Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

174 Silvio E. Petricciani
begins at home) what I wanted to do for
my family was taken care of and so on and
so forth—and then any surplus would go
to charities. But the charities that I would
pick out—not something that would be
administered by somebody else. In other
words, if I had millions and I wanted to put a
million dollars into that University, I would go
up and say, “Here is a million dollars, but this
is where it’s going to go and where it’s going
to be spent, and it’s not going to be spent on a
bunch of administration. It’s going to be spent
exactly here. Now get your contractors and
your architects or anything else, but I want to
see to it that this money is spent exactly for
the purpose I want it to go for.”
Of course a medical school or something
like that, you would have to go through and
spend through a board of trustees and so on
and so forth. But you could still, to a certain
extent, dictate to the board of trustees, the
departments that you’d want it to go to and
so on. And that’s what my plans for the future
are. I don’t know how many years I’ve got to
go yet, and you know when you get to be sixty
years of age, you say, “Well, what do I have?
Do I have ten years, do I have twenty years, or
do I have five years?” You don’t know. But as
long as I’m alive, why these are my ambitions
to keep going ahead, forging ahead, and doing
everything that I possibly can to improve
anything that I have anything to do with. That
includes my flying.
And if I can help somebody along the
way—you become cynical after a while
because when you do help people, sometimes
they take advantage, and sometimes you
incur some substantial losses in trying to
help people. And this has happened to me
many times, and it’s usually a little different
outlook—well, it makes you a little more
cautious and wary of who you help and why.
But, you know, everybody has their illustrious
dream that they want to do things, but nobody
has any money. And of course, they come to a
person like myself and say, “Look, this is what
I’ve got;” and so on and so forth, “you be my
partner and everything, and I have so much
collateral that in the event that something
happens, you won’t lose any money, but I need
the money right now.” And you start feeling
sorry for people and you tall into a trap. Then
when the time comes if their illustrious dream
doesn’t come true, the money is spent, and all
of a sudden the collateral is gone too, so who
winds up paying? The lender, the bank, or
whatever—they come to the guy that is more
capable of paying and say, “Here, you signed
this note, so now we want our money.” And
this has happened to me many times.
I used to think many years ago that taking
them to the bank and putting them on a
note or something would offer some form
of protection, but it doesn’t offer one thing
because the bank always comes back to the
cosigner because that’s the only reason the guy
got the money to begin with— is because you
guaranteed the note. So consequently, I have
decided that’s not the way to go.
And from here on out if I feel that
somebody has something of merit, well, then
they’re going to have to be able to put up their
own share of the cash, so that I know that if
I lose, they’re going to lose also. But when
they lose with my money, and I have to pay
it back, why they’ve lost nothing, except their
idea. So, I’ve become very wary. And another
psychological thing is this: that nobody should
ever go into a business they are not well versed
in. And that means that you should not buy
into a business, a restaurant business, if you’re
in the gambling business because you don’t
know anything about that. And if you rely
on somebody to take care of it for you, pretty
soon they don’t. So you don’t let other people
handle your money because you—we’ve seen