Big fish and small fry

 

 

November 19, 1985
 
I'm beginning to believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong in American business only illegality and even these last are only important when you get caught.
and more important than any of that is the power derived from the whole experience.
A natural inclination to feel superior arises out of the acquisition of money much like the feeling that some Germans felt during the first 3rd of this century about their Aryan heritage, an economic fascism derived from the ability to hire and fire and sometimes spoil a person's life forever
The difference between Donald Gottheimer in 1974 when I first started working for him and in 1978 when I was fired is remarkable.
Just as the spread from when he started in his garage as an independent minded son of a Jewish working-class person affected his ego, too.
It was buying the building in 1976 that really turned him around, making him realize something about himself that had not been evident before: he was important.
This led to a roller system (manual at first then later motorized) from which he could squeeze more efficiency from his loyal employees.
Still later the computer and his new house added jewels to this industrial crown and further isolated him from the realm of his parents
He was above us common Folks
This newfound superiority had to be enforced, however, with middlemen.
It is not good for a man of position to deal with too many underlings which is why he hired Stanley.
But Donald was a bad capitalist. in spite of his effort to separate himself from the working class, he couldn't quite get away from his own roots. He always had to dirty his hands to feel real about himself.
Phil, the middle owner of the Dunkin in Willowbrook, is a better capitalist, rising in a similar way to Donald.
Only Phil lacks the ethics that Donald had or managed to shed them when Donald couldn't
This is not to say that Donald was right or even close to being ethical any more than Craig at the card company was before Donald.
We are simply talking about levels of competence and conscience
Craig was sometimes a jerk with a streak of kindness. He wanted desperately to be important, to act as vicious as normal capitalist might. But his basic good nature killed all his chances.
Frank, one of the original owners of the Willowbrook Dunkin, learned about capitalism the hard way. He latched onto a real shark named Yacenda, a man so lacking in conscience he was bound to go somewhere in this world.
Frank reacted with bitter admiration for this capitalist when Yacenda sold out the business under him – Frank was a minor partner – a true capitalist buying and selling small fries like Frank.
Yacenda knew this money-making game and its vicious rules that allowed one player to gut another player, paying attention for the most part only to the legalities, never wavering from the basic concept that small fries are meant to be eaten in a business various of evolution in which only the fittest survive.
This would not be bad if only the game players got hurt. But their actions often destroy other people’s lives in the process of change, the small people the people who do all the work.
 
 

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Man of Steel

Stanley decided to stick with Donald because he had a family support.

And so, began the daily trudged from his home in Belleville to the Fairfield warehouse complex on Bloomfield Ave.

Since Donald had started the business in 1968, Stanley must have started with him right from the beginning.

I was aware of him as the neighbor next door after I started at the card company in 1972.

And he was still there when I got hired as driver in June 1974.

I had had such frequent contact as a neighboring employee that the transition was easier than it might have been had I gone to a strange place because I knew him and knew he knew me.

I needed to learn was the job the stops and to put up with Donald unpredictable moods.

Stan and Donald were both moody but in different ways.

Donald was manic, an agitated gerbil not much different from the Energizer Bunny, always moving, always ambitious for something more than he had. If he did not yet have a complete clear vision of what it is he wanted, then he had a clear vision of the road that would take him somewhere better than it was at any given moment.

Stan was a turtle. He followed the same road Donald did but did not -- despite his dreams of success -- seem in a hurry to get anywhere.

Sure, he wanted to make more money and wear white shirt. Yet once he fell into the situation with Donald he trudged along as if he really had nowhere to go nor wanted directions on how to get anywhere.

More to the point, the products Stan was hired to pack scared the hell out of him.

Accustomed to dealing with steel -- which was for the most part indestructible -- Stan suddenly faced items contain in glass, perfumes and fragrances so costly he sometimes handled them as if they were nitroglycerin.

Stanley was so obsessive in his need to pack everything so securely that an atom bomb could not have caused it to break -- though some drivers might have managed it.

Orders took many times longer to get ready than was actually necessary. This seemed frustrate Donald to no end and was the source of the most disputes between them, one the urging the other to hurry in a constant game of the unstoppable force seeking to move the unmovable one.

While Donald disliked damaged goods, he already set up a system with the manufacturers to get credit for anything destroyed in shipment. We had whole shelves dedicated to these, a thankless and stench-filled task of going through them set aside for off-season when we mostly had little else to do.

Stan would have done better had he pursued a career as a teacher since he tended to lecture me or anyone else as we worked.

He often talked about his past and how disappointed he was with the bargain he had made with Donald, yet -- as if a bargain with the Devil -- he could not get out of it.

Working across the backing table from him, I learned a lot of how he'd come there about his early years at the steelworks in Harrison.

“I grew up with metal,” he told me. “My old man made me sweep up the shavings during summer vacations when I was young. Then took me on as an apprentice when I was still in high school.”

Stan blistered his fingers on hot metal and he pulled splinters of steel out of the backs of his hands -- the scars of both showing like shameful tattoos he kept from sight as often as possible.

