My Dad's Job

A knit ski cap from the early 70s turned up in my office the other day, emblazoned with the corportate name "Toscany." I smiled --that was my Dad's employer from 1960 to 1999.

My father was a salesman, and Toscany, a start up from a few years before, recruited him. The founder, Morris Katz, was a powerful, big presence of a man, and with 3 partners willed the company into existence and growth. They imported glassware and dinnerware from overseas, mostly Europe, and he needed hard working "outside" salesmen to sell the stuff. My father, a Jewish WWII vet like many of the other partners (one was Italian), fit right in.

The company was the best thing to happen to my Dad, professionally. He developed customers who were booming in the 60s and 70s, like Alexanders Stores, and Al's Pottery. He was also lucky, in many ways. Toscany decided to import flower pots at exactly the time there was a new attention paid to ecology, and EVERYONE wanted house plants in their homes. My Dad sold many of them.

By the early 70s, he had so many "standing orders" from his customers that he made money without having to find new ones. I remember him smiling in his home office, which was just an alcove off of the laundry room in our small, split level house, as he explained to me that he made money for years after developing a client.

His desk was the house's original formica counter top from the kitchen, held up with some wooden dowels installed at the front. It was never very stable, and I was always aware, as I rumbled by with my friends on our way outside to play sports, not to let it topple over.

In the early 70s, the company offered my father a sales/buying manager's position, which paid a LOT. I seem to remember a salary of something like $150 k per year being discussed, but the job required him to travel at least one week per month. I thought he should take it (I had visions of becoming a much richer kid, like some of my classmates who lived in South Wantagh and Seaford (whose fathers had bigger jobs), but he turned it down. He simply loved being home with my Mom and me too much to sacrifice the time.

When I was a teenager, Toscany hired me and a friend to come to the NY Collisseum to help set up the yearly trade show. My friend Kenny, now a retired US Navy Captain and Pediatric Radiologist, still remembers it as the best gig ever. We rode the train to the City with my father, had to wait for union guys to do stuff like roll open carpets, unwrapped some merchandise and put it on tables, and got paid like $50 each. Back then, a new record album was $4.99 and a concert ticket about $7.00, so we were some flush teens...

Mr. Katz loaned my father, I think $2000, for a down payment for my family's first house. My father paid him back promptly, but that one financial gesture propelled us from apartment living in Queens to the true American Dream, with a lawn on our less than 1/4 acre property.

My father feared Mr. Katz' wrath in later years. When a call came in on Dad's business number (PE 1-1679) (I wish I could remember relevant things today like I can remember 50 year old phone numbers), I was instructed to say Dad "wasn't home" even if he was stadning right next to me. In fact, this business of "having a boss" was what inspired my father's one dream for me, professionally: to have a profession where I wouldn't have to answer to a boss... I followed his advice.

Still, Mr. Katz was a legend in our house. He died in, I think, 1977, and I remember my father showing me that his obit warranted several columns in the NY Times, because of his business and philanthropic positions.

My father, coerced by my mother, retired in 1979, as I was graduating high school. My mother had grown to despise the cold weather, and essentially made the family decision to move to Florida. My father, in the best thing he ever did, pressured me into coming, too, by going to the U (before it was the U).

32 years later, and nearly 30 years after my father died only 3 years into retirement, my nearly 92 year old mother is still living on the last of the savings and retirement money my Dad earned at Toscany. Again, there was luck --back then you could get over 15% return on bank CDs, so the principal remained untouched for years... Oh, now that I have savings, how I wish those days would return...

But the point is, Mr. Katz and his partners Sid Glazer, Sonny Pasquale, and Harold Potchtar started a company, and my Dad and my family had a life changing experience.

I went online and did some checking, yesterday. Toscany apparently went out of business over 20 years ago, and its assets were bought by the Anchor Hocking Company of Ohio. Sid Glazer died just last August, at 93. He and my Dad were the same age --since Sid was the boss, I always assumed he was older.

Harold Potchtar died in Boca 10 years ago, at 77. I couldn't find any news about the lone Italian partner, Sonny Pasquale.

My partner Paul and I had similar experiences. At the height of our firm, we changed the lives of some of our employees. Norma and Andrea, our long time secretaries, retired from law with savings more than they ever hoped for. Mirta, our last "tenured" staff member, thanks me constantly for how we changed her life, financially.

So, over 50 years after a new company in NYC hired an honest, hardworking salesman named Hy, who took the anglicized name Henry to better appeal to his non Jewish customers, I thank this Toscany Company.

Although they're long gone, the acts of their owners continue to have good effect.