SEIDEL STORY

(c) 2005 Arnold Seidel

     Every story is supposed to have a beginning.  However, this beginning is only a starting point, not a beginning.  There is no way to go to the beginning.  Let us see what we can do to tell the family story.  A short time ago Danny Seidel, my grandson, asked me, “Which member of our family came to California first, and from where did he or she come?”  So the credit goes to Danny for starting this adventure.  If other members of the family want to use this, naturally they are free to draw what they may from it.  I began to think about writing a few words about this, and I have no idea how long it will be nor where we shall end this.  I will try to tell stories and not dwell on dates and other trivia too much, but I do want to give as many facts as possible.  I will probably ramble along, but really life is not a textbook of cold facts.  I hope you do not mind my style.  It is my way of telling you what I think is important to you, and to you, the reader, I say, “I love you dearly,” and I do hope you will not be too hard on me by the time you reach the end.

    Morton Seidel was born in Brooklyn August 27, 1897.  His mother’s name was Sarah.  I do not know the first name of my grandfather, his father; but it might have been Isaac or Israel.  I believe that Sarah’s father and mother were Isaac and Jennie Mendelssohn, and they probably emigrated from Austria in 1897.  It is possible that Isaac was a violinist.  When Morton was a young child, Sarah and he moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts where he obtained a New England accent and never lost it.  He had sold Crum and Forster insurance stock to clients and called it, Crum and “Foster,” which all of the clients dutifully repeated.

     They lived on “The Cut,” which was right on the bay.  In the winter the sea ice would come into the harbor, and it must have been quite cold.  One winter, in fact, he slipped off the rocks and fell into the water.  The boys were afraid to tell anyone so they took him into a barn and tried to get him dry, and that might have led to his loss of hearing in later years, which was especially poor in one ear.  We will never know, but he did use a hearing aid in the early days of that gadget.  In fact it was before our dry cell batteries of today.  This was a heavy wet cell battery, and from time to time the fluid, which was sulfuric acid, spilled out and spoiled a suit. It also had a microphone, which was about five inches long and hung from his undershirt.  Then there was a wire, which extended from the mike to the earpiece. The wire was always splitting or separating or breaking.  One model size hearing aid fit all hearing problems.  We talked many times about customizing these things, but it only came years later. Nobody had the concept of digital hearing aids or digital anything at that time, which was the late 1930’s or early 1940’s.  It was a great help to him, though.  General Electric was among the very first to manufacture these hearing aids.  I should mention that I have lost hearing, and Dr. Howard House, the 93-year-old founder of the House Clinic, says that his loss as well as mine is and was hereditary, not due to the cold, and I will never be totally deaf.

     After living in Gloucester, they moved back to the Bronx.  By this time I believe the family consisted of his mother, Sarah, who I was to call Grandmu, and Morton.  For me Grandmu was a little old lady who sat.  She also had a funny accent, probably German and wore a long funny dress.  She gave me a small toy and candy every week when the family got together.  The family, Grandmu, Clara (Forona’s mother) Uncle Ivan, Forona, Morton, and little Arnold, got together every Sunday, and I do remember that we went out to dinner on Sunday.  There was one restaurant, which was a buffet.  It was run by Kalman Loeb who had run the food department at the Hillcrest Country Club before the depression.  One day, near the end of the depression, he came over to our table and told my father that he was worried because he had to raise his prices from fifty-five cents to sixty-five cents for dinner.  Did we think that it would be all right?  We agreed that was fair. 

     We received a nightly phone call precisely at dinnertime, which Morton answered. “Hello, dear.  (Grandmu)  How are you?”  It went on along a very structured script and ended in the same way every time.  It was a good routine.  She finally lost it all mentally and died in the 1946.  It was funny but sad.  There was a famous comedian by the name of Georgie Jessel who had a similar routine on the radio.  That was funny.  While looking for things, I found a receipt for twenty-five dollars paid to Beth Olam Cemetery in Hollywood paid on August 27, 1946, Morton’s birthday.  On the receipt someone has written, “Paid under protest.”  Sarah, Grandmu, is in Crypt 414 in the “R” Lobby Mausoleum of Beth Olam Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.  Morton and Forona are buried there as well as Ivan.

       Morton never spoke of his father except that he had gone to Palestine.  I am sure that this was well before 1920 and probably before 1910.  I can only surmise that his father had left him and his mother alone when he was a child.  I never met him, which was a shame.  When his father died in the 1950’s or 1960’s, Morton was contacted by somebody in Israel to pay for the funeral, but he refused to send any money for his father’s burial.  Morton was quite bitter but never spoke of it.  While in the Bronx they lived with family upstairs or down.  He told of the ladies calling up or down a dumbwaiter,  “Malvina, du bist haben ein bissel kaffe klache?”  That should translate to be something like, “Malvina, do you want a little coffee and a lot of talk?”  I have no idea who Malvina was except to say that she was probably some sort of a relative to Sarah. This all happened before Morton’s high school days.

     Prior to 1922 Morton Seidel went to Morris High School in the Bronx and then to the City College of New York in New York City and then to New York University for postgraduate work. He told the story of taking a course (I believe it was a utility course) from a lawyer on Wall Street who said to them that he did not have time to come uptown for the class sessions, and he told the students to come to his Wall Street Office.  That is where the rest of the classes were held.  You will see that this little story will fit into the scheme of things shortly.

     Records show that he entered high school in February 1912 and finished in January 1915.  That would show that he finished high school in three years and college in about three and a half

years.   During high school he went out for sports, especially track and field.  He entered the high jump in which he was quite good.  They used the old scissors method.  At the conclusion of the jump they landed in a pit, probably sand, and you landed on your hip.  I am sure that is what led to his arthritis on that hip when he was older.  They had the best coach available, the school’s janitor.  Morton told the story of running with his mouth open and having the burning feeling in his lungs from the cold air.  It was not the best-coached team of all time.  During that period of time he sold ladies’ shoes in a retail store.  He received his Bachelor of Science degree June 20, 1918 in mathematics.  That would have made him less than 21 at graduation because his birthday was August 27th.  In fact he did teach math in high school for three days.  He said that he knew he did not want to teach, but he had to get it out of his system.  I have found a substitute teaching credential good for only one year, 1918 or 1919.  Fifty years later he would teach investments in adult school at Hollywood High School.  He enjoyed that a great deal.

     From graduation until December 1920 he had several jobs of interest.  I believe that at first he worked as Boys’ Supervisor for the Marks-Nathan Jewish Orphans Home in Chicago.  After that he worked as superintendent for a combination old people’s and orphan’s home in Worcester, Massachusetts and after that as superintendent in a children’s home in Albany, New York.  His mother, Sarah, also had a position as the matron at the homes.  He always said that the combination of the aged and children was not a good one.  He told the story of the families who wanted to adopt a nice young girl of about twelve years of age or so.  He threw them out because they were only looking for a housemaid.  He also gave the children better quality milk than the supporting families served at home.  That was great for the children but bad for public relations.  He was let go from there because he was seen carrying a briefcase on a Saturday.

     About that time he was introduced to Morton Stern of Bache and Company.  Morton Stern’s brother, Charles M. Stern, was on the board of the home and liked Morton so he introduced him to his brother.  This is where his Wall Street course came in handy.  Of course, he also met Mr. Jules Bache.  He took the job between June 23 and July 21, 1921. He was put at a desk to sit with the idea that he would do nothing, and they could then fire him in a few weeks.  It didn’t work out that way.  He began to develop a business trading Canadian municipal bonds for Bache.  At that time there was no United States market for Canadian municipals.  Before he left in 1922, he had developed a good business in trading those bonds.  He was not given any credit for what he did.  He was told that it happened because Bache and Company was so great.  In fact several months after he left Bache that segment of the business was gone.  He always laughed about that. That utility course he had in college was help to him at this time and would be more help in the future. 

     Some of the relatives in New York are worth mentioning.  Cousin Phil was Philip Seidel D.D.S.  He practiced dentistry at Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue in Manhattan, and many of his patients were not able to pay him handsomely.  He was paid a dollar or two for major dental work.  I am sure that he was a competent dentist, but evidently did not make tons of money.  I never met his wife, Pearl Geller Seidel, who died in the 1929.  Phil’s mother’s maiden name was Mary B. Wadler, and one of Arthur’s daughters is named Mary Beth, for her grandmother.  Phil’s son, Arthur, was to be involved with the Manhattan Project, which was a secret project that obtained uranium from Africa and helped to separate two isotopes of uranium, U 235 and U 238, which was necessary to develop the atomic bomb.  He also was to become an attorney specializing in patent law.  He is still in practice in Philadelphia with an excellent reputation and a national and international clientele.  He is married to Raquel Eliovich Seidel, and they have three children, Stephen, Paul, and, of course, Mary Beth.  Stephan’s son is Ethan.  Mary Beth is married to Gordon Sharp and their children are Alexander, Gregory, Jason, and Emily. 

     Sometimes life is a small world.  Pearl had a brother, and his son’s name was Bruce.  Bruce came to Hollywood instead of practicing law, which brought a great deal of sadness to his father until Bruce began to make more money as a famous writer, director, and producer in movies and television than his father.  There is more to the Geller story.  Joan’s cousin, Phil Treiger, married Honey.  Honey’s cousin is Jinny, and Jinny and Bruce Geller were married.  Unfortunately, Bruce was killed in an airplane crash quite a few years ago.

     Cousin Julie was Julius Mendelssohn and his younger brother, Irving, fit into the typical New York mold.  Other Mendelssohns include Sam, Helen, and Esther.  I do not know anything about them other than their names and the fact that I met them on my first trip to\New York when I was seventeen.  After World War II we drove to New York in our Chrysler convertible with red plaid seats.  When turning the corner, my father put his hand out of the car to signal.  Poor cousin Julie almost flipped as he yelled, “Get your hand back into the car. You’ll get it knocked off!”  Everything was all right.  I believe that Irving still lives in Florida.  I believe that he is married with children.  Julie and the rest are long gone.  Alex Wolheim was a high school friend, and Morton and Alex remained good friends until their deaths.  They would pick up right where they left off each time they met.  He is mentioned here because he was one of the people I met on that first trip to New York.  It was logical.

     Another young employee of Bache was Jacques Cohen.  The two young men started working about the same time.  Jacques was given the job of taking care of Mr. Jules Bache’s portfolio.  He kept the position records for Mr. Bache.  It is interesting to note that I never heard either Morton or Jacques ever refer to Mr. Bache as Jules in any conversation.  Both of them got an excellent training, which they made for themselves.  Jacques was able to see what Mr. Bache was buying, and he looked into everything as much as possible.  He stayed in New York, left Bache, formed a company called Barr, Cohen and Company and later changed his name to Coe.  I have no idea why Jacques left Bache other that he felt that he had more opportunity as an independent.  Jacques was born in the Netherlands, and in his later life he moved to Florida.  He once said that he had more money, and Morton had a better life.  It was true.

     In 1922 Morton heard that you could play tennis in California all year round.  Being in his

mid twenties and single, he decided to move out to the, “Wilds of California,” as he called it.  This was before the airplane so he came west on the train, the only way to travel in those days.  All was well until the train came to Seligman, Arizona.  To help you locate, Seligman, it is east of Kingman and west of Ash Fork.  It was a stop for the railroad and on the old Route 66.  It is important because there was a hotel of sorts and a Harvey House.  The Harvey Houses were restaurants where the train stopped, and everybody got off, sat down to the already served salad, received a main course and desert, and continued on their way.  There were no dining facilities on the train in those days.  It normally took seven days or longer from New York to California, but not this time. Other people, other than train passengers, could also eat at the Harvey Houses.  The Harvey Houses were known for cleanliness and the “Harvey girls,” the well-dressed uniformed waitresses. 

     There was a railroad strike when the train arrived at Seligman.  The train was to go no farther for about two weeks.  All was not well.  In fact the army was called to guard the train, and machine guns were posted on the front and rear of the train.  The Indians came by on their horses, which they rode bareback, to see what was going on.  No problem there because they were friendly Indians.  Morton made friends with the Indians, and they let him ride their horses.  You must understand that this is a twenty-five-year-old boy from New York who had never seen a desert much less an Indian.  I guess that he had even seen a horse if you refer to the above picture.  He rode down the tracks to the end of the train, turned the horse, which reared up on its two hind legs.  He stayed on and galloped back to the front of the train.  Needless to say he was well known from then on.

      He told the story of deciding to walk over to the mountain, which looked like it was a little ways away.  He was told that it was thirty to fifty miles away.  He did not go.  The desert can be

a dangerous place.  Finally the strike ended and he did arrive at the old railroad terminal on Central Avenue in Los Angeles.  This is not our present Union Station, which was built many years later in the 1930’s.

     A word about Morton’s tennis racquet: Bancroft was the best tennis racquet that one could buy.  He said that the racquet was bought in 1938.  On the racquet itself there is a patent date of 1915.  In other words this style of racquet was patented in 1915.  I have played tennis with this racquet in the past, and it is still usable today, but of course, there are many finer newer racquets with far better new plastic or metal materials.

      The cast of characters begins to increase in Los Angeles.  The first person he met was Rabbi Dubin who was to become one of the rabbis at B’nai B’rith on Ninth and Hope streets, which was eventually to become Wilshire Boulevard Temple in the 1930’s, which is still situated just east of Western Avenue in Los Angeles.  However, at that time Rabbi Hecht and young Rabbi Magnin were the rabbis then serving the congregation.  The family still holds its memberships in the temple, and we were married by Rabbi Magnin and Rabbi Dubin in 1957.  David and Gina are members of the temple, David and Craig had their Bar Mitzvahs at the temple, and Ronnie is coming up and April 1, 2006 for the fourth generation.  By the way, when Morton died, Rabbi Magnin and Mrs. Magnin were the first to come by the house, and Rabbi Dubin and Mrs. Dubin came shortly after. 

     The clock in the picture has some historical significance.  One time when Rabbi Magnin and Mrs. Magnin were at our house, when the temple was being restored, Rabbi Magnin saw this clock over the fire place.  He said, “We should have a sunburst like that at the arc in front of the torah.  Let’s have something like it.”  In fact if you look today, that theme does make up the door to the arc at the temple.

     Also, in Los Angeles were relatives.  Uncle Iz, Israel Mendelssohn, and Aunt Maime lived with daughter Irene at 1062 Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles.  While it is not in the best section of town, it turns out that that address was very important to them.  You understand that these were not rich people, but they were from New York, and they now lived on Fifth Avenue.  They were quite proud of that.

     Uncle Iz was a fine pianist.  The word was that he was very dependable and precise.  He played the piano for the silent movies in his early days but final days of silent movies.  His final job was playing in a trio at a gypsy or Russian restaurant or tearoom on the Sunset strip.  The deal was three songs an hour, no more.  Their last name was Mendelssohn.  We believe that the line comes from a brother of Felix, not Felix.  Uncle Iz had at least one brother who played the drums. I was told that he was quite good also.  I believe that there were other members of that part of the family who were also musically inclined, but I am not sure of their names.  I wish that I could add more to that.  Morton was musical but played no instrument.  Aunt Maime was only the housewife as far as I knew.  Irene, the daughter was to change her name to Mernes.  She was to become a schoolteacher.  When Uncle Iz died, I was quite young but taking piano lessons.  I was offered his baby grand piano for fifty dollars, which I bought.  It is a Mason and Hamlin and is a fine instrument, which we still own today.  It is slightly longer than a normal baby grand by a few inches.

     Before I owned the Mason and Hamlin, I had another baby grand piano.  I do not remember the make, but it was adequate for a child.  I had it for years until I got Uncle Iz’s piano.  As you know, the instrument was known as the pianoforte in Italian.  That means soft loud.  An Italian harpsichord maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori is given the credit of making the first instrument in 1709.  I played it for all it was worth.  Have you ever heard a piano string break?  If I say it was a resounding boom, would you begin to get the idea?  It was the E above middle C.  Play that note about as loudly as you dare.  Now imagine a bang of a factor of 10 or maybe 100.  It did get my attention real fast.  I probably jumped six feet when it happened.  Remember I got the Mason and Hamlin when I was still quite young, and this happened before that, and I still remember that shot.  The piano was never quite the same after that.  When I should have played that E, I

always substituted another E for the bad note.  It worked but not well.

     Going back a bit before the piano problems and remembering the reason Morton came to Los Angeles, is important.  After Morton and Forona were married, they decided to join the Hillcrest County Club, which is still on Pico Boulevard just south of what today is Century City.  There, Morton was the first chairman of the committee to build the clay tennis courts.  He did come to California to play tennis all year ‘round.  I remember a man sitting on the patio and telling me to come to him, and the folks telling me that it was all right to do so.  I climbed up onto the man’s knees, and he started to sing. I remember looking back to the folks and getting a nod that it was all right to sit there.  I also remember scampering back to them when the man had finished singing.  The man was Al Jolson who sang Sonny Boy to me.  This had to be before 1930 because Morton and Forona resigned from the club, never to return, because of the 1929 depression. That means that I was probably three years old or younger.

     Quincy Cass and Associates was formed in 1922 to sell securities.  That meant selling bonds in those days because only the very brave or foolish bought stocks.  Well, maybe one could buy “Ma Bell,” American Tel. and Tel., but not much more.  Morton met Quincy, and they agreed that Morton would become Quincy’s first salesman.  Quincy Cass Associates is still in business in Los Angeles, but, while some of the family still works there, the ownership has changed hands. There was a young lady working there by the name of Forona Arnold.  She and Morton were to be married on April 2, 1925.  Their honeymoon was in Yosemite Park at a hotel that is no longer standing.  I was told that upon telling Clara, Forona’s mother, that they went horseback riding, her answer was, “Oh, she can’t ride!”  When the money ran out, they came home.  They were married 48 years until Morton died in December of 1973 and Forona died in January 1975, just over one year later.

     Something should be said of the waterfalls in Yosemite Valley.  While most of them do flow all year round, in April they are most full.  Bridal Veil Falls spreads its water as it falls thousands of feet to the valley floor.  Yosemite Falls on the other side of the valley is really three falls.  The top is really full of water and crashes to the rocks about one quarter of the way down.  The next two are about equal in length.  In the winter in the morning you can see frost or snow in the sunlight at the base of the middle falls.

     Two of their friends were Arthur Mansbach and Eleanor Marlow.  They were friends, but

Arthur’s mother was living.  When the old lady died, they were married.  They gave Joan and me a unique wedding present.  It is an ivory handled carving set that came from Arthur’s family.  It is made up of the fork, knife and sharpener, and we still use it today.  It was old in 1957, and I am certain that it could be called an antique now.  Eleanor was an opera singer who sang with the San Carlo Opera Company as well as other companies.  She was a mezzo-soprano and sang rolls such as Hansel in Hansel and Gretel and Suzuki in Madam Butterfly.  I went to my first rehearsal to see her as well as Lawrence Tibbet who was the director as well as a singer.  I remember he got up after he was “Killed” on stage.  That was weird.  The opera was a one-act opera by the name of Emperor Jones.

     Married life for Morton and Forona started in a rented apartment near the old Ambassador Hotel half way between Vermont and Western Avenues.  At this late date the Ambassador is closed, and the apartment is probably long gone, however, it was their first home.  While that was not very far from down town, Beverly Hills and the west side had not been developed yet.  Their second home was more interesting and led to troubles.  It was a house at 912 South Spaulding Avenue in Los Angeles.  It is just south of the La Brea Tar Pits or Hancock Park, or, what we now call, the County Art Museum and the Page Museum as well as three or four other museums.  My mother, grandmother, Clara, and I used to gather wild mustard greens just south of Wilshire Boulevard in an open field, which is a parking lot today.  You must always gather the mustard greens from the center of the field because the sides might not be as clean as the center.  Traffic in those days was not as heavy as it is now, and Wilshire Boulevard had double deck busses, which were open on top.  They were fun.

     Wilshire also had palm trees, which extended from downtown to the beach.  I remember when the decision was made to take some of them down because it was said that they were too messy.  That was a sad day.  Beverly Hills has kept the trees.  Wilshire Boulevard was named for Mr. Gaylord Wilshire, and it was planned that it would go directly west to Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean.  The street starts from downtown Los Angeles and goes magnetic west until it reaches just west of Hoover Street.  At that time they discovered that the magnetic deviation was about seventeen degrees so they had to make the street turn left by that amount.  The original city fathers also planned that the city would move south to the harbor, and they made the long blocks go north and south.  However the city moved west, where we had the short blocks, and that is the story of part of our traffic problem of today.

     One of Los Angeles’s north/south streets, Rossmore, ends at Wilshire Boulevard.  Many years ago, probably in the 1920’s and 1930’s, there was a nice home on the northeast corner of Rossmore and Wilshire.  An old Indian gentleman lived there with a lady who took care of him, and she most probably was not his wife.  I never did get the whole story right, but I think that he was allowed to live in the house because he was a Native American.  He was always well dressed and clean, and every day he would stand on his corner and direct traffic, and the drivers would pay attention to him and follow his instructions.  Remember, traffic was nothing like it is today, and there was no signal on the corner.  He did serve a purpose and enjoyed his hobby.  He was known and loved by all who knew anything about him and Los Angeles.  After he died, the house was sold and the lady was kicked out of the house.  The whole town was up in arms, but that was the end of the story as far as I knew. 

     Getting back to their house on Spaulding, Morton and Forona bought this house on Spaulding Avenue and another one across the street from it at 907 South Spaulding as an investment in the spring of 1926.  To be exact, the deed of Trust is dated “This 13^th day of April, 1926” and is made out to “Morton and Forona A. Seidel, husband and wife.”  I was to come along on Saturday morning, April 17^th.  They were to pay “Seventy five hundred dollars at the rate of Ninety dollars per month.”  It must have been exciting times for both of them.  I have not found the terms of the house at 907 South Spaulding.  Two houses meant two mortgages, and 1929 was to come with the stock market crash.  I really do not know if one house and one mortgage would have made a difference, but the houses were to be lost.  His decision process on where to buy this home is quite interesting.  Ralphs Grocery Company had decided to build a new store just east of the La Brea Tar Pits.  He figured, and correctly so, that they had done a great deal of research into a new and growing area so he made his decision.  He was several years too early.  I do remember playing in the back yard of the Spaulding home, and that the folks took a trip to New York before the crash.  I made roads on a small hillside for my cars.  My grandmother, Clara, and my uncle, Ivan, stayed with me.  Boy, did I get my way!  Neighbors were the Suppee family on the south and the Rinds family on the north.  We would be friends with the Rinds’ for decades to come.  As a little one I was passed over the fence to play.  They had a formal gravel garden. 

    I remember a few things about that home.  We had an icebox.  That was not a refrigerator.  There was place in the box where you put ice and another place to put food.  Every morning my mother would rush to the icebox to empty the water from the melted ice.  It did keep the food cool, but sometimes the milk became sour.  Naturally, a freezer hadn’t been invented yet.  More about pots and pans a bit later. I was put into a playpen, and I found that if I pushed at the side, I could set up a harmonic rhythm and, eventually, I knocked the playpen over with me inside, of course.  My mother left it to show my father.  They must have had a big discussion whether it could be done or not.  It could.  One day a man came by with a cart and a goat and took my picture.  It must have been in 1929, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  The picture shows the cart with the date of 1929 in the front.  I would guess that it was after the crash in the stock market, which took place in October.

     Another house was bought by my grandmother, Sarah, is at 6227 Fountain Avenue.  I believe that it was bought on or before November 10, 1922.  There is a receipt written on a plain piece of paper saying, “Received from Rosa Lesgold and Sarah Seidel Two Hundred and 00/100 dollars as part payment on purchase of house #6227 Fountain Avenue.”  It is signed by Otto Lefevre.  I believe the total purchase price of that property was $9,625.  My guess is that, this was the first property purchase when he came here. 

     At this time something should be said about Dr. Oscar Reiss and his family.  He was my pediatrician and cared for me over the years.  He was a doctor who was an artist in his profession.  Some people do things by the book, and others just know the correct way to do things.  When I was brought into the office, the nurses would call me the “Mercurochrome kid.”  Mercurochrome was used to clean cuts for kids.  I was active and always had something.  By the way, when I was little, a kid was a baby goat.  When I was about 16 or 17, I contracted pneumonia.  This was in the early days of the sulfa drugs, but far earlier than the development of our wonder drugs of today.  I was sick for virtually the whole summer.  When I was better, I was told to drink a malted milk or two per day.  After Dr. Reiss died, a small group of people met at our house to discuss the formation of a clinic for children to honor Oscar Reiss.  It is known today as the Reiss Davis Clinic for Child Guidance.  Dr. Davis was also a beloved doctor.  Oscar was married to Edna, and they had three children: Jean, Dick, and Ann.  Dick and I were friends from our first birthday parties, which was around the five-year age.  Edna made great cookies, which requires a teaspoon of bourbon.  Joan still has the recipe.  One day Joan made the cookies with scotch because she didn’t have any bourbon.  It was awful, and she threw the batter away. Edna’s side of the family involved the Portis family.  We will discuss them a little later on.

     The Reiss family lived on June Street in Los Angeles, and later moved to Beverly Hills on the 700 block of North Roxbury Drive.  They had great neighbors.  On their south was a little old gray-haired man by the name of Jerome Kern.  Just for the record, he was one of the great songwriters.  I saw him once at his front door.  On their north was the bandleader, Spike Jones.  He made a bunch of goofy records, which were fun.  He decided to build a swimming pool in his back yard.  How would you dig a hole for a swimming pool?  Not Spike Jones.  He invited all of his friends to a party one Sunday morning.  A steam shovel came up the alley, which was dirt in those days, and all of his friends got a chance to help dig the hole.  That was really just another normal day for him. 

     But going back in time for us, a decision was made to move to Beverly Hills because of the quality of the school system.  The first short move was to settle in an apartment on the one hundred block of South Peck Drive for a short time.  After returning to the Spaulding home for a short time, we moved into a duplex at 451 South Bedford Drive where we were to stay from 1931 until 1941.  Two details might be of interest.  There was the year that it snowed, and there was snow on the ground before breakfast but none after.  Also, there was the Long Beach earthquake, which came in about 1933 or 1934.  That came about five o’clock in the afternoon.  My mother, grandmother, and I got in the doorway and waited.  After the quake we all went outside to talk it over with the neighbors.  Of mild interest the telegraph company, Western Union, was almost broke, and the earthquake saved the company.  It was quite a disaster, but I thought that it was fun. 

     Speaking of neighbors, it was important that there were a million kids on the block, and that was great for all.  Among the things we did was play roller hockey.  Two driveways went to the back of the buildings side by side.  They spread to the right and left so the cars could go into the garages, and the pavement was smooth.  That left enough room for us to play.  We needed roller skates, which we had.  They were the old fashion kind with two wheels in front and two in the back.  Nobody had even thought of the four wheels in a line skates that were going to be popular over fifty years later.  We also needed a puck.  That we made by stuffing dirt into a tuna can.  Next we needed hockey sticks.  You got a board, cut it at the proper angle and nailed the two pieces together to form what looked like a hockey stick.  Then you rounded out a handle on the top part of the stick, and you were in business.  I don’t remember any serious injuries.

     The 1932 Olympics took place when I was six years old.  As you know that was in the middle of the depression.  Everybody thought that I should go to see something, and I was to go to the men’s swimming.  It might seem silly to you, but there were very few events in which women participated.  In fact in ancient Greece only men were allowed to participate or view the games.  The Olympic pool was just south of the coliseum, and both facilities are still standing today.  In those days everything was measured in yards, not meters, and our seats were not the best, but it was great for me.  You know where the start/finish line is?  Our seats were at the other end.  I think that it was Ivan who took me in the morning, and Morton took me in the afternoon.  It might be just opposite, but that is not important.  What is important was that each of them got to see some part of the Olympics.  They told me whom to watch for at the finish line because that person would probably win.  At that time I had no idea how they knew who would win.  After all everybody had the same chance.  Didn’t he?  I do appreciate what they did for me so many years ago.  I think the tickets were $2.50 per person for the day.  Don’t laugh too hard; that was big money in those days.  When the 1984 Olympics came to Los Angeles, I think that I was the only person in the area to believe that this was going to be the greatest thing ever. It really was, and fortunately we had a few more dollars to go to the events we chose.  Do remember that times do change, both ways.  Happily, we went to the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as track and field, gymnastics, swimming, and diving, and we must not forget the walking race on Exposition Boulevard.

     Forona did not have much of a formal education other than high school and a little time at Cal.  Her education in Washington, Pennsylvania was in a Catholic school for a time.  It was my understanding that the teachers could be pretty tough on the kids.  I am not positive, but I feel that that education was not coed.  It is interesting that Forona’s education included training in proper etiquette.  She was the expert, and if anybody had any question, she would be called.  For example: she would say that when introducing people, one should always introduce the lesser person to the more important, such as: “Mr. Jones, I would like you to meet His Majesty King Important.”  Or she

would accept, “Your Majesty, this is Mr. Jones.”  She was very strict about thank you notes, or “Bread and Butter notes.”  She would explain that not only was in a nice thing to do, but it let the sender know that the gift had been received.  She always argued that etiquette was only logic and common sense. 