When his hands were not in his pockets, he kept them hidden in a box and when exposure was unavoidable, he gripped a clipboard to expose only his thumbs.

Stanley never talk to me about his personal problems. But over time -- especially when he became manager at the new warehouse -- I would overhear him on the phone with his wife, talking about a bounced check or a telephone bill from her long-distance calls to her sick sister in California.

Stan repeated talked about those seven years of hell, keeping himself going with the idea that the hell would end when the day finally handed him the diploma.

“I hated steel,” he said. “I hated it smell when the torches cut it. I hated the touch of the warm metal when I had to help move it after it was cut. The place was always hot, and I was always dirty, sweating my balls off and stinking of metal even after I took a shower. I used to go out for dinner sometimes with my family and I could smell the metal in the restaurant. I wanted to quit the job a million times, but I knew I could not afford to I kept telling myself it would get better and wouldn't always be like that. That's what got me through those seven years.”

He told me he saw himself working in an office building in Manhattan or Newark as one of those “soft men” with “soft jobs” he always saw you going into and coming out of buildings made of glass, carrying briefcases, and dressed as if every day was a graduation ceremony -- suits always pressed nobody breaking out in a sweat.

While, he didn't get a solid job offer from the places he applied to, a few brought him in on as trial jobs slightly better paying then the mailroom. They were not at all what he thought the degree would qualify him for.

“I didn't feel right in any of those places,” he said. “I kept looking around and scratching my head wondering what I was doing in a place like that. Nobody seemed to do any work or very little. When I asked someone what they needed me to do next, they told me to slow down and not make them look bad by doing too much work.  I know I should have stayed in one of those places if I could have then I wouldn't be putting in the kind of hours I am now.”

Donald’s offer seemed attractive at the time.

“He said I wouldn't make a lot of money at first but that I would be on the ground floor of a growing business,” Stanley said. “If I showed a little patience, I would end up better off than I would if I worked in one of those corporations.”

Later, after we moved to the new warehouse, Stanley came to really regret his choice.

“It's like I never left the steel company,” he said. “but instead of being out on the floor doing honest work, I'm the boss I hated when I was working, and everybody hates me the way I hated my boss back then.”

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Being lost with Bruce

Born in 1950, Bruce came into an age different from the ones of his brothers, just as I differed from my uncles who were born before or during the war.

Bruce was roughly my age and so suffered many of the same issues adapting to a career as I did.

Barry and Donald while different in their approaches from each other were both very practical men with very practical ambitions.

Bruce had none or if he did, they were so vague he could not easily articulate them, and I got the feeling he was more than a little intimidated by his father and brothers while at the same time seem to love them dearly.

I worked with Bruce a few times twice while working for Donald, once or maybe more while working for Barry -- and all those times I got along with him well but got the feeling he could not take himself seriously and so did not expect anyone else to either.

I learned later that I actually replaced Bruce when Donald and Stanley hired me.

Stanley did not trust Bruce, found him too flaky -- a prejudice Stanley would later display again when Gary got hired to be the new driver at the new warehouse a few years later.

I also think Stan did not like relying on his boss's brother and may have imagined Bruce running back to Donald if Stan gave him too much of a hard time-- something I could not imagine Bruce doing since I suspect Donald scared Bruce as much as he scared me or even Stanley.

Bruce resembled Barry more than he did Donald though did not dominate a room when he came into it the way Barry did.

Bruce seemed less substantial and less likely to look you in the eye unless he already knew you and liked you and trusted you. At the same time, he struck me as someone who didn't trust anyone easily though he clearly trusted and respected his family.

I most likely encountered Bruce first when I worked in the card company warehouse next door. But I did not recall him except as that other guy who worked with Stanley and drove the big red truck to make pickups and deliveries.

After I worked for Donald for a few months Stan would mumble from time to time how unreliable Bruce had been,

 Stanley, like Donald and Barry, was born in that practical generation side that did not quite understand the emerging generation so closely associated with Woodstock and the Beatles. Stanley could not get the idea in his head that people could live carefree, a passing fad that helped ruin many of us who actually believed the hype the way Bruce seemed to.

I had more extensive contact with him later in 1974 when Donald brought Bruce back to help with the Christmas rush.

He and I got to interact more extensively, and I found I actually liked him despite the negative hype Stan had fed me, and Bruce seem to like me

He liked the fact that I laughed at his lame jokes and I liked him because his jokes were lame.

He was unpretentious and seemed to accept who he was without any pretense of being someone important.

At the same time, he struck me as someone suffering deep wounds which I could not comprehend since his family seemed to love him and he never took the world seriously enough for it to bring anything remotely hurtful into his life.

Stanley didn't trust Bruce to pack orders or to pick up merchandise on the road. So, Bruce largely loaded and unloaded trucks and ran for cases of merchandise we ordered him to get when we picked our orders -- a kind of workhorse but one who seemed to accept his role as if he expected nothing better or wanted anything better either.

Bruce apparently worked on and off for Barry at the beauty supply in Verona and appears to have lived with Barry from time to time as well.

