Drinking in New Jersey and other Diversions

 Since I was now earning a decent amount of money, I purchased a bar for our apartment. Somehow we had come to believe having a well-stocked bar in your place was the height of sophistication. It was a status symbol of success. Our bar was very well-stocked with a large variety of booze, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Bacardi 151 Rum, Smirnoff Vodka, Crown Royal Whiskey, Dubonnet, Galliano and many more. I had several mixology books and by the time we were high up in Cherry Hill Towers getting high, I had gotten a handle on making cocktails. Back in Philadelphia at the Commodore I almost killed Lois one night.

Lois’ drink of choice was a Manhattan, so this particular evening I decided to make her one. I had bought a little cocktail kit. I took the shaker and added some ice. I opened a book I had and read the recipe. It said use 8 parts whiskey to one-part Vermouth. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I assumed a jigger constituted one part. I added in 8 jiggers of whiskey and one jigger of vermouth. Dashed some bitters on top, put on the lid and shook that baby up. I poured it out into a glass and she drank it down.

Talk about woozy drunk. She staggered about and announced she felt sick, then headed into the bathroom to throw up. There was a loud crash and I hurried after her. She lay upon the bathroom floor where she passed out after falling head first against the toilet so hard it cracked the tank.

 We didn’t see them quite as often, but we did continue getting together with Bill and Grace weekly for our usual evenings of cards and drinking and listening to Bill pontificate about harapozoids. These were sometimes raunchy, but never oozed over to any group sex affair.

Besides the Stones, we still got together with Joe Rubio occasionally.  These were more on the order of normal suburban life, cookouts and cocktails and a lot of chit chat about jobs and trips.

Wayne and Bunny were out of the picture. It helped us split with them when we disappeared across the Delaware River into South Jersey, new address, new telephone number and not long after, a new employer. We certainly never had a nude Bunny at the front door or heard from them again.

At the my employer, Welder Tube, I met a fellow who would become a close friend for most of the next decade. His name was Victor Ernest and he had originally immigrated to the USA from St Lucia. He had a interesting accent. Lois thought he sounded like Grover, one of the Muppets on Seseme Street.

 He had been with the company for a few years in the position of Cost Accountant. His grade was above mine of Assistant Bookkeeper when I started. Yet in a few months our roles became reversed. He was still the Cost Accountant, but I was now his boss. He had no difficulty with the situation for the most part, although he preferred to keep it quite that I was his boss, even pretend it wasn’t so. Despite this, we become close friends and he remained such for the next several years. We were together a lot, certainly at work, but socially as well. We began playing tennis every lunch hour, putting up a makeshift net of string between lamp posts in the parking lot. We also took up golf and played every weekend. Sometimes we even got together on weekends and played tennis on a real court.

We were just average weekend golfers. My best score at a full-sized golf course was 95 at the Westwood Country Club in Woodbury, New Jersey.  This Club allowed the public to play their course. It was a lovely course. We were playing there one time when a sudden thunderstorm came roaring in overhead.  It was something of a dilemma as we were on the far back end, a long way from the clubhouse and any solid shelter. Mostly this was open field. They tell you not to stand in an open field during lightning, but the only thing around was a solidary tree, but they also say don’t stand under a tree in a storm either. All we did was walk a bit of a distance away from our bags of metal clubs.  I’m here writing this, so obviously we survived the incident.`

 Usually we played at an Executive Golf Course, called the Golf Farm. An Executive Course had nine holes, but two cups cut into each green. You played the nine, then played them again but to a different cup to make your 18-hole course. We played here because the green fees were pretty cheap and Westwood's were pretty steep.
The golf farm bordered right up against a private country club. One day as I came along the fairway near the drive into that club, this guy stopped along the side and took his club and some balls from his trunk. He began driving them directly into the Golf Farm course, darn near hitting me. I yelled at the jerk, but he kept hitting his drives anyway. Finally, he got in his car and continued on to the country club parking lot.

One time we were playing a round at The Golf Club when we came up behind two women. Instead of just waiting for them to finish a hole, we suggested playing as a foursome. After the first nine, Victor headed to the rest room and one of the women also trotted off somewhere. After chit-chatting with the pretty dark frizzy-haired lady with a spectacular figure, she suddenly suggested we go to her apartment, which was just down the road she said. , She would make us a lunch. Then she began to tell me her husband’s business kept him on the road for long stretches and he was away and how lonely she was. I turned her down on her offer of lunch and the other two returned and we finished the back nine.