     Cooking was done with iron pots or iron frying pans.  These pots were not steel or anything that we use today.  They were heavy iron.  Don’t pass over the word heavy.  They were way beyond what cooking utensils weigh today.  Their surfaces were not smooth; in fact they were just plain rough.  They did keep the heat, and everything we had was fried or stewed.  Lamb chops were fried, and stews were made with plenty of nice fattening gravy.  Everything was browned.  That meant black on the surface.  I still like carrots fried in butter, which are also black on the surface.  Margarine hadn’t been invented yet.  The oven was fun.  If a cake was cooking, you were told to walk lightly.  “Don’t jump around like that!  There’s a

Figure 8 The heavy iron skillet.

cake in the oven!” Nobody bothered using thermometers for cooking. They were used only for taking your temperature if you were sick.  This picture was taken in the back yard as they were getting rid of the stove.  It had the warming oven on the top left with a regular oven below and the larger one to its right.  You had to light the top burners with a match because it had no spark.  They should have kept it as an antique.

            Maybe we should talk about some of my illnesses.  Outside of the regular colds I had a few interesting ones.  I had chicken pox; everybody had chicken pox.  I had mumps and/or swollen salivary glands twice, once on each side.  And then, when I was quite young, there was scarlet fever.  Another fun one that came along was whooping cough.  The best one was the viral pneumonia that I mentioned above while talking about Dr. Reiss, but it did mess up the whole summer.  Happily most of these diseases do not exist any more so that gives me the right to brag about them.  I almost forgot about the time I strained my ankle while skiing.  I did that near the end of the ski season so that wasn’t too bad.  Another problem I have is called an esophageal ring.  The esophagus carries the food down to the stomach.  Part way down the path it had closed up a bit.  It had closed from about twenty millimeters to about twelve and had to be opened a bit.  The doctor did just that, and now I have an open esophagus, but I have to be careful not to swallow big bites.  No problem there.  I just have to eat politely.  I should also mention Keratoconus, which is a cone shaped cornea, which leads to my poor vision problems.  That’s enough about illness so let’s go forward for everybody’s sake.

     Something should be said about my education at El Rodeo grammar school.  Among the work we did in the early years was to go to the library every week for a science book report.  By that time I had an interest in astronomy and used the books about it to write my report.  This was certainly in the early grades and during the depression, and in a short time I had used up all of the science books on the subject.  That created a real problem for everybody.  The school had no extra money to buy new books on astronomy for one child so it was suggested that I take up an interest in something else like the birds and the bees.  I guess they could have made a deal with the city’s library, but I didn’t know about that at the time.  I was a good kid, and that ended my research on astronomy for the time being.  It was too bad.

     While the next little story is a sidelight, it might be of interest for the record.  Evelyn Magnin, Rabbi Magnin’s wife was president of the PTA, and Forona was corresponding secretary.  This was during the time that the Wilshire Boulevard Temple was being built.  Hugo Ballin had been hired to paint the mural in the sanctuary in the temple.  Mrs. Magnin said that there should be a mural in the lobby at El Rodeo School.  The school system floated a bond issue for eight hundred fifty dollars, and the school has that mural today in the lobby of the school’s auditorium.

     As a child I was taken to the Philharmonic Auditorium on Saturday mornings to hear a concert especially for children.  In the early days the conductor was Otto Klemperer who was a large man who controlled the orchestra with an iron fist.  He conducted without the use of a podium.  He had the cellos directly in front of him, and when he wanted them to play, he would lean over them and practically point to the string he wanted.  He knew his music and exactly what he wanted from the orchestra, and he got it.  It wasn’t then, but later on I was able to discern that different conductors made the music sound differently.  That was quite a shock to me.  It led to my telling which conductor was conducting the Standard Hour on radio just by the way the theme was played.  The Standard Hour was a weekly radio program devoted to high quality classical music, and everybody listened to it. 

     In the summer we went to concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.  At first we put a blanket down in the twenty-five cent seat section up high and had dinner.  Later on we shared a box with some friends in the lower level.  It was in the two hundred level down low.  Charlie Chaplin owned the box directly in front of us.  By then he was just another old man to me. I believe that our last year in that box was 1942 because World War II had started and my mother decided that the Japanese were going to come right over the bowl and bomb it during a concert, and she did not want any part of it.  Among the nights to remember was the Lilly Pons night when over twenty-five thousand people packed the hillsides as well as every seat.  I remember that she sang a million encores.  To this day I remember the Bell Song from Lakme as well as other difficult areas such as the Meditation from Thais.  Maybe it is better these many years later, but I don’t think so.

     Another night to remember was the night Vladimir Horowitz played and conducted Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto.  The Gas Company began a program on KFAC at that time and chose this piece of music as their theme because of this night.  In those days, many long years ago, they moved the shell back in order to produce opera on the open stage.  One night they produced the Walkeri with lights on white horses on the hillside in back of the stage during the ride of the Walkeri.  Today we have box 52, which is about as good as it gets.  When there is a piano soloist, we can see the piano keyboard as well as the pianist’s facial expressions.

     About ten or fifteen years ago or so a man and his wife had a box about six or seven boxes down the row to our right.  They were always served by a waiter with a white coat who took excellent care of them.  In those days we had candles, and we really did the thing up right with our picnics.  The man was General Omar Bradley, who was one of the top Generals of World War II.  One evening I went over to him and thanked him for what he accomplished during the War.  He was very gracious, and we spoke several times after that.  Unfortunately, I believe that was his last year, and I don’t remember seeing him again.

     During those years on south Bedford I played at Roxbury Park in the summer beginning when I was eleven years old.  That was 1937, and the park was only a block west of our home.  The routine was to go to the park after breakfast.  Then I would run around the park.  This was years before jogging became the fad that it turned out to be.  It is interesting to note that nobody else ran in those days except Skipper.  Skipper was my fox terrier.  He was important because in the afternoon, when it was time to come home, my mother blew a whistle, and Skipper took off for home.  When he arrived home, my mother knew that I was on my way.  The next dog was Vonnie (his name was “Something Von Shetler,” or something like that.) but more about him shortly.  When the organized day began, we played baseball, croquet, and at lunch we played checkers and chess.  The chess quickly became more important than the checkers, and it was fun for all.

     Two high school coaches were our baby sitters.  Charlie Brown was the track coach, and Sax Elliot was the gymnastic coach.  He brought a springboard to the park, and we all did front rolls and flips.  We learned how to do many things such as cartwheels with no hands and round offs with a half flip.  I put that in here just to impress anybody who might be impressed easily.  It is interesting that Ronnie, one of my grandsons, plays baseball exactly where I did those many years ago.  Happily his coach is also a coach at the high school, Jason Newman.  We played softball with underhand pitching, while he is playing in a more organized league now with uniforms and equipment and overhand pitching.  They also have an announcer’s booth, which remains unused most of the time.  In the winter we played football there.  In those days the ground was level; now it is rolling landscape, but they do have a soccer field. That program is also organized.

     One summer Morton, Forona, and I went to Catalina Island for a few days.  Everybody took the Great White Steamer, which took about two and a half hours.  It had music and dancing and food and everything.  When we got to the island, we were met by all of the natives singing in the main square where the ship docked.  The kids dived for coins on the side of the ship away from the dock.  From there we were taken to the Saint Catherine (Santa Catalina) hotel where were to stay.  The hotel had everything.  There was music with dinner.  I remember that one of the bands was Bob Crosby and his Bobcats.  After dinner the bands went to over to the Casino and played for dancing.  The dining room overlooked the ocean, and the whole setup was beautiful.  Alas, the hotel was old and taken down.  When David was about one or two at the latest, we took him to the St. Catherine.  There was a pirate ship in the harbor, and he had a fine time.  When we were returning home, he fell asleep in the car for the very first time.  That was a fine trip, but the hotel died of old age.

     The next move was to 607 North Rodeo Drive.  It had been taken over by an insurance company, and the real estate person at the insurance company told my father about this opening, and we moved into it.  The decision to move was an easy one, but it could have been difficult.  The landlord, Charles Jones, lived downstairs at 453 South Bedford.  We had Vonnie, a dachshund, and, as kids and dogs would do, he and I used to run around upstairs above the neighbors downstairs.  Just as my father was about to tell Mr. Jones what was about to happen, Jones told my father that something had to be done about that dog, “Or else.”  Whew.  My father took the, “Or else” choice.  The new home was a great home for us for a long summer.  It was low rent for us, and the insurance company had someone watching over their property.  I had a couple of great kids’ parties there before we moved.  The house was bought from the insurance company sight unseen.  No harm; a better deal was in store.  Our new house was to be at 601 North Rodeo, just three houses down on the corner.  We’ll get back to that shortly.  During the years on South Bedford I went to El Rodeo grammar school, which was north of Wilshire, and after we moved I went to Beverly Hills High School, which was south of Wilshire.  That was bad because I had to walk.

     There are always stories about school worth telling.  I began schooling in kindergarten at El Rodeo grammar school in February 1931.  In those days they had two semesters per year, the winter and the summer.  I must have been told not to let anyone pick on me so on the first day of school I decided to clean up on all of the boys in the class, and somebody who was standing well away from me said, “Oh look, there’s Popeye, the sailor man.”  And I carried the nickname of Popeye all through school.  Even after we were married, when we were visiting the Clover Field airport to watch small planes, when David was small, somebody came up to us and said, “Popeye is that you?”  Once I composed a piece of music and sold it on the steps of the school for a nickel.  I didn’t have many buyers.  That was all right; the experience was worth it. 

     In high school I was busier.  One venture I had was a scheme I had while at class or school parties.  When it was convenient, after I had eaten, of course, I would go over to the piano and start playing something.  I really wasn’t that good, but I wasn’t too bad either. In a short time one of the guys came over to the piano, and I slid to the edge of the piano bench nearest the wall, which was usually on the bass side, and the other guy would begin to play, and I had my seat for the evening, and nobody could get there to bounce me.  Sheet music was not part of this situation.  He would just improvise.  I was well aware of the routine, and I did set it up on purpose.  To this day he doesn’t know that he was set up.  The other guy could not stand my playing and had to do something about it.  Once he sat down, he couldn’t quit.  Your talent scout had found the world famous Maestro, Andre Previn.

     There was the school play, which occurred every year on “Color Day.”  I really do not remember a bad show.  This one year the band was conducted by a guy who played the trumpet by the name of Jimmy Higgson, and Previn played the piano in the orchestra.  I thought that that was funny because by that time I knew that Previn was a good conductor, and I assumed the teaching staff knew it as well.  I just didn’t know how good he was to become.  In any event years later I figured it out.  By playing the piano he was able to keep the orchestra together far better than the conductor.  In those days the Beverly Hills High School orchestra and band were top quality.  In those days many of the students were the offspring of famous movie stars, and the children were talented as well.

     In that show I had two parts.  One was to jump over a bunch of chairs laid with their backs up and their tops facing the audience.  I started with a couple and began to add to them.  Needless to say, everybody was hoping for one thing: a bloody and lingering death.  Alas, it never came.  The final bit was to jump the bunch of chairs with a “Friend” placed just before the last chair.  As I remember it, there were five chairs, the friend, and one more chair.  I started well off stage to get up speed and went for it, but I swerved around the whole thing just before the jump and went wishing past the stage.  By the way two strong guys caught me at the end by the stairs.  I returned with great showmanship and did the whole thing all over again, much to the relief of my poor stooge friend.  It was a good routine but never to be repeated.  I give long jump lessons on request.  By the way I did win the long jump in a four-school meet while in El Rodeo.

     The other part was more dangerous.  I sat in the audience, and at a certain point I got up and said in a loud voice that I thought that this was a lousy show, and I just yelled at the people on the stage and complained about everything.  It went something like: “This is a lousy show…!”  Of course they hollered back and sent two of the biggest guys in the school to get me just as I was about to leave the auditorium and dragged me all the way down the isle and up onto the stage.  We were careful to be sure that I did not get too close to the door so the people in the balcony could see.  Then they pulled me across the stage and all waited.  Silence.  We had a stretcher all set up, which I hit, and then I took my hand and hit the floor with one big whomp.  It sounded like I was shot with large cannon, and most definitely not a small one.  Then I was covered completely with a sheet except my right arm, which hung down so all could see while the band quietly played the funeral march as they marched me across the stage for all to see.  I was told that a little girl cried.

     Then there was the time at the football game, and I was sitting in a rather high row in the grandstands.  I had gotten a thing on a string that one could say looked like a spider.  It had springy arms.  The string was really a spring so if you dangled it in front of somebody, it might look real for an instant.  Well, you know what’s coming.  There was this young lady directly in front of me, and I did it.  I leaned forward and brought it down slowly and made it bounce a little bit.  She did what she was supposed to do, (I think it was a high G) and we all laughed.  You know perfectly well that that is not the end of the story.  I really felt sorry for the Principal when I had to visit him.  He had to explain to me that I shouldn’t do things like that, and I had to assure him that I meant no harm to the girl or her parents, or the school, or anybody else, but he could hardly keep a straight face. 

     How does a fad come to be?  At a loft on Spring Street not far from my father’s office down town a jobber was selling hats.  I bought them at my cost of six for a dollar and sold them for twenty-five cents each.  They were not ordinary hats.  I called them “Jitterbug hats,” which was a great name for them in that time in history.  They were felt hats, and they had a million colors.  What the manufacturer did was take all of the scraps of anything he had and press the junk into a hat.  All of the boys started to buy the hats, which I sold at school.  That was fine until someone decided that you couldn’t sell things on school grounds, so I took my business to a card table on the sidewalk in front of the school and finally at home.  What I believe now is that they watched until the fad began to die down and then gave me the boot.  I have no idea how much I made but it was a meaningful amount.

     We ought to discuss musical instruments, not musical instruments but boxes and buckets and the like.  I made the instruments.  I made a ukulele out of a wooden cigar box, a piece of wood and legitimate ukulele strings.  Harry Essex, our next-door neighbor at the time and family friend, helped me with the calculation of the struts, the cross sections for the fingerboard.  For this I used wooden matchsticks.  They worked well.  The tone quality wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a great instrument.  It has long since been broken and disappeared. 

     The other instrument was a gutbucket.  It is a wash bucket, picture frame wood, a door hinge, and a real G string from a base violin.  The wood is attached to the side of the upside down bucket with some screws.  The hinge is attached to the other end of the wood and another piece of wood is attached to the other side of the hinge making a T.  The string is attached to the end of the cross bar and goes down to and through the center of the bucket.  It is attached and held in place with a few washers and screws.  In order to play the instrument you press down on the outside of the T and give tension to the string.  The stronger you pull the higher the pitch.  Only one person played a tune on the thing.  He was an expert professional cellist, and he was able to play Three Blind Mice.  Mostly it is like slapping a base and going boom de da boom with it.  It still exists today.  The gutbucket, banjo, and the armonica are the only solely American musical instruments.  The armonica was created by Benjamin Franklin.  It is an instrument that has glass bowls of different sizes and is made to turn with a foot pedal.  You gently place your fingers on the bowl or bowls that you want to play, and it makes a pleasant sound not unlike a saw.  There are very few in existence and fewer musicians able to play it. 

     One of my friends in high school and college was Moisie Friedman.  He lived with his parents and sister on the seven hundred block of Beverly Drive, and we lived on the six hundred block of Rodeo.  The walk to their house was about a block and a half.  If I walked through their alley and jumped the fence, it was even shorter.  They had a rather small house on two large lots with a good sized swimming pool.  It was fun for a Sunday afternoon.  The Friedman’s were interesting people.  Mr. Max Friedman had owned the Dodge agency in China before World War II.  Very simply, he made a lot of money there.  They spoke English with an English-Chinese accent and had wonderful Chinese art pieces throughout the house. From time to time the ladies prepared a Chinese dinner, which was really something else.  It took three days to prepare the food and about ten minutes to eat it.  Chop sticks or bust.  They did get one fork for Forona.  She was much happier that way.  The best part of the dinner was going to the pots in the kitchen at the end and finding goodies that were leftovers.  One day Moisie and I heard a lot of music and noise down the block.  A few people were entertaining themselves.  When we showed up, Jimmy Durante was at the piano and singing, and he was only one of a bunch.  We sat ourselves on a wall and had a fine time.  You couldn’t buy entertainment like that.

     I had just entered high school when we entered World War II.  However as I got older and approached draft age, something had to be done about my entering the service.  There were two major college programs.  The army had the Army Specialized Training Program, which was known as the ASTP.  The Navy had the same program called V5.  I chose the ASTP.  We were to take an exam, which was to be given in the school’s cafeteria.  I believe that all of the boys in my class and older, as well as strangers, took the test.  I know the place was full.  As it turned out only five of us passed the exam.  One boy had had polio and heavy braces on his legs.  He was going nowhere.  I had and still have bad eyes, and I was out.  That left three who were to go into the service and college.  By the way, the college was the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho.  That would have been fine because it would be great for skiing.  That was the good news, but the bad news was very bad.  At a point it was decided that the ASTP program would be ended, and all of the students would be regular soldiers.  It happened that they were sent to Europe and were involved in what we know today as the Battle of the Bulge, which was Hitler’s last push of any sort.  I would have been in that battle and might not be here to tell this story.  I do know of somebody who was killed in that battle. 

     Before we talk about teachers we should talk about shaving because this is about the time I started to shave.  Oh the joy of shaving!  When I was small, my father had shaving soap and brush as well as the razor.  You got the brush wet and mushed it around in the soap dish to get lather on the brush.  Then you lathered your face.  When that was done, you were almost ready to shave.  But wait.  You had to take the razor and strop the blade.  The strop was a piece of leather about a foot long, which was attached to something.  If you had a straightedge blade, you took the blade and brought it along the leather for about ten or twenty strokes to smooth the tiny rough bits of the metal on the blade so it would be smoother on your face.  Before you got to that point in your spare time you had taken the blade and the stone and honed the blade against a stone for maybe twenty to fifty times to sharpen it.  OK, now after the stone, strop, shaving soap, and brush, you can start to shave.  By the way, I never had to use a straightedge blade.  I had the modern safety razor.  One final note, the quality of the steel that we use today is much better that that if yesteryear.

     Maybe we should mention something about some of my teachers now.  They do have something to do with school.  There was Juan C. Padilla who taught Spanish.  He was a great teacher because he believed every word he said, and we all learned Spanish.  The most important story about him was the big question, what did the C. stand for?  Was it a name or just an initial?  I won’t keep you waiting because we did find out that the C stood for Concepcion.  When we finally found the answer, we never touched that again   as a great teacher, he did his job.  One time I was in Mexico City with my parents.  We were being entertained by a family who had a son.  They could all speak English, but the son had a friend visiting for the day who spoke no English.  I spoke Spanish with both boys for the whole day with just a little assistance from my friend, my host.  It was a feeling of accomplishment and success.

     And then there were Miss Wheeler and Miss Parker who were the two English teachers who everyone had.  One day in Miss Parker’s class I was giving a speech in front of the class.  This involved a new product called Lucite, and I explained that it was strong and if you dropped it on the floor, it would not break, which I proceeded to do and it did.  It broke into two pieces.  After everybody stopped laughing I calmly explained that it did have a weak spot, but it did not break into a million pieces, and I got out of a tough situation.  I got an A for the speech.  I do hope they did their job properly, because if I have too many grammar mistakes in this, they’ll come back and get me.  I was always correcting David and Craig when they were little.  Many long years ago when Beverly Hills High School had its 50^th reunion, I introduced Joan to the then two little old school teachers.  This was the first and only time Joan ever met them, but she leaned down a bit and said, “Oh, so you’re the ones who made him so obnoxious.”  Nobody could have said anything nicer to them.  They died shortly after that.

     Another teacher who was dedicated to his profession was Mr. Norman Fjeldsted.  He taught physics and made it fun.  With him we played with toys and measured their actions.  In fact he did much more than that, of course, and gave a bunch of teenagers an understanding of the universe around us.  One day he demonstrated how a Leiden jar works.  He had us hold hands, while he built up the electricity in the jar.  All of a sudden the jar became overloaded, and we all go a shock.  It worked.  He was to prep us the Army and Navy tests that we would take.  We were to stay friends for years after my high school days.  In fact we were friends with his son and daughter-in-law for years. 

     Charles C. Herbst was our biology teacher.  Biology is both botany and zoology, which was his specialty.  He always talked about, “Old Lady” McCullough.  She was the zoology professor at USC and taught beginning zoology.  She might have given an A once, but she did give mostly Cs with a rare B and rare D.   I do not know of any F.  I was to get the usual C.  The words “Old Lady” were not an insult.  It is just the way it was.  I think she died in her late 90’s.  Herbst had her for beginning zoology, and I had her for beginning zoology.  Herbst did influence me a great deal, because when I entered USC, I registered as a pre-med major instead of becoming a business major.  That was good and bad.  I was able to get a good scientific education, which I was able to apply in later years to the investment world, but I am sure that I did miss important investment and business courses in college.  There are other teachers, of course, but I hope that you get the general picture from these few examples.

     While at USC, I took a course in beginning astronomy from Dr. John Russell.  It should have been called “Very beginning astronomy” because there was really no math involved.  I did well, and we became friends.  In fact I got a job working as his lab assistant and general assistant.  As a result of that job, I became a tutor to those who needed help.  One of my pupils was an older lady who had returned to school after her family was grown.  I met her every week and charged my usual fee, which was something around 70 cents an hour.  When I reported home about my great financial success, my father asked me if her husband’s name was Paul.  Several days later I reported back that it was Paul.  Morton told me that my student was the wife of Paul Fussell, one of the highest paid attorneys of O’Melveny and Meyers, one of the finest and most expensive law partnerships in the city of Los Angeles.  His fee in those days was probably $100 dollars an hour, which was high for those days. My fee was fair, and it was the going rate, and I never changed it. The Russell’s were invited to David’s and Gina’s wedding.

     Two other professors should be mentioned as an example of the best and the worst.  Frank C. Baxter was the top Shakespearian scholar of his day.  In his classes he would act out each part as he was discussing the play.  That is to say that he would jump around from right to left, say a line, and jump back to answer.  His classes were a lot of work but fun.  I never had him in class, but I dated his daughter for a short time.  That never went anyplace.  He gave lectures for television, which were very worthwhile and educational.  The only problem there was that he had to sit still, and that was difficult for him.  Today he would have had props and have been allowed to move around.  So much for the best.

     I had Mr. (I guess Dr.) Riddle for French one year.  His French accent was bad.  Good day became, “Bone jour” or something worse.  I guess he was one step ahead of us, but I’m really not sure of that.  It was a bad experience.  Do you know that there are three types of teachers?  There is the average teacher who you forget after a while.  There is the superb teacher who you will never forget and will remember his or her name gratefully for the rest of your life.  And then there is the teacher who you remember by name and wish you could forget but, alas, you never will.  “East is East, and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet.”

     But getting back to the home and mortgage problem, which we left way above, Morton would never talk about having a mortgage again until 1941 when they bought their new house at 601 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  Needless to say it was paid off as soon as possible.  He felt strongly that in times of a falling market or a depression one should not own property.  It was much better to rent a diminishing asset.  In the middle of 1941 it was obvious to him that we were about to enter World War II.  War is inflationary.  We bought a new car in August and moved into the house on October 2, 1941.  That was a hard move. I was a fifteen-year-old kid, and I moved a lot of furniture and stuff down the sidewalk on a dolly.  This was to be their final home.

     Neighbors can be interesting.  One of those neighbors was Burton Lane who lived at 603 North Rodeo.  He was a composer and worked mostly at night.  Buy working later nobody would disturb him.  Our bedrooms were on the south side of our house, and his living room and piano were on the south side of his house.  Forona was a light sleeper and heard him working at night.  He would work on the bass first and then finally the melody.  Burton Lane is known for the wonderful musical, “Finnians Rainbow.”  One of the songs is, “How are things in Glocamora?”  It was fun after the fact, but we did hear a lot of boom de da booming through the night.  Other neighbors over the years were Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who wrote plays, as well as their three daughters.  One of the daughters, Nora, became famous by writing articles for magazines and other things.  We kept Harry (mentioned above) and Lee Exsex as friends until their deaths.  We still are in touch with David, their son.

     During World War II Forona was an air raid warden.  She would go to the Beverly Hills City Hall for meetings about once a week or so.  Naturally the members would share the ride because of the gas shortage.  She had Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo Marx in her car pool.  By the time they got to the City Hall she said that she was laughing her head off.  They just could not help it.  They were funny all the time.  They all owned corner houses on Canon and Beverly Drives.

     That house was bought from Mrs. Maybell Powell.  She sold the house and some furniture and oriental rugs went along with the deal.  We still have a few of the rugs, two lights in our living room, and an old English chest in our entryway.  The house is Spanish or Mediterranean style with a tile roof, which was a problem.  There is a tower, which is a circular stairway, and it is right off the entry hall.  This tower is made of concrete and is considerably heavier than the house so that in the normal course of time or if an earthquake hit, it would move at a different rate than the rest of the house. That would leave a space, or crack of some sort in the roof and allow rainwater to come in. You could sit on the roof with an umbrella, and it would still seep in through the tarpaper and tiles.

     Something should be said about the furniture that Forona and Morton acquired as well as some other pieces along that line.  Beginning at the time of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939, Mr. Rodriguez came to the United States from Spain with tiles of scenes of chapters from Don Quixote.  (I never knew his first name.)  He made a table for my father and mother at this time.  It is made without nails and has value.  There are similar tiles at Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley, California.  The table at Scotty’s Castle has three scenes and is much larger.  Rabbi and Mrs. Magnin had a similar table, but the tiles were not as pretty as ours, and the legs were too long for the table.  There might be others around, but I know of none in a museum or elsewhere.  All of the furniture that he made is unique.  It is all one of a kind, and I know of no other duplicate of any of his work.  After the table was finished and about the same time, which is about 1936, they decided to have Mr. Rodriguez make a bedroom suite for them.  It is made of black walnut and is hand carved with the initials, MS, Morton Seidel, on the headboard of the bed and the dressers.  The suite has a bed and “his” and “hers” dressers as well as a mirror to hang over the “hers” dresser.  These works are heavily hand carved and have no nails either.  David and Gina have those pieces today.  Then it was decided to make a love seat. It is very deep and not comfortable. It too has superb workmanship and is well made and has a small amount of carving on it.  It is a nice piece for someone who likes it but not for everybody.  It like all of the above is original and one of a kind.  If my memory is correct, the two chairs, mentioned below, and love seat have the original upholstery on them.

     At this time, about the beginning of the 1940’s, two things happened.  Mr. Rodriguez bought new tools, and he began to drink.  Two final pieces were made by him.  First was a sideboard for the dining room.  The carving on this is much less deep than his original works.  The work was still done by hand, but his soul was no longer in it.  The final work was a record cabinet with two drawers.  At that time 33 and 45 RPM records did not exist so it is made for the old 78’s.  It is good work, but sadly not the work of the original man.  Records of value are still in this cabinet. He finally went to work selling mobile homes, and then we lost touch of him. 

     After a short time, still during the Rodriguez era, they bought a heavy throne-like chair from the estate of Lupi Valez, the colorful Latin entertainer.  My father and Mr. Rodriguez decided to make a similar chair.  The new chair was to have a gargoyle in the front.  Gargoyles have an angry or down turned mouth. It was decided that this one should have a smile.  Mr. Rodriguez couldn’t really handle that completely so he made the frown as well as the smile.  I know of no other gargoyle that has a smile.  This chair is heavy and completely hand made and hand carved and one of a kind.  There is another chair, which should be mentioned here just for the record, and is probably of Mexican origin and is no way near the quality of the other two chairs.

     Dinnerware and dishes are of interest too.  One set we have came from Morton and Forona.  This set of dishes is English Spode, and the design is called, “Old Salem.”   When we were on our honeymoon, we went to Victoria, British Colombia.  We walked up the street and found a Spode store.  We decided to go in and see what they had.  The salesperson asked me what pattern my folk’s dishes were.  I had no idea, so I sat down in a chair with a book of patterns.  Finally, I said, “This one,” which was Old Salem.  They told us that on that table over there they had a closeout of Old Salem at a big discount.  We bought a major part of their inventory with the idea that we would own it someday.

     On a later trip to Canada we began to take an interest in old Beleek, which is Irish china.  There are different labels or marks on the bottom of most pieces, which tell their age.  For example, the black label is 1926 or earlier.  Our first purchase was a set of desert cups and plate/saucers for putting small sandwiches or biscuits.  We bought them and took them with us because this was a trip when we drove.  They were packed very well.  Part of this story involves a minor car problem we had in Oregon while returning.  I took everything out of the back of the car and put it on the roof of the car.  When repacking the car, I did not put the box with the dishes into the car but left them on the roof.  As we were driving along, I looked out and saw the box sliding along beside the car.  Woops.  We stopped, picked up the box with the dishes and decided not to open them.  If they were broken, we couldn’t do anything about it there, and if they were all right, we would open them at home.  They were all right; nothing was broken; they were well packed.  Thank you whoever packed that box.  We have added quite a few pieces from time to time over the years.  There is a Beleek book.  The pieces are cataloged in that book and have been marked with pencil.  I have not found all of our pieces, but newer catalogues will have them.