His duties for Barry appear to have varied -- from picking orders for deliveries to various beauty salons to making deliveries himself on a route that covered nearly all of Northern New Jersey.  But Barry seemed to have one or more drivers and Bruce for the most part went along as a helper.

This was Bruce's role during a week or two long stretch when one of Barry's drivers called out sick and Donald lent him me as a driver.

Tt was literally the blind leading the blind.

Since Bruce was supposed to direct me because I was not familiar with the routes, we got lost as much as we found what we were looking for.

We laughed, joked, complained, exclaimed, cursed and generally made other fools of ourselves,

Yet as I recall it was the toughest week or two of labor I ever did, and despite my enjoying being lost with Bruce I was grateful to get back to Stanley and the less strenuous pickups and deliveries Donald demanded from me.

I saw Bruce only once after that during the long week when Donald, Barry, me, John Telson, Shark, Stanley and others gathered to make the final move from the old warehouse to the new,

It was a move that was more than just a move across town but one that altered the world as I knew it though I did not know it at the time.

Because we were so caught up in what we had to do, I could not tell if Bruce was happy or sad or even satisfied and whether he had yet found direction or someone to love or be loved by.

I never saw him again, but I heard about him about a decade later when I worked for a local newspaper and someone told me -- I don't recall who maybe Gary -- that Bruce had died.

I never got the details. I still don't know them.

Yet I feel the loss as if -- even not seeing him -- I had lost a friend.

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Donald, a miracle baby

Donald was born on VE day, marking the final defeat of the Nazis in Europe, an event of such monumental significance to Jews that Irving and Ruth must have seen this as a positive sign for the future.

The family had moved from Newark to Rutherford and lived in a brick house just off Park Avenue – the main thoroughfare – on a relatively quiet street, Gouverver – closer to State Highway 3 than to the traffic circle that marked the center of town near the railway station.

Rutherford was one of those towns that clung to prohabitionary rules meaning it served no alcohol. But it was progressive enough to give Ruth parking tickets, as were reported to the local newspapers in those days.

Rutherford, where Donald would later set up one of his first batch of retail stores, was located near Wallington, Garfield and Lodi where my family resided at the time, and near Passaic where I would live for a time while working for him at his new warehouse of Kaplun Drive in Fairfield.

Although geographically closer to St. Mary’s and Beth Israel hospitals in Passaic, Ruth gave birth to Donald at the more distant Irvington General Hospital, a massive relic of the 19 th century that sat on an imposing hill, later neglected and torn down.

This was located near where the Garden State Parkway would later intersect Route 78 when both were constructed more than a decade later. At the time, the main highway was Route 22 which connected Newark, Elizabeth, Bayonne and Union with the inner parts of the state.

Irving’s successful career apparently allowed him to move over the next few years to west to the Livingston and West Orange area, part of a massive exodus of Jews from the inner city. His kids eventually attended local schools there, with all three attending West Orange High School, graduating in the 1960s.

As the middle child, Donald makes me think of that old rent-a-car commerical which claimed number two had to ry harder.

It’s hard to say for certain if Irving favored one son over the others and whether or not he hoped for Barry to live up to all the potential he showed in childhood. But Donald’s later success must have impressed Irving, partly because Donald seemed not to have all those talents Barry ddi, and so Donald had to work harder to get ahead – and for him to have gotten as far ahead of his two brothers as he did must have come as a complete surprise.

Known in his senior year of high school at “Don,” Donald was aparently involved with a school group called Cowboy Consolidated (Cow-con), a booster club that supported all the sports teams know as the West Orange Cowboys.

Unlike Barry, who took up wrestling and swimming, and his other brother, Bruce, who took up tennis, Donald does not appear to have been involved in sports while in high school – unless you consider jewelry-making a sport.

Yet as a member of Cow-Con, Donald and others were responsible for setting up the annual bonfire, football pep ralleys and distributing the booster tags most students from West Orange High were expected to wear. The group also held poster parties where the members designed posters that would later be put up around the halls of the school.

Donald was also a member of the International Relations Club that took an annual trip to the United Nations among other activities.

Donald’s classmates at the time painted a whole different picture of him than the Donald I encountered as his employee. To them, he was a gentleman with a kind heart. And perhaps this was accurate the the Donald I met felt compelled to put up a front, scared of being to close to those who worked for him. Indeed, even his relationship later with Stan seemed full of controdictions, a sincere effort to share wealth and success but still maintain distance – something that Stan (and I at the time) clearly misread.

While Donald may have come to high school as a geek – and somewhat freewheeling – he didn’t leave school that way, graduating a changed man, more dignified in some ways than Barry who had preceded him.

For those of us looking back at Donald’s frequent exclamations of “Where’s Susan,” who he meant remains a mystery – although most of his classmates likely knew at the time. He could have meant any number of Susans that shared clubs and classes he attended, although I’d like to think he meant one of the particularly popular cheerleaders.