I had taken the lady’s offer at face value, just a lunch thing. When I told Lois about it later she gave me a look, shaking her head. “You are so naïve,” she said.

As far as my scores, I didn’t measure my improvement by those. I measured it by how many balls I loss. When we first began we would lose several, either in the water hazard or in the rough. Eventually I reached a point where I was finishing with the same ball I started with and then I felt I was really improving.
Victor particularly hated to lose a ball anywhere. They cost money, you know, and he was a bit tight. He would tramp about in the woods or roughs for a long time before giving up on a ball and if he couldn’t find it he was unhappy. I might look about a bit if I lost a ball, but was willing to continue with a new ball rather than spend time searching. I preferred playing.

Psychologically the worse hazard was the water hazard. The Golf Farm had a lake you had to tee off over. The distance you had to clear was usually easily carried on any other hole, but staring at the water drained away one’s confidence and more likely than not, we would drive our ball straight into the water. Victor really despised this hole. On one occassion he sunk ten straight balls into the water where they disappeared forever. (Actually, they weren't lost forever. There was a guy who came around with a snorkle and fished all the sunken balls from the bottom, which he then sold to golfer for a low price.) Victor and I eventually went to a driving range and bought a bunch of used balls floaters. These balls did not sink. They floated about like strange round white fish and you could sometimes fish them out of the drink. I carried in my bag a special tool for just just a thing. It had a cup at one end and a telescoping handle that could be extended out about ten feet. 

Vic was kind of obsessive-compulsive. He lived by a pretty rigid schedule. He couldn't get together on Tuesdays because this was laundry day. He was fanatical about his appearance and festidious in his grooming. He would arrive at work and head right to the men’s room where he would wash up and fuss with his hair and beard, even though he had showered and groomed himself at home. He often spent 45 minutes in this ritual.

His pride and joy was his yellow Porsche 914. He used to park it right next to the office along the driveway instead of back in the parking lot. He didn’t want anyone parking near him that might ding or scratch his baby.

The structural steel tubing was fabricated in the long building behind the offices. Flatbed 18-wheelers would come in through the front gate, turn up the drive and deliver these great coils of steel to the plant. These coils were very large and very heavy. One day we heard a loud thud just outside the offices. We ran to the windows. Somehow as a truck turned onto the drive, the restraints gave way and one of these giant coils tipped off the side. It made a large dent in the driveway macadam and only missed Victor’s little car by a couple of inches. He never parked along the drive again. Better a couple of dings than a pancaked car beneath a steel coil.

Victor had a girlfriend named Marsha, who he eventually married, so the four of us, he and Marsha, me and Lois, did a lot of things together, but there was no sex involved in this relationship. There was still drinking at his parties.

That was a mainstay of our socializing throughout the early 1970s, parties and plenty of booze. Victor’s parties never got as drowned in the stuff as at Bill and Graces, no one got falling down drunk. We mainly loosened up and spent time singing and laughing. The guitar Victor is playing was mine, but he actually knew how to play it.

We were to continue reveling with this group of friends from 1973 to the fall of 1975 when something would happen that changed everything in my life. I had met Joe Rubio in 1967 and he was still a friend in this period. Victor Ernest became a close friend in early 1973. Both of these would still be friends into the 1980s. Our boozing with Bill and Grace began in 1972, but ended in 1975. Our sexual dalliances with Wayne and Bunny had begun in 1972, but were over by 1973 when we moved to Jersey.

This did not mean our risky sexual proclivities ended.

On September 15, 1973, Lois and I headed to Wisconsin on vacation. It had been a long time coming that we earned enough to afford a real vacation. Our last real one had been the trip to

New York and the tour of Virginia in 1962, our second year of marriage. Since then we had taken a number of day trips, a few overnight stays and one drive out to Cleveland, but that was hardly a vacation since we just drove straight to that city and then straight back home. This was a ten-day trip across several states. The first leg was sort of a dash northwest on interstates, crossing Ohio on up through Gary and Chicago, with no stops. We then went right up to the Wisconsin Dells, after a side trip to Baraboo because I wanted to see the Circus Museum there. We stayed in the Spinning Wheel Motel one night there (right).

Circus had long fascinated me, especially the Ten-in-one or sideshow or Freak Show. Circus World is a museum dedicated to the history and all things circus. Owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, it was built in Baraboo because that was the home of the Ringling Brothers. Ringling began their first circus tour out of the town in 1884.

