A 20-year climb to the top of Toll Bros.

Doug Yearley remembers the March day in 1990 - March 5, to be exact - when he sat down in Bob Toll's Huntingdon Valley office to be interviewed for a job as "executive assistant."

"It was my 30th birthday," said Yearley, who had been kept waiting for an hour and a half in the lobby, "and the first question Bob asked me was how old I was."

Before Yearley could answer, a Toll Bros. Inc. employee burst into the office.

" 'I've got good news and bad news,' " he recalled the employee's telling Toll. " 'The good news is that your helicopter is here. The bad news that it is surrounded by five police cars.' "

The company's former headquarters were in the middle of a residential area, and the neighbors had had enough.

"They let him take off, but the helicopter never landed there again," Yearley said. "I thought it was cool: This guy has a helicopter in his parking lot."

On Wednesday, almost 20 years to the day since he joined Toll Bros., Douglas C. Yearley Jr., now 50 plus a couple of months, talked about his journey from "executive assistant" - he says Toll wasn't sure what the job was he was trying to fill - to chief executive officer of the nation's largest builder of luxury homes.

As it turned out, Bob Toll was looking for someone to acquire distressed real estate and work with the banks that controlled much of it after the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s.

Yearley, like Toll a Cornell University graduate and a lawyer, fit the bill.

Staff expertise on land acquisition was limited to "sitting down with farmers and making deals over a glass of whiskey," Yearley said. "Bob figured he needed someone who wore a suit every day to make land deals with the Resolution Trust Corp."

There was no long discussion about how to do it.

"He said, 'Here's an office, and here's a book with a list of every bank in the country. Have fun,' " Yearley said.

"Holy smokes," Yearley said to himself. "I have a phone and a book."

He started with the A's. The first banker he called lived in a Toll Bros. community, and, as Yearley made his way through the rest of the alphabet, he began using some of the cash the builder had acquired since going public in 1986 to buy lots of distressed property for development.

Getting into real estate was not a youthful ambition for Yearley, who was born in New London, Conn., while his father, Douglas Sr., was a lab engineer at the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics Corp., of Groton.

The family moved to Westfield, N.J., in 1962, when his father (Cornell '57) joined copper manufacturer Phelps Dodge Corp. as a metallurgist, working his way up to chairman and CEO. The elder Yearley died at 71 in 2007.

"Dad could tell you what happened when you mix four different metals," said Yearley, who noted that he had a middle-class upbringing and graduated from Westfield High School in 1978. "My only claim to fame was that I led the tennis team to a state championship."

He enjoys camping, hiking, and mountain climbing - Mount Rainier and "three or four winter ascents" of New Hampshire's Mount Washington.

"I've put aside mountain climbing because I have a 3- and 4-year-old," he said. The two little ones are from his second marriage to present wife, Sue; he has three children - 20, 17, and 13 - from his first marriage.

He was good in math and science, so "Dad decided that I should be an engineer and go to Cornell."

"After two weeks, I realized I was over my head, but hung in for a year, then transferred to business and received a B.S. in economics."

Jobs were scarce in 1982, so he took the law school admissions test and aced it. When his parents declined to pay, he took a job as a paralegal at Shea & Gould in New York for a year.

In 1986, he got a law degree from Rutgers. Yearley joined Archer & Greiner P.C., which then had only one office, in Haddonfield, and bought a house off Warwick Road.

He handled a lot of Superfund cases. "I hated to be engaged in a fight as an outsider, to be paid hourly, having to keep track of every six minutes of time spent," he said. "It started to grind at me."

He started spending time rehabbing his Haddonfield house.

"I became really handy," he said. "I loved fixing it up. I built a room in the basement and the attic. I was becoming so disinterested in law that I thought about buying houses, fixing, and flipping them."

In the middle of the late 1980s' housing downturn, Yearley decided to answer the Toll Bros. ad.

Since that interview in 1990, Yearley has seen the company go from a primarily regional builder to one that builds in markets all over the country. Many of them, like Arizona in 1995, he opened.

It is a job he said he took personally and seriously.

"I was a project manager at a community in Upper Makefield, and we were scheduled to open a model on [a] Saturday, but the landscaper didn't show up," he recalled.

"So I brought over a push mower early Saturday morning and cut the grass," Yearley said.

Taking the reins from Bob Toll comes as no surprise: His mentor has often said to him, "When you are running this company. . . ."

Toll Bros. executives gather every Monday with Bob Toll to talk business. And since he started, Yearley said, he and his boss have always been the last to leave.

"I've turned off the lights with Bob for 20 years. Those 800 Monday nights have molded my career."