While Donald like Barry got involved in community organizations, Donald seemed to focus more on his Jewish heritage and in helping Jewish immigrants. This may have been his motivation for getting involved in Valley Settlement House, a non-profit service organization that helped people in the four Orange towns, as well as Newark, Maplewood and Irvington. Although the immigrants the organization has well elped changed over the years since, many of those helped at the time where Jewish immigrants making their way to the United States from Eastern Europe.

Donald also got involved with the Young Men’s Hebrew Associatin located at the time on Chancellor Avenue in Newark – which was then making plans for its move to Northfield Avenue in West Orange. He most likely got involved with the centers first Israel Exhibtion and Trade Fair held there in 1963.

The Y’s original mission was to help new Jewish immigrants assemulate in urban areas like Newark, Jersey City and Bayonne. But after World War II as Jews began to move out of the cities, the Y’s role changed and became a key element in helping Jews move from the cities to the suburbs with the goal to keep Jews enaged with the Jewish community.

This not to say kids who belonged to the Y didn’t have fun, enjoying a variety of activities as well as trips to museums in New York City or even to the Naval base in Bayonne or the Ford Plant in Mahwah. This last is somewhat ironic since Donald’s son, Josh, would later play a critical role in rescuing what became an ailing car company.

How and where Donald met his first wife, Gwenn Kuskin remains a mystery to me as well. But their paths could have easily crossed during his trips to Bradley Beach, a sea side resort within spitting distance of Deal where Gwenn lived at the time.

While the Kuskins lived in Deal, the primary Jewish community was in Bradley Beach, and the Kuskins were very involved in their temple while living there.

Bradley Beach, two towns south along the ocean from Deal, was one of the few towns that allowed Jews in the post war years. Brooklyn Jews discovered Bradley Beach long before they started buying up land in Deal in the 1970s. Magen David Congregation opened in the summer of 1944 after which Jewish families began renting bungalos in Bradley Beach the way my family did at the time in Seaside and Point Pleasant.

While it is too much to hope that Donald and Gwenn became high school sweetheart or had a summer romance, they ironically must have passed each other during those years.

Although Donald was a history buff in high school, he apparently had less lofty goals than his brother, Barry, and attended Rutgers to major in Finance, opening Cosmetics Plus shortly after graduation.

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Irv’s favorite son: Barry?

If Irving’s professional life lived up to the hype of TV's “Mad Men,” his personal life fit the mold of that classic TV show “My Three Sons” and the lifestyle as a Suburban family that America coming out of World War II ached to embrace.

Irv most likely met Ruth in Newark. They married in 1941 and had their first son, Barry in 1943. Donald the middle son was born in 1945 after the family had moved to Rutherford, and Bruce, the youngest in 1950.

The three boys could not have been more different had they been born to different parents, and the expectations for their success must have been immense.

Whether or not it is inspired sibling rivalry, I'm not certain, since all three brothers seemed entwined in both professional and private ways.

Yet as the eldest and perhaps the most gifted of the three, Barry must have felt the most pressure to achieve -- even though Donald must at the same time felt he had something to prove, standing in the shadow of an elder brother.

Barry oozed eloquence even his father lacked, breaking the mold of the stereotypical Jew by proving Jew kid from a Newark family could be cool.

He dressed cool, acted cool, and hung out with cool crowd in high school, engaging in sports like wrestling and swimming that gave him the macho most teens in the 50s craved -- and which made him extremely attractive to girls and he was drawn to them.

Because Barry and Donald were born about two years apart, they attended West Orange High school together briefly.

This must have been a burden for the geek-like Donald who hung out with geek-like friends and took up geek-like things such as jewelry making rather than sports.

While Bruce, born five years after Donald, may have seemed more fortunate in that he had not the shadow of either of them hanging over him, there must have been some residual effects from both Barry, who was popular among teachers and fellow students, and the extremely studious Donald.

Bruce, who graduated in 1969, apparently started working for Donald, who by that time had already gone into business, and had seen his business grow out of his father’s garage, and decided Bruce could help him – something that didn’t completely work out since I was hired in 1974 to replace Bruce – although Bruce continued to work for Barry, when Barry opened his beauty supply company in Verona.

In high school, Barry was a classic 50s middle-class kid, wearing his hair Elvis style, and when he wasn't wearing some sort of sports-jacket he wore button down shirts with long collars called high rollers considered very cool at the time.

Early on in high school, Donald looked very much like his father with thick-rimmed glasses and a tendency to wear bizarrely pattern shirts geeks often mistaken school. He would later more than make up for this -- perhaps taking lessons from his brother -- and in some ways exceeding Barry in tasteful attire.

Even the way Barry looked defied most of the stereotypes of Jews. He was fair-haired, almost Aryan in his features, and had a noble even an arrogant look -- like a young prince assured he would someday inherit his father's crown. He was that self-assured and equally ambitious.

Even when I knew him, he had the habit of repeating the word “seriously” something he was noted for in high school, a phrase that might have defined the seriousness of something he said or as a putdown, questioning the validity of some statement made by someone else.

As Aryan as he might have looked, Barry did not abandon his Jewish roots. He became a member of United Synagogue Youth, which was a youth movement for conservative Jews to use as a stepping stone to leadership as young Jews learned values and skills for leadership.