From there we went to The Dells for a couple days. My regret is I had a fairly new movie camera at the time and I took a lot of films on the trip and not many photographs. I still have the films in a metal box, but nothing to view them with since I got rid of my projectors a few years back. If I ever have any spare money, I will take my movies to a place that can convert them to DVDs.

We took the long way home, cutting through Minnesota, then Indiana. We found a wonderful little local bar restaurant in some small town in Indiana. It wasn’t a tourist destination, but a place where the locals ate. We also had some car trouble in Indiana. The carburetor needed adjusting or something, but we were able to get it fixed quickly and continue our tour.

We began driving through Iowa. I decided we would continue into Missouri and stop over at Hannibal where there was a lot of Mark Twain stuff to visit, but we didn’t make it. After hours of driving through repetitive flat farm land and hearing obituaries being read on the radio along with pork belly market reports, we made a left turn east halfway down the state and headed home.

One of the few pictures I did take is of Lois in the Redwood Center Motel in Angola, Indiana. If much of our life sounds typically humdrum, the drinking and parties aside, our sexual behavior was not. For instance, I often parted the curtains slightly when we stayed in motels on the idea people might peek in and see us making love. Our risk taking sex life continued in these years, just as I continued buying pornography and going to the xxx films or strip shows.

Several of the adult bookstore now added cubicles or booths in the back where you could view pornography movies in private. Some even added such booths where a curtain would part revealing a naked woman who would do “tricks” for you as long as you pushed money through a slot. Sitting in those booths viewing such “performers” as Annie Sprinkle (use your imagination), I never gave a thought to all the previous men who had sat on that bench doing whatever they might be doing while watching a filthy film. The films weren’t the only thing dirty about such places, the interiors were none too clean either.

And at the end of 1973, we were moving again.

Day Job

Before we were interrupted by sexual pursuits I was left unemployed and in a high rise apartment in New Jersey. Olson Brothers’ Eastern Regional Operations had collapsed, the Blue Anchor plant would never be built and I and the General Manager did the final functions of closing it down, and then I was unemployed in a strange land.

Lois had left the University of Pennsylvania’s chemistry department when we moved across the Delaware River, so we were in somewhat tenuous shape that January of 1973. I received a few week’s severances pay, hardly enough to see us through the month. I had immediately gone to the Pennsylvania Labor Office and applied for unemployment. (I was now living in New Jersey, but the job had been located in Pennsylvania.)

Unlike the difficulties I would someday face with the

Delaware Employment Insurance, Pennsylvania approved me very quickly. Meanwhile I was sending out resumes and checking the want ads. One ad that caught my eye was for a job with a company called Bestline. I dialed the number and they gave me a date and time to go to the Cherry Hill Inn.

I went expecting an interview. Instead I was ushered down a hallway outside a large ballroom filled with chairs. There were finger foods and drinks on tables lining this corridor. A man with a clipboard greeted me, took my name and invited me to indulge in the edibles. There were quite a number of people nibbling at finger sandwiches ambling about. After a while we were each handed a folder and directed to find seats in the ballroom. The folder

contained a small booklet and several forms.  Once seated the lights dimmed.  A spotlight picked up a well-dressed fellow stepping out on a stage down at one end and he enthusiastically began explaining Bestline to us. The products were cleaners and waxes. It sounded like we would be selling these items like some scrub-it-up Amway peddlers.

A sales job, I had no interest in a sales job. I had tried training to sell Encyclopedias door to door for Colliers a few years earlier and left the training after a week. I did not consider myself any kind of salesman.

But no, we weren’t sales staff and this was not some salaried position. This was a great opportunity. As they say on TV, there’s more. This wasn’t just a peddler’s position. We would be like little individual franchises for Bestline designated local distributors.  It wasn’t that we would take simply take customer orders and Bestline would ship out the product to fill what we sold. No, we were expected to buy the products up front, like buy a whole garage full of the stuff,  at a discount beneath the retail price, of course.  The initial discount was 30%.The greater your sales, the higher discount you would receive, up to 52%. Sure, Bestline would get their money and we would have to actually sell all the junk to get back our investment plus any possible profit.

Yet, that wasn’t all at all! Selling wasn’t the main point. If you

really wanted to make money then you would recruit other local distributors. You yourself wouldn’t wear out your shoes going door to door, you would bring in your friends and neighbors into the scheme to order their own garage-size supply to sell and you would collect a commission on their sales. You only needed to recruit ten people to do it and then convince them to recruit ten of their acquaintances to also do it. Those ten would sent a cut to your original ten, and in turn your ten would pass on a percentage to you for of all these now 110 people. You would soon be rich as Bill Gates.

