Merritt Lutz
Alumnus, 1965, 1967
New York , New York

I work in the financial services industry. In New York City that means Wall Street usually. It always does. What I do is I invest in companies on behalf of my firm that are small, growing, exciting technology companies. And then I sit on the boards of those companies and help them become great.

I never imagined this for myself. I love it though; I just love it. I love the job; I love the firm that I work for. I just love it. It is very competitive, but I’m okay with that.

[addressing his son Reed]

“Hey, Reed, come here. Come here. How are you?”

My wife and I have an autistic son. His name is Reed. I have two sons. Reed is 32 and Jason is 22, he is the younger one. But Reed is the older one, who is autistic.

It is a tragedy for our son to be autistic. He is severely autistic. And we worked for six years on a program that where my wife would work like 12, 14 hours a day, solid, trying to retrain and break through the autism. So we did that for six years.

She is a saint on this thing. She really every day, we were going to try everything possible to bring him back and not give up. So we did that. And my wife did it, primarily. She just was relentless. And he has come back to a degree. But clearly he is not normal at all. He still doesn’t speak.

So when we moved to New York, he was unable really to cope with the noises and the activities and how fast it was and everything else like this. And he was also getting older and harder to handle.

So we found this organization, which is a national organization, called the Devereux Foundation. And it deals with autistic and other mentally handicapped people. It is a nonprofit kind of thing. And they have group homes and schools across the nation. So when he was 17, he went to one of these schools. So I got active in that because of how they treated my son.

[addressing his wife]

“Yes, I know what he wants. He wants to go in the car. [laughing] Give him a smile.”

So we see him virtually every weekend. Virtually every weekend we go up, and he has his own room at our place. It is 20 minutes from his group home.

But I sometimes understand a word or two, but I talk to him and he talks to me, and my wife talks to him. But now and then he says things to me. And I was—last year I think it was—I was standing outside at our place up north, so he was at the house, so it was dark. And I was with a friend cooking outside. And all of a sudden I hear this voice that says, “I love you.”

I thought, I said, “Ray, who said that?” to my friend and I looked and it was Reed.

And I said, “Did you say that?”

And he gets all giggly and everything else like this, and he walked away. It was amazing. I have never heard him say that again. I have never heard him say that before. It was clear as a bell—very touching, to say the least. But it was amazing. So you know, things like that are rare. That was awfully meaningful. I will remember that the rest of my life.

You know, I think that after going through all we went through, our hope is to do anything we can to make his life as it is today happier. And also I view that as all the kids that are in that predicament or other predicaments that are really almost hopeless at this point. I know that sounds like a hopeless statement, but it really isn’t. It is just that I focus now on making his life better as it is today. That is the best I can do. And any of those other kids that I could help through working and raising funds for Devereux or one of the autism research societies, I certainly would do anything I can. And there is a cure out there. I just thought it would come earlier than this.

[sound of a snare drum]

I was a drummer. I played snare drum. It was just my love. I loved it. I just loved it.

I had seen the Michigan State drumline on television. I used to, if you remember, they used to show the halftimes on television in the prehistoric years. So I saw that drumline and I thought, my god, I would do anything to be in that drumline to play with those guys. I mean, you saw all of them on television, but that clearly was the most incredible thing I had seen.

So it really got me going. It really got me going in the small college I went to. I worked like crazy so I could get my grades up. I did do that so I could transfer to Michigan State.

[Spartan Marching Band playing "MSU Fight Song"]

So I transferred to Michigan State to be in the drumline. And, eventually, after the first year, I was offered a scholarship because I didn’t have any money. I was offered a scholarship, which kept me going, and I borrowed money. And I did everything possible to be in the drumline.

So I would say that Michigan State had everything to do with any success I have now—my happiness, a lot of my happiness. I met my wife there.

And I am still very involved in Michigan State in various ways. And one of those ways is in the music and with the drumline. It changed my life. I went to school there, and I had a great time there—still a great time there. And it really got me moving, my career moving, my personal life moving, in various ways. It has truly changed my life.