New York Lawyer

Chapter 1

It was absurd that this was happening to me: A former boy scout (literally) and a boy scout (figuratively) all my life; attended to my studies in high school and finished in the top 20%; served honorably in the armed forces; earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the country; and, in the end — approaching the age of 50 — finding myself persona non grata in my own country.

Revere Copper and Brass Incorporated, my employer as staff attorney for the previous seventeen years, had been in the midst of a bankruptcy proceeding.

A new president of Revere had been brought on board by Bear, Stearns & Co., a Wall Street firm that had recently acquired a controlling interest in Revere. He was replacing the newly retiring Bill Collins. Also, Revere’s Executive Office in New York City and its General Office in Rome, New York had been consolidated and moved to Stanford, Connecticut. In the midst of that, I had told myself: "This feels like the beginning of the end of Revere."

Surely, Bear, Stearns had not bought into Revere for the long term.

The merger mania phenomenon of the 1980s was in full force. Downsizing and leveraging were expressions being heard everywhere.

Stories of middle management layoffs were floating in the wind constantly. Public companies were being taken private by ravenous Wall Street sharks right and left.

The scuttlebutt held that the new CEO was picked by Bear, Stearns because he was eager to participate in a management buyout of the company if no other buyer was found.

I may have reached out in search of another job before that but now I began to look in earnest.

I prepared an updated version of my resume, deploying all my wordsmithing skills trying to highlight my depth of experience over a period of twenty-seven years. I compiled a list of attorneys and law firms with which I had interacted over the years for the purpose of announcing my availability to them. I routinely scoured the legal help wanted sections in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Law Journal, responding to a listing on the rare occasion when it offered a reasonable fit.

It crossed my mind that a person’s engaging in a job search while still in his present position might not be looked on with equanimity by his present employer. I did not want to make the same mistake that I had made in a previous employment. On the other hand, it seemed likely that others, perhaps many, in the Stamford office were engaged in the same pursuit. There may even have been the occasional allusion to that effect on the grape vine. Still, it seemed advisable to act discreetly.

Sure enough, as soon as Revere’s financial crisis was successfully resolved in the chapter 11 bankruptcy case and it had a fresh start Bear, Stearns put Revere on the auction block leading to a successful takeover bid by another set of Wall Street vultures, whose get rich plan was based on an orderly liquidation of Revere.

And then it happened. I was out the door with six months severance together with a desktop pen and pencil set having my name engraved in faux brass plate.

# # #

Where had things gone wrong?

I had had no ambition to be a lawyer when I was a kid. The whole idea was put in my head by my mother.

According to her, whenever she tried to tell me something I would give her an argument. It happened frequently and went something like this:

Mother: Sex without love is meaningless.

Me: That can’t be true. Without sex the human race would cease to exist.

Mother: "There you go again. Always giving me an argument. You need to become a lawyer when you grow up."

We were living in a rented, two room duplex unit in what was, in the 1950s, the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida. There was a living room and one bedroom in addition to a kitchenette and bathroom. There were two double beds in the bedroom. My brother and I slept in one and Mother and my sister slept in the other.

Not too long before that, Mother, at the age of thirty-four, had finally left the nest of her mother’s house in Fort Lauderdale, determined to become independent. What little savings she had left with was soon depleted but she was able to land a job as a secretary in the town’s principal industry, the state government. That, plus modest child support payments from two former husbands resulting from what had been short lived marriages, constituted the financial basis of our little family unit.

But things had not always been so lean.

As Mother was often heard to say, Before the Depression your grandmother was reported by Dun & Bradstreet to be worth over a quarter million dollars. (A quarter million in 1928 is the equivalent of three and a quarter million dollars today.)

It never occurred to me at the time to wonder why she referred to my grandmother, rather than both my grandmother and my grandfather, in that statement. It must have been because, in my mother’s mind, it was grandmother’s efforts, rather than grandfather’s, that were responsible for all that wealth.

My mother’s mother represents the Norwegian side of the family.

According to Mother (whom I don’t always consider a reliable source):

Your Norwegian great grandparents immigrated to America because they could not get married in the old country. He was a cabinet maker in a town. She was a farmer’s daughter from the country. They were from different classes and their marriage was not allowed in the old country.

Be that as it may, the story goes on:

"When the two of them found themselves on the streets of New York City in the late 1860s they encountered someone who made a sales pitch on a parcel of land in rural Wisconsin. They fell for it.

When they arrived in Wisconsin they discovered that they had purchased swamp land. They settled and became a family but the entire household perished from tuberculosis except your grandmother and two siblings, who grew up as orphans.

There is better evidence as to the origins of my maternal grandfather’s side:

Your great grandfather’s parents met and married in Scotland. He and two other children were born there. Then the parents both died before the children were grown. Your great grandfather with his brother and sister were taken in by their mother’s parents and the whole bunch immigrated to America and settled in rural Wisconsin in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

My great grandfather can claim part of the credit for what became Dun & Bradstreet’s estimate of the ultimate family wealth. He partnered with another Scot in a business comparable to the present day Agway, a retail operation catering to the needs of rural Wisconsin, supplying feed, tools, seed and the myriad of other requirements of the farmers of that day. Building on the success of that venture, they (perhaps among other investments) acquired a tract of land in the vicinity of a growing town, subdivided it, installed infrastructure and resold it to home builders, all undoubtedly at great profit.