     Other dishes in this story are the almost complete set we have from Betty, Joan’s mother, which we use for outside dishes.  When we were in China, we went to the “Company store” and bought a dozen ornate dinner plates.  They are to be used only when we have Chinese food.  One day Joan found another set that we liked very much and bought it.  It has a blue and gold border.  Most importantly to us is our set of Royal Dalton dishes, which we have used every day since we got them at our wedding or shortly after it.  They are well worn.  We can seat hundreds for dinner.  There are also some glass dishes used as desert dishes or the like, which Forona had and liked very much.  There are several Lennox plates as well as a plate or two of Rosenthal china in the house somewhere, which came from Forona or possibly even my grandmother, Clara.  More will be said about household possessions as we go through the years a bit.

     After the folks died the 601 North Rodeo house was bought by a contractor who added a swimming pool and did a great deal of work.  One of the things that he did was paint over the ceiling in the entry hall. That was a shame because it had oil paint murals on it.  He also whitewashed the dining room.  The house has changed hands several times since we sold it.  Something has to be said about the original refrigerator.  It had its motor in the cellar and was cared for by Mr. Seibert.  Both he and the refrigerator were very old.  Finally they both gave up the ghost.  I am not sure who died first.  The house had a butler’s pantry as well as a breakfast room and dining room.  The butler’s pantry had an incinerator for burning papers, such as newspapers.  The ashes from that incinerator emptied into a receptacle in the cellar, which had to be cleaned out from time to time.  The old stove, mentioned above, was something to remember. One had to light the burners with a match, and it had a warming drawer for dishes.  It would sure be fun to have it back today.  I hated to see it go.

     The house had two cellars.  It had the one with the refrigerator motor and hot water heater and the drawer to empty the incinerator ash, as well as two heaters.  You entered the other basement by way of a trap door in a hallway.  Then you went down a ladder.  At the bottom were two more heaters and a wine cellar, which was in the ground behind two hefty wooden doors.  The first time we looked into this wine cellar, we found a jug that looked like it had a special dark colored great wine in it.  Upon turning it around carefully, we were able to read a label that said, “Distilled water.”  A disaster had come upon us.  The “Wine” was never tasted.

     Along with the dogs mentioned above, there were several other dogs that we should talk about.  After all, they were part of the family. Annabelle was a Bedlington terrier.  Bedlington Terriers rarely bark.  I do remember that she barked once or twice.  Wolf was a dog owned by some friends.  They were introduced at the proper time, and Annabelle became a mother.  The dogs did have pedigrees. Annabelle’s bed was a pillow placed in a paper towel carton, which was cut to allow her to enter.  She and Wolf slept there while he was visiting us.  During the time Annabelle was in heat, a visiting large German Shepherd jumped the wall, which was over seven feet high, and made his intentions known to Wolf.  It should be pointed out that Bedlingtons are good fighters but never start a fight.  The fight was on in the middle of the night in the patio.  The door to the outside was opened to let the German shepherd out; the hose was turned on; and there was blood all over the

place.  Finally the German Shepherd retreated into the night.  Wolf had a little nick on his ear and was wet.  That was it.  He was dried off, and I think that he was pretty proud of himself.  As I remember it, I think there were four pups.  One day Annabelle took the pups hunting.  They ended up in a pigeon coup and killed several pigeons.  Naturally they were prize pigeons, and I had a legal problem.  After hiring an attorney and a lot of discussion, I paid a rather substantial amount for those days.  I think that more payment was due, which was paid by the family.  The pups were given good homes; Wolf went back home, and Annabelle lived happily ever after.

     While we are thinking about dogs, we ought to talk about Porsche.  She was an Italian Greyhound.  An Italian Greyhound is the smallest of the Greyhounds.  This one was nervous and would shake.  The medical condition is called an incomplete tetanus.  If somebody went boo, she would become completely unglued.  When Joan and I were married, I was replaced by Porsche.  In fact Forona kept the dog even after Morton died until the dog did become an overwhelming problem and was given away.  She was an indoor dog, and I don’t think that her feet ever changed color from the day she was born.  Let’s just say that her feet never got dirty.  That is enough about dogs until much later when we get to Frisky who was David’s and Craig’s dog.

     At this time we had better show how my mother’s side of the family came to town.  My grandmother, Mama, Clara Prager, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania considerably before the 1900’s. She had virtually no formal education, but she sure could figure at the checkout line at the grocery store.  Sometimes she was faster than the checker.  She was smart, but, unfortunately, not educated.  That was too bad.  She was married to Isaac Arnold, but he had died in San Francisco before Forona and Morton were married.  My uncle, Ivan, the older sibling, and Forona were born in Pittsburgh in the middle 1890’s.  They lived along the Pike in Washington, Pennsylvania, called, “Little Washington.”  There is a slight chance that their grandmother might have been born there also, but don’t count on it.  However, I am sure that she was born in the United States, and probably in Pennsylvania.  The original discovery of oil occurred in Pennsylvania, and Ivan got sucker rods from the wells and made a railroad, which went down the slope in back of their house.  These were horse and buggy days, and Forona was taken to school in the buggy, which she liked very much.  Ivan walked; he was a big kid.  I have no idea what my grandfather did for a living; however, other members of the family were in the glass business as well as the stockyard business in Pittsburgh.  Eventually the family moved to Tonopah, Nevada well before 1920 where Ivan worked by running a silver mine, the McIntyre Mine, however, after several years it was obvious to him that it was no place to live.  While in Tonopah he was to become the youngest Potentate of the Shriners in Nevada up to that time.

     In the late teens or early twenty’s they came to California and settled in San Francisco where Forona attended UC Berkeley for a short time, and their father died, and their final move was to

Los Angeles.  Both of Forona’s parents are buried at the Hillside Cemetery in San Francisco.  I

know of no other Arnold decedents.  I have no idea what employment Ivan had in San Francisco, but it might have been with the Tarr, McComb Oil Company.  When he came to Los Angeles, he did work for Tarr, McComb, which also dealt in grains and other commodities.  The owner, Marshall McComb, later became a Justice of the California Supreme Court.  While still sitting on the bench, he became senile.  That is a matter of history.  I had met him several times as a child and young man.  Ivan always called him, “Judge or the Judge.”

     During Ivan’s time at Tarr, McComb he worked for a year or so in Bakersfield running an oil well.  The location was just north and west of Bakersfield called Oildale, and he was in charge of everything.  I watched as the men added pipes to make the hole deeper as they drilled the well.  There was an area they called an oil sump.  It was a small open area for overflow oil.  At the time I thought that that was quite a waste.  Ivan lived in what he called his doghouse.  It was a step or two below ground level and had an “Air-conditioning system” for summer.  It was a garden hose run to an area of kapok, shredded wood fibers, which hung by the window.  He turned the water on slowly and let it drip into the kapok.  It evaporated in the dry climate and was quite cool and comfortable.  We will just call it a working home.  He called it his doghouse. One of Ivan’s friends at Tarr, McComb was Peter V. Meyer, Pete.  We will return to him when we discuss Morton Seidel & Company later.

     The drive to Bakersfield was not what it is today.  The drive was called the Ridge Route.  It was very simple, because the road was build on the ridge of the mountain.  It was a two-lane road, which followed the contour of the top of the mountain.  That is, it went to the right and to the left and up and down.  To make it more interesting the trucks also used the road.  They traveled about three miles an hour going up and down and around.  In fact when the drivers couldn’t take it anymore, they set their throttle (now called cruise control) and got out and stood on the left side running board and held the steering wheel with their right hand as they went along.  At the north end of the ridge route the road came down to the valley below.  That part was called the “Grapevine.”  If you think of a grapevine as being gnarled and very twisted, you get the idea of what the road looked like.  In the valley the road was straight.  They called it the “Straightaway.”  It had only one slight turn between the bottom of the grapevine and Bakersfield. The whole trip to Bakersfield took about five hours.

     One day we were driving down the grapevine in our car, the Packard, which we will get to a bit later, and my mother’s hat blew out of the car.  Ladies always wore hats in those days.  It was always windy in that area because the valley below ran right into the mountain.  My father parked on the small shoulder and climbed down the mountain to try to find the hat.  We were told to stay in the car.  We did.  Needless to say, to this day the hat is still on the hill.  How sad it was.

     Part of Clara’s family, the Prager clan, left Pennsylvania and went to New Mexico.  While they did not found the city, they were instrumental in the formation of Roswell.  In fact they named some of the streets.  I was told that they all named the streets after themselves.  However, Uncle Will named his street Pennsylvania Avenue in honor of his home state.  I do not know if it is true, but until I know differently, I believe it.  Other streets are named after other states, but I believe that Pennsylvania was the first.  I always heard of a mysterious, “Uncle Will.”  It appears that he was William S. Prager.  I would guess that they came to Roswell in the 1880’s.  Two members of a later generation were named Myron and Boy.  I doubt that Boy was his real name, but I never heard another name.  Arthur Prager was Chairman, and before that, President, of the Public Service Company of New Mexico in the 1950’s.  The headquarters of the company was in Albuquerque.  I met him at least once and did talk to him on the phone about his company. Forona, Morton, and I were in Keane’s Chop House in New York having dinner.  Forona said, “I hear Arthur Prager’s voice behind me.” She turned around and said, “Arthur, is that you?”  He said that it was, and we all talked for a while.  She had not seen him for years, nor would she ever see him again.  It was always made clear to me that the family name was Prager, not Praeger.  There is another unrelated family by that name.

     There was another uncle.  He was Uncle Walter.  He came here every summer and stayed in Santa Monica.  He came with Aunt Carrie, and as I remember it, they stayed in a small house near the beach.  I asked why they didn’t stay closer to us, and I was told that they enjoyed the ocean because New Mexico didn’t have any ocean.  Looking back at it, I never knew that Carrie’s last name was Prager.  In fact I don’t think she had a last name.  Finally they stopped coming.

     This leads to Clara’s two sisters, Aunt Annie and Aunt Ella.  They lived in the central part of Los Angeles just northeast of Beverly Boulevard and Larchmont in a small bungalow.  I remember the lace on the arms of the chairs and how dark the house always was.  Annie’s last name was Price, and she lived with her sister, Ella Prager.  Looking back at that situation, Ella was the worker and Annie was waited upon.  When I was quite small, I remember Aunt Annie telling me to come to her in her chair across the room.  She said that this was probably the last time e that she would be able to see me because her eyesight was going.  In fact it really was because she did lose her sight, got sick, and died not long after that.  The funny part of all that was that my grandmother, Clara, and Ella, were the ones who were well, but the first to go.  Annie was the sick one and never knew that the others had gone.  This was all within a week or so.  When Clara, my grandmother, died, I was in high school, and my parents told me that my place was really in school and I did not have to go through the funeral and burial routine.  Maybe they were correct, but I think at this late date that it would have been better if I had been there and involved.  As stated elsewhere, they took her to the Hillside Cemetery in San Francisco, and I stayed home.  I said above that Clara could stand at the check stand at the grocery store and add the items faster than the cashier with the machine.  That impressed me.  She was smart and a nice lady.

     The way Aunt Annie’s will was drawn up was interesting.  She left money to all of the members of the family.  However dollar amounts were left, not percentages.  The more distant relatives were mentioned last and lost their share as the medical expenses grew and the principal decreased.  Clara, and Ella her sisters, got their fixed amount, Forona and Ivan got theirs along with the next generation including me.  My father went to the trustees, the Security Bank, and argued with them trying to tell them that there would be better investments than two and a half per cent municipal bonds.  He was really arguing on behalf of the less fortunate relatives.  He failed.  The bank told him that they had to keep liquid securities, which really was not the case.  They could have done much better for all.  In fact they did a very poor job.  Morton was angry but had no say in the matter.

     There is one more part to this story.  I believe Annie’s husband was named Will, “Uncle Will.” That is confusing to me because there was the other, “Uncle Will” in Roswell New Mexico.  However, this man had an electric car with a running board!  If you are tiny, you have to climb up to the running board, then up to the floor of the car and finally up to the seat where you turn around and face the front, and then you are ready to go.  You are pretty winded when you are through.  I remember it well.  I also remember the electric plug in the corner of the garage where he unplugged the charger and the electric circuit and made it possible for us to go around the block.  We probably never made more than 25 miles an hour.  One day he and the car were no longer.  I remember the empty space in the garage.  It was very confusing, but nobody else knew how to drive a car.

     Getting back to Morton and Forona who were married April 2, 1925 and Morton Seidel and

Company, which was founded in June of that year, Morton decided to go into the brokerage business for himself.  Forona’s birthday was June 20, and I believe that that was approximately the starting date. (I have found a one month lease dated June 1, 1927 and expiring June 30 1927.) In any event the company was incorporated on October 26, 1925 and located in the Van Nuys Building at the corner of Seventh and Spring Streets.  The business flourished in its early years until the end of 1929.  Morton did everything.  He sold the bonds or stocks, usually bonds in those days, bought them from another broker, posted the books, and kept all of the records.   Nothing was really required, but he did keep his books.  These are the days before the SEC and NASD had really any effective regulation. 

     There was an income tax, but it was quite nominal and not a real problem.  Unfortunately, it certainly was no problem at all through the 1930’s.  In 1930 Morton asked Mr. Van Nuys to give him some relief from his rent of two hundred dollars per month and a three-year lease, which he had signed March 7, 1928.  That lease was to last from April 1, 1928 until March 31, 1931.  Mr. Van Nuys was no help so when the lease

Figure 15 Our basis book.  This is the way we figured interest to the day.

expired in 1931, Morton moved the business to the Rowan Building at Fifth and Spring Streets and had only a month to month lease until we moved decades later.  That location was to be Morton’s last office.  Don’t let me give you the wrong impression.  He was in business there from 1931 until the end of 1973, over 42 years.  That business location was to be our home until we moved to the old Southern California Edison building in 1977, which was well after Morton’s death in 1973.

     One thing should be said about bonds.  They were denominated in units of one thousand dollars.  One bond had a par value of $1000.  When someone asked, what is the yield on the bond? You would look into the basis book and tell him that if he bought a 2 7/8 per cent bond, which had 29 ½ years to run, and you paid 116.96, he would get 2.10 per cent.

The banks were small, and they would buy only a few bonds.  Five or ten bonds was an acceptable trade then.  Inflation has eaten away at the purchasing power of the dollar over the years, and ten bonds was profitable.  Clients might buy as little as one or two or three bonds.  It was not easy, but all went well until the depression hit in October 1929.  One of the clients, Charles Haskins was in the insurance business.  He also started little banks and sold them to the big ones.  He was a bond buyer during those days.  Morton and he were friends until their deaths.  We continue to do our insurance business with his firm, which is now run by his grandson-in-law.

     In early 1929 Morton and Forona bought a twelve-cylinder Packard Phaeton car with twelve ply tires and two spare tires.  The car was broken in on the rack.  That means that the car was run at the shop at a steady speed for days and many miles until it was ready for delivery.  This car was to last all the way through the depression and longer.  It had to.  It needed gas and oil, and that’s all it got.  Gas was about thirteen cents a gallon in the 1930’s.  Forona was small; the car was big, and they took me to school for years.  The car was an open car, but rain never came into it.  Of course the wind would blow, but we did stay dry.  Years later they had a Lincoln.  The only thing that I remember about that car was that it had two horns in one.  If you hit the left side of the horn, it went, “Beep,” and if you hit the right side, it went, “Ahooga.”  So you could go, “Beep, beep, beep, beep, ahooga, ahooga.”

     One day we got a good old fashion California rainstorm.  There were only six students in the class that day at El Rodeo School.  Naturally, I was there.  It was not really a day of learning.  I remember looking out of the window and seeing the milkman delivering milk to the school’s cafeteria.  The rain was really coming down, and he looked up and waved to all six of us and the teacher.  It was a great day.  It is important to note that as a result of that rainstorm, the Los Angeles County Flood Control district was formed.

     And then there was the day, when I was seven years old, I complained to the teacher from the back of the room that she wrote up hill on the blackboard.  When I was told to come up to the front, I realized that she wrote all right, but I didn’t see all right.  They had my eyes checked, and it was found that I had astigmatism.  Years later it was diagnosed as being a conical cornea, which is also known as keratoconus.  That meant that my cornea was shaped like an ice cream cone, which gave me distorted vision.  That led to glasses, contact lenses, and finally to a corneal transplant in my left eye in November 1983.  It also led to research and my writing a research paper in school at U.S.C. on scleral lenses as well as the new, at that time, corneal lenses and finally to soft lenses. 

     My research, which was done in the last few years of the 1940’s, was interesting but not really successful, but it did allow others to pursue a more productive path.  When one wore the old

scleral lenses, it was necessary to put a liquid in the cup, which covered the cornea, while the plastic part of the lens rested on the sclera or white part of the eye.  The question was what liquid should be used?  We tried a normal saline solution, Ringer solution, buffer solutions, which used baking soda and salt, as well as methylcellulose, which is slippery, and finally good old spit.  (It was my own.)  Nothing worked because we were trying to solve the wrong problem.  The real cause of the problem was that the cornea was not getting any oxygen from the outside air.  The liquid within the cup became stale and robbed the cornea of its oxygen, and one saw rings around lights after an hour or so.  They were quite pretty.  The research was a success, but scleral lenses were not long for this world.  This was done at the 601 North Rodeo Drive home. My research lab, which was my bathroom, was an organized mess with do not disturb signs all over the place.  This was a case of failing at the research at hand but making it possible for others to go in the right direction.  It had to be done so others would not have to do it again.

     Before my research at U.S.C., we were told about a firm, Belgard Spero, which was an optometrist company in Chicago, which specialized in making and fitting scleral contact lenses.  They had an excellent reputation, and it was decided that I give them a try.  This was my first trip to New York in the summer of 1943 when I was 17.  These were the old scleral lenses not the new corneal lenses, and they had to be fitted exactly to the white part of the eye.  They did in a day or two what had taken weeks or longer at home.  They did a good job, but as I said above, nothing was to work because of the lack of oxygen to

the cornea.  On the train home I did keep those lenses on one day for about ten or twelve hours, but all I got were pretty rings around lights.

     This is not a story about contact lenses though.  This is the story of a well-run company that went astray.  The two owners Belgard and Spero felt that they had very loyal employees who had worked hard for them and decided to give the company to their employees.  It was a noble idea but was to fail badly.  The employees did take over and were quite grateful, but earnings fell because there was no capable management.  Strife and arguments arose, and finally they begged Belgard and Spero to take over again.  They did, but, as it always is, “You can’t go back.”  They finally sold out or liquidated the company.  When you plan to take action, you must see the whole thing all the way through to a final solution.

     The happy part of this whole thing was that Kevin Tuohy was working on the corneal lens at Loma Linda University, which he was to bring to the market shortly.  This is the latter part of the 1940’s as well as the early 1950’s by then.  While he was successful with his work, I am afraid the he was not a very astute businessman, and when all of his money was gone, he killed himself. That was sad because shortly after he was gone, the lenses were improved and the demand increased.  Now materials have improved lenses greatly, and one wears the lenses the whole day, and longer, which was not the case in those days.

     In the summer of my second year of college I got a summer job.  It was in a candy factory located just north of Sixth Street on La Brea.  At the candy factory I had about the lowest job you could have.   It was my job to take big bars of chocolate and chop them up, put the small pieces in a big double boiler, add some cocoa butter, stir and melt the stuff, and take one bucket at a time into an air conditioned room so the ladies could dip the centers into the chocolate and make pieces of candy to be packed into boxes.  That was all fine until we got paid on Friday.  I was not the janitor, but when I came to work each Saturday morning, (Yes, we did work on Saturdays.)  I was told that the janitor got drunk, and would I be kind enough to clean the floor?  What could I say?  This did not mean sweep it out a bit.  Little bits of chocolate fell on the floor when they were warm and so they had to be gotten up with a scraper.  There were better parts to the job.  When one dips a piece of chocolate, one ends by putting a letter or mark on the top of each piece. For example C is for chocolate, O is for orange, W is for walnut, and so on.  I also worked in the kitchen where the candy making really begins as you make the little bits that were to become the insides.  We worked with boiling, melted, sugar.  If I remember right, sugar melts at 250 degrees Fahrenheit.  When school started, the job ended, but the people gave me a USC sweater as a going away present.  Hooray for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

     I was fortunate to take a course having to do with public utilities.  I thought that it would be about the financial statements and the business end of the utility business.  Instead of that it was given by an attorney who talked about ratemaking and its legal problems.  In those days there were three ways of regulating utilities: original cost, reproduction cost, and fair value.  The original cost method took the cost of the plant and said that the company was allowed to make a fixed return on the value of that plant, say ten per cent.  The reproduction cost method involved a little negotiation.  The question involved what would the plant cost if reproduced today?  Then the company would be allowed to make its fixed return on the reproduction cost.  The fair value method involved a lot of negotiation to figure what the return should be.  Certain states were more friendly to utilities that others.  Now the regulation situation is in turmoil and confusion. 

     One of my friends I met in college was John Menkes who went on to become a doctor.  I believe that we met in a zoology or chemistry class in our first or second year of college.  As a doctor he specialized in child neurology.  Later on he wrote plays as well as books.  At first he wrote textbooks and then novels and plays.  During his medical career he discovered a disease called maple syrup disease.  It affected only a few children who began to smell like maple syrup. It was a fatal disease.  He met and married Miriam, who was an Australian.  She died in a tragic fall in her home.  A repairman had left a trap door open in a closet and she walked right into the closet and fell through the hole.  They had three children Simon, the oldest, Simmy, Tamara, Tammy, and Raphael, Rafi, the youngest.  Rafi is married to Lauren, and as of this writing, they are expecting their first child.  John had been married a second time to Joan, who, unfortunately, passed away. 

     Another friend was Mohamed Kamel Anous.  He was Egyptian, and we hit it off well.  After we graduated from school we wrote to each other about many things such as Egyptian cotton, which is good quality cotton.  I remember that he was not anxious to return home because a wife had been picked for him, and he was not anxious to find out who she was.  East is East and West is West and ne’re the twain shall meet.  At one point he asked me not to write to him any more because he might not be good for him.  That meant that he might end up in real trouble, and that was the last I ever heard from him.  Remember this is shortly after the creation of Israel, and Egypt and Israel were not exactly the best of friends.  It was too bad.  We have since visited Egypt, but I never did look him up.

     Before 1929, Morton had margin accounts.  A client, his neighbor and friend next door on Spaulding Avenue, Sid Rinds, had securities held on margin.  That meant that he owed some money on them.  When Sid asked Morton not to sell his securities out during the crash because he would take out a mortgage on his house and keep the securities, Morton said that he was so sorry but had just sold the securities that morning.  He had not done so yet, but he did sell them

immediately and saved the man’s home.  Since that day Morton Seidel & Company has never had another margin account except a couple of special situations, which were changed back to regular accounts in short order                                    

     The bad period really started in 1930.  Morton said to Forona, “Let’s close the business and take a trip around the world.  We’ll be broke when we come home, and if we stay in business, we’ll be broke anyway.  I will probably make contacts, which will help us later on.”  Forona said, “You must be crazy.  We have a young child, and we can’t afford to do that.”  They didn’t go, they were broke, but they stayed in  business.                                     

     One of the clients Morton had was a gentleman by the name of Robert Burns who was the manager of a large brokerage house in Los Angeles, E. F. Hutton and Company.  Morton sold him bonds for Mr. Burns’s own account all during the depression.  The 1930’s were rough years. Morton sold the securities, bought what he had to from other brokers, kept the books, paid the rent, and, once in a while, paid himself a small check.  While going through his things when he died, I found that on December 31, 1934 he wrote a check to himself for ten dollars.

      The 1930’s were a time of great depression and great opportunity.  This is easy to say seventy years later.  The opportunity came by being aware of what could be done to protect one against devaluation.  In this case the dollar was devalued by changing the price of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce.  When that happened, one was required to turn in his gold, which had been legal

to own up to that time, and receive the new money.  This government action put money into circulation and stimulated the economy.  It was slow at first, but it did get things going again.

     First of all, one could have owned gold.  That gave a seventy percent increase over night. 

Another choice was to buy Dutch or Swedish or other European bonds, which could be redeemed in a basket of currencies.  In this case you bought with dollars and sold the bonds into the strongest currency against the dollar and converted back to dollars.  This too returned about

seventy percent and some income.  I have found a document referring to an interest payment of 35 English pounds on 4 per cent Consolidated Stock dated 1^st August 1934.  (The word stock here means what we call bonds today.)  After the British tax, the net payment is 27 pounds, two shillings, and six pence.  Handwritten below is written in longhand, 137.73.  If you divide that out, you will get the exchange rate of the time to be $5.073 to the English pound.  In my memory that is about correct for those days.  The trouble was that not enough people had enough money to buy bonds or gold in the first place.  Among other things, Morton also traded in Australian, New Zealand and Indian bonds as well as the gold bars, which he bought in London.

     When Morton died, I found a newspaper clipping that reported that on one Saturday during that period a total of just over four hundred thousand shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange for the day.  We were open on Saturday until twelve or one o’clock.  Business got slower and slower on Saturday, and only one of us came in to mind the shop.  Later on the Exchange was closed during the summer on Saturday, and finally during the 1950’s it closed completely on Saturday.  It was no loss when that happened.  I had a deal with everybody in the office.  I would come in every Saturday if there was no snow for skiing.  It was a fair deal for all of us.  Earlier, as a child going through school, I came in on Saturday and was general office boy, gofer, file clerk, and also delivered securities.  It was good training.  I got paid twenty-five cents an hour and a penny a block.  To go to the bank and cash my check was one block up Spring Street, one block down Fourth Street, and two blocks back: four cents.  It was good training for the real world.

     When we bought or sold securities, we knew where the best markets for the securities were, and these people became our friends, but we always remembered that our client came first.  For example we bought foreign stocks and bonds from Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder and Company.  We also bought foreign stocks from Carl Marks and Company.  We knew each other over the phone as well as in person.  Henry Arnhold ran Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, and Shelby Cullum Davis ran Shelby Cullum Davis and Company.  He was the specialist in insurance stocks.  We bought railroad bonds, as well as other bonds, through Goldman Sachs, which was run by Sidney Weinberg in the early days and Gus Levy during “Recent” times.  (Gus as been dead for decades.)  A gentleman by the name of Rashkind traded American Telephone and Telegraph bonds.  We also traded other corporate bonds with Mabon Nugent.  Jimmy Filipus was our best contact there.

     Let’s take these names one by one.  Henry Arnhold was Hans Arnhold’s son or nephew.  It was his company.  Their company had been bankers to the German Kaiser.  They traded German bonds as well as other European stocks and bonds.  They also traded South African gold stocks, which we bought.  We had an excellent relationship.

     Carl Marks also traded foreign stocks.  He was the American capitalist, Carl Marks, not the German Karl Marx, the communist!  One day somebody at Carl Marks gave me a box and told me not to open it until I returned to the hotel.  When I opened it, the insides exploded into a thousand cardboard bits and pieces.  That was a big laugh for everybody.

     We knew Shelby Cullum Davis as Shelby, but he was still also Ambassador Davis because he had been ambassador to Switzerland.  In private it was still Shelby and Arnold, but if anybody else was around, I was careful to call him Ambassador Davis.  He knew everything that there was to know about insurance stocks.  He also knew every insurance executive as well as everything about his insurance company.  He was very helpful.  He was a skier and that made his job in Switzerland even better.  He gave millions to various charities, which bear his name.  We met him in Switzerland when he was ambassador.

     Gus Levy was the head trader in Goldman Sachs and later the head of the whole thing, but he was always the trader.  He was as relaxed as a tightly wound spring.  He was always as nice as could be but always had his eye on the tickertape.  Morton and I would visit him in the trading room at Goldman Sachs.  It was not a quiet room!  One day I was standing behind Rashkind, “Rash.”  He looked up from the desk and said that he had traded 300 Telephone 6’s and made a quarter.  Translation: he had bought and sold three hundred thousand dollars worth of American Telephone and Telegraph six per cent bonds due in the year 2000, which were rated triple A in those days, and made $250 per one hundred bonds, or a total of $750.  He was happy.  Gus was as honest as could be; he could not move slowly; and he made quick decisions involving a great deal of money.

     Elsewhere we have talked about railroad bonds and arbitrages.  Gus is really the guy who came up the whole deal at that time.  It was not new, but the railroads were being reorganized after going into receivership, so that’s how the Missouri pacific story came to be.  We bought the bonds of the existing company and sold the securities that we were to receive when the reorganization was completed.  The new securities were sold on a “When, as, and if issued” basis.  In some cases you received a little bit of cash, senior bonds, and junior quality bonds equal to or greater than your “Old” bonds.  The purchase price was less than what you were going to receive.  The two unknowns were the time the reorganization would take in court, and the question of if the reorganization would be completed at all.  Sooner or later each deal did go through, and our clients did quite well.  The time was the real problem so this is where I came up with my 2 ½ rule.  If they said, “One year,” I said, “Yea sure, make it 2 ½ years.”  It worked.  Keep it in mind today.

     Gus’s family is of interest.  He was married to Janet.  Their daughter’s name was Betty.  Janet had a sister named Betty.  Betty had a daughter named Janet who lived in Los Angeles.  While we didn’t go on dates, we knew each other and were about the same age.

     Jimmy Filipus was our guy at Mabon.  We were in New York the day before the stock market fell over 500 points in 1987, and I was in their bond trading room.  One of my clients wanted to buy bonds.  As I remember it, I needed about 150 thousand dollars worth.  (The bond market was falling that day, and I was lucky.)  I got the client on the phone and suggested two or three issues, which he bought at a very high yield.  Everybody was happy.  Mabon got rid of bonds, the client got a good deal, and I made some money on the deal.

