business and did well some years and knots while some other years and actually went out of business and opened up a second store and went out of business. Six weeks or eight weeks later or so got back in the business but when he went out of business he made sure nobody lost any money. He made sure he gave all the product he could back to the suppliers and sold his house and car and had to move back in with his mother, my mother was pregnant with kim and she had to move back in with her parents but he made sure nobody lost any money. Eight weeks later he got back into business and back on court street and always did okay but was never he was always in debt but had a great story that he would always look at me and say which i did not understand at the time but he always look and say if i had what i owed i truly would be a wealthy man. A lot of people feel that way. He had a great empathy for kids and was a tough guy but my father was a tough Old School Guy and he wasnt this warm and cuddly guy on the outside but he had a good heart on the inside and one of the things he did was he treated how Little League was played in binghamington. There used to be four teams that had Little League in binghamington, one on the northeast and south and west side and he thought that was not right that more kids should have an opportunity to play but he got together with his buddies and a junior high pharmacy and put together these league had four teams on each side of town. Now instead of 60 kids been able to play there were now two and a 40 kids who could play plus they put a farming together and they were playing orb organized baseball and they had a place to be coached and men toward and they could go and stay out of trouble. He did that with one prerequisite only. That prerequisite was you cannot buy the equipment to start the league from his business because he did not want to look like he was doing that to better his own nest, so to speak. He started Little League and he did not know how many thousands and thousands of kids came through that Little League right now and we are redoing the field up there and it is so great to go back there to that field today and see the place where we grow up and had so much fun with. My father loved binghamington and always thought you had to the community had to do wellin order to do well. He told me when i was 13 years old he would put me to work because he would teach me responsibility. When i was 13 years old i went to work in the store and when i was 15 i worked fulltime in summer vacations and christmas vacations and i had to do that all through high school and i can tell you right now honestly, i hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with that business. I got ready to go off to college and thought id number going back to that business. I remember my father drop me off at school and we had the National Lampoon vacation station wagon, wood on the side and ours was white as opposed to green but i remember watching them leave because i did not want anything to do with that but i remember watching them drive away and i remember the only thing that came into my mind was Martin Luther kings famous speech that free at last, free at last, thank god i am free at last. Im never going to go back to that place. As i got ready to get out of my freshman year i got a job as a law clerk and was so proud of it and came back until my father going to work and i will be a law clerk which is a gophers gofer but i would be there and i was excited and he looked at me and said i cant tell you exactly what he said [laughter] but he said you are working in the store but this is what put food on the table and what gets you to go to college so you are working right here. I worked there. It all worked there again and tim myers was there by this time and i can tell you that i still hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with it. As i get ready to get out of college and no interest in coming back into the business. My dad got real sick and had a double bypass operation back in 1975 and he never quite made it back emotionally or physically from that experience and so i think im going off to coopers or Price Waterhouse and i wanted to go to law school and i found myself having to come back into the business to help. My father was sick and i was the oldest of five and i came back into these two Little Stores in binghamington, new york and something happened, i dont know if it was six months, eight months, nine months but at some point i fell in love with the business. Its a love affair that i talk about that is still on fire today. I still love getting up in the morning and going to work and love the people i work with and love that it gives us an opportunity to make a difference in somethings in this world whether the sports piece or firearms piece. When you are working in retail you can see people at their very best. You get to see people at their very best and one of the times you can see people at their very best is at christmas time but i remember it was around 4 00 oclock in the afternoon and Christmas Eve and this woman came barreling into the store and she says i see her and i say can i help you and she says i have to find a gift for my sister in law. I said no problem weve got these sweaters right here and i took her to this stack of sweaters we just mark down and they were not selling very well because they were marked down and i said we got these sweaters are tier and she looked at them and looked at me and said those are the ugliest sweaters ive ever seen. I looked at her and i said yeah, they really are and thats why we marked them down but right over here we got other sweaters and i looked over at her and she Still Standing at these other sweaters so i walked back over and said ive got other ones over here and she picked up this sweater, ugliest of the bunch and said you know what, i will take this one for my sisterinlaw biggest [inaudible] ive never met. I said Merry Christmas and off she went. [laughter] a couple of things. I will embarrass a couple of people here today. I will tell you a couple of stories about people in binghamington who had an impact on my life. Katie, is she here . Katie, standup one second. [applause] i will tell you a katie story. I wasnt the best student in the world. Katie when i told her that we talked a few years ago and i thought she would say no, you are not that bad but just like when she said no, you really werent. I did not apply it myself as much as i should have. I was taking a friend from katie and we were getting ready for the final and she said and looked at me and said eddie, you will not pass the final. I said i know. [laughter] she said listen, i will tell you what. If you write a paper on a french author, french artist, anything french, threepage paper she said i will exempt you from the final. I said kate, thats great. She said one more stipulation. I said what is it to . I will write the paper and she looked at me and said last stipulation is you have to promise me you will never take another french class. [laughter] i never took another french class. So underrated, underpaid, underappreciated and one of my favorite movies is to stir hollands opus. The teacher had no idea the impact he had on those kids until after they graduated and he was ready to retire so