Greenwich multimillionaire Ned Lamont has served as Connecticut’s governor for nearly four years and spent the previous three decades as a successful business entrepreneur in cable television and digital technology.
But the 68-year-old Democrat says the greatest job he ever had was serving as editor of a small weekly newspaper in Vermont that he produced with a group of talented friends. Lamont’s experience at the now-defunct weekly opens a window into his views on life, work, public service and the role of government.
It was 1977, and Lamont was 23 years old and looking for his first major job out of college after graduating from Harvard.
“Everybody who graduated from my class tried to go to a banking program or something like that, and I went and [joined] a weekly newspaper in Vermont called the Black River Tribune in Ludlow, Vermont,” Lamont said in an interview.
The biggest employer in Ludlow at the time was General Electric Company, an iconic manufacturing powerhouse that in 1977 ranked among the most influential and profitable companies in the nation. Lamont’s experience with GE in his younger days came full circle four decades later.
“GE, as they had a habit of doing, pulled up roots, shut down the factory [in Ludlow], laid everybody off, and this was a community that said, ‘How are we going to survive?’” Lamont said. “So I covered it for about a year and a half. That’s when I started covering selectmen and school boards and departments of economic development and local business.
“So it was sort of an ironic parallel when GE yanked roots in Connecticut and left their building empty and moved up to Boston. We were all worried, ‘Oh, my God, last one out, turn out the lights.’ There was a certain parallel there. I was thinking about Connecticut when I was running (in 2018), the same way I thought about Ludlow back in 1979.”
For both Ludlow and Connecticut, the moves by GE prompted contemplation of economic reassessment following the departure of an iconic, industrial giant. GE manufactured aircraft engines in Ludlow in three shifts in a 24-hour factory, and the company still competes today at other locations with East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney.
Lamont continues to see comparisons with Connecticut.
“Ludlow reinvented themselves as an amazing tourist destination, and that created a real estate boom, and it’s an incredibly vibrant city,” Lamont told The Courant. “I think Connecticut is reinventing itself — digital media and fintech, the next generation of financial services. DCG and Tomo and all those next-generation companies that are growing and expanding in Stamford. It’s life science and bioscience, now devices.”
DCG, which stands for Digital Currency Group, is often touted by Lamont as one of the largest cryptocurrency companies in the world. Tomo Networks, also based in Stamford, focuses on the real estate industry as a financial-technology firm.
The financial firms of the future, Lamont says, are only one part of the new Connecticut.
“They’ve added on probably 50 incredible startups in the Greater New Haven area,” Lamont said. “I was just talking to one that was just bought and they’re expanding there — a medical device company. Positives build on positives. It’s a virtuous cycle. Now, people want to be there. There’s something for their trailing spouse to do. It’s half the price of Boston, and I can get to Boston a half an hour faster within a few years if I’ve got to go up there.”
As governor, Lamont is Connecticut’s chief economic cheerleader, pushing the positive narrative at a time when his opponent, Republican Bob Stefanowski of Madison, says that the middle class has been getting battered by high gasoline prices and the highest inflation in the past 40 years. Among other issues, the fall election campaign has centered on the state of the economy, jobs, abortion and inflation.
Looking back on his days in Vermont, Lamont said the community represented a harbinger for change as it was transformed from being dominated by an old-line manufacturer that has lessons for Connecticut.
“I think Ludlow was the canary in the coal mine,” Lamont said.
Formative period of life
Lamont worked with an All-Star team of highly talented, confident Ivy League students who were proud of their work on the weekly paper in Vermont. The staff of aspiring journalists included several who later became widely known, such as author Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine and columnist Alex Beam of The Boston Globe. They also worked with Christopher “Kim” Elliman from the Rockefeller family and the Douglas Elliman real estate empire. At one point, several reporters actually lived above the newspaper office.
Lamont worked with an eccentric friend from boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy named Will Hunter, who founded the paper and later graduated from Harvard Law School. When Hunter went overseas as a Rhodes Scholar, Lamont stepped in to lead the paper, including selling advertising and making the payroll.
