Normally, banks transport large sums of cash in armored trucks. At least that’s the legal way to move bundles of big bills.
But David Fay was introduced to an alternate method when he was a teenager working for a bank in his hometown of Clinton, Md. Because the branch where he worked was outside the armored truck’s regular collection route, the bank president asked Fay to drive the money in the back of his old station wagon to a larger branch 10 miles away. So Fay stacked bundles of money — amounts ranging from $200,000 to $500,000 — in the back seat and covered it with a rug.
In recognition of this special duty, Fay received a bonus from the president. His pay was bumped up to $1.40 an hour from $1.25 an hour.
“They weren’t going to pay me just $1.25 an hour for transporting half a million dollars for them,” Fay joked.
While transporting piles of cash wasn’t his first job, it was certainly the most memorable for Fay, the president and CEO of The Bushnell, Hartford’s performing arts center.
His very first job was delivering the Washington Star Evening News when he was 12. He began work at the Clinton bank when he was 16 and stuck with it until he left for college in Illinois.
Leaving the banking world and his $1.40 an hour job behind, Fay studied speech and communications at Wheaton College. There he worked in the mailroom and did some painting and sanding for the residents in the area near the suburban Chicago campus.
In his junior and senior year of college, Fay took a paying job as a tenor soloist for a local church choir. Upon graduation, he entered the theater arts graduate program at Northwestern University.
After graduation from Northwestern, Fay got his first career job teaching theater at the National College of Education in Evanston, Ill. He remembers telling his wife, “Honey, they’re giving me a five-figure salary … $10,000.”
After the National College of Education, Fay managed several other theaters, but remembers when he received a call from a headhunter about an opening at The Bushnell.
“I love to make money,” Fay said in describing the appeal of his position at The Bushnell. “I like that The Bushnell is a commercially driven institution with a mission that isn’t commercially driven.”