He also seemed to follow in his father’s footsteps by giving back to the community. While still in high school, he volunteered frequently at the nearby Lyons Veterans Hospital as well as the Kessler Institute of Rehabilitation located in his hometown of West Orange -- a hospital that had a close relationship with the still struggling nation of Israel.

Often called “Barr” by his closest friends, Barry got involved in a remarkable variety of other activities in high school from photography the horseback riding along with wrestling and the school's swim club. He may also have had literary ambitions, since he was also involved with the school's literary magazine -- although he may have been there only for the girls.

For all of Barry's academic prowess, he was every bit a classic 50s teen -- the kind exemplified in the later film grease or Pleasantville. he loved music and collected records and knew very well the social benefits of dancing and became a member of the social dance club.

Even more symbolic of that era’s teens, he worked in The Valley Sweet Shop as a soda jerk -- not terribly far from where he would set up his beauty supply business a decade later and easy stroll to South Mountain Reservation which was a tangle of trails that several local teens used as a Lover's Lane.

Barry exuded self-confidence from the way he combed his hair to the way he tilted his head, even engaging in public speaking early in his high school as if he already assumed, he would need it in a later career. His plans to study law in college may even have been his first steps towards a career in politics.

He was bold arrogant and seemed to believe he could not fail to someday obtain greatness.

It was difficult to know if the same schemes he later in hatched in his life went through his head even then: the land speculation, the business venture after business venture, or even a brief stint in movies (though this also had a dark side) -- schemes that seemed determined to outdo all the accomplishments of his father.

Barry married Gina LaRiccia in April 1977, inheriting the already established Gina’s Discount Beauty Supply, where I would work briefly with his brother, Bruce, making deliveries. This was a big to do with the reception held at the posh Glen Ridge County Club. Donald served as his best man.

But Barry had other business interests back in Newark where he apparently hobnobbed with a different kind of crowd, The Lucchese crime family, the smallest of the five major New York crime families. While this group mostly dealt in narcotics, it delved into a few other sidelines that included hijacking, gambling, loan sharking, illegal landfills, and pornography.

At the time, the northern Jersey branch was headed by Michael Taccettra, best known for the 21-month trial in which he beat the rap against the feds – one of the longest mob trials in history. Unfortunately, he was convicted in charges out of state, and could not run his organization. Leadership fell into the hands of his younger brother, Martin – with whom Barry had a close relationship.

Martin had been around for a while. I knew him in the early 1980s from his operating of several rock and roll clubs in northern and central New Jersey.

It is hard to tell if Barry’s relationship started that early, but most likely did. He had significant financial troubles in the early 1980s and may have turned to Martin and others. Federal authorities believe Barry became the finance guy for some of Martin’s operations.

The New Jersey branch in the early 1980s had grown in power with large loansharking and gambling operations in and around Newark.

Michael and a number of his high ranking members were indicted in 1985. The trial started in 1986 and ended with Michael and his associates being found not guilty in 1988.

In fighting, partly due to things that came out in the trial, created factions inside the organization, and there came an order from the New York faction to “whack” the Jersey Crew. Michael and Martin quickly sided with New York saving themselves, and won them uncontested leadership of the Jersey branch.

This came at a time when Bobby Manna plotted in Hoboken the murder of New York crime boss John Gotti and his brother, Gene. Federal authorities swept them up in early 1989.

In September 1989, Martin and Barry were charged in another scheme to bilk manufactures of video equipment. Barry had already left his mark as executive producer of two b-rated horror movies, released in 1987 and 1988. But in this scam, he was seen as the money man behind the operation.

Martin with Barry’s help had set up a video production company in 1987 ordering a vast amount of products on credit, which they promptly sold to pornography movie makers for cash – then went out of business, stiffing their creditors.

The charges were filed in California. Martin and Barry surrendered to the feds in New Jersey and got out on $50,000 bail.

Lawyers for Barry and Martin claimed media had sensationalized the whole business transaction by tying it to the $1 billion California pornography industry. Both men denied wrong-doing.

In December, the two men – faced with five counts of grand larceny and one count of conspiracy – challenged the legality of their arrest. A month later, both men dropped their challenge and agreed to go to California – and apparently prevailed in court.

But the feds kept their eye on Barry, and a year later, his home was among dozens of homes and businesses in four counties raided by the FBI where records were seized in an effort to find data on money laundering and insurance fraud schemes. Martin and Barry again apparently prevailed.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Barry and Gina parted ways. She apparently was still married to him leading up to the federal investigations, but by 1991, Barry found a new bride.

 On St. Valentine’s Day, Barry remarried to Kim Blanton, who apparently retired to Florida after Barry’s untimely death in 2002.

For the last decade of his life, he appeared to settle down to running family business which included Thymer Health Care, Carrara Marble Company – both still located in Fairfield, and the Garden State Hospice, in Cranford – a for-profit nursing home. He had gravitated into the nursing home field as a result of his company supplying medication carts for nursing homes. He had also invested in hospices in Oklahoma and Louisana.

