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MICHAEL M. MILLER, W'84
No Time Like the Present
Michael M. Miller planned to get engaged on New Year's
Eve last year. But he could not wait.
So he popped the question just after Christmas instead,
said Patricia Skic, his fiancée. "We were going to a wedding,
and everybody at the wedding knew, and he was afraid I
would find out," Ms. Skic said.
It was not the first time Mr. Miller, 39, of Englewood,
NJ, had moved quickly. A three-sport athlete in high school,
he was recruited to be a wide receiver at the University of
Pennsylvania, said his mother, Betty Ann Miller. After college,
he fulfilled his passion for speed by skiing and riding
his Harley-Davidson.
A bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, Mr. Miller had
planned to marry Ms. Skic last month. "We were just going
to elope and throw a party," she said. "We didn't want to
spend the money for a big wedding — we were saving to buy
a house in the Hamptons."
Said his mother: "He brought pleasure to a room. He was
a joy to be around."
Copyright © 2001 by The New York Times Company.
Reprinted by permission.
TU-ANH PHAM, WG'89
Overcoming Life's Obstacles
Tu-Anh Pham was a small woman with big ambitions who
lived the way she worked: full of determination, always ready
to rise to a challenge, and intent on overcoming anything
that stood in her way. And there were several such obstacles
in her life, says her husband, Tom Knobel.
One was discrimination in the business world. In the
early 90s, at the large chemical company where she worked
as a research scientist, Pham expressed interest in a position
in marketing, and was told she didn't look the part. In
response, she applied to business schools, enrolled at
Wharton, and never looked back. Her MBA was her ticket
to consulting positions at Scientific Generics in Cambridge,
England; UMS Group in Madison, NJ; and finally,
Fred Alger Management, on the 93rd floor of the World
Trade Center.
Cultural attitudes were another obstacle. Born in Vietnam,
Pham was raised in a society — and a family — where
women aspired to technical work, not business careers. She
pursued her goals anyway and became a respected managerial
consultant and entrepreneur.
Most recently, Pham faced the challenge of infertility.
For years, she and Knobel tried to have a child without success.
They persevered, and last summer, at 42, she delivered
daughter Vivienne, now four months old. Knobel sees his
daughter as another triumph for Pham. "Tu-Anh wanted to
prove that she could do just about anything," he says, "and
she did."
On September 10th, Pham returned to work after maternity
leave. Earlier, the couple had decided that Knobel, a
former sales executive and the author of an historical novel,
would stay home to care for the new baby. He has continued
to do so, despite the challenges of single parenting.
"We are moving past the obstacles and carrying on with our
lives," says Knobel. "It's what Tu-Anh would have done."
Juliana Delany (for Wharton Alumni Magazine)
MICHAEL SAN PHILLIP, W'67
Family First
Michael San Phillip was a man of many passions. Since
his days at Penn, where he played football and lacrosse, he
reveled in healthy competition and spent hours perfecting
his tennis, paddleball and golf games. He loved his community
of Ridgewood, NJ, where he volunteered to teach tennis
to local kids. He was passionate about his 33-year career as
an equities trader, and about his most recent job as a vice
president at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, a banking boutique
on the 104th floor of 2 World Trade Center.
But most of all, San Phillip was passionate about family:
his wife, Lynne, whom he first met while vacationing at the
Jersey Shore, and his two daughters, Jill Abbott, 34, and
Carrie San Phillip, 31. "His family was the most important
thing," says Abbott, who is pregnant. "He was expecting
his first grandchild, and he was really looking forward to it."
After graduating from Wharton in 1967, Michael joined
Halgarten and Company, a New York brokerage house, then
Merrill Lynch, where he remained for 26 years until joining
Sandler O'Neill. "He was very involved with the onset of
electronic trading throughout his career," says Lynne San
Phillip. "It's an exciting field, and for him it was always an
interesting place to be."
Today, Michael's passions are evident in the lives of his
daughters. Both played college tennis, which their father
taught them. In 1993, Abbott graduated from the Fels
School at the University of Pennsylvania. "It was wonderful
to walk down Locust Walk with my father," she remembers.
Carrie San Phillip, who received an MBA from Pace
University, is a business analyst with Lehman Brothers.
Abbott, a senior events coordinator at the Winterthur
Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, recently learned
that her co-workers are dedicating a bench to her father.
It will face one of Abbott's own passions: The Enchanted
Woods, a fanciful children's garden at Winterthur that she
played a key role in developing. "I like to think about all the
children who will come to sit on Dad's bench," she says.
Juliana Delany (for Wharton Alumni Magazine)
As of the time we went to press, we were unable to
reach family and friends of J. Howard Boulton and
Hideya Kawauchi. If you would like to share your
memories of these individuals, please e-mail us so
that we may run profiles of them in our Spring issue
(magazine@wharton.upenn.edu).
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