     During the early days of the company Morton would buy securities, usually bonds, from these broker friends in New York.  Communication was not what is today, and they would use Western Union, the telegraphy company.  When you used the telegraph, every word cost money.  I believe that there was a minimum of about ten or twenty words, which were allowed for the first charge. The New York broker would offer securities “Firm” for overnight.  That meant that they expected an answer early in the morning, about 5:30 AM our time.  The telegrams went something like this: “Wofty 100 MOP 4 ¼’s of 05 @ such and such price Best.”  They had room for one last word.  The translation is: “We offer firm to you 100 Missouri Pacific Rail Road Company first mortgage 4 ¼% bonds due January 1, 2005 at a certain price.   Best regards to everybody.”  That would be called into the Western Union phone operator who would call the receiving party.   The answering telegram would be, “Wbfy 100 MOP 4 ¼’s Thx.”  We buy from you 100 Missouri Pacific 4 ¼ percent bonds due January 1, 2004.  This went on for many years.  One morning Morton got a call from the operator, which was quite late by their time, say 8:00 o’clock or so.  She said that she was going to retire, and while she was not allowed to give her name, she thanked him for the business and said that she would miss those calls.  Those days are long gone, but they were part of the history of Morton Seidel & Company.

     The study of interest rates is an interesting one.  During my career the State of California had an issue of one-quarter of one per cent bonds issued in the depression when nobody had any money or need for the bonds, and later on there were the California Water Resources bonds that were twelve percent bonds and originally sold at the price of 94 in 1982.  Those were tax-free municipal bonds.  During that time in the 1980’s banks and savings and loans were paying as high as 14 to 16 per cent.  Money is a commodity, and its price fluctuates, and that is called yield. When interest rates go higher, bonds, which have a fixed payout, go down in price, and when money gets cheaper, the bonds go up.  The longer the bond has to maturity the greater the fluctuation will be.  That is basic calculus.

     Now days we have computers so we can figure interest to the day.  When I started in business, we had basis books.  They were books that figured interest monthly or quarterly for whatever percentage you needed.  If you had a three percent bond, which would become due in twenty years and three months, you would look into the book for the three per cent page and look for twenty years and three months.  When you found it, you then would ask the book at what price the bond should be to yield five per cent, and the book would give you an answer.  That would be the price to buy or sell the bond.  If it were between two periods of time, you would have to interpolate.  If the bond could be called, you would have to figure to the call date and price as well as the due date of the bond.

     One day that happened to me.  I had a client sitting at my desk who had some bonds for sale.  He asked me what the price of the bonds would be.  I looked it up in the basis book, got a price, and called a broker who was a potential buyer.  The broker gave me a price that I considered very high and wrong.  I said to him with the client across the table that I thought his price is too high and asked him if he was sure that he would pay that much.  He said, “Absolutely, he was sure.”  I again said that the client was here in the room and once we did the deal it had to be final and asked him if he wanted to check with anybody in his firm.  I finally told him that the client was going to leave my office after we finished.  The guy said that he was satisfied, and we sold him the bonds.  You know what the punch line is going to be.  About a half hour later the guy called back and told me his problem.  It was a shame, but I had done the deal with the client and with him.  I really felt bad about that deal, but the client was happy. 

     We should say a few words about the skiing.  I enjoyed skiing beginning in college and continuing until well after our sons were born.  In fact we took them skiing when they were little. They sat on my shoulders.  In my school days most of my skiing time was up at Big Bear Lake in the San Bernadino Mountains.  I would go up early on Saturday morning and be off the mountain before dark on Sunday so I rarely had to put chains on the car because the road was warm enough to melt the ice.  There was a small ski jump there.  One winter we built up the jump by adding blocks of snow above the jump.  Then one day we went for it.  I think that I jumped about forty feet, and the ski pro jumped about sixty. 

     My skiing took me all over the West.  There was the Valentine day when four of us went to Sun Valley.  Bernie Wilner, Bill DeBear, a friend of theirs, and I drove on one day and skied for a week and drove home again in one day.  It is about 1000 miles to Sun Valley.  One day they met me at the bottom of the mountain, and all three of them were standing there shivering.  I came down the hill with my parka around my waist because I was perfectly comfortable.  I thought that they would kill me.  Bernie developed a bad toothache, and I took him to the dentist the next morning, where the dentist took the X ray, worried about his loss of the tooth, pulled the tooth and charged about fifteen dollars.  He had a real bad abscess under the tooth.  It was a shame, but it was the only way to go in those days.

     Another ski trip was to Aspen, Colorado.  My father and I drove to Salt Lake City and took the train to a junction in the mountains and then took a bus into Aspen.  On the way to Salt Lake Morton was driving and hit a patch of ice on the road and did a 360 and kept going in the right direction.  We switched drivers.  Before we went to

                                                                                                                               Figure 17 My 215 cm skis c 1950’s

Aspen, we drove to Alta, Utah, which is just south of Salt Lake City, for the day.  I parked the car so the radiator faced the sun.  Nevertheless, the car’s radiator froze over.  It was a cool day.  In those days we put only water in the radiator, and cool meant cool or cold as the case may be.  The snow was light and dry, and it was a great day.  We met some friends, and they could not handle the dry powder.  It was quite sad.  They asked me not to say anything about their problems.  I never did.   I enjoyed getting away over the weekends.  It was exercise but restful.

     The reason for going to Aspen was to attend the F.I.S. meet there.  That stands for Federation Internationale de Ski.  The greatest racers in the world were there.  I met Marius Erickson and his brother, Stein, who were Norwegian.  That year Zeno Colo, an Italian, won the men’s downhill.  His average time was over sixty miles an hour, which was super for those days.  I did ski down the whole course bit by bit.  One day, when I was on top of the mountain, I met Mr. Jacoby who was about to ski down.  I asked him if we could ski down together.  He agreed, and at the bottom I discovered that he was seventy-two years old and was from New York.  But that isn’t the story. A couple of years later I saw him with a young lady at a restaurant in New York, and I went over and reintroduced myself.  He said that he was so happy to see me because he was telling this lady about his skiing, and she didn’t believe him.  I assured her that everything that he said was true, and that I had really skied with him, and he was a good skier.  I think that she thought that I was a plant and didn’t believe a word that she heard.  It would be years later when I would take my two little sons on my shoulders so they could ski. 

     As a sidelight to the above, years later in December of 2004 I went skiing in Yosemite for one day at the age of 78 with my son, Craig, and two grandsons, Danny and Tommy and thought that that was pretty good.  Naturally they were all better than I.  Craig found my name on one of the “Skis’ in the bar that listed my name as having passed the third class ski test in 1948. 

     Well, we got away from the subject, which was the 1930’s.  Eventually the 1930’s finally came to an end.  They really ended about 1939 as Europe began to become engaged in the beginning of World War II when Germany began to invade their neighbors in September.  We were not going to enter the war until December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, but we were selling goods to our allies.  That put our people to work here in the United States, and business in general began to pick up.  I remember exactly where and when I heard the news that Pearl Harbor was hit.  It was about 9:55, and we were walking from the car on Wilshire Boulevard approaching the street just west of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and someone said to my mother, “Did you hear that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?”  There was really no time to talk because school started at ten A.M..  It is no surprise that we did talk later in the day.  Roosevelt was going to ask Congress to declare war on Monday, but we did not know that yet.  There was only one vote against it.  To me it was the end of ancient history and the beginning of modern times.  It is interesting to note that somebody might say, “And where were you over sixty years ago?”  You don’t forget that sort of thing.  There was no question about anybody’s patriotism.  We were all going to lick the @#$%*&’s!  Flags came out of nowhere.  There was a flag hanging from everybody’s front window.  Emotionally we were all ready to go in every way, but we were not prepared militarily.  We had to close automobile plants and make tanks and trucks.  Ships had to be made to transport supplies and troupes.  Life had changed, and, unfortunately, it was to end for many.

     Getting back to business and with the 1940’s beginning Morton Seidel & Company’s business also improved.  Other changes were to take place.  My uncle, Ivan, Forona’s brother, came in with Morton and began to do the back office work and trading.  This was a big boost for everybody.  Morton was free to talk to more of his clients, and Ivan watched over things.  Ivan had been with the Tarr McComb Oil Company, which was located in the old Pacific Electric Building at Sixth and Main Streets in Los Angeles.  This building was an office building as well as the terminal for the street cars, which ended their run on the second floor on the east side of the building and inside the building.  One always used the word, “Old” when talking about the, “Old” PE Building.  I don’t know why except to say that it was old, and there was a, “New” Pacific Electric Building, which is still located between Hill and Olive and Fourth Streets in downtown Los Angeles.  In “Recent” times busses ended there, but before that Los Angeles had a subway.  It began where Beverly Boulevard and First Street meet and ran to the Fourth Street building and actually extended underground to Grand Avenue just north of the old Southern California Edison Building at 601 West Fifth Street.  The old PE Building has a restaurant in it called Cole’s, which is a million years old.  Ivan called it the PE Saloon.  It had and has good French dip sandwiches and sawdust on the floors, but it is not in the better part of town.  More about the Pacific Electric in a bit.

     In the 1940’s the trading units became larger, and instead of buying one or two bonds the unit became ten or more.  Something else had been going on during the depression and all through the 1940’s and into the early 1950’s.  The railroads all had far too much debt to stay solvent during the depression, and most of them went bankrupt between 1931 and 1939.  Several of the railroads were able to stick it out until the 1940’s, but they too finally collapsed.  In each case it would take about ten years or longer to get everybody and the courts to agree.  Some still had not been reorganized until the 1950’s.  This is where I came into the picture when I entered the business in June of 1949.

     I went to U.S.C. and received my bachelor’s degree in Zoology in February of 1949.  After

that I worked at the Farmers and Merchants National Bank at Fourth and Main streets in downtown Los Angeles for about five months. It was a rude awakening.  Instead of being Mr. Seidel at school, it was, “Hey, Arnold, go get the pencils.”  My hours were from 6:30 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon.  There was a bank cafeteria so a half hour was plenty of time for lunch.  There was a speakers club called the Toastmasters Club, which was interesting and useful. The employees of the bank were paid in cash every two weeks from a teller’s window.  I seem to remember that I got seventy dollars and some change every two weeks. Remember that this was just down the block from Morton Seidel & Company where I had worked for twenty-five cents and hour and a penny a block.

     The first day on the job I was told that the bank examiners had just come to the bank, and I would be needed to watch them for the bank’s protection.  I was sent to the securities vault and watched them count tons of stocks and bonds.  These were the securities held in safekeeping for the clients as well as the securities held by the bank’s trust department.  Remember, in those days everything was kept in house.  If they went out for coffee, I went out with them.  I watched them for several days, and they did not get away with anything.  The bank was safe for another year.  After those few days, my job consisted of getting a big mail bag from the night crew and going to the bank clearing house, which was on Spring Street near Seventh Street, not one hundred yards from where my father had started his business.  I took the checks to be delivered to the other clearing banks and exchanged them for our checks, which were to be processed during the day. 

     We had to balance with one another, which we did.  My bank’s number, The Farmers and Merchants National Bank, was 16-1/1220.  Sixteen is the banks of this area, and one was the first bank.   All of the banks in this area were all 1220.  Twelve is the twelfth Federal Reserve district. Two is Los Angeles, not San Francisco, which is one, and zero is immediate credit.  If your check of today ends in a one or a two, that means that is one day or two day settlement and not immediate credit.  The downtown clearing banks were Farmers and Merchants, Security Pacific, Bank of America, Citizens National Bank, California Bank, Union Bank, and California Canadian Bank.  If you did not balance, the bank with the mistake paid one dollar per minute that you were out of balance.  It was not big money, but it was big shame on you.  As a sidelight for you to remember, none of those banks is in business today!  Farmers and Merchants was bought by Security.  Security was bought by Bank of America.  Bank of American was bought by Nations Bank and changed its name back to Bank of America.  Citizens was bought by Crocker, and I think that it was bought by Wells Fargo.  California Bank and Union Bank were bought out, and California Canadian Bank, which was a subsidiary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, closed up and went back home to Canada.

     After I got back to the bank, I had a big pile of checks from the large accounts that I had to add up and balance.  Now it is all done by computer.  One of the companies that the bank had was Socony Mobil, which became Mobil Oil and then eventually merged with Exxon to become Exxon Mobil.  I was always fascinated by some of the large checks that I saw.  There were large paychecks as well as an occasional deal or two with million dollar or larger checks.  Later on I was put into the go-back department, where I had to call some of the customers of the bank and tell them that their checks bounced.  It was great training to become a diplomat.

     The bank was really only one block from Morton’s office at Fifth and Spring streets.  Some of the people at the bank are interesting.  Mr. Victor Rossetti was top banana and boss.  Some called him Vic, but not I.  Arthur Gaines, Fred Dickey and others were loan officers.  When Fred Dickey retired from the bank, he came to work at our firm for a while.  Also the bank was to merge with the Security Pacific Bank, and Jesse Aguirre, who was in charge of the general books of the bank, came into our firm in the early 1950’s.  But by June it became obvious to me that with good behavior and five years and luck I might advance somewhat to the trust department.  I thanked Mr. Rossetti for the experience and came into Morton Seidel & Company.  If I remember correctly, my starting date was June 20, Forona’s birthday.

     When I started at Morton Seidel & Company, John Dale and Ross Conwell were working in the office both selling securities.  John came a long ways.  He started as a miner in the coal mines and brought himself up to a white collar job.  It was quite an accomplishment for him.  One day he told me that the doctor had told him that he had an aneurysm on his aorta.  “What did I think about that?” I had a choice and made it quickly.  I told him that he had nothing to worry about, and it really wasn’t important.  I was thinking, “It is a bulge on the most important artery in his whole body, and it would blow some day like a balloon and kill him, and he never would know what hit him.” He never did worry.  In any event in those days nothing could have been done for him, but I was correct.  It was John who told me that whatever happens, be sure to kiss your wife and tell her that you love her.  You know, he was right.  Bob Cass, Quincy’s brother, was with us for a while.  He did trading.  He used the old telewriter or teletype, and our number was LA 888.  The senior Mr. Cass had had a big job with the local telephone company.  To put it simply, I think he owned it.  Eventually Ivan got Pete Meyer to come into the office in the latter days of the Tarr Mc Comb Company.  Pete took care of the back office and Ivan spent his time on trading. 

     Pete was graduated from Northwestern with a degree in English.  He had taken many language courses, and he would play with words in other languages.  When Leo would talk to clients in German, he would give prices of stocks over the phone.  If the price were twenty-three, he would say, “Drei und swansig,” and Pete would quietly say, “Wet und swansig.”  Pete retired and lived in Medford, Oregon.  I met his mother once.  She was a very old lady who told me that she remembered that her father came home one day and said that Lincoln had been shot.  They did not have radio or TV in those days.  It was a good arrangement for all.

     I started out by making cold calls and telling anybody who would see me about the railroads going into receivership and their reorganizations.  I explained about the word arbitrage.  If one

makes a purchase of something, a security, (or currency) in one market that is convertible and saleable in another market he has arbitraged the securities.  We bought the bonds of the existing railroad and received a package of new securities in the new successor company and made a

profit over a time period of about a year to a year and a half.

     As a sidelight, we should take time out for lunch, and then we’ll get back to the railroads.  Almost every day Morton and I went out to lunch at the Biltmore Hotel.  Morton would call Mr. Frikey who was the matre de at the men’s grill to say that we were coming to lunch.  On Thursday they had deviled roast beef bones, which included soup or salad, three beef bones, potatoes, vegetables, beverage, and dessert for eighty-five cents.  This included tablecloth, napkins, and service.  Later on the price went up to ninety-five cents.  The expensive dishes were about one dollar and a quarter.  The Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles when Kennedy and Johnson were nominated, and the Biltmore was headquarters for everything including the press, but we always got our table for lunch.  Those were fun times.  At one time or another we saw all of the players.  We saw then Senator Lyndon Johnson on the street in front of the hotel.  We visited the pressroom, which was down in a large ballroom a couple of basements below street level.  In those days there was no security.  We just went where we wanted.

     While there were others, the first railroad reorganization that I worked on was the Missouri Pacific.  We called the bonds the “MOP” bonds.  Its first reorganization petition was filed on March 31, 1933, and they were still working on the plan when I came into the business in 1949. 

I would call on people as close to the office as possible and ask for an appointment.  I was

successful with lawyers, and that is how I got my start.  They were interested in what I had to say because it involved the law as well as money.  I described an arbitrage.  Ian arbitrage is the purchase of something in one market, which is convertible into another market and saleable in the other market.  I showed them that if they bought 100 bonds ($100,000 par value) of the old company, they would get a package of new securities in the reorganization.  They would get some cash, new Missouri Pacific 4 1/4 per cent bonds due in 2005, and some junior bonds due in about 2020.  If they were to sell their bonds immediately on a “When issued” basis, there was a profit of about twelve per cent in the deal and it would take about a year.  I got many ten bond trades, which I was happy to have, and one hundred bond trade.  This is where I developed my “Two and a half rule.”  If somebody says, “It will take a week,” figure it will be two and a half: a month: two and a half.  It is a rule that works.

     There were other railroads too such as the Wisconsin Central Railway, “Whisky Central.”  St. Louis – San Francisco Railway Company was simply called “Frisco.”  Baltimore and Ohio was  “B and O.”  Southern Pacific was “SoPac.”  One bond was of interest.  It was the New York Central and Hudson River Rail Road three and one half per cent first mortgage bond due in 1998. It had the first mortgage on the property, which is under Park Avenue in New York City.  If it didn’t pay its interest, the bondholders would own the land along Park Avenue from Spuyten Duyvil, where the East River meets the Hudson River, up to and including the Grand Central Station.  Even in those days, it was a whole lot of money.  They paid.  In fact the New York Central Railroad and the Penn Central Railroad were merged and went through receivership again, and those bonds continued to pay.  We did buy them again many years later in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s.  But this is not a book on railroad reorganizations.  That is in the history books.

     Now we need to get back to the Pacific Electric, and the time is 1940 or early 1941.  This company did not go into receivership like the other railroads.  It was a subsidiary of the Southern

Pacific Railroad and had bonds outstanding.  Two of them, which were of interest to me, were the Pacific Electric five per cent bonds due in 1961 and the PE 5% of 1942.  Morton’s attorney, Stanley Arndt, found that in the indenture of one of the Southern Pacific bonds it said that no       “Underlying bond could be extended.”  Nobody figured that the Pacific Electric had enough

money to pay off the bonds when they would be due in 1942.  Morton sent a postcard to the bondholders of both of the bonds of the company saying that he had some pertinent information

about their bonds.  The response was remarkable.  For the bondholders who owned the PE 5%’s of ‘42, which were selling near, but less than par, he had them sell their bonds and switch their holdings into many more of the PE 5% of 1961, which were selling about 30.  For those who owned the PE 5% bonds of ‘61, he reported on the situation, and they were all pleased to know that their bonds had more value than they expected.

     However, one man, “Lennie” Marquis, said that he was going to keep his bonds and turn them in when due, which he did.  But that wasn’t the end of the story.  As I said, the bonds were selling slightly below par so he had Morton buy more for him, which he did.  Then they turned the new bonds into the company at the “Old”PE building, and he got his money.  Then he did the whole thing over again.  Finally the Pacific Electric management got wise to what was going on, and they told him that they would accept these bonds but no more.  It was a big laugh, and Morton and Lennie made money on the whole thing.  I actually carried some of the bonds to the Southern Pacific office and was in on the deal.  It was fun.

     During this period of time currencies were fluctuating.  Among the things that Morton did was to buy Hong Kong dollars.  They were about ten cents on the US dollar and were denominated in silver, and silver was to become more valuable against the US dollar.  Prior to the start of World War II in 1940 or as late as 1941, it was obvious that we were going to enter the war, and war is inflationary.  Nobody was allowed to buy gold as decreed when gold went from $20.67 to $35 in the early 1930’s.  However it was legal to buy natural gold, “Gold that had not been melted, smelted, or refined, or treated chemically.”  Morton did just that by selling our clients a poke of natural gold.

     These pokes were made from moose hide.  They were not pretty because the smooth side was on the inside so that gold would not stick to the hide.  We bought gold from Alaska and the

Newmont Mining Company, which was located in the Mother Load section of California in Grass Valley.  This gold looked like golden Grape Nuts cereal, and it was about the same size.  It ran about 85 fine.  That means 85 per cent was gold, and the rest was other stuff such as platinum, silver, copper, lead, and zinc.  In the end they paid you for the platinum, silver, and copper, and charged you for the dirt and other stuff.  It would be a slight plus.  First of all we sold the clients 100 ounces of material by weight.  That meant that he was getting about 85 ounces of gold.  We then decided to approximate 100 ounces of gold, which meant that we delivered about 118 ounces of material.  Naturally some people bought more than 100 ounces.  Some of the clients bought as much as a thousand ounces.

     One of these clients kept his gold in Reno to avoid personal property taxes, which was perfectly legal.  This gold was purchased in the early 1940’s and sold in the 1970’s or 1980’s.  He had ten pokes each weighing about 118 troy ounces.  There are twelve troy ounces to the pound. That meant that each poke weighed just under ten pounds.  How do you sell 1000 ounces of gold and get it delivered to the right place?  The client and his wife and Joan and I went to Reno to get the gold.  The armored car company’s courier would not take a package that weighed more than fifty pounds.  One thousand one hundred eighty ounces divided by 12 ounces to the pound equals 98.33 pounds so we had to give him two packages.  Then we went to the bank vault and

Figure 18 A gold polk

introduced ourselves.  We took the pokes from the vault and put five into a five-gallon metal

paint can, which I had brought with me.  The can and the lid had holes drilled through them so we could close the cans and stick a wire cable through the closed can.  When that was done, we

put the wire through a seal and crimped the wire and seal closed.  The whole thing weighed just under fifty pounds per can.  Whew.  We did it again and gave the two cans to the courier from Purolator Courier.

     Now we all went to the airplane: we in the cab and gold and courier in an armored car.  The

armored car met the plane on the tarmac, and we met the plane the usual way.  The courier was

the last person on the plane.  When we arrived in Los Angeles, the courier was the first person

off the plane, and he got the gold, took it to a waiting armored car and left us to go to Engelhard

Minerals smelting facility in the southeastern part of Los Angeles.  I followed as soon as I could. We both arrived about the same time and went into the very guarded back workroom.  Once there we opened each poke, turned it inside out, weighed the material, and began to melt it. It was not yet a pretty gold color because it had all of the impurities in it.  In the long run the client had just over one thousand ounces of gold plus he was ahead about $250 for platinum, silver and copper.  Gold had gone from under 40 dollars per ounce to over 400 when he sold.  He was a happy investor.

     You might ask: how do you know how much gold was in a poke?  The easiest answer is that the miners knew exactly what the fineness of the gold was from each creek, and they never mixed it with gold from other creeks.  Nevertheless, we took the gold to the assayer, Smith Emery and Company, who emptied the poke onto a large rubber sheet, which was larger than a desk.  He would then mix the gold around and then cut it into four quarters.  He would select one of the quarters and quarter it again.  He did that several times until he had a small amount about the size of a large button.  In fact they called it a button.  He returned all of the gold to the poke and resealed it.  He kept the button and assayed it and paid us for it.  Naturally the assay was exactly what the miners expected, and they were satisfied.  The client who purchased the gold trusted the assay, but we did not really know if we were right or not until the final delivery of gold to the final source.  History was to show that we were right on the button.  Get it? “Right on the button.”

     Before and during the time that we were buying natural gold we bought Yuba Consolidated Gold Fields stock.  Yuba was a placer mining company, which had dredges on the Yuba River in Northern California.  They worked every day of the year except the fourth of July, Christmas, and Thanksgiving.  The buckets from the dredges went down into the soil of the riverbed and dug up about a ton of dirt per pass.  Each time they collected the soil, they had about ten cents worth of gold in it.  This went on twenty-four hours per day and seven days per week except the holidays. The company was successful until management began to make poor decisions.  The management was a bunch of attorneys in Boston.  One of their decisions was to buy a hard rock gold mine in Tonopah, Nevada.   They made two major mistakes.  Hard rock mines need a great deal of labor, and that did not exist in Tonopah.  That alone was enough to bring the whole thing down, but the second mistake was to underestimate the grade of ore.  A pit mine needs much higher-grade ore to be profitable than a placer mine.

     That brought in Ben Pitman from Texas.  He was a stockholder and wanted to throw the old management out.  He called on us and asked if we would join with him and put up another slate to become new directors.  We agreed and began to send out mailings to all of the stockholders.  In those days we had to lick our own stamps, and I will never forget that.  You know who had to do that.  We were about to meet an attorney who would work with us.  His name was Richard Keatinge.  We were to stay friends until both Morton and Dick passed away.  In fact we are still in touch with his wife, Betty.  That relationship was one of those meaningful friendships that one appreciates in life.  We had to fight for everything including the stockholder list, which Dick got. During the fight one of the Boston directors had some sort of tragedy with a daughter.  I do not remember the details, and they are not important, but we all stopped and wrote letters expressing our sorrow.  It was a great experience for me to see how true gentlemen acted in times of trouble. We were to win the fight, but the company had really been destroyed by the old management.  It was to last a few years longer, and then it was liquidated.

     I ought to take a break here to talk about strange deals that we never had regarding gold.  People would come into the office and report to us that they were representing some individual who, we were told, had large quantities of gold, which was for sale.  Large quantities were supposedly up or down from a million ounces of gold in some mysterious location.  The numbers were usually in the billions of dollars, and in truth their amounts just did not exist.  We would begin by asking a few questions.  “Do you know that the gold exists?”  Oh sure.  “Have you ever seen this gold?”  That was followed by a: “Well not really, but it is there.”  “Where?”  “Sorry, I can’t disclose the location.”  Our final suggestion was, “When you do see the gold and can tell us where it is located, we will be more than happy to discuss it further with you.  Thank you.  Good-bye.”  We never saw the guy a second time.  We called them the daisy chain.  Maybe we should have called them, “Flakes.”

     Another one like that happened when Castro took over Cuba.  A gentleman came into the office and offered us zillions of Cuban pesos.  He said that the banks did not know how to handle foreign exchange transactions like his.  Sure they didn’t.  The Cuban money was blocked and virtually worthless, but this guy was willing to give us an opportunity.  “Thank you Buster.  Good-bye.”

     On the other side of the coin there was a quality company called Christiana Securities.  It owned 80 shares of Dupont for every share of Christiana as well as shares in General Motors, the newspaper, bank, and milk company in Wilmington Delaware.  There were other holdings, but we won’t worry about them.  Their expenses were nominal expenses for office rent for a room or two and one or two people in the office, but their income was gigantic because they had all of the income from the dividends of Dupont and the other stuff.  The Dupont family all owned the stock.  Morton bought the stock for his clients at about $3000 per share, which was about 80 per cent of just buying 80 shares of Dupont stock on the market, and when the company was liquidated the clients received in the neighborhood of $15,000 per share plus the dividends over the years.  All were happy with the investment but sad when the stock was sold.

     Here is a sidelight completely unrelated to Christiana.  Our offices were on the second floor of the Rowan Building, which is at 458 South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, which was on the corner of Fifth and Spring Streets.  Across the street was the Citizens National Bank.  We had large windows on the second floor so we could see the Spring Street side of the building across the street as well as the Fifth Street side.  One day there was a robbery, and the police came.  They pulled their car into a parking lot just north of the bank and came out with rifles in hand and entered the bank.  One of the officers knew that there was another entrance on Fifth Street, so with gun in hand, he went around the corner.  Right there he came face to face with a gentleman who was walking along minding his own business.  They were nose to nose.  The poor guy’s feet started going up and down, but he was getting no place fast.  His experiences in life came to pass.  He swung around 270 degrees and put his hands spread against the wall and his feet as far apart as possible.  Naturally the cop had no interest in him, and he went around him to the other door.  Finally the guy turned and continued on his way right into the street against traffic and left the scene.  To this day I can still see his feet going up and down.  It wasn’t funny, but it was.  I have no idea if there even was a bank robber or not.

     Returning to Dick Keatinge, he had an excellent law practice.  He hired young people right out of college and put them to work.  They would stay with him for a period of time and then move on.  One of the young lawyers actually became a clerk for one of the Supreme Court Justices.  Everyone laughed because it was known that Dick had the greatest alumni of any law firm.  In fact to this day we still use one of those attorneys who taught at USC and has just become a grandfather himself.  One of the young attorneys lost his father, and they funeral was at the “Old North Church” in Forest Lawn on the eighteenth of April, 1975 about two PM.  I remember it well.

     I think that it was Dick Keatinge who brought in the Telautograph deal.  How can I describe the Telautograph machine with what we have today?  Remember this is before the copying machine and faxes.  If you wrote on a metal plate with a special pen, it would transmit the information to the receiving machine if it were not too far away.  That might seem like a laugh to you now, but it was a way to send a signature from one place to another quickly.  It was used at racetracks for the betting.  The company was started by two partners Alexander Graham Bell and

Gray.  They had a fight and decided to split their inventions.  They flipped a coin, and Gray won and took the Telautograph, and Bell lost and had to make do with the telephone. 

