Joe O’Donnell bids Harvard Corporation adieu
During his first week as a Harvard freshman in the early 1960s, Joe O’Donnell passed the kind of personal test that would resonate for the rest of his life. Surrounded by his classmates, most of them from well-off neighborhoods and with fathers who were lawyers, doctors, and professors, O’Donnell ’67 introduced himself, without hesitation, as a guy from Everett, the son of a cop. “Everybody turned around and looked at me,” O’Donnell reminisced on a recent sunny morning in the conference room of his company, Belmont Capital LLC, located in a sleek building overlooking the Charles River. “I wasn’t worried about anything. I was physically the toughest kid in the class. It was a moment of truth, and I decided to be myself, to be truthful.” O’Donnell has carried that straightforward approach and unassuming demeanor throughout his life, and it has served him well, mostly recently as a Harvard Corporation member. After seven...