“Hospice is a win-win-win situation in a nursing home,” he was quoted in one report. “The patient gets extra care, the nursing home gets help taking care of the patient and the family gets additional support.”

He called it “a tremendously under served area and highly competitive. But he also noted to turn a profit, the hospice must serve seven to ten patients in each nursing home.

“If we operate efficiently, we make a profit,” Barry said.

By far a sadder story and significantly more significant involves Irving’s youngest son, Bruce.

Born in 1950, Bruce came into an age different from the ones of his brothers, just as I differed from my uncles who were born before or during the war.

Bruce was roughly my age and so suffered many of the same issues adapting to a career as I did.

Barry and Donald while different in their approaches from each other were both very practical men with very practical ambitions.

Bruce had none or if he did, they were so vague he could not easily articulate them, and I got the feeling he was more than a little intimidated by his father and brothers while at the same time seem to love them dearly.

Bruce graduated West Orange High School in 1969, nearly a decade after Barry and Donald did, and apparently was hired on after Donald started Cosmetics Plus in 1968. He most likely worked in one or more of the retail stores, until they closed, and worked in the Pia Costa warehouse prior to my arrival there in June 1974.

I worked with Bruce a few times twice while working for Donald, once or maybe more while working for Barry -- and all those times I got along with him well but got the feeling he could not take himself seriously and so did not expect anyone else to either.

I learned later that I actually replaced Bruce when Donald and Stanley hired me.

Stanley did not trust Bruce, found him too flaky -- a prejudice Stanley would later display again when Gary got hired to be the new driver at the new warehouse a few years later.

I also think Stan did not like relying on his boss's brother and may have imagined Bruce running back to Donald if Stan gave him too much of a hard time-- something I could not imagine Bruce doing since I suspect Donald scared Bruce as much as he scared me or even Stanley.

Bruce resembled Barry more than he did Donald though did not dominate a room when he came into it the way Barry did.

Bruce seemed less substantial and less likely to look you in the eye unless he already knew you and liked you and trusted you. At the same time, he struck me as someone who didn't trust anyone easily though he clearly trusted and respected his family.

I most likely encountered Bruce first when I worked in the card company warehouse next door. But I did not recall him except as that other guy who worked with Stanley and drove the big red truck to make pickups and deliveries.

After I worked for Donald for a few months Stan would mumble from time to time how unreliable Bruce had been.

Stanley, like Donald and Barry, was born in that practical generation side that did not quite understand the emerging generation so closely associated with Woodstock and the Beatles. Stanley could not get the idea in his head that people could live carefree, a passing fad that helped ruin many of us who actually believed the hype the way Bruce seemed to.

I had more extensive contact with him later in 1974 when Donald brought Bruce back to help with the Christmas rush.

He and I got to interact more extensively, and I found I actually liked him despite the negative hype Stan had fed me, and Bruce seem to like me

He liked the fact that I laughed at his lame jokes and I liked him because his jokes were lame.

He was unpretentious and seemed to accept who he was without any pretense of being someone important.

At the same time, he struck me as someone suffering deep wounds which I could not comprehend since his family seemed to love him and he never took the world seriously enough for it to bring anything remotely hurtful into his life.

Stanley didn't trust Bruce to pack orders or to pick up merchandise on the road. So, Bruce largely loaded and unloaded trucks and ran for cases of merchandise we ordered him to get when we picked our orders -- a kind of workhorse but one who seemed to accept his role as if he expected nothing better or wanted anything better either.

Bruce apparently worked on and off for Barry at the beauty supply in Verona and appears to have lived with Barry from time to time as well.

His duties for Barry appear to have varied -- from picking orders for deliveries to various beauty salons to making deliveries himself on a route that covered nearly all of Northern New Jersey.  But Barry seemed to have one or more drivers and Bruce for the most part went along as a helper.

This was Bruce's role during a week or two long stretch when one of Barry's drivers called out sick and Donald lent him me as a driver.

It was literally the blind leading the blind.

Since Bruce was supposed to direct me because I was not familiar with the routes, we got lost as much as we found what we were looking for.

We laughed, joked, complained, exclaimed, cursed and generally made other fools of ourselves,

Yet as I recall it was the toughest week or two of labor I ever did, and despite my enjoying being lost with Bruce I was grateful to get back to Stanley and the less strenuous pickups and deliveries Donald demanded from me.

I saw Bruce only once after that during the long week when Donald, Barry, me, John Telson, Shark, Stanley and others gathered to make the final move from the old warehouse to the new,

It was a move that was more than just a move across town but one that altered the world as I knew it though I did not know it at the time.

Because we were so caught up in what we had to do, I could not tell if Bruce was happy or sad or even satisfied and whether he had yet found direction or someone to love or be loved by.

I never saw him again, but I heard about him about a decade later when I worked for a local newspaper and someone told me -- I don't recall who maybe Gary -- that Bruce had died.

Barry appears to have made a living – on and off – as a used car salesman from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.