     A man by the name of Lou Kurtin decided to buy the company.  Mr. Roger Babson had control of it at the time.  Mr. Babson lived in Boston, and it was decided that Morton, Lou, and Dick would go to Boston to meet Mr. Babson.  Morton started the interview, which had the makings of a very formal meeting ending with a final answer of no by saying, “Hello, Mr. Babson; we are from the land of lemons prunes and nuts, and we would like to talk to you about Telautograph.”  Without that tension relieving start I am convinced that the deal never would have taken place.  After that beginning a series of difficult discussions took place, and finally Lou Kurtin became the CEO of the company.  One of the final negotiating points was to be that Mr. Babson had the right to appoint one director.  That director was to be, I believe, Mr. Dwight

Hollister.  On any issue he voted against the new management.  Other directors were Lewis L. Clarke, Pat Frawley, Dana Latham, who headed his own law firm, Ray Lee, who had been president of the American Stock Exchange, Morton, Ben Swig, who owned hotels in the San Francisco area and elsewhere, and Phillip L. Carret.  Phil is a story all by himself.  But before we get to Phil, though, after Kurtin left Telautograph he bought Executive Car Leasing, which was sold, and the final buyer was Sam Goldman who lives on our block today.

     Phil founded the Pioneer Fund in the later part of the 1920’s or, possibly, the early 1930’s.  I think, quite strongly, that it was before the market broke in 1929.  When the bank holiday occurred in 1932 or 1933, he paid a dividend to his shareholders out of the Postal Savings account he had at the Post Office.  In those days it was possible to lend money to the Post Office and receive interest payments of about two and a half per cent.  Those days are long gone.  He was very conscious of money and gold and overseas investments.  One time we talked about coins with an intrinsic value, not just the tokens that we have today.  In those days coins did have silver content that made them of value.  When we discussed our investments in gold stocks, he was very enthusiastic.  He also was interested in viewing total solar eclipses.  In fact our last phone conversation was about the next solar eclipse, which he said that he would not attend.  He had seen a total over one half hour of eclipses in his lifetime.  His formula for investing was always to invest for the future.  That was true even when he was 101 years of age. He did die about six months after his 101^st birthday.  His idea of packing for travel in those days was to have his pajama tops and small bottle of liquid refreshment and a few other things.

     When one runs a business, one hopes to have satisfied clients.  We have one family in particular, which we have served for six generations, and we continue to do business with them today.  Without using names we can start in the middle.  “R” is now a great grandmother, and we are taking care of her children and their children’s young children.  That is four generations there. Morton handled the accounts for “R’s” husband, John, and brother, Sam, who used to work at the Farmers and Merchants National Bank.  Now we must add “R’s” father-in-law and grandfather-in-law.  That is pretty good considering we have had three generations of Seidel’s in the business. There is more to tell about these people, but I do not want to be in the position of possibly disclosing information about a client that might cause trouble for them.  I will say that they are a fine family and very nice people.

     Helen and Morton Adler were interesting people.  They were clients of Morton and friends.  They lived in Rye, New York on Purchase Lane.  They did not need a number.  Everybody lived on Purchase Lane was properly known.  Their only difference from the others was that they belonged to the proper Jewish country club, while the others belonged to their other club.

     We were invited to the club for dinner on several occasions.  That was good and bad.  The Adlers were fast eaters, and once I was just starting, and they were finished.  I got some food, but I remember it well.  That only happened once.  Don’t get me wrong; they were very hospitable and friendly people.  In fact Morton Adler offered to give Morton a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in order to handle his personal transactions.  We were members of our local exchange, and after a great deal of study and agony Morton decided to turn down the offer because he felt that the monthly expenses would be too high.   I thought at the time that Morton made the wrong decision, and I think so today, but I had no vote.  Adler’s units were not small.  I remember being in his home once and seeing a whole pile of his annual reports sitting on a couch in his office, and Adler saying, “I just haven’t had time to read those reports.”  I thought that was funny.  Why didn’t he have time to read them?  Little did I suspect that one day I would be in the same position?

     One of Adler’s purchases leads to another man whose name was Arnold Kirkeby.  Among other things he owned the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Hampshire House on Central Park South in New York, and the National Cuba Hotel in Havana, Cuba.  His ownership of the National Cuba Hotel was interesting because he was not a stockholder, but he did own the bonds when the company could no longer pay its interest on the bonds.  That was ok with him because he got and kept control by keeping the bond interest in arrears.  That is to say that he paid last year’s interest but did not pay this year’s so the bonds never met their interest obligations. 

     One day Kirkeby told Morton that he thought that he would like to sell some of his bonds so Morton went to some of his clients to see if they would like to buy some bonds.  Naturally Morton Adler was one of those clients.  This took place on December 8, 1950.  When Morton told him the story, he bought twenty-five bonds, which were six per cent bonds due in 1959 and paid 103 ½ for them.  That was a good deal at the time, and everybody was happy until Kirkeby decided that he shouldn’t have sold and asked Morton to try to buy back all of the bonds.  That was difficult because Morton had done a good job of selling the bonds in the first place.  Nevertheless the bonds were repurchased on April 24, 1952 at 115, and Kirkeby and Adler were both happy.

     Kirkeby had his office on the mezzanine level of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.  He smoked very expensive Cuban cigars, and I figured that every time Morton visited his office, Morton made five hundred dollars.  Don’t laugh; that was a lot of money in those days.  Kirkeby always offered Morton a cigar for my uncle, Ivan, which Morton always accepted.  Unfortunately Kirkeby died on a plane crash, which landed in the water short of the runway at LaGuardia airport in New York.  It was a tragedy in our lives.  As a matter of interest, this is being written on an airplane while returning from New York.

     Morton had a good friend, Jack Zucker, who was an investment advisor.  One of Jack’s accounts was the California Institute of Technology, CalTech.  One day in 1951 Morton was in Jack’s office and Jack had a picture that was thrown over on the couch.  Morton said, “Where did you get that?”  Jack told him that he was given it by someone at CalTech.  It was one of the first pictures taken by the then new 200-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar.  The date on the cover sheet is February 1951.  After Morton finished admiring this great new picture, Jack said that he didn’t want it, and would Morton like it.  As they say, “The rest is history.”  It is one of the first photographs taken by the telescope.  It was worth millions of dollars at the time because so few pictures had been taken.  It is a photograph of NGC5194-5, Messier 51, or M51, a spiral galaxy with a companion galaxy.  The cover sheet called it a “Spiral Nebula.”  While correct at the time, we now know that is a separate galaxy from ours and not a nebula.  Fifty years later I still marvel at the quality of that picture.  When we first looked at it, we realized that one could see single stars.

     Now it is fifty years later, and the Hubble telescope is taking pictures from space, which is another marvel.  I said to David that if I could ever get a picture taken by Hubble of M 51, I would sure appreciate it.  For my 75^th birthday he got me that picture.  It is absolutely unbelievable what science has done in fifty years!  The new picture is in color, and the detail is so much greater than the original picture that it is unbelievable.  The new 2001 picture does not show the whole galaxy, but it does show the bright center and its spiral arms.  The magnification is much greater than the original picture.  I guess I should say that I you can see single stars and their color.  The detail and clarity are remarkable.  I wonder about the quantity of light in the center of the galaxy as well as its luminosity and how many stars are in this system.  I really have been hit by the question that you have heard asked many times: It raises more questions than it answers.  Yep.  I think that the two pictures together will have real monetary value.  Time will tell.  Don’t be afraid of progress.  It is what makes us go forward in science, learning and life.

     In 1953 or so Morton and I attended a Financial Analysts meeting in which the President of Kennecott Copper spoke and discussed their exploration for copper in Africa.  Why go to Africa? Don’t we have plenty of copper here in the United States?  Why spend all of that money in Africa at this time?  The War is over.  We were asking the wrong questions.  Yes we did have plenty copper here, but Kennecott had their eye on far more than copper.  There is an area called the Copper Belt in central Africa, but far more importantly, there are other minerals there also such as cobalt, uranium, gold, silver, diamonds, titanium, and so on.  There was much to be gained by looking around a bit, and that is exactly what we did.  We found Liberian Iron Ore, run by a Swedish group, Union Miniere de Haut Katanga, which was Union Mining of upper Katanga in the Belgian Congo, Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, and others.  But there was another investment that involved copper and gold, however it also involved many other metals as well as diamonds.  It was called De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited.

     De Beers was started by Sir Cecil Rhodes, the man who created the Rhodes scholarship.  Diamonds were discovered in South Africa in 1866, and Rhodes consolidated a bunch of small diamond mines in the 1890’s into this large new company.  It is important to think of De Beers and Anglo American Corporation of South Africa as two more or less equal companies run by the same management.  In fact in your mind put Anglo American and De Beers at the top of the page and think of many lines of operating companies filling pages below them.  De Beers owned stock in Anglo American, and Anglo American owned stock in De Beers.  Below them there were companies such as Anglo American Gold, which in turn owned and controlled many gold mines in South Africa.  Then there was Anglo American Investments, which controlled many other holdings.  Naturally we had nicknames for everything: Big Anglo, Amgold, Amic, and so on.  De Beers was always De Beers.  Free State Geduld Mines Limited was the first gold mine, which we bought, and it always remained as Free State.

     These investments were unpopular with the public as well as our clients.  They were unpopular because of political reasons as well as distance.  “Why do I want to buy a stock all the way over in Africa?  If I’m going to stick my money in a hole in the ground, it might as well be here.”  But our clients did what we told them to do.  All of the companies paid excellent dividends, and the people loved that.  They also were selling very cheaply because nobody wanted an investment in South Africa.  We bought the stocks, held them, were ridiculed, and made a lot of money on them.  In those days everybody watched the price of gold fluctuate.  If gold went up, the stocks would rise a little bit. If gold fell, so did the stocks.  Finally, though, they could not go unnoticed forever, and they did rise, and when that happened we thanked them for what they had done for us and sold most of the gold stocks.  However, many of our clients kept De Beers.  In July of 2001 Anglo American did the unthinkable.  They bought De Beers and “Took it private.”  That meant that there was no more De Beers, which we think is kind of sad except for one thing.  I have no idea overall how much money we have made on the De Beers investment, and we received a big chunk of cash and Anglo American stock, which we still own. We could go on with this, but I think that this is enough for now.  There is stuff in the files in the office if anybody still wants to do research.

     Another of the investments that we made was in State Mutual Savings and Loan.  One day in the 1950’s Ivan got a call on the trading desk and was asked if he wanted to buy some stock in a company called State Mutual Savings and Loan.  Unlike the word, mutual, it was a stock company.  If my memory holds, I think that it was 75 shares.  He went to Morton who did not have any balance sheet or any other information.  State Mutual was at 411 West Fifth Street, two blocks from our office.  They needed a runner to run and get a report.  You know who that was.  When I got back and put the annual report on Morton’s desk, we discovered that the stock was selling below its book value.  We bought the stock.  I do not remember exactly what the selling price was, but it was low, possibly it was forty dollars per share.  Morton and I went to meetings for years.  We were outsiders, and we understood that.  Each year at the annual meeting there were the two outsiders and the board of directors, and I nominated Morton to the board of directors.  Naturally, they were ready for us, and we were always voted down.  In any event that is not what this story is all about.  There is one thing of interest about 411 West Fifth Street.  There are murals painted on the wall across from the elevators, which depict the Western movement and are painted by Hugo Ballin.  I would like those murals if I could get them.  He also painted the murals at the Griffith Park observatory in Griffith Park as well as murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.  As mentioned above, Mrs. Magnin, Rabbi Magnin’s wife was president of the PTA at El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills.  She arranged it so Hugo Ballin painted a mural at El Rodeo.

     Morton had died in December of 1973, and early in 1974 there was talk of State Mutual selling out.  We would have had a large capital gain and really were not interested in selling.  Less than six months after he had died, however, I got a call from someone at the company.  They were interested in buying my stock.  I think they were talking about five hundred dollars a share.  Remember that now the stock had been written up to a higher level because of Morton’s death.  I told them that I thought that they were doing a wonderful job and chose to stay as a stockholder.  I knew that there was one other party who owned stock and had not sold yet, and they were dying to get the stock away from both of us.  A short time later, and after the other guy did sell, they called me and suggested $650.  Again I told them of my love for them, but as a co-trustee with the Security Bank I would talk to the bank.  I did, and they said sell.  Of course they did.  It wasn’t their money; they were only t2he co-trustees.  This was on a Friday.  I had one more bit of information.  State Mutual was negotiating to sell out.  There were two possible deals.  One deal needed all of the stock, and the other did not.  I did not know which deal, if any, was going to go through.  At this time there were five members on the board.  One was a friend, but I knew that, as a director, he had to work for the best for the company. 

     Over the weekend I thought that if I asked $1000 per share, they would say, “No.”  Six fifty was out, and I felt 900 or 950 might not work.  So on Monday morning I called and told them that I would take 850, but I really did think that they were doing a good job and wished to stay on board.  In a few minutes the phone rang, and they took my stock at $850.  I agreed and went on to something else.  In minutes a gentleman walked into the office, and asked where the stock was.  I told him that it was in the vault, but we had done our deal, and I would honor it.  That was not good enough.  We went to my safety deposit box, got the stock, signed it, and he gave me my check right then and there.  I learned years later from my friend, Bill Baum, who was one of the directors, that the vote of the board of directors was three to two in my favor, and the deal they made to sell the company did not need my stock.  There is a little more to the story.  When doing the taxes, the accountant took the gain as a short term gain from Morton’s death, which meant more taxes than a long term gain.  I happened to remember that in the tax code at the time of death, and only at time of death, that provision did not hold.  In fact I was right, and we saved a considerable tax.  Do not be afraid to question a possible mistake because your knowledge is valuable to you.

     There was a similar deal.  One day an attorney, a friend of Morton’s called him and said that he had a client who was very old and needed money to take care of herself.  She owned Watson Land Company and was a member of the family.  Would we like to buy a few shares of stock in the company at the price the company had bid?  I believe it was around $350 per share.  It was not a publicly traded because it was really a family holding company, but the company bought stock from time to time.  I believe that there were about eight thousand shares outstanding at the time, and there was no market on the stock except the company.  They were willing to buy the stock at a low price, and he felt that they were not being fair with a family member.  After a lot of study the final answer was yes, and so we were able to interest a few of our clients in buying a few shares at that time.  This is just the beginning of the story.  Morton and I went to the annual stockholders meetings year after year.  They were interesting, and we were a real bother to them. As with State Mutual, we nominated ourselves to be a director.  Of course we were turned down again because they held all of the shares and votes.

     At first the meetings were held in the company office with Dr. Lacayo presiding over the meeting.  Dr. Lacayo had married Miss Susanna Watson, and that is how he came into the picture.  Of course the man presided over the meeting in those days.  Before the Lacayo regime I understand that Mr. Bob Watson conducted the meetings.  I was told that he came into the meeting, put his two six shooters on the table and called the meeting to order.  It seems that Bob drank heavily, and when he was too drunk, he had his chauffer drive him to the Union Rescue Mission, where they would take care of him until he was dried out.  Then the chauffer would pick him up.  That is important because on Mrs. Lacayo’s death, the Union Rescue Mission as well as the Catholic Church received her stock, which was meaningful.  Many years later all of that stock was to be sold back to the company over a several year period.  When Dr. Lacayo died, Mrs. Lacayo did preside as chairman.  Unfortunately, she was to lose it all mentally and become senile and unable to function.  Morton and I both felt that the meetings prior to our time were held in Spanish.  With the Watson Land Company we are talking about the original settlers of land in the Southern California area.  They have a charter for their land from the King of Spain.  Their original land holdings amounted to what is now the harbor up to, and including, beach cities and inland for miles.  The original owners were the Watson, Dominguez, and DelAmo families.  Their language was California-Spanish.  They were truly Californians.  It is my understanding that the present generation is the twenty-first generation Californians today.  This was a sleepy little land holding company with oil and oil refineries at one location.  To this day the refineries are on one corner on their property.  Corner means a cross street, not the edge of the property.  A two-volume book has been written about the families, which we have in our library so we will not belabor this point.

     After Mrs. Lacayo’s death or inability to serve in the 1970’s a young man by the name of Bill Huston took over the running of the company.  Bill had married one of Mrs. Lacayo’s nieces who was one of the Watson girls.  He was to change it completely into a real estate development company, and create industrial parks, as well as other developments.  The nature of the company was changed also to a real estate investment trust, and that was done for tax purposes.  During this period of time two stock splits took place.  The first was a one hundred for one split.  If you had one share, you would now have a total of a hundred.  That wasn’t the end.  A short time later they had a ten for one split, which made that original one share into one thousand.  Therefore, the price of the stock became another story.  Our cost of $350 per share became $3.50, and then the cost became thirty-five cents.  Now the stock has a market valued at $59.75 per new share.  The company has continued to buy its stock whenever anyone was willing to sell.  The last two major sellers were the Union Rescue Mission, which, as mentioned above, had received stock as the sizable charitable gift because of Mr. Bob Watson, as well as the Catholic Church, which had received a sizable gift also.  That means that the number of shares now stands at about 7.5 million or 7,500 old shares.  There is much more to this story because it is part of California’s history. 

     Another Savings and Loan story involved Western Federal Savings and Loan.  Mr. Hugh Evans and his son, Hugh Jr. ran the company, but there was no stock outstanding.  This company had a federal charter, and only state chartered companies could have stock outstanding.  The company was very well run with virtually no losses or foreclosures year after year.  The Evans family was making good money, but they had an opportunity to make far more.  I went to their annual meetings each year and talked to them for years.  Finally they did change and made it possible for depositors and management to obtain stock.  We did get some stock, which did quite well, but it was to be sold to new management, and we got cash for the deal.  As a final note to this story, it was taken over by William Simon, who later on ran for Governor of California, and the company was run so badly after that that it eventually went into bankruptcy.  That was sad because it was unnecessary.  We had met the Evans family because of our interest in opera at the Bocci Ball, which was a yearly dinner dance to promote opera and raise money, which it never did.  This was when Joan was pregnant with David in 1958.

     As a matter of fact we made quite a few friends as a result of our venture into opera.  We have stayed friends with Don and Tam Dickerson over the years as well as Erena and Jim Gibbons.  Don is an ophthalmologist, and Tam has been very active in charitable affairs.  Through Tam, who had been a supernumerary many times with the New York City Opera Company with Beverly Sills, we too became supers in an opera and also became friends with Beverly Sills.  The Music Center took over when our company collapsed for lack of funds.  Joan was a nun in Faust and I was a monk.  She got paid, and I didn’t.  Dinner and parking cost more than she got paid.  Joan was in two productions, and I was in only one.  I had gone to the rehearsals, but they didn’t need too many monks so I was out, but Joan fit the costume so she was in.  That is true; they selected the supers by the size of the costume.  It seems that during the first production one of the monks swiped another guy’s jacket and took off with it.  They needed a new monk so I was in.  How do you explain to our two little boys that your mother is a nun and your father is a monk? 

     Jim Gibbons is a dentist specializing in dentistry for children.  David and Craig have gone to him as well as Ronnie.  Both Jim and Erena sang with the Los Angeles Opera.  Erena also sang with other companies.  We went to a production of the “Queen of Spades” given in Seattle, which was sung in English by Erena who speaks and sings in English, Russian, Armenian, Italian, French as well as a few other languages.  The tenor was Russian, and he sang the important areas in Russian, which Erena knows and understands.  The worry was that the English production would slip into a Russian one, but it did not.  It was really a top-notch production, and we all enjoyed the opera.  Then there was the time when she was going to be in “The Girl of the Golden West.”   It was obvious that she needed a lesson in how to play poker.  This was done in our den with David wearing a green eyeshade visor and placing shot glasses around the table.  It was real fun, and she learned her part.  Jim also had a good voice and could have continued singing, but he felt that opera was not the most profitable profession in the world, and he decided that somebody in the family had better make some money.  It was true.  Erena’s father, Varos, who was also a physician, had a wonderful voice and sang until the time of his death in his ninety’s.  

     Among other friends we met were Henry Duque who worked with Hugh Evans and later became a member of the California Public Utility Commission, and Jean and Bob Ramsey.  Unfortunately, Bob died at an early age, and Jean married Charlie Warner.  We see them from time to time at the opera.  Later on I will talk about the City of Los Angeles and their attempt to tax security transfers.  I will mention the law firm of Adams, Duque and Haseltine, which fought the City Council for the stock exchange.  Henry Duque is the son of that Mr. Duque.  There were others, but there is no need to go into that here except to say that we all tried our best to have a successful opera company but really did not succeed in the long run.

     Our opera company was called the Los Angeles Opera Company, and it was started by a small group of young people in their twenties and thirties.  Their managing director, impresario, employer, and mother hen was Francesco Pace, Frank.  We were not in the original group but soon became fully involved, including trying to raise money, which was very difficult in those days because none of us had much.  The opera company’s home was the Wilshire Ebell Club’s theater in Hancock Park in central Los Angeles.  Our greatest night was our white tie event.  All the men had the proper white tie and tails, and the ladies had the long dresses and the whole works.  I do not remember which opera it was, but I do remember that it rained cats and dogs.  The scenery was held together in any way possible.  It is remarkable what some people can do with two by fours and chewing gum and string.  It never did collapse on the stage during a performance, but it could have. 

     Frank hired top quality conductors who really new the score.  (I just had to put that in.)  They controlled the young performers as best they could.  I remember the time in one of the operas when the tenor came onstage from the rear with a cloak over his arm.  He was supposed to drop the cloak on a couch and sing.  He carefully put the cloak down but forgot to sing, and the conductor almost waved his wrist and arm off.  Finally the guy caught on and began to sing.  And then there was the time the sheriff came to the performance and came to the stage door to attach the wages of one of the singers.  If he would have gotten to the singer before the opera, the performer would not have sung so the sheriff was asked to hold off until the end.  I think he was given a nice seat to enjoy the opera.  At the end when our favorite performer took his curtain call, he looked as if he could eat everyone in the audience.  Only a few of us knew what had happened. 

     In the first act of Rigoletto a tenor comes on stage and sings Questa o quella, which is a beautiful area.  This night we watched as he looks down at his hand for his crib notes, which appeared to be written on his hand.  Everybody in the audience saw what was going on.   Frank never took these things lightly because he knew his opera and knew what should and what should not be done.  Let’s face it, we had a minor league club, but we didn’t know it until much later.  The demise of the Los Angeles Opera Company took place when it was decided that we should move to the new music center downtown.  You should know that every time the curtain goes up in an opera you lose money about equivalent of building a house.  The size of the stage is the measurement of the size of the loss: small stage, small loss, big stage, big loss.  At the Wilshire Ebell the stage was small, and at the music center the stage was large.  The last opera we gave was the Italian Girl in Algers.  It was a great opera with a great loss.  And that is how the New York City Opera Company came to Los Angeles.

     In the September 2000 we went to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera.  At the opening the audience sings the “Star Spangled Banner” so we sang along with them.  The voices were wonderful.  The next night we went to Carnage Hall where there was a concert to wish Isaac Stern a happy eightieth birthday, and the following night we went to a show on Broadway, “Copenhagen,” where one of the actors was celebrating a birthday.  So, for the record, on three successive nights we sang at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnage Hall, and on Broadway.

     Getting back to some of the companies in which we were involved, there was a company called Zeigler-Harris, which made stainless steel kitchen sinks.  The sinks came in all sizes and shapes.  First they took a piece of steel and put it under a press.  The press would come down with a big bank and press out the sink.  Then they had to drill holes for the incoming water and wastewater.  After that the sink was polished and packed for delivery.  It was a good product, which needed very little daily care.  I was elected to be the secretary of the company.  It was my job to take minutes at the directors meetings and write them and deliver them to the directors before the next meeting.  At one meeting the directors were, shall we say, exceptionally boisterous.  To put it another way, there was a big fat argument.  As secretary it was my job to report what happened at the meeting.  If you told it one way, you would continue the argument at the next meeting, or you could report the meeting in diplomatic terms.  My choice, to which nobody objected, was, “After a lively discussion of all the pertinent facts at hand…” At the next meeting nobody said one word, and I sat there quietly and purred. 

     In the 1950’s Morton was a director of a company called Budget Finance Plan.  It is still in business today.  It was small loan company and was to grow through the years.  They had a complicated list of different types of stocks.  There was one issue called the “A common.”  It participated in the earnings of the company and was a real drag on the actual common stock.  The company decided to get rid of that issue.  They sent a notice to all of the stockholders to turn in their stock to the company.  A stockholder does not have to turn in his stock if he doesn’t choose to do so, but most of the people did turn it in.  However, there were a few who did not.  That created a big problem for the company.  They found the nearest young person to take care of the matter.  They said, “Arnold, go get the stock, and we’ll pay you.”  OK, I went to work, but why should somebody turn in the stock if it is paying a good dividend?  So I got the board of directors not to declare any dividend in the future.  I began to get results, and finally I did get one hundred per cent of the stock turned back to the company.  Looking back at it I did a good job and did not get paid enough.

     There is a company called Allerton, which I can best describe as an investment trust or mutual fund or holding company.  Anyhow, it has a bunch of securities with few shareholders and little management.  The holdings consist mostly of financial stocks and real estate stocks.  One holding is TWA ten per cent bonds due in 1998 or so.  Now it is April 2001.  Mr. Randal Holden runs it today.  Mr. Jonathan Holden was President before Randal.  Nobody else works at the company.  Many years ago I remember Morton and Ivan talking to each other and asking each

other how they could sell the stock and get rid of it.  Obviously they never did, and this is the beginning of the next century, and we still own our seventy shares.  We definitely do not have any idea what our cost is on the stock or how Morton and Forona got the stock in the first place; however, I have found a balance sheet of “Morton Seidel Company” dated February 28, 1929.  One of the assets is “$9,000 Allerton Corporation 1942” bonds valued at $8,827. 

     This is being written on Sunday April 15, 2001 on a plane returning from New York.  It is Easter.  On Friday April 13^th Joan and I went to Larchmont, New York to meet Mr. Holden.  Before I go any further, we must discuss the annual report of the company.  It is a one page list of the securities that we own, which he values at cost.  The December 31st statement told us that the cost was about two million dollars.  I figured it was worth about four million last Thursday.  He told us that as of March 31, 2001 the value was about six million.  I will take his figures.  I must add that Mr. Holden is quite frugal.  He sends an annual dividend with this report in a stamped envelope that he has saved from a gas or electric bill or something.  He and his family own more than fifty percent of the outstanding shares.

     As arranged, Friday we took the train to Larchmont, and Mr. Holden met us on the platform.  I would guess that he is a man of about 80 who is sharp and honest.  I really was not surprised by

his appearance.  He wore old corduroy pants, which had a few spots on them.  His shirt did not give us the feeling that it was brand new, and he walked with a shuffle.  We approached his car, which was easy to spot.  It was an early, not late, model Honda with the front right headlight gone and side mashed due to an accident some time ago.  He told us that he had to check to see that the lights were out because he could not tell from the dashboard, because that didn’t work.  There was a towel on the passenger’s seat next to him.  The back seat and floor were full of junk. There were old plastic bags, an old telephone book, a cane on the floor, and I found part of a July

Figure 11 One $1000 6% Allerton Gold Debenture in Forona A. Seidel’s name.

29, 2000 Wall Street Journal that I pushed aside.  I did not ask him if he would like me to throw it away.  I hope that you get the general idea about the car.  He asked us if it would be all right if we went to a bar for lunch.  We said that that would be fine.  What else could we say?  It was a sports bar with a Babe Ruth picture in the front window.  He said that he has seen Ruth play.  I told him that I had seen Willie Mays’ make his famous catch at the Polo Grounds.  Then we talked about Lou Gehrig and DiMaggio.  We became “Old friends” real fast.  Joan was worried that she might interfere with our conversation.  That was no problem.  He turned his chair away from her and directly towards me.  We discussed his company and I got out of him the idea that he might be willing to walk away from the whole thing sooner or later.  We left it with the conclusion that he would talk things over with his son. 

     He told us that he had two sons and a daughter.  One son lives with him in his home in Larchmont.  His other son has a home not far from his, but it is on the water, and he has a boat.  It was described as a “Stinkpot.”  That is different from a sailboat.  He says that his daughter will not come into his house.  From what we saw, that is very logical.  He told us that a tree fell onto the roof a few years ago, but he hasn’t had time to fix the roof yet.  His grass was the only grass in the neighborhood that hasn’t been cared for.  He drove us around Larchmont, which we felt was quite a nice place to live.  Finally he drove us back to the station and we were ready to return to New York City.  I feel that there might be more to add to the story later on, but time will tell. 

     Let’s add some more now.  It is now February 3, 2004.  We have just received a dividend for $35 per share or $2,450.  If the total cost were $9,000, that would make the yield of 27 per cent.  By putting two and two together, and guessing a bit, I just figured the value of the whole thing to be worth a little over 9 million dollars.  It might be worth more, but who knows.  We own 70 shares, and there are 9950 shares outstanding.  That means that it is worth about $904 per share times 70 shares, or over $63,000!  By the way, there is still no market on the thing, and I have no idea how this part of the story will ever end, but that’s the end of it for now!

