Cornelll graduate Willard Straight is hired in 1901 by the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an agency of the Chinese government, which conducts opium traffic.

He serves as secretary to Sir Robert Hart, the Service's head, in Nanjing. (Straight will later become head of Morgan Bank’s Far Eastern operations.)

Born on January 31, 1880, in Oswego, New York, the son of two Yankee missionaries to China and Japan, Henry H. Straight (1846-1886) and née Emma Dickerman (1850–1890), who were faculty members at Oswego Normal School, Willard was orphaned at age ten, by the death of his father in 1886 and his mother in 1890.

Willard and his sister were taken in by Dr. Elvire Ranier, one of the earliest woman physicians in the country.

He attended Bordentown Military Institute in New Jersey, and in 1897 he enrolled at Cornell University in upstate New York and graduates in 1901 with a degree in architecture.

At Cornell, he had joined Delta Tau Delta, edited and contributed to several publications, and helped to organize Dragon Day, an annual architecture students' event.

He was also elected to the Sphinx Head Society, membership in which was reserved for the most respected men of the senior class.