Bruce married Sandra Candura in May1975. Born in Newark in April 1951, Sandra was a graduate of Belleville High School and received her bachelor’s degree from Montclair State College. She taught on semester at East Side High School in Newark, where she taught English and English as a second language before she was hired as a teacher at Belleville Junior High in 1974 where she taught remedial English for three years.

In 1977, Sanda was hired as a reading specialist at Belleville High School.

She was already well-traveled having made several trips to Europe as a college student. In 1972, she was among 14 students that went to study at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

A year later she took a three-week sojourn in early 1973 that oddly enough included a close friend of mine. Some of the students remained in London, while others went on to visit Munich, Vienna, and still others remained in Paris at the Sorbonne to study for the winter semester.

She and Bruce lived in Belleville for most of their marriage, although apparently moved to Caldwell in the mid-1980s where they both died on the same day, April 16, 1988.

Because the police reports are filed in some dark basement somewhere in a paper form, they were not yet available for review by the time I wrote this. But there are hints as to something terrible occurring, although the official story about Sandra’s death published on April 21 is vague and doesn’t mention Barry at all – even though he died at the same time she did.

“Mrs. Gottheimer died April 16 in her home,” this report said. “She was recently named Teacher of the Year (at Belleville High.)

Her obituary published on April 19 said she was “the beloved wife of the late Bruce.”

Oddly, his obituary was not published until April 27, also pointing out that he was the “husband of the late Sandra.”

Sandra and Bruce had two separate funerals. Hers took place on April 20 with a mass at St. Peter’s Church in Belleville. She was buried at Glendale Cemetery.

Bruce had a graveside service heled at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge on April 17.

Although several stories followed over the next year about Sandra’s being honored at Teacher of the Year, none mentioned Bruce in association with her, even though the stories noted that she was being honored “posthumously.” For the most part, these stories merely said, Sandra had died, but with one glaring exception.

A May 12, 1988 story noted that Sandra’s mother represented her daughter at the awards ceremony “because Gottheimer was killed last month.”

 

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A broader vision of Stan

Oct. 15, 1982

On those rare times when the radio plays Kenny Rankin music I can't help think of Stan.

In the earlier days at Cosmetics Plus -- when he and I work side-by-side in the warehouse – Stan used to play tapes he made from Kenny Rankin albums, tapes made using a condenser mic because he had not yet figured out how to record them any other way. So, sometimes I could hear a cough or him shushing someone in the background.

Over repeated listings, these small additions became aspects of the music I came to expect and hearing them on the radio now I anticipate.

Then, when they don’t come when they should, I'm disappointed when they're not there

Kenny Rankin wasn't the only music he recorded to listen to while we worked but was by far his favorite. He like Jackson Browne, James Taylor the kind of music radio with later labeled as soft rocks these tapes became the soundtrack of our lives, a mellow underpinning to the day-to-day routines we shared for two or so years before Donald made enough money to buy his own building across town and to expand his business enough to hire other employees and to condemn Stan to management position he craved, for but proved unqualified to do.

Stam could not and often would not delegate authority. So, when he got his office in a new place, we called it the “Fishbowl” because he had a large picture window that looked out onto the warehouse and he seemed to be floating inside it waiting to be fed.

Stan became miserable and angry, largely because he believed he got sold a bill of goods when he took the job with Donald and because being manager looked more tempting than it actually became.

Stan’s family originated in steel country in Pennsylvania which is how he got into metal work while still in high school -- though he grew up in Newark at the time when it began to change due to white flight.

He didn't move far when he got married slipping over the border into nearby Belleville, a mostly white enclave that bordered some of the worst of Newark’s ghettoes.

As a teen, he was more than a little wild, a typical high school kid who like to drink to excess though he's somehow kept himself out of jail and out of the hospital.

He hated metal work, but it paid good and allowed him to go to school at night, even if it did take him seven years to earn his degree in business.

He would often recall how tough those days were and how tired he was trying to hoist and cut sheets of metal by day and crack school books by night.

He said he kept looking ahead to a day when he would earn his living with his brain and not his back and would not have to come home and treat the cuts bruises and burns, he got from his non-stop struggle with steel.

He wanted to wear white shirts and a tie and a suit jacket and not the work clothes he sweated through within an hour of punching the time clock.

Every day, he looked ahead to when he would get his degree, his key out of the sweatshop and into the dignity he believed a college education would endow him with.

Stanley was too working-class to fully understand how the system worked, how people like him would only trade one sweatshop for another and, unless he went to the right kind of school and came from the right kind of family, the degree would be a useless piece of paper.

Donald understood

If not a member of America's elite, Donald understood he would need another way to climb the social ladder and was able to manipulate the system to get him there and to better to guarantee his children became even better than he did

Stanley must have felt the first twinges of the truth when the degree did not immediately turn him into a Cinderella at the prince’s ball and he did not get the kind of offers he dreamed about in the steel company.

Part of this was his age and the fact that he was already married, he needed a higher salary to support his family when younger kids popping out of the university could afford to work for less.

The fact was, Stan earned more cutting steel by far than any of the office jobs he worked as temporary on a trial basis.

