Christopher Reich

I was born in Tokyo, Japan on November 12, 1961. No, my father wasn’t with the military. In fact, he’s Swiss, and was in Japan running a travel agency that sent Japanese tourists to America. You know that old stereotype of the Asian tourist with the camera glued to their eyes. Now you know who’s responsible! Willy Wolfgang Reich.

We moved back to the States in 1965 and settled in Los Angeles. I attended Carl Curtis School before moving over to Harvard School for Boys (now Harvard-Westlake), where I graduated in 1979. Some people say you learn more in high school than in college. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I definitely learned as much. A few of my teachers, among them Dr. John Johnson, Father John Gill, and Jerome Margolis, made a lasting impact on my life and I’m grateful to them.

A highlight of my high school years was a summer spent at Outward Bound East Africa located on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was fifteen and you can pretty much imagine how exciting it was to attend a camp in Kenya. At least, it was exciting until we discovered that every morning we had to run a mile and then jump into a frigid pool and swim a length before being “allowed” to begin our daily chores.