     And then there was the French Paper Company, which was in Niles, Michigan.  An attorney had a client who was elderly and needed income to live.  She had stock in the French Paper Company, which was small and privately held.  The company would not buy her stock from her and give her the income she needed.  What could Morton do for her?  We went to Niles Michigan to see the company, and I went along on the trip.  Morton had a letter of introduction to the one of the two bankers in town and called on him first with his letter.  The banker was quite interesting.  He had two desks. One was in his office for private meetings, but the other was up front so he could see everybody who came into the bank, and he could wave to them or give the kids candy.  He knew the whole town, and they all knew and like him.  Morton met him, and then he introduced Morton to the management of the paper company.  Morton showed the management how they could make money by doing a deal.  The old lady would trade her stock for debentures paying ten per cent.  That would mean that the company would have fewer shares outstanding, and the payment on the debt would come before taxes, and the remaining stockholders would earn more per share.  It was a good deal for everybody, and management agreed to the deal, the lady got her income, and all was well.  A few years went buy and the management decided that they didn’t like debt in the first place, and they had a chance to get rid of the lady, so they bought her bonds from her.  Again it was a perfect deal for everybody.  It was an impossible deal to do so it took a little longer to get it done.

     One of Morton’s clients and friends was Ed Ornitz.   He was called Ted for short.  He had two businesses.  One involved selling structural material for factories.  The other involved selling pearlite, which was a nontoxic inactive substance used for insulation.  Both businesses were quite good.  He smoked quite heavily and died of throat cancer.  He had a son, Ed, and Ed and I have remained friends over the years.  In our early days we went skiing together, and today we get together as often as possible, which is too infrequent.  Ed and Linda, his wife, have two children, Donna and David.  Both Ed and David are doctors and have been doing research over the years.  Ed has worked on sleep problems and David on genes.  Donna is also a doctor.  She is in private practice with her specialty being pediatric ophthalmology. 

     Ted had his structural materials business, which was an asset if it could be sold.  In fact a young man by the name of Arnold Bogart did choose to buy it.  A deal was arranged that was a good deal for everybody, and we have stayed friends with “Bogie” all of these years.  Happily he did very well with the business, which he changed with the times.  It was a success story made possible by making a fair deal for all concerned.  He started with virtually nothing and was very successful.  Unfortunately, he has just passed away leaving his wife Rosanna.  It is interesting to note that Joan and Rosanna attended UCLA at the same time. 

     Another of Morton’s clients was a gentleman by the name of Spencer Trevanor Hankey.  Mr. Hankey was attorney to the British Consulate in Los Angeles.  He was an excellent lawyer and a true gentleman.  My father took care of Mr. Hankey’s investments.  One Friday Mr. Hankey called Morton and said that he wanted to sell everything.  Morton said, “OK,” and all of Mr. Hankey’s stocks were sold.  This was not typical behavior for either man.  Over the weekend Eisenhower had a heart attack, and the market fell thirty points, which was a lot for those days.  On Monday the two men spoke, and Morton asked Mr. Hankey why he had called to sell everything.  Hankey said that he did not know, and why did Morton let him do it?  Finally they agreed to buy everything back at a lower price.

     One of Mr. Hankey’s clients was George Henry Pinckard.  Mr. Pincard lived in Hollywood with his wife, Ruby.  She had tea parties on the weekends.  Tea was served by her Russian butler. I wish I could remember his name.  The teapot always had the tea cozzie covering the teapot.  I remember a pewter spoon hanging by a string at the mantle.  At the tea parties one could meet all of the flakes of creation.  Morton got into a discussion one time with a “Rabbi.”  While discussing things, it became evident that this guy was not a rabbi but only a freeloader, as were most of the guests.  It was a fun experience for me.  The Pinckard’s two daughters were Coral and Leslie.  Coral lived in England or Scotland, and Leslie lived in New York.  We were told that the two of them fought over everything.  Everyone agreed that Mr. Pincard was the only good member of the family.  Mr. Pinkard had been Master of the Hounds while in England and Eisenhower had used his home as his headquarters during World War II.  Mr. Pincard was elderly and about to die.  In fact Mr. Hankey, Morton and I went to his home, which was now in La Jolla, California, where he made a final will on his deathbed.  This will named Morton his executor.  In fact Mr. Pincard did die in October 1950.

     This began another story sending us to London.  When Mr. Pincard died, we soon discovered that the Pincard family was not the best family of bookkeepers.  In fact there were no good records to use.  Their taxman was Morton Robinson.  He did an excellent job for all.  In fact the combination of Morton Seidel as executor, Mr. Hankey as attorney, and Morton Robinson as the accountant was an excellent combination, and I have followed that technique over the years.  It was decided that Morton should go to London to find out what was really in the estate.  It was necessary to get a court order to allow him to go.  The judge was Judge Condee.  He always looked as if he were smiling.  He was not; his false teeth did not quite fit.  We learned that quite quickly.

     Next we had to make reservations to go.  In those days the airplane was not the way to go yet.  We took the ship, the Niew Amsterdam.  Morton became sick with kidney stones before the ship and air reservations could be made.  It was up to me to get the passports and make all of the reservations.  It was quite a learning experience because nobody in our family had really traveled before this.  Morton got better, and we finally got to London where Morton was going to have real problems because he had virtually no information regarding the estate.  I remember that he walked into London with a three by five piece of paper with a little bit of information on it.

     The very final day, of this long story cut short, in London was spent at the bank, Hoare’s Limited.  It started about ten o’clock in the morning when we saw a row of top hats ready to be put on.  We were told that the hats were used by members of the stock exchange as well as the delivery boys.  We asked how one could tell the difference, and we were told that you just knew. When we sat down at the table, Morton said, “ Let’s see if we can finish this by three o’clock this afternoon.”  And the banker using proper English said, “My word, it can’t be done, you know.”  The final item was a bequest to Coral of one thousand pounds.  The bank wanted her to sign a receipt showing that she received the money, and she would not sign the receipt until she actually did get it into her hands.  It looked like a standoff until Morton said to the banker the t he knew that they liked to keep money, so he suggested that they open an escrow account and give her the money when they were satisfied with the receipt.  That was agreed to by the bank, and Morton asked if there was anything else to do.  Everybody agreed that everything was completed and the estate was ready to be closed.  As that was said we all looked up at the clock on the wall, which went, “Click,” and it was exactly three o’clock!  It is my guess that the estate was finally closed in 1957.

     While in London we met people such as the head of the Bank of America in London.  He pointed his finger at me and said to Morton, “Is that your son?  Long after you are pushing up daises this estate will still be going on and he will be the executor.”  There was the ancillary administrator, the attorneys for Coral, Leslie, and Morton, as well as the banker who would not give the ancillary administrator the list of stock and bonds.  This is a story in itself.  Morton went into the bank and asked the bank officer for the information as executor.  The banker asked Morton to write him a letter for his records.  Morton agreed, however he asked that the banker to call in his secretary.  “His secretary?”  “Yes.”  Then Morton told the banker to dictate the letter that Morton should write.  The banker said, “Dictate?”  “Yes, you dictate the letter that you want me to write, make one copy for me, one copy for the ancillary administrator, and you keep the original, which I will sign.”  A carbon copy in England was called a “Flimsy” because the copy was made on very thin paper.  That way the banker could not say that the letter was not properly written.  Morton figured that if he went back to the hotel, wrote a letter, mailed it, and waited for an answer, a week would go by, so this procedure saved all that time, which the estate was paying for.  If I remember correctly, I think that in those days he got one hundred dollars per day.

     After Mr. Hankey died Mr. Louis Fetterly took over Mr. Hankey’s law practice.  One day in the early 1970’s he called me and said that he was going to have the county council call me and ask my advice on foreign securities.  “Would I be willing to help them?”  I said that I would.  The county council represents the public administrator’s office.  They had a problem with the estate of an English gentleman who had died in Los Angeles County without leaving a will.  He owned foreign securities, which had gone down since his death.  Among the securities were companies such as DeBeers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., the Suez Canal Company, an Anglo American company, and a lot of junk.  The public administrator had taken the date of death price, not the six month later choice that he should have taken.  It was really quite sad.  When the public administrator got up on the witness stand, he was shaking so much that I put my briefcase down because I was the closest person to him, and I thought he was going to cave in right there.  Happily he did not. 

     When I got on the witness stand I assumed a lot of things about how astute this deceased gentleman was regarding his fine investments, and I got away with it.  The judge did not stop me.  The attorney for the other side made an inexcusable attorney mistake.  He said, “And Mr. Seidel, do you own any of these securities?”  I leaned forward in my seat, almost touching the judge, and blurted out, “You bet I do!”  He didn’t ask me what and how many shares I owned.  I would have had to tell him that I owned only fifty shares of DeBeers.  He just said what he should say.  “No further questions your honor.”  I caught the eye of my attorney for the county who was smiling ear to ear. 

     After that court hearing we went to Europe.  My first stop was to meet with an attorney in London.  We had dinner the night I arrived.  The final blow was that I think I discovered that the dead guy did have a will in London.  We did not press the point any further other than to tell my friends when I got home.  The only two heirs the man left were two adult children, an Australian daughter and a Canadian son who, I am told, were born out of wedlock.  I guess all was worked out in the end.  I never knew.  I received a quite substantial compensation for my efforts, and I am sure that the County did have to pay a surcharge, but I did save them something.  The only thing they needed was a short letter from an investment councilor to protect themselves.

     Something should be said about the Stock Exchange.  On March 10, 1958 I bought a seat on the Los Angeles Stock Exchange.  I paid three thousand dollars for the seat.  In those days only a person could buy a seat, and the firm involved had to be a partnership.  That was done so that in case of a problem, there was someone who could be held accountable.  The seat was my contribution to the partnership with Morton.  No brokerage house was allowed be a corporation in those days.  I should point out that we did become a corporation in 1961 well before Morton’s death in 1973.  As the years went by it was decided to merge the Los Angeles Stock Exchange with the San Francisco Stock Exchange and change the name to the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.  Later on that name was changed to the Pacific Stock Exchange.  The exchange was situated on Spring Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets.  We were to have two trading floors, one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco.  The officers were to travel between the two cities and have offices in both cities.  Rather soon it became evident that the really main office was to be San Francisco.  In the later years the Los Angeles Floor was moved to the eleventh floor of a building on Third and Beaudry Streets, just west of the Harbor Freeway.  I should point out that most of the volume, most of the money, most of the members, and most of the transactions were in Los Angeles.  It became a, “My city is better that your city” situation, and that was that.  It is no credit to anyone involved, and it is all quite sad.

     I served on most of the committees of the exchange.  There were the marketing, allocation, and ethics committees, a well as others.  All of these committee meetings were held with a speakerphone in the center of the table so San Francisco and Los Angeles were connected by phone.  That worked well most of the time.  Sometimes the phones gave out for one reason or another and that spoiled a perfectly good meeting.  One of the committees was the Listing Committee.  On that committee we selected the qualified companies for trading and rejected the ones, which were unqualified.  All of the meetings started at the close of business, which was 1:50 in later years.  That means that they really started at 2 PM and went until about 4:30.  The San Francisco room overlooked the bay, and the Los Angeles room was an inside room, which was really a glorified box.  The San Francisco people enjoyed looking out of the window and chatting.  Remember the people on the trading floor got to work and 6 AM to get ready for the opening of business at 6:30.  As a member of the committee, I could only do my best to push things along, which I did with little success.  Eventually, I got to be vice-chairman and then chairman.  When that happened, I knew the guys who would list anything, as well as the ones who would not.  It was the custom for the staff to present the company for discussion.  After a short discussion, I would say, ”Is there any further discussion?”  If I thought that the company should be listed, I would say to someone, “Do you have a motion?” and he or she would dutifully move to list the company and get it seconded.  If I felt that there was no way, I would call on my friend Bill Baum, mentioned above, who was my friend from State Mutual Savings and Loan days.  He is a financial analyst and knows quality from junk.  He would always vote not to list the company.  Then I would take a deep breath and say, “Bill, do you have a motion?”  He would answer according to cue, and I would continue on with: “Second?  Is there any further discussion? Hearing no further discussion, all those in favor of the motion?  All those opposed?  Thank you the motion is carried.  Next company please.”  It was practical.  With my approach I was able to cut a full hour off of the meeting time.  At the beginning of the next year one of the committee members was asked if he would continue on the committee.  He said that only if Seidel were chairman.  I could not be, nor would I be again because the chairmanship rotated between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  I was pleased by what I consider to be a complement. 

     In the early 1980’s options began to become an important derivative tool, and options were added to the stocks of the Exchange.  Eventually in the later 1990’s the word, “Stock” was taken out of the name, and it became known as the Pacific Exchange.  Vice Presidents became numerous and overwhelming, and management sold to a group called Archipelago, which had developed electronic trading techniques.  On May 25, 2001 the Los Angeles floor was closed for good, and on December 31, 2001 the San Francisco floor was closed.  This was to leave only the options floor in business.  All trading is to be “Upstairs,” which is the traders’ way of saying, “Away from a floor.”  The starting date of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange was said to be 1901, exactly one hundred years ago.  It might have been earlier when there was a commodity or cattle exchange. 

     But wait; there is one more detail that I did not relate.  In 1997 we sold out seat on the exchange for far more than our purchase price.  It was obvious that the options had taken over, and that was not our business.  Unfortunately, we did not get the top price, but we really have no complaints.  If you do not have good management, you have nothing.  That does not mean that you need to have a whole page of vice presidents.  When there are too many managers and not enough workers supporting them, you are in trouble.  That is not good management.  It has happened many times throughout history.  Remember it.

     Once in a while management has to fire an employee.  While it is not a pleasant task, it should not be too bad for either party.  I have had to do my share over the years.  When somebody is to be let go, there should be a visible reason, which is crystal clear to everybody, and it should be done privately.  One day someone at the Farmers and Merchant’s Bank called and said that my employee was just sitting in their office.  Didn’t I want her back at work?  Yes I did.  When she got back, I called her into my office and asked her what was going on.  She said that she just wanted to get fired so she could get unemployment insurance and go back to school.  I told her that she had succeeded and wished her well.  What I did not tell her at the time was that she had not worked for me long enough, and we had good reason to fire her, and she would not get unemployment insurance.

     The bank called another time and told me that one of our employees was kind enough to cash Morton Seidel’s small dividend check for him.  That was a woops because we did not want the checks cashed, and the employee was keeping the money.  When he came back to the office, I called him into my office and asked for the ten dollars, which he gave me.  I asked him to explain the situation to me, and he stuttered for a while, and I asked him if he had any more money to give me from previously cashed check.  He said that he had none.  So we both came to the only logical conclusion.

     One example that occurred before I really took over was when an employee came to Morton and told him that he had something to tell Morton.  This employee was the fastest typist that I have ever seen.  We had no reason to fire him.  He was a nice guy.  However, he just had to report that he lied a little bit on his application for employment.  He had given an address for his residence for the last few years, which was not one hundred percent correct.  The information was correct, but he had not mentioned that this was the address for San Quentin prison.  He had been convicted of embezzlement.  He took the money and gave it to poor people.  This is true.  Adios muchacho.

     One last example is interesting.  A gentleman came to me for employment who was from Kenya.  He seemed to have good credentials, so I suggested that we try things out for three months.  He loved his job and gave me gifts, which was all fine except for one thing.  He didn’t do anything.  He would take all morning to add a simple column of figures.  More importantly, everybody was demoralized.  He brought us all down.  So before the three-month period ended, I had to thank him for his efforts and tell him that he would not be needed any longer.  Those are four different examples of how management must do its job for the company.

     The Ford Motor Company had been held privately by the Ford family since its founding, and on January 25, 1956 they came out with a new issue.  Everybody wanted stock so we took orders

and applied for stock in the new issue.  We were allocated only fifty shares for the whole office.  What should we do?  We had orders for thousands of shares.  It was very simple.  We bit the bullet and asked everybody who was interested if he or she would take one or two shares.  Many said, “Forget it,” while others took one or two shares.  The price of this original public offering was $64 per share.  It was not a moneymaker and took a lot of bookkeeping for fifty shares, however, everybody was happy.

     Before we go further, we had better discuss 1957.  In the beginning of March I met Joan.  On July thirteenth we became engaged, and on August eighteenth we were married.  We became

engaged on a one day trip to Catalina Island where, as the ship, the Big White Steamer, was slowly leaving the shores of Avalon Bay, I read her palm, which showed that she was going to change her name and take a long ocean voyage.  Little did either of us realize how many trips we would take together.  Naturally the honeymoon came first.  Two items should be put on the record.  It should be noted that I got a traffic ticket for speeding on my way to pick up Joan that morning and the night before that I had won an electric can opener at a Bond Club dinner.

     Our wedding was at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where we had about 14 people from Joan’s side of the family and four or five from mine.  That meant that there were less than thirty people all told.  Joan changed upstairs, and, I am told, she almost tripped on her way down.  I held her hand during the ceremony, and she felt better.  In any event Rabbis Magnin and Dubin did their job.  The wedding date was really set by Rabbi Magnin who looked into his little black book and said, “ Would Sunday, August 18^th be all right?”  It was just fine.

     After our wedding lunch and first night at the new Beverly Hilton Hotel, we flew to Seattle. My plans were already made; I was not influenced by a can opener.  We then took the ferry to Victoria on Vancouver Island and stayed at the Empress Hotel.  After that we rented a car and drove to Nanaimo where we took the ferry to Vancouver and stayed at the Vancouver Hotel.  There we boarded the Orion of the old Orient Line and came to San Francisco as visitors.  We went to the Fairmont Hotel and heard the great Ted Lewis perform at the nightclub.  Among many other songs he sang, “Me and My Shadow.”  It was great.  As luck would have it, that there was a drunk in the audience who decided to heckle.  Of all the performers in the world not to pick on he found the wrong one.  It could not have been a better experience.  Lewis had an answer ready for anything the drunk said.  From San Francisco we went to Hawaii.  That was a great honeymoon.  It lasted a month, and we returned just in time for Joan to go back to school to teach the very next day.  We are still traveling, but more about that later.

     We should add a bit about the Orion.  She was not the newest ship in the world in 1957, but

we thought it to be the greatest.  We had cabin M 3, which was a large and fancy cabin with two single bunks, and they were across the cabin from each other.  Our room steward was named

Elderkin.  He took care of everything that we wanted.  On the trip, remember we were gone a month, I got a haircut on board.  There was the good and the bad about that haircut.  The good part of it was the price, twenty-five cents, and the time it took.  The bad part was the haircut itself.  It left me with hair sticking up all over the place.  I think that by now I have out grown that mess.  The Staff Commander was an able man, and unbeknownst to him called, “Woof- Woof” by everybody.  He had that name because nobody, including the English, could understand him. That was quite true.

     We sat at the Captain’s table.  Along with the captain were two very dull people along with

their equally dull daughter.  I do not remember their names nor care to.  We began to plot to be somewhere else at mealtime.  We succeeded at lunch.  There was a restaurant upstairs and at the back of the ship where we dined until we were told we had to leave because they had to prepare for tea.  But you know where we were at dinner.  One evening the captain order a savory.  While I knew about savories, it was the first time I ever heard anybody order a one in place of dessert. It was something like a pickle or a piece of cheese on toast. 

     When we left San Francisco, we were on the bridge leaving San Francisco Bay.  There we met the Prince of Tonga.  He was returning back home.  We figured he got paid by the pound because his weight was slightly greater than heavy.  Later in the trip we were fortunate because the Captain let us steer the ship. The steering was manual: that is you held the wheel and watched the compass.  Nothing was automatic back in those days.  It was not easy in those days. Oh those poor passengers below.  The passengers were Australian and had been on the ship from Australia to Vancouver, and they were returning home on a ‘round trip voyage.  They had no money other than Australian dollars because their currency was “Blocked.”  That means that they were not able to trade it in for foreign money.  In fact they had no way to go into San Francisco, our next stop, because they were broke.  The same thing was to happen in Hawaii.  Naturally, I became the banker for them and traded their money for mine at the going rate.  I then used their Australian dollars to tip the staff when we got off the ship in Hawaii, and they saw San Francisco and Honolulu.

     Joan and I met at a dull party.  We were on the other side of the room from each other.  I got

up to help with the drinks.  She changed sides of the room and I sat back down or her old side.  At the end of the party I gambled and asked her if I could take her home.  This was a potentially real problem because I had come with a friend, Joe Miller, who dated the girl who was giving the party.  Happily, however, Joan lived only a few blocks away.  I then had her phone number and address.  I did not call for several weeks, and I still hear about that today.

     There is another party that we should mention.  It was our engagement party, which Ned and Betty held for us a few weeks before our wedding.  All of the relatives were there.  There were all of the cousins, uncles and the aunts.  There was Uncle Sam and his wife, Auntie Eva, and Uncle Uza and his wife, Clara.  They were both doctors.  In fact when Usa had both kidneys fail, Clara saved his life by making doctors answer questions or get fired.  Their sons, Phil and Bill, also both doctors, acted as nurses around the clock.  Uza did practice medicine, but Clara was only a housewife, although she did know her medicine.  I was able to communicate with Joan’s grandmother only in French.  She spoke Russian, Yiddish, and French.  Something could be said of the cousins, Phil and Bill Treiger.  Betty had prepared a fruit punch for us, which was quite good, and there were bottles of liquor.  Among the bottles, was a bottle of vodka.  I know that you are ahead of me.  I think that it was Phil who took some of the fine vodka and, shall we say, enhanced the fruit punch.  I have no idea how much he put in it, but it was not much.  Nobody knew about this, not even Betty.  During the next week Betty had some fruit punch every morning before going to work.  That seemed like a normal enough thing to do.  Oh yes, she did complain about feeling light headed that week.  I finally put two and two together and told her what had happened.  It was all accepted, though, because that seemed to be normal for Phil.  Everybody understood.  One more thing of great importance: Ned and Betty gave me an expensive wristwatch, which I wear today.  It was an exceptionally nice thing for them to do, and I have appreciated that over the years.  It should be noted that after our marriage we had an apartment at 409 South Spalding Drive in Beverly Hills.  We were to be there until we found our house at 419 South Camden Drive, but there will be more about that later.

     Unfortunately, I am not sure if Sandy and Harry were at that party, but I think something should be said about them because we have become quite close over the years.  Sandy is Joan’s cousin and is married to Harry Weitz who had worked for IBM for many years.  They have two children, Rebecca and Michael.  After Rebecca was married to Ed Rice they lived in Washington, D. C., St Louis, and Chicago.  Ed is a lawyer.  They have two children, Ari, and Sochona.  Michael is married to Kathleen, and they have one child, Jacqueline.  Michael has worked for Dun and Bradstreet as well as AOL Time Warner today.  While Sandy and Harry live in New York, when we get together, we pick up our relationship as if were yesterday just like Morton and Alex Wolheim did those many years ago.  When Joan and Sandy were little, they did live together for quite some time.

     Getting back to investing in gold, we had another adventure in it in the early 1960’s.  It was a great idea, but this did not turn out as planned because we were forced to sell.  In 1960 we bought gold in London from Samuel Montagu & Company, Ltd., which was in Old Broad Street, London.  We bought the gold in the range of $35.75 per fine ounce, and if we could have waited,

gold was to move up substantially, but it was to be sold in the range of $35.05 per ounce.  This gold was bought on margin.  We put down only five per cent and borrowed ninety-five per cent.  Interest rates were quite low at the time.  However President Eisenhower pointed out that we were still at war under World War I.  We had signed the armistice in 1918 but had not signed a peace treaty, and he had the power to tell Americans that we could not own and hold gold in bar form.  He gave us six months to rid ourselves of the gold.  Our technique was to wait until our interest ran out and then sell.  Only one client made money.  He bought one day and sold the next.

     The gas pipelines were started in the later 1940’s and early 1950’s.  I believe that Texas Eastern Gas Pipeline was the first in 1947, and I had a major problem with them.  When they

began, their debt was ninety per cent to ten per cent equity.  Graham and Dodd had said that that was a no no.  Debt should not be higher than a maximum of seventy-five per cent or it would be

better if it were two thirds.  I was told that the major banks had invested in the bonds, and they would not let them go into default.  Remember, that this was after I had seen all of the railroads go under.  After long discussions, I questioned why I read the book in the first place and did not choose to sell the stocks to my clients.  I was wrong, of course, because this was a new way to deliver gas and liquid product.  This was a new industry.  Does that change things?  As far as I’m

concerned, the rule still stands, though.  If you have too much debt, it is a good way to run into trouble.  Is a new industry worth more than going ones?  We are going through this revolution now with the dot-com industry creation right now.  That is for you to answer in the future.

     After the days of the railroad arbitrages of the 1940’s and 1950’s but along with the gas pipelines in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s it became evident that the shares of many of the bank stocks were selling for too low of a price.  One of those was the United States Trust Company of New York.  They had been in business since 1853 and paid dividends without interruption since

1854.  In fact they had never lowered their dividend, and the stock was selling below its book value with over eight billion dollars of trust accounts on the books at that time.  We had become friends with Benjamin Strong, Hoyt Ammidon, Charlie Buek, and Dan Davison who were all presidents of the bank at one time or another as well as many others.  In fact I was invited to sit down and talk with their financial analysts, which I did many times.  We sat down with their figures and discussed companies that they studied.

     United States Trust Company was the first stock that I bought Joan after we were married.  I remember that one of our clients bought two shares at $660 per share.  Needless to say the stock has split many times since then.  It is selling above $170 at the time of this writing, and much to my surprise it is to be bought by Charles Schwab, the discount stockbroker, for 7.7 times book value.  I do not know of a higher price ever paid for a bank stock.  I never thought I would see the day.  In January or February of 1965 Morton went to New York to call on them and picked Bird of Paradise flowers from the garden, which he took with him to his friends at the bank.  It was the middle of winter, and it was a great success.  The final trading day for United States Trust Company was May 31, 2000 at the price of 146 per share.  Our gain has been substantial over the years.  The United States Company’s home was 45 Wall Street.  Now that building has been turned into a residential building.  My, oh my!

     Other banks also were selling at very low multiples in those days.  The First National Bank of

New York was an interesting bank.  The price of the stock was about $1250 per share.  When

Morton walked up the stairs at Two Wall Street and entered the bank after being away from New York for six months or a year, the guard would greet him with, “Hello Mr. Seidel; we haven’t seen you for quite a while.  Glad to see you again.”  The bank had only twelve hundred accounts because they didn’t want to be in a position of conflict of interest.  They had United States Steel as an account but would not take Bethlehem Steel.  That was perfectly logical to them at the time. They were to sell out to Citibank, which was to become First National City Bank for a quite a while.  Now it is CityGroup because they merged with Travelers Insurance and Salomon Smith Barney to become everything for everybody.  We’ll touch them again when we get to that merger in a second.

     Another favorite high price stock was Empire Trust Company.  It was an uptown bank and catered to the wealthy who had trust accounts.  Its price of its stock was high, and it paid three percent stock dividends, but usually that was not enough to give the stockholder a new share so one always got cash.  That was a pain because every time that there was a dividend, it had to be explained to some of our clients.  It was to be merged into the Bank of New York and give us common and preferred stock.  The Bank of New York was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 and is still in business today.  As a matter of interest, bank mergers of today are taking place around three times book value.

     Maybe we should talk about a company that we did not buy.  It was Travelers Insurance, which was considered one of the fine large insurance companies of its day.  It was to be merged with the bank, Citicorp, to make Travelers Group.  One day I attended a lunch given by them for a few financial analysts.  I had the latest annual report in hand, which I had read, and at the meeting we were given the new quarterly report.  As the chairman was speaking, I couldn’t reconcile one billion dollars.  This bothered me a bit.  Finally during the question period I raised my hand hesitatingly, and asked in a quavering voice, “I’m sorry, but I can’t find a billion dollar difference between the two reports.  Could you help me?”  The chairman was stumped, but the chief financial officer of the company said that he would see.  He went into a corner and in a little while came back with the answer.  The billion dollars was, in fact, in the balance sheet placed under, “Other.”  In case you might not know, “Other” is used for small items that are really not that important but have to be put someplace.  I politely thanked him for his answer but figured if that’s the way they treat that kind of money, I didn’t need my clients at risk with that type of sloppy bookkeeping.  In the long run I am happy to say that I feel that I did make the correct decision.

     In the latter part of 1968 the city of Los Angeles decided to create a transfer tax for the transfer of securities.  The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange hired a top quality law firm, Adams, Duque, and Haseltine.  Mr. Adams represented the Stock Exchange.  The house attorney from one of the firms spoke for his firm, and I prepared a short statement against the tax.  We were to testify before the Los Angeles City Council.  I was last public speaker to speak on December 6, 1968.  I said,

         “The city council has an outstanding opportunity to vote against transfer taxes on bonds               and stocks and firmly announce to the financial community that the City of Los Angeles               will never – at least in the foreseeable future – try for this type of tax.  However the City               does invite business and industry into our area with the understanding that the city will do            everything possible to aid industry to create jobs and help the normal course of business.  

         “We have instructed our cashiering staff to avoid transfer in any state that has a transfer                tax if at all possible.  This is only the correct thing to do for our clients.  If we can save a              client some money, it is our duty to do so.