Donald offered a position with a future which meant if Stan took the job in a startup company, the position would eventually grow into the kind of job Stan dreamed of.

It was a tough choice taking, a job that paid less than steel metal work with the hope that it would bring him what he wanted or wait to see if a more conventional office offered him something closer to what he really wanted.

Practicality won out.



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Another side of Cliff

January 1, 1982

Before coming to Cosmetics Plus, Cliff O'Neal was a football player at the University of Pittsburgh. He was going to make a career of it, but he hurt his knee.

He was a real party man at college; he was involved in a number of drunken brawls and, in one case, he threw someone through a glass window.

Cliff was also involved with a lot of women at these parties.

His father owned an insurance office nearby. Cliff resisted going into the same business but since he had to have a job, he came to the new warehouse just after Donald moved there in early 1977.

He was a big New York Yankees and New York Giants fan. In fact, Cliff looked like a larger version of Thurman Munson with blond hair and a brush like mustache.

His father or some other family member introduced him to some friend of the family, a woman who he dated a few times. While he didn't seem to be in love with her, he thought he ought to settle down and decided at one point to marry her.

The day Cliff started at the warehouse, John Telson ran up to me in the warehouse to warn me that about Cliffs of arrival. Since I tended to taunt fellow workers, John thought it wise to tell me that Cliff is too big and tough for me to mess with. But John also told me about this trick knee, so I started in on Cliff right away. Naturally, Cliff chased me through the warehouse and when he caught me, pounded on my arm until I said uncle.

I said, “I thought you had a trick knee.”

He said, “I do it tricked you didn't it?”

Cliff didn't like John he saw him as a kiss ass and Cliff just barely tolerated Donald. But Cliff sincerely like Stan and often split the tab on a six pack of beer we all shared in the late afternoons.

Cliff, unlike the rest of us, didn't start out as a driver but remained a warehouse worker picking and packing orders and loading trucks.

During the summer of 1977, Cliff and I attended a number of New York Yankee games. We drove to a garage near the Port Authority building and from there we took a Subway to the stadium. We drank too much at these games to trust driving home directly. So, we figured we could sober up on the subway ride back to Times Square.

At first, we each drank a beer for each inning. Later on, for 1/2 Innings; then we tried for every out. I did not survive this; even Cliff staggered.

By the end of the 1977 Christmas season Cliff made up his mind to work for his father and get married. I never saw him again.

Since Cliff arrived just out of college, he must have been about 22 or 23 and 1977 I was 25 going on 26 so I guess he was born in 1954 or 55. He tended to take things in stride though when pissed could get violent. He was a soft-spoken man the epitome of Teddy Roosevelt's concept of speaking softly but carry a big stick.  While he was flexible, he never let anybody push him around; he was calm in the way a brooding volcano is.

He loved sports and seemed most at home on a field or stadium where he could let loose a little.

He wanted to pursue a career in sports and when that was denied him, he felt around for something to make a living but made it clear he wasn't going to be hoisting boxes into a truck the rest of his life.

He wasn't looking for success in the way John Telson was, nor wanted a position; he just wanted security and was looking for a place in the world where he could live comfortably.

I remember how his clear eyes seemed to be laughing or thinking of something funny except when pissed and then they narrowed and focused.

His blond hair hung down over broad forehead which had a few creases suggesting he worried at times yet held in his concerns

he also had a broad nose yet not one overly large and this thing over the bristle like mustache that partially hid his thin upper lip. He had shoulders so broad he seemed to be wearing shoulder pads even when he was not -- this idea supported by a football jersey he routinely wore -- some from his college some from the New York Giants.  He also wore a New York Yankees pinstripe shirt sometimes with Munson's number on it and the New York Yankees hat with his blond hair sticking out the back and sides.

His chest was as broad as his shoulders only he was clearly out of shape and had a bit of a beer gut from partying he did in college. He limped a little, more on cold or wet days when he claimed his knee bothered him most.

Cliff grew up locally the Caldwells where he went to school and where his father still ran the insurance office.  He had a younger sister I never met.

Cliff told me he respected his father yet did not wish to end up like him. But eventually, he got so sick of working like a mule, he saw no alternative since he wanted to live a normal life which meant home and family and job.

This may be the reason he calmed down after college. Instead of partying with party girls, he started to date women he might eventually marry. He tended to be more conservative than the rest of us more like his father yet did not wave a flag and never served in the military since he was in college during the last years of the Vietnam War he graduated after the draft had ended.

Unlike some of the other workers that came on at the warehouse, Cliff tended to like drinking more than drugs and was part of that kind of crowd when in high school and college yet as much as he loved party women and focused on marriage, he struck me as someone who preferred being around other men rather than women and found it easier to talk to a man than he did to a woman and so did not lust after the girls in the outlet like some of the other warehouse workers did.

He wasn't a dumb jock. He was versatile enough to be able to do more than physical work and wise enough to want to life that allowed him to use his talents rather than his back.

While he boasted about his past exploits, he clearly did not want to get trapped into the kind of life he saw many of his college friends getting trapped in.

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