“You could have reinvented The New York Times with the team we had up there — or at least they thought so in their own brains, I can tell you that,” Lamont said.
Hunter said in an interview that the days in Vermont had a major impact on Lamont.
“Whatever common touch Ned has comes from his experience in Ludlow working on the Black River Tribune,” said Hunter, a former state senator who still lives nearby in the small town of Cavendish. “Unlike Exeter or Harvard, where there are buildings named after his family, nobody cares who Ned Lamont is when he arrives at a selectmen’s meeting in Cavendish in the summer of 1977. He’s very personable and has a good sense of humor, and he had a good appreciation for a lot of the characters he ran into.”
At Exeter, Lamont did not chat with classmates about his family’s immense wealth that dates back to his great-grandfather, Thomas, who was a partner with famed financier J.P. Morgan.
“He didn’t have to talk about it,” Hunter said. “You knew that if you got sick, you went to the Lamont Infirmary. If you wanted to look at art, you went to the Lamont Gallery. Some of your friends lived in Lamont Hall. … The same at Harvard with the Lamont Library.”
The biggest celebrity in the region in the Lamont years was famed Russian dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lived in Cavendish, a tiny, rural town near Ludlow. He lived in an obscure area 2 miles down a dirt road in a home that was so deep into the property that it could not be seen from the road.
Solzhenitsyn had raised local concerns when he surrounded his property with barbed wire as a security precaution. But local snowmobilers were upset that they could no longer cut through his 51-acre property.
“He came to the town meeting once,” Lamont said. “He explained, in Russian through his translator, that he thought the KGB was after him.”
Lamont and his friends all recall their time at the Black River Tribune as among the best days of their lives.
“We were all young and single and didn’t have a care in the world,” Hunter said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Cable company to governor
After leaving Vermont, Lamont received a master’s degree from Yale University School of Management, one of the nation’s top business schools. By that time, he had dropped his thoughts about becoming a journalist. Instead, he moved into an industry of the future with the then-emerging cable television industry.
As the founder of Lamont Television Systems, which later changed to its name to Lamont Digital, he created a niche by providing wiring on college campuses from coast to coast. That included overseeing the wiring of more than 400 college campuses with 1 million students — from the University of Connecticut to UCLA and Berkeley.
In a fast-moving business, Lamont now knows that he clearly missed some business opportunities that would have expanded his cable company. By not growing faster when he was the biggest player on college campuses, Lamont allowed another cable giant — Cox Communications — to sweep in and grab a huge chunk of the college market. He looks back and says his company could have been three times bigger.
That’s where Stefanowski steps in and says Lamont’s experience with a small cable company does not provide the proper skills for being governor.
“I think running a $24 billion operation, which is what Connecticut is, with 50,000 employees is a different skillset than running a small cable company,” Stefanowski said when asked by The Courant. “I’ve negotiated hundreds-of-millions contracts and billion-dollar contracts.”
Stefanowski added, “I don’t think he deserves another year to fix it. … I think it’s time for a change, and I think most people agree with me.”
But Lamont responded that he has already been doing the job for nearly four years — turning deficits into surpluses, pushing the state’s rainy day fund to its highest level in history and allocating more than $5 billion to reduce the state’s unfunded pension liability.
On being a multimillionaire
During the campaign, Stefanowski has also maintained several times that Lamont, whose wealth dates back generations, simply cannot relate to ordinary, middle-class Connecticut residents.
Lamont has generally remained low-key about his wealth, rarely talking about the millions that he has and never bringing up the subject himself.
Across Connecticut, many residents struggle every day, often playing the lottery in the hopes of striking it rich. That leads to a philosophical question that was posed to Lamont: Do you ever think about the fact that people in places like New Britain and Enfield play the lottery every week and even if they won $20 million, they still wouldn’t have as much money as you do?
Lamont pondered the question before responding.
“I think people know me pretty well,” Lamont said. “People know that I had a small business and helped it grow. People know that Annie has been a very successful investor in a lot of startup companies, creating thousands of really good-paying jobs out there.”
Lamont added, “It’s not where you’re from. It’s where you stand, and I think people know where I stand.”
Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com.
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