         “The transfer agents that we have worked with, in the City have done a good job.  It would            be a shame to force smaller or out of city banks to handle the large amount of transferring            of securities that goes on each day in the City.  We would get less service and slower                    service, and the City would not get as much money as planned.  Please assure banks and               transfer companies as well as business and, hence the public that this tax will not be                     considered beyond this point.  Just one more point: please, we have enough bookkeeping              items now, don’t give us another one.”

     After we spoke questions were asked by the members of the Council.  I said that I lived in Beverly Hills and was asked why.  I snapped back, “Because the taxes were lower.”  With that Councilman John Ferraro, who I had known since college days, got up and began to walk out of the Council Chambers.  The Council member who had proposed this ordinance asked him where he was going.  Ferraro said that on my statement he had made up his mind and didn’t need to hear more. I believe the final vote was eleven to one.  The guy who had seconded the motion didn’t even vote for it.  What I did not know at the time was that all of the transfer agents in the City of Los Angeles were sitting behind me in the audience.  I sure got my way with any transfer problems for years to come.  It was a fun experience because we were right.

     Something should be said about the delivery of securities in times gone by.  We used to deliver and receive securities through the bank.  If we had to deliver securities, which we had sold, to New York, we would take them to the bank and instruct the bank exactly where to deliver the securities.  The bank would then ship the securities to the Federal Reserve Bank in Los Angeles.  The Los Angeles Fed would send the securities to their counterpart in New York.  The New York Fed would then deliver the securities to the buying broker and get paid in “Fed Funds.”  That is Federal Reserve money, not a cashier’s check from the bank, but their own money.  Then finally we would get paid for the securities.  Although it is not polite to say so, I think the bank sat on the money for a day or two on each end.  Obviously it would take considerable time to get this all done.

     When we bought securities from our New York broker friends, the reverse would take place.  It would take about two weeks to get the securities, and then we had to transfer them into our client’s name.  When the delivery took place, the securities were delivered by the messenger from the Federal Reserve Bank.  That means that there was the deliveryman, and he was always accompanied by an armed guard.  The guard always walked about two steps behind the man with

the briefcase.  They never walked together, and the only time that they would be next to each other would be in the office.  If I walked with them, the guard would be behind us.  We did quite a large business this way.  It was a pain, but it was the only way.  Naturally we became friends after a while.  Finally they gave us what I consider to be a great compliment.  They called us “The Little Giants.”  That’s pretty good from the Federal Reserve Bank.  Naturally things have changed dramatically since those days, and now we have virtually no physical delivery of securities. 

     One particular company is interesting because it is still in business today.  A doctor, Milton Portis, who was an internist, and like Dr. Reiss, was a specialist in his field, told Morton that the nurses in the hospital were using a new product, which we now know as Kleenex, Kotex, and Delsey toilet paper.  In the early 1940’s the company was a new company.  Would Morton be kind enough to look into this new company for him?  International Cellucotton Products had been operated by Kimberly-Clark, but Kimberly-Clark had sold a few shares to the public.  The shares sold for about twenty-five dollars per share.  They were to go up to fifty and be split.  This happened about four or five times.  All of the people who bought the stock sold a few shares and kept the rest.  The original management of International Cellucotton began to get up in years and it was decided to have Cellucotton merge back into Kimberley-Clark, and we got our new Kimberley-Clark stock for the Cellucotton.  It is my understanding that Kimberley-Clark has retained the auditors throughout the years.  In fact, Joan and I still own some Kimberley-Clark stock today.  Milton had retired, but he couldn’t take it and went to Palm Springs and practiced there and retired again.  In fact Milton Portis’ son, Robert Portis had been an orthopedist and also retired.  The Portis name was also know for hats in Chicago.  Mrs. Portis and Mrs. Reiss were sisters and lived across the street from each other on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills.

     Flower bonds were United States government bonds, which could be used for estate taxes.  If

someone bought the bonds at any time before death, the bonds could be used to pay that person’s

estate taxes at face value when the taxes were due.  In other words if the bonds were bought at 80 on Friday, and someone died on Saturday, the bonds could be turned in to the government at par when the taxes were due in place of turning in cash nine months after death.  In fact that did happen to me on a Friday afternoon about three P. M.  A client called me and said that he needed $300,000 bonds for his uncle who was sick.  At that late hour I was lucky to find bonds, which he bought, and the man did die over the weekend.  It is interesting to note that I beat the Bank of America by one quarter point.  In the Government Bond business that is like a mile.  I enjoyed that.  There were many different issues, but the last of these bonds was the US Treasury three per cent bonds due in 1998.  It was a good tax break during their time, but there are no more issues like them.  They were called flower bonds because when the person died, he would be, “Pushing up daisies.”

     Another bond that is fun to talk about and should be mentioned for the record was the California 1/4 of one per cent bond due around 1998.  (That is less than one per cent.)  They were issued during the depression when nobody had any money to buy bonds, and they only paid $2.50 interest per $1000 bond per year. It was a good deal for the State but nobody else.  I don’t think that we will ever see those rates again, but one never knows.  California Water Resources issued a twelve per cent bond in December 1982, and the bond came out at 94 to yield more than twelve per cent.  It was due in 2012 but callable in December 1992 at 102.  Naturally, it was called.  At that time I sold our clients long term municipal bonds with coupons as low as possible.  We found good quality bonds that were three per cent selling at thirty.  That meant that they would get ten per cent yield tax-free.  Naturally, the bonds will be paid off at par when they come due.  Many people still have those bonds, but they have gone up in price considerably.  Others said that they could get fourteen percent at the bank.  I said that was true, but it would only be for a limited time.  It was a spectacular time to make that type of investment.  I don’t think that we will ever see those interest rates again either.

     During my early days in the business it was obvious that electric utility stocks were deeply undervalued.  They were yielding over seven per cent with safety, and they were to grow in size and dividends.  It was an opportunity for an investor to get income.  Utilities were out of favor

because of a man by the name of Samuel Insull.  He had run a scheme by having his holding

companies control each operating company.  He had his holding company, which was on top of

the heap, control many other holding companies, which were twenty-six layers deep.  That means that the operating company had twenty-five layers of holding companies above it.  Insull’s game was to own the one at the top and sell stock in the many companies below, while he had control of the whole thing.  Needless to say the whole thing came tumbling down, and he went to jail.  This led to the holding company act, which did not allow holding companies to be more than two layers.

     After the reorganizations new clean operating companies came out of this mess, but, while they had been in business for many years, they were unknown and untested on their own as operating companies.  Their debt was quite low because of the reorganizations.  Happily the opportunity was there, and we took advantage of it.  Some of the companies were Central Maine Power, Central Illinois Public Service, “CIPS,” and Northern Indiana Public Service, “NIPS.”  In fact the company used to be called Nipsco and now has the meaningless name of  NiSource.  The moral to this story is that the stock of the operating company comes before the bonds of the holding company.

     Another utility company of interest, but completely unrelated to Mr. Insul and his problems, was Utilities and Industries, which was run and controlled by Richard Rosenthal.  It was mainly an electric utility but did have some water and gas.  The company paid no cash dividends but did pay stock dividends of three to five percent every year.  He never paid out more in share value than the company earned that year.  That meant that we got more and more shares as time went on.  At the end of each stock dividend payment he had fractions of shares left over and chose to sell them on the market.  He asked any interested broker to bid on the shares.  Once in December of 1968 we were the highest bidder and bought those shares and sold them to a few clients.  That transaction was 857 shares at $28.75.  It was good for all.  This technique meant that it was never necessary to borrow for the utility business, and the bonds that were outstanding were rated AAA, the highest possible rating. 

     Rosenthal was also the head of Citizens Utilities.  It had water, electric, and gas utilities in fourteen states.  It too was well run.  At one point he gave the Utilities and Industries stockholders the opportunity to receive shares in Citizens Utilities.  There was a bit of a catch.  You could get one share of Citizens for every twenty shares of Utilities and Industries that you owned.  If you owned 100 Utilities and Industries, you could get only five shares of the new stock.  Who needed five shares of anything?  Everybody said, “Let’s sell.”  I felt that if everybody was selling, we should buy.  So we bought 95 shares or whatever was needed to even out the portfolio.  It was a good move until rather recent times, when Rosenthal sold his stock, and the new management decided that they were going to go into the electronics end of the business exactly at the wrong time.  And so we thanked Mr. Rosenthal, Utilities and Industries and Citizens Utilities, and sold our stock and let them fade into the past.

     In the 1980’s we became interested in a company called American Family Life Insurance, which was an insurance company, which specialized in selling supplemental cancer insurance in Japan.  Mr. John Amos developed the concept and decided that it would be a good product to sell in Japan.  He made the necessary financial and friendly contacts and began to sell the insurance.  He was quite successful.  He had his brother, Paul, with him in the business as well as Paul’s son, Dan, as well as other family members.  The only problem we had with the situation was that John took an enormous salary at the time.  Other than that everything went well.  Earnings increased year by year, and they continue to increase at this time.  There was another company, which sold magazines, also known as American Family, so our company changed its name to AFLAC.  John died, and Dan Amos took over as CEO and continued to do well.  Dan was well trained and had come up through the ranks.

     One time they decided to have a contest among the stockholders and brokers.  You had to guess what their sales and earnings would be for the next year.  Another part of the contest was to show how many clients the broker had by having clients turn in their guesses.  We won that part of the contest because we had the largest number of clients who entered the contest.  The prize was a trip to their headquarters in Japan, as well as a side trip to Hong Kong.  This was our second trip to visit the company because a few years before the contest we had called on the company in Japan and were known to them.  It didn’t take long for everybody to know that we did our homework before we bought the stock.  We took the kidding.  On that first visit, while we were in the meeting, a young lady came into the room with coffee.  I could not say, “I don’t want your coffee.  Give me tea.”  That would have been very rude, and it would have been a terrible thing for me to do.  I smiled and thanked her, and when she asked if I wanted one lump of sugar or two, I just said, “Three.”  I also took plenty of milk.  Now I had to decide how to get rid of this stuff.  I couldn’t pour it into a flowerpot because there weren’t any there, so I was trapped.  I decided that I would gulp one third of it early, gulp another third later, and leave the last third, and I did exactly that.  As we shall see a few paragraphs down, that was my third and last time I had had coffee. They also took us out to lunch.  I do not remember the price of lunch, but for desert we each had melon.  If my memory is correct, I think the melon cost about fifty dollars. 

     Alliance Bank of Culver City was created in 1979 and opened its doors in May 1980.  I was asked to become one of the founding directors.  We put in $50,000 and went out to raise money among our friends and clients.  Jerry Sherman and Michel Abrams were two attorneys who came up with the idea.  We were to raise at least three million dollars to begin the bank.  In fact we raised almost four million.  They decided to give back the extra million.  Big mistake.  When you have stockholders in a bank, it is “Free” capital.  One can use that money for expansion, growth and leverage.  All went well for a while, but some of the members of the board decided that we were growing too slowly.  They decided to get rid of the president who was experienced and conservative.  They got a guy who was a “Go-go” type and he made the bank grow faster for a while.  A small group caught him in a “Kiting” scheme, and the bank took a big hit.  That did not bother me as much as the fact that the directors were not told of the problem until several months later.  “I resigned because of “Health reasons.”  Since then the bank has new management and has done well over the years.

     We should spend some time talking about travel because that is part of the story.  Morton and Forona traveled very little because they really did not enjoy it that much.  They did spend some time in Japan and they had gone to Europe several times, but that was about the extent of their traveling.  They had gone through the Panama Canal for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary trip, and I got to come along.  The trip was from New York to Los Angeles on the President Polk. The ship traveled at ten knots, which is not acceptable for today’s travel.  I got bored by all of the little old lady passengers and made friends with the crew.  I went down below when they had their coffee break.  That was a great experience.  Everybody was there, Popeye, Peg-Leg-Pete, and so on.  The language was beautiful.  Every other word was a swear word, but, you know, in their terms they really were not using foul language, bad grammar, but not crude language.  I don’t think any of them had gone beyond the sixth grade except one.  He was the boss.  If his crew could not fix it, he could.  There was a donkey engine that was stuck.  Two of his crewmen worked for quite some time with a crowbar and could not get it to budge.  Finally he came over and with his powerful bare hands he jarred it loose. 

     When the ship goes into the canal from the Atlantic side, it goes straight into a cut up to the first lock.  We looked down and saw a giant shark playing with a large timber right in front of the lock.  He tossed the plank into the air and let it splash down into the water.  The toy was big, and so was the shark.  Travel was not as easy as it is today.  I remember the first time they went to New York by plane.  Morton had to go on business right away.  Forona was not sure if she really wanted to go or not.  Finally she did go.  There were storms over the eastern part of the country, and they had two full crews on the plane.  I remember that they reported that they flew at seventeen thousand feet!  That was really high for those days.  It was probably in the 1950’s.  I have no idea how long it took to go fly across the country then, but it was probably close to 24 hours with stops for fuel.

     On the other hand Joan and I enjoy traveling.  In 1958, a year after our honeymoon, we decided to go to Europe.  That was to be Joan’s first and my second trip.  We figured that sooner or later children would come along, and we wouldn’t have the chance to go anywhere for years.  That would not really be the case, but that was our thought at the time.  Before we left New York we visited our friends Ed and Linda Ornitz in New Haven, Connecticut, which was very nice.  Ed was at Yale at the time.  We had come to the conclusion that it would be best to buy a car and sell it when we got home.  The car was a Volkswagen Bug.  After the trip Joan would be whistled at in the car while she was pregnant with David.  Our plans were to fly to New York, and there we would take a ship, the old Niew Amsterdam, to England.  Morton and Forona gave us a present of first class instead of cabin class and arranged for us to sit at the chief purser’s table.  We did, and that is a story in itself.

     We shared the table with the purser, of course, and Mrs. Block and her friend or companion or assistant or whatever.  Also, at the table were the Belgian council to Pittsburgh and his wife.  They were quite nice, and the gentlemen had coffee in the lounge while the ladies excused themselves.  That was to be the second time in my life that I had coffee.  It was a demitasse.  It was a case of, “One lump of sugar or two?”  “Three, please.”  The first time I had coffee was when I was skiing one time in the local mountains and got real cold and took medicine to warm me up.  Happily that is the end of my coffee experience.

     Mrs. Block’s husband was the President or Chairman of Inland Steel, and he had no interest in going to Europe for no reason at all to him.  We soon figured out how important she was.  It wasn’t hard.  She told us.  At the table, we were all generous.  We bought wine for the table every night.  First the purser, then Mrs. Block, then our friends the Belgian council, and then it was our turn.  We didn’t want to buy wine for this mob nor did we care to drink any.  On the other hand we were fortunate to win a bottle of champagne at some sort of a dance contest the night before it was our time to be generous.  I say, “Win,” which is a joke.  The “Contest” was rigged, and we won.  In any event we took the bottle to the table the next night and were generous with all.  We didn’t have to buy!

     We met one of the Dutch deck officers, with whom I had made friends previously, and spent quite a bit of time visiting the bridge.  As I remember it, his name was Hodinus or something near that.  He put me to work, and it was my job to tell him exactly when the chronometer hit noon so he could fix his position.  The position of the ship was important because there was a daily pool on the miles traveled that day.  I never bet nor won nor lost.  Later on he had me using the sextant so he did not have to do that job in order to find our position.  The library on a ship’s bridge is a wonderful place to study geography.  While we were traveling on the Holland American Line, the Cunard line says that getting there is half the fun.  It was.

     Europe was great.  It was twelve or thirteen years after the end of World War II, and we started our trip in London.  London was not in the best of shape.  There were many vacant lots, which had had buildings on them.  The German bombs had peppered London, and the damage and destruction was obvious.  The British, “Chin up!” attitude was everywhere, however clothes were shabby, and it was obvious that things were tough.

     The first thing we had to do was pick up our Volkswagen “Bug” at St. Johns Wood in the middle of London, which we did with our suitcases in hand.  Everything fit under the bonnet.  Whew!  Then we got a short lesson on how to drive the stick shift car on the wrong side of the road.  We made it to the hotel, the Grosvenor House.  There we met Mr. Welch at the front desk who took care of us and gave us a special room, which was really a regular room.  One day we were in the lobby about ready to go out, and all of a sudden, many men burst into the lobby and covered all of the doors and just stood there.  Within seconds the swinging door went around and one of the Arab Sheiks came into the room with his young son.  His wives followed behind him. The boy and his two bodyguards were going up to their room in the elevator so I went along.  We smiled at each other but did not speak.  I wonder how many oil wells he owns today.

     I do not remember going to the theater in London on that trip, although we would do that with great enjoyment later on.  We did go to Carmen at Covent Gardens.  It is interesting to note that while we were in New York, we saw “My Fair Lady.”  It is a show about the “English language” and London and Covent Gardens and the flower market, which is next to Covent Gardens.  After the show we got on the ship, met the same taxi driver we had seen in the show in New York, went past the flower market and into the theater.  It wasn’t planned that way; it just worked out.  We did the usual such as going to Westminster Abby, the Houses of Parliament, looked in at Buckingham Palace with the changing of the guard, and for lunch or tea one day we had baked bean sandwiches.  That is absolutely not on the recommended list.  On that trip we took a boat down the Thames to Greenwich to stand at zero degrees east and west.   Maybe the twain does meet.

     After we left London, our plans were to go to Belgium by plane. We drove to Rye in the southern part of England and stayed at a small inn overnight.  They were proud of their fireplace where they hid smugglers in the “Good old days.”  The next morning we drove to a small airport and got on a small airplane with the car and flew across the English Channel.  There were four or six passengers and two or three cars.  That trip was to take an hour or so instead of all day by boat crossing the English Channel.  As I remember it, it was not much more expensive than taking the boat and using more time.  It was fun seeing them drive a car onto an airplane.  We landed at a small airport near Brussels and stayed in Brussels for a few days.  While there, we went to a great restaurant, Epoule de Mouton.  It was a small place on a side alley off a main square with only twenty-two seats.  We had a top quality dinner, which concluded with sabayon.  To my eyes it was egg white, sugar and white wine.  It was great.  It was all done with a whisk at the table.  I wish I could remember the name of the chef.  Not far from the restaurant is a statue of a small boy doing what he has to do.  In French it is called, “Le Pisoire.”  It is a cute fountain or the corner.  There was a world’s fair in progress.  We decided to have a hamburger at the American exhibit.  It was not made by Americans.  I have no idea how they made it taste as badly as it did.  After that we thought we might win with borscht at the Russian exhibit.  We lost again. This was like striking out with the bases loaded.  We lost! 

     We were to drive around a major part of Europe, and this was to be my second first trip to Europe.  I feel that I have taken three first trips.  The first was my own, of course.  The second was this one, and the third was to be with our children years later when they were eight and ten years of age.  I am looking forward to my fourth first trip.  After we left Belgium we went to The Netherlands, Denmark, over to Sweden, which was a short day trip, and more.  We remember the fields of tulips in blossom in Holland.  We also remember the cheese and the wagons at the market.  We went by boat from Volendam to the island of Markum, where the people lived in costume.  By now the Dutch have drained the water out of the area, and it is all connected by land.  They had wonderful cheese for breakfast.  Joan didn’t think much of Amsterdam at first because it seemed too much like an American city.  We were to return there near the end of our trip, and we both agreed that Amsterdam sure looked great.  When crossing from Denmark to Sweden, we took a ferryboat for the short trip.  While we were waiting in line for the boat, a German with a Mercedes went to the shore with a bottle and got seawater to put into his car’s radiator.  (If you don’t know it, salt water is very bad for the inside of any engine.)  A Danish gentleman and I saw what he was doing.  We did not say a word.  Remember this was 1958, not long after the end of World War II.  There was a festival of some sort going on, and a Viking came over to me and asked me if he could kiss the lady.  I gave him my permission.  All went well.

     After returning from Sweden we went to Copenhagen.  Copenhagen is a town of bikes.  At one point I could not open the car door because there were too many bikes coming at me.  There is a famous clock in Copenhagen that is very accurate.  It stands in the City Hall and is worth seeing.  Also there is Tivoli, which is everything to everybody.  There are, among other things, restaurants, bandstands, at least one indoor theater, a lake, and much more.  It is certainly a gathering place for everybody in the summertime.  One cannot leave Copenhagen without a short trip to see the little mermaid.  It is a small statue that sits on a small rock a few meters offshore.  It is a pleasant statue that is “Just right.”

     After leaving Denmark we went through Germany.  There were no speed limits in Germany.  It was my intention to go quickly.  It was fun driving into the city of Cologne.  It was complete rubble except for the hotel, which was across the street from the cathedral, which was virtually untouched.  It was good that we saved the cathedral as well as the Roman artifacts under it.  From Germany we were to go to Switzerland.  On the way we passed a road sign, and among other places, it pointed to Paris.  Joan did the only thing possible, she cried a little for joy.  She was going to Paris!  We would go to Paris, but not just yet.  First we were headed to the Alps and Italy.

     Many books have been written about Italy.  We will just touch on some of the highlights of this trip.  Venice was our first stop in Italy.  By the time we got to the hotel, it was quite late, but they still fed us.  Naturally it was spaghetti. We stayed at the Danielli Hotel, which you get to by gondola.  Trieste is not far from Venice, so we drove over there one day.  It is a city state town.  We also drove down the Adriatic coast and then turned inland to Rome.  It was a long two day’s drive, and I misjudged the time it would take and ended up driving in the twilight one day.  It was quite difficult because you did not know if you were looking at a speck on the windshield or a cow down the road or several people talking a little ways ahead.  In Italy in those days one drove with only the parking lights, not the main headlights.  That was a difficult drive.  One thing about traffic in Italy: it is directed by “Traffic Toscaninis.”  They direct the traffic with a graceful arm motion, which goes all the way over their heads.  Then they bring the arm down and slowly repeat the motion.  It is musical.  There is no point in writing about Venice, Rome, and other cities at this time because you can get more out of history books about the subject, but there is one thing of special interest.

     We stayed at the Hassler Hotel, which is at the top of the Spanish Steps.  The restaurant is on the top floor of the hotel overlooking the Coliseum, the Forum and the rest of Rome.  Naturally it is a beautiful view.  Also, naturally, the Italians always enjoy the wine with dinner.  This one evening it was, “Almost always.”  The gentleman was shown a bottle, and he tasted the wine with the usual look, swirl, and taste.  All was not well.  We could neither hear nor understand what he had to say, but the discussion went on for quite a while.  This was serious stuff.  Finally, as I do remember it, he was brought a new bottle, which was acceptable.  There was no anger or any emotion.  They both had a problem to solve.  I have never seen anything quite like that before or since. 

     One day we decided to go to Alfredo’s for dinner.  You know Alfredo’s today because you can order Fettuccini Alfredo at any good Italian restaurant.  He made the Fettuccini with three Italian cheeses, and everything was prepared on a silver platter at the table by Alfredo himself.  The fettuccini came to the table hot and on a hot silver platter.  The cheeses were sprinkled onto the fettuccini one at a time and mixed right there.  It has to be done fast.  No milk or cream was used!  Then the gentleman is given his plate first!  That should be followed by, “But the lady…?” To this Alfredo answers, “Ah yes, the youngest and prettiest lady gets the platter.”  With this he puts the hot platter with fettuccini and wonderful, gooey melted cheese in front of the lady.  This was the original Alfredo’s restaurant.  We jumped into the car for a short ride.  No such luck.  They had changed one street, which I wanted to take into a one-way street, the wrong way, of course.  Well, I tried everything, but to no avail.  I couldn’t do what I wanted so I went all the way north and around to the west end of town near the Vatican and came back to Alfredo’s.  I was so happy that I found a parking place right in front of Alfredo’s restaurant.  Naturally, it was August, and the restaurant was closed in August.

     We drove north along the romantic Italian Mediterranean coast to Genoa.  We remember the beautiful large pink marbled bathroom in the hotel.  During our stay in Genoa we visited Christopher Columbus’s home, which was in the wall of the city.  To be exact it was in the outer part of the wall.  His home was not in Genoa but outside.  We found that interesting.  We also drove up the hill to Cararra.  Cararra marble is a beautiful solid white marble and is used for statues and fine works.  It was Michelangelo’s favorite for his statues.  Above the town is the mountain of marble.  We parked our car at the bottom of the excavation and began walking.  We climbed over broken bits of marble and up several hundred feet.  Finally we reached a railroad track.  A train was there with giant hunks of marble loaded on flatcars.  We asked for a ride back down to our car.  In Italian they said the equivalent of, “Sure, hop on, and we’ll be off.”   We had a question; hop on where?  Finally we were put at the very front of the engine in front of the boiler and told to hold on.  That means if the train ran into anything, we would be the first to go.  The problem was solved for us in an interesting manner.  We went through a tunnel, which curved.  You get the picture; it was pitch dark.  We could not see anything.  The darkness was absolute; there was an absence of light.  There was none.  I hate to say the following: finally we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and, all of a sudden, we were in sunlight, and our car was a few steps away.  We had curved down the mountain, and the load of marble behind us was about to be delivered to market. 

     We entered France and Monaco, and stayed in Nice for our first night in France.  The beach in Nice is not something to remember.  The “sand” is a bunch of rounded stones.  It is not a pleasant walk to the water.  In fact they have mats, which help a whole lot.  The beach at Cannes is much better, because it is a beach, as we know it.  We drove to Arles and Nimes and through southern, historic, artistic, romantic France and spent the night in Avignon, a walled city, which used to be home to the Popes.  Space was limited.  You left your car by the front door, took your key without locking the car, and went to your room.  In early evening all of the cars were pushed to a side by side parking position for the night.  This was not the best hotel in the world.  The sheets were as smooth as sandpaper and not real comfortable if you get my point.  In fact it was noisy.  Two young people were washing dishes and talking.  The noise wafted upstairs like the smell of dishwater.  Finally one of them dropped a whole stack of dishes with a big crash.  With that we both went to sleep.  There is a song about Le Pont de Avignon, which we did visit.  Pont is French for bridge.  Only half of the bridge remains today.

    After Avignon we drove north, and our next stop was at Le Choisel, an inn at Amboise sur Loire, or Amboise on the Loire River just south of Paris.  I had heard about this place from Quincy Cass many long years before this trip.  When we checked in, the lady said, “You are Americans.  I will speak English to you.”  From there on she spoke only French.  Among other things, and across the street from the inn is the final home of Leonardo da Vinci.  With a little money one may get a tour of the place, which is in French.  It was all right, because the lady did not get in our way too much.  This is an old area.  Behind the hotel there are caves probably made by Roman soldiers.  If you go into the caves and up to the top, you come out and overlook a vegetable garden.  This garden supplies all of the vegetables for the inn.  The dining room was both inside and outside.  Our first dinner was outside overlooking the river with the forest across the river.  During dinner somebody was playing a guitar or mandolin across the river, and the music drifted over to us.  It was a perfect setting as the twilight got deeper.  I do not remember what we ate except it was good French cooking. 

     During our stay we were told that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would be coming for a stay.  He was King of England and had to abdicate because he wanted to marry Mrs. Wallace Simpson, a commoner who had been divorced.  It was also said that he was too friendly with the Germans at the start of World War II.  That was all right with us.  They showed up one morning, and that was a production!  First the station wagon came to the entrance, and it was completely full of suitcases.  In a few minutes a car came with the Duke and Duchess and a friend of theirs.  It turns out that he was hosting them on this little trip.  They were freeloading.  They came into the hotel and were shown to their rooms.  The duke had his room and the duchess had her own room.  We had been married for about a year, and neither of us could see separate rooms for ourselves.  In fact we still can’t see it today.  At one point we heard him knock on her door and ask if she were decent.  I guess she gave him permission to enter.  Remember this man had been King of England. 

     Dinner was a real joy if you want to call it that.  We were seated in the inside dining room, which was small.  The three of them entered and were seated directly behind me.  I had my back to the king, and Joan was able to hear what they were talking about.  It couldn’t have been better. We thought that we might be in on world policy or something important.  We couldn’t wait.  It was a disaster.  All they talked about was what we call gossip.  They just talked about people, but it was nothing constructive.  In fact it was really quite sad.  How low could a disenfranchised king fall?  I guess the moral to all of this is to keep interested in whatever is happening in the world around you and be alive.

     After dinner they decided to go to one of the Chateaux in the neighborhood.  I believe that it was Clemenceau.  We said ok, let’s follow them.  They had English plates on their cars, and we did too because we picked up our Bug in London.  Off we went at about eighty miles an hour, but I was able to keep up with them.  When we got to the parking place, I was asked if we were part of their party.  I decided to tell the truth, and we parked and walked. 

     And so as the king and Leonardo stayed in Amboise, we drove to Paris.  With great joy we finally did arrive in Paris.  I won’t say much about Paris except we did all the things one should do in Paris and ate in a restaurant that served cheese.  You started with the mild and ended with the strong stuff.  I am sure that it is there today, and whenever you visit Paris, it will still be there. One restaurant that is no longer there was at les Halles, the market place.  This restaurant had a specialty: French onion soup.  I knew that upstairs was a great restaurant, but downstairs, on the main floor it was a bar fit for drunken sailors and the like.  When they tried to seat us, I forgot all of my French, and I didn’t understand a thing.  Joan tried to help, but I was beyond all hope until they gave up in frustration, and we were allowed to go upstairs.  Then we had a big laugh.  By the way, the onion soup was so good!