It was clear to me this was a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme. If you were at the top of the pyramid perhaps you would actually make something, but there would be diminishing returns down the line as each spin off group attempted to find ten suckers to be their own salesmen. For the scheme to work each person involved had to hook up ten more people. Think about it. If I got ten people and they got 10 people each, then I’d have 110 people passing a share up to me. And if those additional 100 people each got 10 recruits there would be 1,010 people sharing the loot with me. But for those people to earn anything they would have to keep recruiting. Twelve layers down and you would need to have 100 Billion Bestline dealers. You’d have to be recruiting on other planets because the population of Earth in only 7 Billion.

They really put on the pressure to sign an agreement right there and then. It felt as if they would let you out of the place until you did, but despite their ganging up on me and calling me names, I managed to break through the gauntlet and angrily stomped out.

         I came believing it was a real job offer and here it was a scam. I also contacted the Better Business Bureau (Part of the BBB reply is on the  right). 

Bestline was taken to court more than once and judgments brought against them for fraud and false claims.

People v. Bestline Products, Inc.

Annotate this Case

[Civ. No. 46034. Court of Appeals of California, Second Appellate District, Division Three. August 25, 1976.]

THE PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. BESTLINE PRODUCTS, INC., et al., Defendants and Appellants

(Opinion by Potter, J., with Allport, Acting P. J., and Cobey, J., concurring.)

COUNSEL

Humphreys, Berger & Pitto, P. C., Donald A. Drumright, Cotchett, Hutchinson & Dyer, Joseph W. Cotchett, Meis & O'Donnell, Owen P. O'Donnell, Gallucci, White & Kelley, Thomas E. White and Irving Reifman for Defendants and Appellants.

Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, E. Clement Shute, Assistant Attorney General, Herschel T. Elkins and Michael R. Botwin, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

OPINION

POTTER, J.

Appellants Bestline Products, Inc. (hereinafter "Bestline Products"), Bestline Corporation (hereinafter "Bestline Corp."), William E. Bailey, Robert W. Depew, David L. Eastis, James Rohn and Larry D. Huff appeal from a judgment dated December 21, 1973, in favor of plaintiff the People of the State of California. The judgment (1) permanently restrained defendants from operating or participating in a marketing program embodying proscribed features which the court found were in violation of Business and Professions Code section 17500 fn. 1 prohibiting "untrue or misleading" statements; (2) required defendants Bestline Products, Bestline Corp., and Bailey to offer to make restitution to victims of the Bestline marketing program, and (3) imposed civil penalties of $1 million jointly and severally, upon defendants Bestline Corp. and Bestline, Inc., $250,000 upon defendant Bailey, $100,000 upon defendant Eastis, and $50,000 each upon defendants Depew, Huff and Rohn. [61 Cal. App. 3d 885]

I needed have fretted about my situation for long. Three weeks after I applied for unemployment compensation my first check came. However, by then I had acquired a job with Welded Tube Company of America. I went from nothing to having a good salary and the extra bonus of three weeks of unemployment checks.

Welded Tube was located in South Philadelphia on world-famous Weccacoe Avenue. You’ve all heard of Weccacoe, haven’t you? It is a slanted street running between Snyder and Oregon Avenues, paralleling Christopher Columbus Boulevard about a block over along the docks. The plant and

offices of Welded Tube took up most of the west side of the street, there wasn’t much on the east side. Railroad tracks ran alongside the plant. There was a little shack down near Snyder that sold hoagies and other sandwiches, one of the few places to buy lunch nearby.

The offices and plant are still there, but the sign says Hyundai

Rodan, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with cars. But across Weccacoe it is not some wasteland  anymore  it is a large shopping center containing a Lowe’s, a Best Buy and an Ikea (right).

Welded Tube had another plant in Chicago, but Philadelphia was the headquarters. The founder was a native Philadelphia named Lou Baylis. He had started out in business with a push cart collecting and selling scrap metal. From that he built the largest manufacturer of structural steel tubing in the USA.

Baylis was Jewish and the upper management of the company were all Jewish and mostly his relatives. It had stock, but it was all privately held by the management. The vice-president was Lou’s son, Melvin Baylis. Another executive was Allen Baylis, either a nephew or cousin. Didn’t see him much. Melvin often put him down.

