Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502100025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHERINE CROCKER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
In the cramped conference room of a small Manhattan investment banking firm, where the walls are lined with imposing legal tomes, Milton Fisher is discussing his passion - mergers and acquisitions.
He has three currently in the works. In all of them, big, opening moves have just been made and he's ``sweating out'' their denouements. There's a lot at stake. But not the parties' net income or performance on the stock market.
What's involved here is something as basic as the future happiness of three men and three women. Fisher, investment banker, attorney and author (and wearer of well-tailored, conservative suits) is also a matchmaker.
You won't find Fisher in the yellow pages under marriage brokers. There are no pictures of happily married couples on the walls to document his successes. He has no index card file or computer disk with the names and personal data of people seeking his services.
And he charges no fee, although he does like a good table near the dance floor at the wedding reception.
But over the past five decades, Fisher estimates he has set up thousands of blind dates, scores of which evolved into relationships and 35 of which he knows resulted in marriage. And, he adds proudly, none has ended in divorce.
``Helping a person find a best friend, a spouse, is one of the greatest things you can do for them,'' Fisher says, leaning back in a chair with one leg on the conference table. Then he pauses and says, ``That is not as strong as I would like it to be.''
Another pause. Then, animatedly, in his big, gravelly voice: ``Talk about the greater good! I don't know of any greater good you can confer on somebody when you consider how much of their lives is involved and also how it affects the quality of their lives.''
Fisher knows. He has had two wonderful marriages. After his first wife died, he met his second wife on a blind date.
On a rainy winter day, Fisher's most recent attempts were very much on his mind. The matchmaker, who prefers the title ``marriage activist,'' had set up blind dates for three couples the week before, and he was anxiously awaiting reports on how they fared.
``I'm sweating it out,'' he says. ``I've got no feedback, yet.''
The couples included two high-powered Yale graduates who had finally realized that ``there was more to life than successful careers''; a receptionist and an artist, and a recently widowed young woman and a gardener, both of whom, he says, were Catholic and had ``a good shot at liking each other.''
Fisher says his interest in mergers of the heart started when he was a child in New York City and his parents, immigrants from Austria, frequently opened up their home to young eastern European women looking for a place to hold their weddings.
``They inculcated in me a sense that it was a good thing, that marriage was good and to try and help,'' he says.
His first successful match took place when he was a student at Brooklyn College. As a joke, he told a shy friend that one of the young ladies in English 101 was crazy about him. ``He shocked me by saying, `Great, set up a date,' '' Fisher recalls. The problem was that he now had to come up with a young woman. There were 14 in the class. Fisher picked one out and told her his friend ``had a crush on her.''
After class, the novice matchmaker introduced them.
``It was spontaneous combustion,'' he says. They are still married.
Most of the couples Fisher has matched up either sought him out after learning of him through word-of-mouth, or he knew of them through social and professional circles. Wherever he is, Fisher says, whether it's on the commuter train home to Connecticut, playing tennis or teaching his adult education course in ``Applied Creativity,'' his eyes and ears are open for potential candidates.
``I never meet anybody for the first time without checking and finding out whether they're single or not,' Fisher says.
And he added that his how-to book, ``Haven't You Been Single Long Enough: A Practical Guide for Men or Women who Want to Get Married'' (Wildcat Publishing Co. Inc., 1992), has helped broaden his pool of interested parties.
Fisher says that when he meets a man or woman, he makes a mental note of their age, sex, education, religion, style, appearance (not necessarily in that order), and then throws in a good dose of intuition.
If it all adds up to someone he doesn't like, Fisher promptly discards the person from his mental roster. But if he likes them, he writes down their name, number and address ``on little pieces of paper that end up all over my house, my office, in my old coats, in my suits.''
He claims there are ``very, very few cases'' in his life where his filing system has failed.
Fisher gladly recounts his matchmaking successes, and his book is full of them.
There was the time, for example, that he set up a couple who had hated each other as teen-agers at summer camp. He was shy. She was beautiful. But Fisher thought they belonged together. Both were aghast when they realized who they were being set up with. Today, they're married.
Fisher also gladly recounts his failures.
At the top of his list is the ``tall, handsome, brilliantly educated writer, raconteur, actor, playwright'' and ``the brilliant gal who had a Ph.D. and was also a writer and attractive.''
He set up a blind date for them at a restaurant. They both went there at the appointed time. Later, each angrily called Fisher and complained about being stood up. They didn't want to try again. Maybe she saw him, he saw her, and they didn't like what they saw.
Fisher, who has a true-life story to illustrate just about every point he makes, recalls attending the wedding of a couple he had matched up. The bride's grandmother, he says, came up to him and whispered in Yiddish: ```Milton, I thank you on behalf of the whole family. And I also want to tell you that for this kind of work you'll go straight to heaven.'''
Says Fisher: ``I think there is no business merger that can match that bonus.''
by CNB