     From Paris we sent the car home by boat, and we flew home by TWA Constellation.  There were no jets in 1958.  It took twenty-four hours including the stops in Frobisher Bay, which is a part of Hudson’s Bay, and on to San Francisco.  While we were on the ground at Frobisher Bay at about five A.M. local time, we looked directly overhead and saw the Northern Lights.  We were almost exactly at the North Magnetic Pole, and we saw four fingers of grayish, white light directly overhead, which were pointing north, south, east, and west.  Two things about that flight were unforgettable.  We were awakened by a steward coming up the isle with a monkey mask over his head.  They wanted us to get off the plane to stretch our legs.  Who needed that?  The other was at that time the airlines had a policy that they would only serve cold sandwiches on the planes going overseas.  We certainly did not relish a cold egg sandwich at five A.M. or whatever time it was.  Happily that did not last for long, but it was long enough for us.  In those days the flight crew was not sealed off from the passengers, and on the final leg of the flight I talked to the flight engineers who had a map of Canada because he said that he didn’t trust the navigator.

     As I remember it, we had dinner with Morton and Forona the night we returned, and it was back to school for Joan the very next day and back to the office for me.  In a short time our Volkswagen Bug came home.  Morton and I went to the harbor to pick it up because Joan was teaching.  He was quite surprised to see me drive it away with very little warm-up time.  The engine was air-cooled.  Life was to go on in a normal manner until we announced that Joan was pregnant.  During that time Joan was whistled at while driving the Bug and pregnant.  We thought that that was pretty good. 

     When we knew that Joan was pregnant, we decided that we needed a house so we began to look.  While taking a walk one evening, we saw a house at 419 South Camden Drive in Beverly Hills with a sign in front.  The lady was always baking cookies.  We decided to buy that house, and we did live there from November 1958 until November 18, 1976.  They had a first mortgage on the house, a second mortgage to his mother-in-law, and a tax lien.  Needless to say we made the deal easily.  You might be interested in the way we clinched the deal.  The Farmers and Merchants National Bank was the one that I had worked for in 1949, and they had known me since I was a small child.  They agreed to give me a bank check made out to me for the price of the house.  That evening we came by, and while discussing things, I showed them the check.  The guy’s eyes popped out of his head, and we were pretty sure that we controlled the situation. We did.  It should be noted that I returned the check to the bank the very next morning. 

     While in the process of deciding to buy or not, I looked at the inside walls, which needed painting badly.  That was fine because I could see that no water had leaked from the roof, and that was a good sign.  They needed painting for two reasons.  The living room was painted a pastel blue, and the dining room was a pastel pink.  It might have been just the opposite, but you get the idea. There was a room that had a bar in it.  It was painted a color that we were to call, “Hawaiian Seasick.”  It was awful.  Downstairs we also had a breakfast room, kitchen, service porch for a washing machine, bathroom, and den with another bathroom.  Upstairs we had two bedrooms and one bathroom.  It also had what was to be a good backyard for kids.  It was a great house for us at that time.

     The backyard had plenty of room in which to play.  At one time we had a railroad that went down the hill.  It was a little cart that ran on two tracks and off onto the grass.  We also had room for swings as well as a climbing apparatus.  We had birthday parties and a lot of fun in that yard. In one of the corners of the yard we had a covered barbeque with a sink and cupboards.  We ate a lot of meals outside.  One time it was quite windy, and the top began to lift up.  I used the Swiss method of repair.  I put heavy rocks on the roof, and that kept everything in place from then on.  We also had a lemon tree, which was in the corner of the yard next to the alley.  It grew and grew and hung over the wall and produced enough lemons for the entire neighborhood.  As far as we were concerned, the lemons belonged to all of our neighbors as well as us.   When we sold the house, the new owner put up a higher fence above the wall and cut everybody off.  That was a shame. 

     We spotted one problem quickly.  It needed more heat in the den.  We were told that we needed new heaters and how that would work.  Not having all the money in the world at the time, we got a small motor and inserted it into the heating duct above the furnace.  When the heat was turned on, the motor started and gave a little push to the air so we had “Forced air,” and we had enough heat in the room.  The cost was pennies not big bucks.  The back doorbell didn’t work.  To this day I really don’t know what the problem was.  We strung a line down the outside wall to the place where you push the bell, and it was connected to a cowbell on a porch outside of our bedroom.  If you were downstairs, you heard the knock, and if you were upstairs, you heard the bell.  I figured that every time a worker came through the door, fifty dollars went out the door.  Now, I think it is about $1,000.

     After we had been in the house for quite some time and the boys were born we had a problem with the washing machine.  It was really a washer/dryer combination.  One Saturday the repairman came to fix it.  When he left, he pushed the unit back to the wall but pulled the gas line away from the wall.  I called to try to get him back, but I was told that they only work until noon on Saturday.  Yes, but it is now 11:59!  But the gas is coming out!  We’ll take care of it on Monday. But….  I called the gas company, and they put putty over the hole until Monday.  The company was RCA/Whirlpool.  I will never forgive them.  We had two small kids and no washer for the whole weekend!  That was a disaster.

     Joan was pregnant a couple of paragraphs above so we had better report that David was born on Monday, May 18, 1959 and weighed in at six pounds nine ounces.  That Sunday evening we took a walk and passed Will Wrights Soda Fountain on Beverly and Charlieville.  It was on the southeast corner.  We were across the street and did not go in.  They had small marble tables, which were just large enough for a few sodas.  As I remember it, the colors were black and white and red.  Joan said, “Let’s get a hot fudge sundae.”  I suggested that she was pretty well along with the pregnancy, and if she did have the hot fudge Sundae, maybe she would regret it.  Alas,

we never did have that hot fudge sundae, which was for the best.  However, every year we do remember that incident and do something about it. 

     C. C. Browns was a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard next to the Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  They were known for their hot fudge sundaes.  They did have other food, but you really could never find anybody who had had anything but the hot fudge sundae.  In the late 1990’s the family decided to close the restaurant, which appeared to be a tragedy.  However, Lawry’s restaurant bought the name and recipe for the hot fudge from the C. C. Brown operation.  To state the problem simply: after you finish a large prime rib dinner, you have to stuff your face with the great ooey gooey hot fudge sundae.  Of course the point of all of this is that David was born on May 18, 1959.

     When we came home from the UCLA hospital, we had Tone.  She was the baby nurse who helped with everything.  It might as well be said here, “How can one sweet little child who can’t even get around give you so many things to do?”  One day we put David on a pillow on our bed and took a picture.  He was so small then, and there was plenty of pillow still showing.  When he was about three, we had a good old fashion thunderstorm in the middle of the night.  Naturally we all woke up, and we went to the window.  We counted after the lightning to see how long it would take for the noise.  In a few minutes we saw and heard the fire department come past us with sirens and more noise.  The lightning had hit the oil well at the high school.  All was well.  After that we realized that David was dry!  We sent him to the bathroom, and that was the first night that he slept all the way through without being wet.  Little things are important.

     Today’s date is December 13, 2000, and I am sitting on a plane going from Los Angeles to Washington, D. C., and I planned to write about something other than the Presidential elections, but I just have to add a few words of my own to this whole thing.  Elections were held on November 7, 2000.  Everything was close, and Florida, which has 25 Electoral votes, made the difference.  Late last night the U. S. Supreme court ruled in favor of Bush by a five to four margin so I think it is safe to say that Bush is going to be the next President.  I heard that Gore will give a speech tonight.  Those are the simple facts, but this has been a long legal battle over the count and recount of the ballots.  You will read about this in your history books, but I just want to express my feelings at this time.  The race was close.  I don’t know if all of the ballots were counted or not, but the election was certified by the Secretary of State of Florida.  I think that it should have ended there, but Gore chose to fight it out in the courts.  He had a perfectly good right to do so.  So we have all lived with this drama all this time. 

     Remember this is all political.  The Governor of Florida is Jeb Bush, George’s brother.  The Florida Legislature is about sixty per cent Republican.  The same goes for a majority of the judges and Supreme Court Justices in Florida.  This thing has been played out in at least three state courts, twice in the Florida Supreme Court, and twice in the U. S. Supreme Court.  The final blow to Gore was the mighty five to four decision by the U. S. Supreme Court.  I want to stress that it is my opinion that, while the various Justices have different persuasions, they have made their decisions based on their knowledge regarding the Constitution and the laws.  Vice President Gore will give a speech tonight, and it will be followed by a Bush talk.  History will tell the rest.  To conclude by writing later on, Gore did concede graciously, and Bush gave a short speech telling some of his plans for the future.

     Maybe I had better explain why I am on an airplane.  I have served as a panel member that reviews staff decisions regarding expelling companies from the NASDAQ stock market.  I have served on this committee for years, and the members go to Washington, D.C. when needed to hear as many as twelve companies in one day.  Most of the time there are two panel members and one staff attorney.  Most meetings last one hour or less, and the company explains why they should continue being listed in spite of the fact that they do not meet the parameters of being listed.  Some are hopeless, and we try to give others a short time to return themselves to compliance.  I personally do not like to throw them out, but if we cannot find a way to cure their problems, there is no choice.  Some of the presentations are written only, and they do not require as much time as the oral meetings.  When I first started this adventure, the meetings were held around the country, and the panel members as well as the staff would travel around the country.  I had gone as far as Washington, D. C. to Seattle to San Francisco, and as close as Los Angeles.

     Joan served as a charter member of the Small Firms Advisory Committee for the last two years ending in 2001.  It is a national committee.  She is more important than I am because her committee is a committee of the board.  She is picked up by a special driver and taken directly to her hotel, and I have to take a cab.  She was one of the original twelve members on that committee.  Twelve more were added for the second year, and then the original twelve left the committee in July 2001 when a new group was added.  The committee speaks for the small firms to advocate for their problems in the industry.  I think it is a worthwhile committee.

     Maybe we should say something about being regulated rather than regulating.  In the brokerage business we are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Securities Dealers, the Pacific Stock Exchange, when we were members and when it was in existence, and our own auditor.  They have many rules, which we must follow.  Most of their rules are fine and for the protection of everyone.  Some of the rules are made only for large firms, but we must follow the rules also.  Many times the auditor is just out of school or has little knowledge of how the real world operates.  I have been helpful to them.  Putting it bluntly, in the past I have given them the best double talk that you can imagine, and they have been so happy to get out of our office that we are all winners.  I could not say that if our books weren’t as clean as a whistle, but they are now and always have been.  In any event many regulators have gone by the wayside, and we are still here.

     This is really not about elections or the NASDAQ or regulators, though.  It is about our story, and David has just been born.  In fact when he was less than a month old, Joan had a problem.  She called me from home and told me that she had blacked out while changing the baby, she had fallen, and she was in bed now and her leg hurt.  I asked her a few questions such as, “Can you wiggle your toes?”  That was a perfectly useless question except it gave me a short time to think. Then I asked her, “If she turned her foot, and leg a little to the side, did that hurt?”  It did.  I said that I would come right home from downtown.  It was my guess that she had broken her fibula, the small bone in her lower leg.  She did.  She said that I arrived home before she put the phone down.  We went to the doctor, and she spent the next five or six weeks with a cast from the knee to the foot.  We slept in the living room, and David slept in the den.  He did not complain.  Joan got so that she could really swing the cast around.  In fact we were worried that I might get zonked in bed.  Thank goodness, I never did.  One day David was a little fussy and wouldn’t go to sleep.  It got to the point where I said, “The heck with it,” and turned on the radio to listen to the baseball game.  When Vince Scully began to talk, David went right to sleep, and all was well. Remember this all happened in 1959, and Vince Scully is still broadcasting baseball games for the Dodgers in 2004.

     On April 24, 1961 Craig was born.  He was six pounds, eleven ounces.  When he came home, we arranged it so David would meet us in the hallway at the foot of the stairs so he would be properly prepared for his new brother.  He walked by and said something like, “Hello ‘Caig,’” and walked away because he was busy at the time.  All was well with Craig.  There were no more broken bones this time.  We did have a baby nurse who spent all of her time cooking and very little time with mother and baby.  It is surprising to see how small babies are and how large his older brother was at the time.  As Craig grew, it was also interesting to see other little ones who were smaller than he.

     Speaking of hospitals when David was three, he was taken to Children’s Hospital to have his tonsils removed.  I read the entrance document, which said that if he contracted a communicable disease, he would be taken to the Los Angeles General Hospital.  My first answer was, “No way, no how, no!”   After a short discussion with the clerk I wrote something saying that if his parents or doctor could not be reached, then they were free to take him to the General Hospital.  We had all agreed that Joan would stay with him overnight so that took care of our problem.  The supervisor was called, and we all agreed.  All was well.  A couple of years later when Craig was to go through the same routine, I read the form again.  My exact words had been added to the printed form.

     All boys should have a dog.  About the time that David was beginning to read, I came home with an unnamed dog from the pound.  She was known to the pound as a,  “Terrier X.”  You know, a little of this, and a little of that sort of dog.  David was reading about Frisky the cat.  When this dog jumped on him and wagged her tail, we told him that Craig and he could name the dog anything they wanted.  He immediately said that she was frisky, and we could call her that.  That was how that decision was made.  We figured that she lived until she was about 16 or so.  When she had puppies, we gave one to friends.  It turns out that this dog was more frisky than Frisky.  From inside the house he barked at cars that passed by on the street. One day he decided to go get the car so he jumped through the front plate glass window.  He never did get the car, but, if I’m not mistaken, a car did get him in the end.

     Birthday parties were fun for all and well planned.  We tried to plan the parties to the minute. To start the party, we through a bunch of boxes on the lawn.  Soon the kids began to be arranged in to a line by the kids, and we had the kids sitting in them in their train.  There was the year that we had a midway sort of thing.  Throw the ball at the bottle, pin the tail on the donkey, and so on until everyone was completely tuckered out.  We also had swings and a climbing apparatus in the yard.  They were used all year round.  When anybody went out the back door, I would say, “Don’t slam the (Bang!) door.”  I never won that battle.  I also got a kick out of our two boys finishing a half-gallon of milk in one sitting. 

     David and Craig went to Beverly Vista and then to Beverly Hills High School.  When David entered Beverly Vista, Joan and I met the Principal, John French, who had been my geometry teacher in high school.  With a twinkle in his eye he asked me if I remembered any geometry.  I said to him that I sure did.  “The square upon the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the sides.”  That is the Pythagorean theorem.  He put his head down and smiled.  That was really a big laugh for him.  We got along fine from then on.

     Both Craig and David were members of the Indian Guides, which was a pre Boy Scout or Cub Scout organization.  They had little meetings with games or arts and crafts.  On one occasion in either the Indian Guides or Cub Scouts Craig was showing a copy of a Marc Chagall painting to the group.  All of the little boys were listening and were interested, however, the all of the parents who had come to pick up the children were in the back of the room talking.  We were planning to go to France, and Craig had written a letter to Chagall, which, unfortunately, was never answered.  It would have been so simple for him to write, but it was quite a shame that a little child’s letter was not answered.

     David’s Indian Guide group decided to make wooden racing cars and race them on a special track at Roxbury Park.  There would be a prize for the fastest car as well as a booby prize for the slowest one.  I am not very good with woodworking and handy crafts.  Our car did not look like much, and it was slow.  Well, maybe we would have a chance to win the booby prize.  We were doing just fine for a while, but finally there was one car that was slower than ours.  One time there was a costume party for Haloween at Roxbury Park.  I said to both boys, “Let’s make a rocket.”  So we got some silver paper and thin pieces of wood for the frame and put it together and went to the park.  The boys got into the rocket, but it was horizontal so they could point it in the right direction.  I guess we would have won if we could have made it vertical.  I think that it looked great.

     During this time it was decided to take the boys to the snow and camp out.  I personally thought that would be a great idea if the temperature were about seventy degrees warmer in the snow.  Of course that was not to be.  My solution was to get reservations in one of the lodges in the mountains and get skis so the kids could learn to ski.  I felt that that would be as much fun as returning frozen kids to their un-understanding mothers on a Sunday afternoon.  It did turn out that I was correct.  The few who did know how to ski went off on their own, and the others were given ski lessons.  To this day I do not think that they needed mountaineering training at that early age.  A good time was had by all without freezing.

     One Friday Simmy Menkes, now Simon, came to visit David, and he forgot a book about computers.  Craig found it and began to read it.  On Sunday afternoon he came out of his room knowing what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.  He wanted to work with computers.  When he took his first class in high school, the teacher asked why he was taking the course; he could teach it.  Craig was the first to say that computers would use more paper than they would do away with.  Naturally he was correct.  He started college at UCLA but told us that the computers were not adequate.  “What do you mean the computers are not good?  This is UCLA!”  He was right, of course, and he transferred to Berkeley.  It was much later that we discovered that they only took a hand full of students in electrical engineering and computer science each year, and he was one of them.  We thought that it was quite a feat.  Later on he came home with pages of electrical drawings and told us that it was a computer, but he told us that it was obsolete. 

     On an early trip with David and Craig we decided to go to Detroit and pick up a new car and drive home.  We got a Plymouth, which had been driven by one of the executives of the Chrysler Corporation and drove it from Detroit.  One of our first stops was in Springfield Missouri.  You might think that Springfield is important because it was the home of Abraham Lincoln.  That is not the case with me.  After we visited the Capitol we asked somebody if we could get a soda or something.  He suggested that we go to the old corner drugstore, which we did.  This drugstore had everything including the smell of an old time drugstore and the counter stools and a little old lady who had been making ice cream sodas for a hundred years.  She did it her way.  First she put in a little cream, not milk, cream.  Then she put in a little chocolate syrup and a little ice cream and soda and mixed.  Then she added more of everything with the whipped cream on top. I do not think that I will ever have another chocolate soda like that one. 

     Since those days we have taken many trips.  Joan and I have bounced back and forth across the country many times working mainly for the National Association of Securities Dealers.  We have taken major trips to Europe, Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Japan and South East Asia, as well as cruses to Alaska, the Galapagos Islands, and through the Panama Canal.  We have also taken a cruse to the Mediterranean.  That experience was interesting.  Joan was asked to teach a one-day class on investments at UCLA, and because of that she had been asked to lecture on investments on ships. We worked a two for one deal for the shipping line.  We both lectured on the ships and never had a complaint.  We received a phone call one Thursday asking if we could leave next Monday from Naples and go through the Mediterranean because the ship was not going to stop at one of the ports, and they were going to be at sea an extra day.  We said, Yes,” and we were in Naples and ready to go on short notice. 

     We must take another break from our story to discuss current events.  This is being written on Friday, September 14, 2001.  Current events of today turn into the history of tomorrow, so I do think I should give my feelings of what has happened on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  Joan and I woke to our radio alarm clock at 6:49, which was timed to give us financial news.  That was 9:49 AM in New York and Washington.  The first thing that we heard was that an airplane hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and I believe that we were told a short time (minutes) later that another plane had hit the second tower.  We were awake real fast.  I think that it was later in the morning when somebody said something about another plane hitting the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., although that seemed less important at the time.  Upon thinking it through it is my personal thought that the Pentagon plane might have been headed for the White House.  We really didn’t quite believe what we were hearing although we had it figured quite fast that this was not just an accident.  There was another plane that crashed in western Pennsylvania, which had left Boston for San Francisco and had made a U turn approximately west of the Great Lakes and was headed back towards Washington.  Evidently the passengers fought with the hijackers and brought the plane down into a cornfield.  It looks like they are real heroes.  You realize that four planes were hijacked about the same time from three different airports, New York, Boston, and Dulles.

     Do get a clear picture in your mind that these two structures of the World Trade Center, which, it was said, housed up to fifty thousand workers on an average day, and this was an average day, stood at the lower tip of Manhattan Island overlooking the Stature of Liberty and Ellis Island and about five or six blocks from the New York Stock Exchange building and Wall Street.  These buildings had their own subway station and their own zip code.  The weather was clear and comfortable in New York City, as it was in Washington.  What happened was no accident.  Hijackers who knew how to fly airplanes flew them into the buildings.  I wrote those last two sentences so that nobody can try to change history for you many years from now.  It is interesting to note that the US flag has come out and is being displayed throughout the country and probably throughout the world.  Yesterday I talked to someone in Greece who said that the Greeks were quite angry at what has happened.  Really this is not only an attack against the United States, it is an attack against every civilized country in the world. 

     Shortly after the 9/11 attack Wall Street was made into a fortress.  The street itself has mechanical roadblocks, and there are barriers along Wall Street near the entrance to the Stock Exchange.  You need special friends and passes to get past the guards at the entrance.  It is not a happy scene.  You can walk down the center of Wall Street.  In the old days you could enter a building on one street and walk through to the adjacent street.  That was great if it was raining.  Those days are gone.  You have to walk all the way around the block. 

     This attack is not unlike the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 when patriotism and flags came out all over the country.  And I want to stress the point again that flags are being displayed again all over the place again now.  Beverly Hills has put flags on the light posts on Wilshire Boulevard, and we have been hanging our flag in front of the house.  We have been given little red, white, and blue ribbons, which we pin onto our clothes.  There was no question that we were going to get them.  Nobody knew how we were going to do it then or now, and now we don’t even know for sure who we are going to get, but we all knew we were going to accomplish it.  There was no question in anybody’s mind then or now.  In 1941 a Japanese general, Yamamoto, who had been against the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor said, “I am afraid that we have awakened a sleeping giant.”  He was so very right.  We were unprepared for such an attack then, and we certainly were unprepared for this unbelievable attract now.  By the way, I am sure that you have picked it up by now that I have used singular and plural interchangeably as well as past and present tenses and other no no’s, but I did so to stress my feelings as well as the country’s.  Please don’t mark me down on grammar.  Now let’s get back to our story, which is far more pleasant.

     We left our story as we were in Naples about to travel around the Mediterranean on a Princess line ship.  Take my word for this: I did not plan the timing of this story this way.  It has just come out like this.  You will see what I mean.  We had boarded our ship, and another ship left port one half hour before us.  She was an awful blue color and really looked cheap.  Her name was the Achille Lauro or something like that.  We did not know it at the time, but she was to be taken over shortly by terrorists at a later date, and several people were to be killed, one man in a wheelchair and others.  This was many years ago and not related to the World Trade Center attack in any way except that the same type of crazy extremists were involved.  I had not intended to go into that, but the events of the last few days seemed to make it important to tell.

     Travel of today is far different that it was fifty or sixty years ago.  At that time you took the train or steamship.  A plane really wasn’t for everybody.  If it were a train, you had your leather suitcase, which the redcap took and put on the train in your drawing room, compartment, or seat. You settled in for a week’s trip across the country.  That meant that you would go over the mountains to Arizona and New Mexico and on to the plain states across the Mississippi river to Illinois and on to Chicago.  In later days you made the trip in five days on the streamliner such as the Santa Fe Chief then the Super Chief.  You probably did not expect to get a shower during the trip.  The train went from Los Angeles to Chicago.  In Chicago you changed stations and trains.  There was a bus or cab company by the name of Parmalee.  They took you from one station to the other, which was the station for the New York Central Railway.  You left Chicago in the late afternoon and woke up traveling along the Hudson River on the final leg of your trip to New York City.  I remember on my first trip to New York, when the train left Chicago in the evening, we went to dinner.  On the menu was Lake Superior White Fish.  To this day I remember that it was the best fish that I have ever eaten.  The train went underground like the subway and below Park Avenue and came into the New York Central station at 42^nd Street, and that was my first experience of New York. 

     Everything was big and noisy.  There was the Automat, which was really a restaurant.  You put nickels in the slot, and then you opened a little door and got your food.  When we went to a restaurant, I was surprised to see the men pay with a twenty-dollar bill.  In those days we might have used two ten-dollar bills, but the twenty was big.  Naturally, one got change for the twenty. The subway was only five cents in those days.  I came to the conclusion that in New York one would pay only five cents or twenty dollars.  There was nothing in between.  I went to all of the tourist sights and went to the Metropolitan Opera.  I guess I had better say that I went to the “Old” Metropolitan Opera House.  We had dinner at Sherry’s where at the next table one of the old time opera stars, Martinelli, was entertaining his guests.  It was fun.  The opera was Faust with Ezio Pinza and others.  My conclusion was that we were three thousand miles closer.  I wanted to bring my ice skates so I could skate in Central Park.  I was told no, because it never gets cold enough for the lake to freeze in Central Park.  I didn’t, and it did because we entered New York along with a blizzard. 

     If you don’t mind jumping ahead over fifty years or so, I think we can end this tale with one last story.  We went to Queen Elizabeth II fiftieth year jubilee celebration in London.  We got to London on Friday, which was May 31, 2002.  On Saturday we went to the Arthur Gilbert collection and had dinner with our group that we were to travel with from Williamsburg, Virginia.  After dinner we went to the Mall and watched part of the classical concert, which was given in the Queen’s garden.  We had not been invited to that but were able to see it on giant TV screens on the Mall.  The next day we visited Hever castle and Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s home.   We had lunch at a third home, met the family, and were taken around on a tour of the house.  They earn extra money by doing this.  I felt sorry for the guy.  All three houses were interesting because in my mind I compared them to Greystone in Beverly Hills.  Neither was really much larger than Greystone, but they had more land.  Furthermore, I don’t think that Greystone is in much worse shape than these three houses.

     Churchill’s home was interesting for two reasons.  We were taken around the grounds and house by Arabella Something-or other, Churchill’s granddaughter.  She obviously knew her grandfather and grandmother.  None of the rooms was large or spacious, but they did seem to be comfortable.  I asked her what her first recollections were as a child, and she said that she remembered running around the grounds.  That figures because there are lakes and an outside heated swimming pool built by Sir Winston.  She also pointed out several walls that he built.  That is to say that he did really build the walls himself.  She said that he always had to be doing something.  We saw many of his paintings, and she pointed out the ones that were hers.  I would guess that she was in her fifties. 

     That evening we went to the Mall, where they had very large TV screens set up so we could look into her Majesty’s garden.  She had twelve thousand of her closest friends to hear the classical concert, and we saw it all on the screens.  Tickets were given out by lottery.  The concert ended with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance number one, and all fifty thousand of us sang along.  I have no idea what the words are; if in fact I never knew it had words, but as they say, “No matter.”  After that the final piece was “God Save the Queen.”  Naturally we all sang along too.  You know, when I was a child, it was our National Anthem.  “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty…” No, I didn’t sing my words.  It was a fun time for all. 

     Next we went to Aplesy House, home of Lord Wellington, and heard all about the Battle of Waterloo.  We also went to the British Portrait Gallery, where we had lunch, and then, most importantly, we were taken to Churchill’s underground war room.  This is where all of the British World War II decisions were made.  There we were greeted by Winston Churchill, Winston’s grandson.  He made a short speech telling us of what happened.  Among other things, we were seated at the table where the war decisions were made.  This was a vast complex and was manned continuously during the war.  When the War was finally won, people who had worked there just left.  Everything was left as it was those many years ago.  It is there for you to see today. 

     That evening we went back to the Mall for the rock concert.  We were told that they had a crowd of over 100,000.  I never though that I would ever say or write the following words:  It was real fun, but I was not able to sing along except for “God Save the Queen.”  And when Prince Charles said, “Hip, hip,” I was able to say, Hooray!”  We were told that with all of the people surrounding the palace there was only one arrest.  The crowd was a family crowd and people on dates.  It was fun.

     The next day, Tuesday, was Parade Day.  We were taken to a church in the Strand where we saw the whole bunch of them in four horse drawn carriages.  The various princes and princesses were in the first three followed by Her Majesty and Prince Phillip in the six horsepower gold one. They were just a few yards from us.  They went to St. Paul’s cathedral for services, then to lunch at the Guild Halls and back to the Palace to watch another parade.  The final blast was a subsonic flyover by a series of jets ending with the Concord escorted by fighters trailing red, white, and blue smoke.  We are told that there will be a sixty-year party in ten years.  Time will tell.  We saw the planes from a bridge on the Thames.  Our final move was to the New Globe Theater to see a Mid Summer Night’s Dream.  That was a great way to end the trip.

     This tale has to end somewhere, but like the beginning the story will continue forward.  It is longer than I thought it would be when I started it.  And now it is up to you to take it upon yourself to add whatever you choose because when you read this, I probably won’t be around to tell the story any more.  Besides that, it will be your story in the future and your responsibilities to carry on with whatever information you choose.  When I was a child, they talked about the man in the Moon and canals on Mars.  You will see people on the Moon and Mars and even more than that.  Some sort of life will be found away from earth and we will accept it as normal.  If someone points to Europa or some of the other moons of Jupiter, don’t laugh.  It is possible that we will visit them. 

     I believe that in the future we will use medicated patches in place of taking a pill for our medication, and when somebody dies, it will be normal and routine to use healthy body parts, which will be transplanted into needy recipients, and burial will be the last resort.  What we now call stem cells will be developed into a complete science of its own to make useful body parts or parts of body parts so we will be able to transplant them so that future generations will live healthy and productive lives far longer that we do today.

     We will look back at the early days of the computer and say, “My how crude those old things were; why did those old guys put up with that?”  Machines, robots that “Think,” will be made to do the drudgery work for us so we can lead better lives.  And so I say to you to go forward, look forward and have the vision to see with your brain and not with whatever you are told by someone else.  It has never been wrong to think on your own.  Maybe there really is an idea out there that only you are able to answer.  “The best is yet to be.”