The real force was Jean Wexler (right) She was the Secretary, both to Mr. Baylis and on the Board. She is who hired me and she was a tough cookie who carried out Lou Baylis orders with an iron hand. Her brother, Sam Wexler was the main salesman and Ann Cooper, a sister also worked there. The controller was Dick Shafritz.

The rest of us were gentiles.

My first position was as an assistant bookkeeper and I reported to the Head Bookkeeper, an older man whose name escapes me.

Even in this lowly position my salary was higher than what I had been making at Olson Brothers. For some lucky reason, every time I changed jobs I began at a higher wage. I had been making $7,800 a year when Olson’s closed; I started at Welded Tube at $8,060 a year. When I left Welded Tube 6 years later in 1978 I was making $17,000. My next position was with a medical center and I started at $18,200. Two years later I got my first position at Wilmington Trust at $20,000. That was 1980 and when I retired from Wilmington Trust my salary was $65,000 plus an $8,000 Bonus and a number of stock options.

I was at Welded Tube three months when the head bookkeeper left the company suddenly. Dick Shafritz, (left) the Controller, who ran the clerical and accounting operations put out an ad for a new bookkeeper, but I went to him and told him I didn’t think he need do that because I was sure I could handle the full bookkeeping. He therefore took me up on my offer and I was doing all the book work.

By the way, Jean Wexler hated how messy Dick's office was. He had papers everywhere and his chair was festooned with notes. On one of Shafritz's vacations, Jean came down and cleaned up his desk and office. When he came back he was flummoxed; he couldn't find anything.

Anyway, as I began keeping all the books, I noticed a consistent discrepancy in the figures. This was constantly being noted as a balance adjustment in the overall reporting. It bugged me and I began searching through the records stored in a side room. I had time to do this because I once again brought my organization skills to improving the processes.  Finally, I uncovered the initial reporting errors and corrected the books and brought everything into balance.

After six months on the job, I was promoted to Assistant Controller. In this position I continued with all the bookkeeping and added such accounting functions as the monthly balance sheets, income statements and other reports. Now I also worked closely with the auditors and in the preparation of the annual report.

Lou Baylis did hire an Accounting Manager and I reported directly to him instead of Dick Shafritz. His name was James Schlief, called Jimbo by his friends (right). He came from the accounting firm of Ernst & Young and had his CPA. He and I hit it off great and I loved working for him. This affinity toward each other would pay off eventually.

Baylis had a computer system installed, the main piece being an IBM System 3. Hee also hired an Operation System Manager, another person whose name I can’t recall (am I getting senile )  even though he and I got along well. In the picture on the right he is the fellow kneeling down in front of the Christmas Tree. (I’m not in the picture because I took the picture.)

There were a number of malfunctions with the System 3 (right) and Lou Baylis fired the computer. He hadn’t liked the idea of getting the thing to begin with, but once he fired it he realized we probably did need some modern technology after all.

He had already booted the Operations System Manager out, though. Next thing I knew I was off to IBM for schooling in the System 3 Computer, and when I completed the course, I was named Operations System Manager as well as Assistant Controller.  I got a raise for now doing both jobs, a situation that gave our outside Accounting Firn, which was Ernst and Young, fits. They argued that it was a conflict of interest, but Baylis wouldn’t be budged.

He wouldn’t be budged on his hatred of the System 3 either, and despite having got me trained on that machine, he decided to get rid of it completely and replaced it with a Sperry Univac BC/7 System. I was sent off now to the Sperry Rand Corporation to learn the BC/7 operation and how to program in a language called RPG-II.

I came back and reorganized the Computer Department, did all the programming for the system and wrote the procedure manuals.

I had two young women performing all the daily jobs, while I attended to keeping the books up to date. One of my most firm rules was backing up the system. They were to do this at the end of each day. Storage was done of these large hard disks and the backup did take a bit of time to perform. One day there was a bad thunderstorm and lightning struck a transformer on the roof of the plant. It fried the disks in the computer. My workers were very upset, but I told them not to worry, just get the backup. They kind of turned pale. It turned out they hated backing up so much they had skipped doing it. We now had to reconstruct our billing and other information from the paper records. If they hated to do backup, they didn’t after that. They found working late manually entering months of records much more tedious than the backup had been.

I did very well at Welded Tube and it became my longest job since leaving ARCo, I was to work there 6 years. The picture on the right is me, well, most of me at the BC/7 console in the Operations Center. But life is always full of transitions.

A lot will change in my life during the time I worked for Welded Tube, a whole lot!