One day, the summer after graduating Nyack High School, Chester Felts was laying in bed when he got a call from someone at Colgate University, where he was scheduled to start his freshman year that September.

The person from the school said there was an Office of Undergraduate Studies program at the school, but Felts didn’t think it sounded mandatory, so he didn’t go. A week later he got a call from a friend also about to start at Colgate in the fall, and she told him he needed to get to the program. The friend said the director of the program called him out for not going and instead sleeping in, and said he might not even get to enroll in the fall.

The same day he got the call, Felts and his father drove to Colgate and he started the program. Shortly after starting the program, he noticed that nearly all of the 40 or so students in the program were minority students, which Felts found odd since Colgate had a study body made up of more than 90 percent caucasian students.

“What they do is they bring a lot of the economically-challenged, which is predominantly ethnic groups, up early to try and acclimate them into this new environment,” Felts said. “To me that was somewhat like a slap in the face because you have a great academic background, high GPA, to even get enrolled into Colgate, I don’t care if you play football, basketball, it doesn’t matter. But just to see that they structured a program to bringing people up two months early and it was predominantly minorities, and it was basically an effort to prove yourself to make sure that you’re able to attend a school like Colgate.”

Felts got a full scholarship to Colgate—half athletic because he was on the basketball team, and half academic. He said the program was basically a two-month early start to school, with classes and exams.

“Wow, this is going to be totally different, nothing like Nyack High School,” Felts thought to himself. “I’ve got to be prepared for this stuff.”

Felts told this story and others Friday afternoon at the Nyack Library when he was on a panel titled "African-American Entrepreneurs & Executives," where speakers talked about their roads to success, and difficulties they encountered.

The event was organized by Stephanie Taylor, a Nyack Library volunteer and secretary with the Nyack brand of the NAACP.

The speakers were Felts, an entrepreneur who also works at MTV, Dr. Lori Martin, an author and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Richard Clark, one of the owners of Off The Hook in West Haverstraw.

Even though it was a bit shocking, Felts said he has no ill will toward Colgate.

“I’m a Red Raider,” he said. “It all worked out great.”

Felts said corporations would come to Colgate’s campus, and even before he started his last semester of school he had a job offer from JPMorgan & Chase. He mulled over the decision while thinking about going overseas to play basketball professionally, but eventually picked JPMorgan.

After starting, he was enrolled in another program, this time the Management Development Program. He said it was about 50 people in a year-long program to determine whether or not they could handle the corporate world. He said the group was split up into two groups: the branch track, where people would travel around to different branches and work toward becoming a branch manager, and the executive track, where people got to work on Wall Street. Initially, the executive track was comprised of more than 50 percent caucasians while many minorities went to the branch track. Felts said if you worked hard, you could get promoted to the executive track.

“I was prepared for that given my history at Colgate, so it wasn’t a challenge for me,” he said. “But again, as I’m starting to grow and to mature, I keep getting introduced with situations with a certain infrastructure that really is kind of integrated with race and has a lot of racial implications involved.”

He stayed there six years, working his way up to being a vice president, but was let go after the company merged with another. He got a job at Sony Music, and once again lost his job because of an issue out of his hands, this time the dwindling CD industry.

“You’re never secure in this corporate world,” he said. “You can be doing well one day and companies make decisions and you can be out of the door the next.”

While at Sony, however, Felts got the idea for Bloostick Lip Balm, a product that helps prevent discoloration of the lips.

“[It] heals, hydrates and has ingredients in there to combat melanin, which appears especially on a lot of African American peoples’ lips when drinking hot coffee, smoking cigarettes,” he said.

He said it’s in 12 stores right now, but that he’s sold thousands online at the lip balm’s website.

Richard Clark is a retired New York City detective, where he worked for about 20 years. He said he always enjoyed cooking, and after he moved to Rockland about 18 years ago, he noticed there weren’t really any places to get good fresh fried fish. About five years ago, he and three others opened Off The Hook, a fish and chips restaurant, located at 15 Route 9W in West Haverstraw.

“There’s just so much involved in starting a business, but it’s so worth it when you put out a really really superior product,” Clark said. “And that’s what I’m really proud of. Our food is really really delicious. The portions are good and the price isn’t ridiculous.”

He said they didn’t go for a loan to open, instead coming out of pocket, and so the economics of everything was the hardest part of opening a restaurant. He said that a restaurant is full of hidden costs, and they completely redid the kitchen, so they needed all new appliances on top of the cost for everything else.

“There’s nothing like having your own, though,” Clark said.

Another difficult part of opening a restaurant is getting the word out, Clark said. Word of mouth helps, but the biggest asset has been a commercial they’ve started airing on different televisions stations.

“Lately we’ve had a whole lot of first-timers,” he said. “It’s always good to get repeat customers, but we’ve been open five years and it just drives me crazy when people say, ‘I’ve never heard of you’ because I’ve walked up and down Main Street in Haverstraw passing out flyers. You think you’re doing a whole lot, but there’s so many different people to get to.”

Dr. Lori Martin said that it’s important for communities to support their locally-owned businesses, and that people should know where and to who their money is going. She added that people should look to spend money on businesses that try to put the money they make back into the community in some form.

She also said she tries to tell students that while it’s great to get jobs with big companies, it’s even better to have your own business and work for yourself, like Felts and Clark are doing.

Since Martin is a professor, she also spoke about racial issues in the education system for a little bit.

“There will be different expectations for students based upon race and ethnicity. So whereas some students that are members of a dominant group, professors may assume that they know certain things and that they are capable of certain things, but if you’re a member of a historically disadvantaged group then they may not give you those same courtesies,” she said. “So you may find that you have to work twice or three times as hard as other people and other people may go ahead and graduate before you and get degrees before you. You just have to not worry about being in a race or competition with them but stay focused on your particular goals.”