To shine a light on the transformative power of tuition assistance, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of alumni who were grateful recipients during their Academy years.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
When Jim Meketa ‘65 set his eyes on the stars above Albuquerque, he had no idea how far they would take him.
His family moved to town in 1952, when the sparse traffic lights on Central Avenue still left the night sky a vast blackness, and Jim was mesmerized by the heavens blazing down from it. He saved his earnings from weeding yards and delivering papers to buy a six-inch telescope, then stayed up late cataloging and sketching galaxies and nebulas.
There were much larger telescopes, used for tracking Russian satellites, at Kirtland Air Force Base, where his dad worked as a draftsman, and one evening when some amateur astronomers borrowed one for a “star party,” Jim and his dad got invited. The middle schooler so impressed the adult attendees with his knowledge of astronomy that one took him aside and told him about a new school in town he ought to apply to, the Albuquerque Academy for Boys.
At that time, the Academy mostly catered to the children of doctors and lawyers, Jim recalled, and his parents, who were still climbing out of poverty, discouraged him. But he took the admission test anyway and was offered a full scholarship.
Jim had some catching up to do. On Fridays, when students were required to don coats and neckties, he had to borrow an ill-fitting outfit from a neighbor. But he set his mind on winning over his new classmates. He was a quick learner, and though small and asthmatic, he joined the soccer and football teams.
Most of all, he embraced the academic rigor of his classes, where it wasn’t enough to get the correct answer if you couldn’t also explain why it was right. For a kid who’d never been to a museum, whose home had no art on its walls, the school was a portal to somewhere new. “The sheer size of the human experience was revealed to me, opened up,” he said.
And that world was one he intended to join. The crew of friends he ran with outside of school were increasingly getting into trouble, mostly “juvenile mischief,” but he could see the trajectory led no place good. At the Academy, he said, “I saw a door out, an escape hatch.”
After graduating, he went on to Harvard to study physics, in hopes of a job in the federal government’s blossoming space program. But he graduated into a recession and jobs were scarce.
Fortunately, he’d also gotten interested in computers, which at the time were room-sized machines, and he began automating tasks for banks. Later, while helping modernize the management of Harvard’s endowment, he started consulting with pension funds. Over the half-century that followed, his business, Meketa Investment Group, grew into a 250-person enterprise, today overseeing more than $2 trillion in investments.
Jim says one of the company’s core values is a love of excellence for its own sake, which he traces back to the Academy. “Every day we come to work and we try to do a better job than the day before, not because they get you a raise or promotion or a bonus—those things just happen—but because it feels so damn good to give your best.”
But he never let work crowd out his other passions—photography, travel, history, architecture, aviation. “I have never in my life worked a 40-hour week. That would bore me to death,” he said. And he hasn’t stopped gazing up at the stars, either.
Cover Photo: Spelunking in 1963