So my grandfather was able to graduate from college and law school at the University of Wisconsin and eventually wind up in Milwaukee in search of his fortune.

Evidently, he had no interest in practicing law but would prefer to make a killing in the business world. After living in Milwaukee for a while, he decided he needed less expensive living quarters. He ended up finding a boarding house operated by my grandmother.

Believe it or not, he was attracted to my grandmother because, She seemed to have a good business head. (I have it in writing.)

I’m more confident in my opinion of my grandmother’s motive for the union.

My grandfather was accurate in his estimation of her interest in business. And having such an interest, she recognized the importance of capital. And recognizing the importance of capital she knew an opportunity when she saw it (namely, grandfather).

My grandmother’s given name was Ella. However, by the time I came along if not before, she was being called Dom. I never knew the genesis of that nickname, but in my mind it stands for dominant.

So with her newly acquired financial partner (and perhaps having become aware of the key to economic success of his own father) Dom embarked upon a career in real estate. In her case, it was centered upon acquiring a run down property she considered to have potential, acquiring it at a bargain price, fixing it up, selling it for a profit and moving on to the next project. No doubt a little leverage in the form of a bank loan or two was involved.

So it was that before the Depression the family was living on Blue Mound Road in suburban Wauwatosa (then known as the City of Houses north of Milwaukee) and was driving to Florida in a Marmon auto (at that time on a par with a Cadillac Deville and Lincoln Continental) during the winter.

Mother, last in a line of women named Mary on her father’s side of the family, said more than once, Dom bought and sold property on Flagler Avenue in downtown Miami in the 1920s. If she still owned it and sold it today (thirty years later), we would be worth a fortune.

But in the end all of it had been a fluke — the result of a cyclical bubble in the nation’s economy, fortunes being made using easily borrowed money and asset values reaching unsustainable levels. The fortune was built on cards which had fallen apart. The Great Depression changed everything. That gilded age prosperity had turned into a working class existence for Dom and family.

It was during the Depression that Mary married my father and I was born.

They were an odd combination. Mary was a fair skinned redhead (not carrot top, more strawberry) with Northern European DNA who had grown up in a relatively affluent suburban setting. Dad (who was named Vartan at birth but who became Marty as he was growing up) was a swarthy, first generation Armenian with Middle Eastern DNA who had grown up in relatively humble urban (first Chicago before Milwaukee) circumstances.

Mother would say, years later, None of the Armenians were nice to me except for your grandfather and your Uncle Archie

In my salacious mind that was explained by the fact that they were men and both had an eye for a well turned ankle.

Most likely, the union of Marty and Mary was the result of their being impetuous, lustful youth.

Mary would say, "Don’t get the wrong idea just because I gave birth less than nine months and two weeks after the marriage. It’s not what you think. The baby was premature."

As in the case of my Norwegian great grandparents, Mary also had a story about the transit of my Armenian grandparents.

Your grandfather was sitting by a bridge in the old country with a friend when a Turk on a horse rode up and cut off his friend’s head with a scimitar.

My reservations regarding the veracity of this story were confirmed when, many years later, I asked Marty about it and he said: The real reason was primogeniture. Your grandfather’s prospects in the old country were not great since he had an older brother who would be his family’s sole heir.

They arrived at Ellis Island in 1906 on the French ship La Gascogne out of La Havre, having spent several years in France. Their first child, a boy, had died in passage.

The timing was fortuitous because it was long before the occurrence of the Turkish version of the final solution.

# # #

During the Depression, Marty, Mary and family lived together in what was left of Dom’s empire, a large house on Milwaukee’s Terrace Avenue containing, due to grandma’s frugal habits, numerous rentable units. Also living there were grandma, Mary’s brothers, Marty’s parents and sisters as well as paying guests.

But the 1940 decennial census records as a fact that by that year Dom had left the others behind in Milwaukee and was living in Franklin County, Florida.

Listed in the census as living in the same Florida premises were one person described as lodger and three listed as servants.

The residence involved was the Lanark Inn, a resort hotel on a rise of land a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico. The Inn had been built by a regional railroad company during the gilded age and had once burned down and been rebuilt. Dom was in the process of undertaking the operation of the hotel.

Dom was soon reunited with her daughter Mary and grandchildren as well as her maiden sister, my great aunt, who had been a partner of Dom’s throughout her life, all of whom moved to the Lanark Inn sometime the following year, 1941.

The men in the family were left behind.

The shine had apparently worn off my father’s golden armor and Mary was leaving him. Ella’s husband also did not make the move, then or in the years that followed. (There must be a story to go with that but I never thought to ask about it.)

On the seventh day of the last month of that very same year the entire country was shocked by the event that will forever live in infamy.

Dom’s plans to reinvent herself through the operation of the Lanark Inn were thwarted by the U.S. government, as it was mobilizing to wage World War II around the globe.

Exercising its power of imminent domain, the United States acquired thousands of acres of Franklin County land for the construction of a military base from which, at any one time, ten thousand soldiers would be using the Gulf of Mexico to train for amphibious landings in Europe and the Pacific.

The Lanark Inn became the headquarters of Camp Gordon Johnson.

But you can’t keep a good woman down (or, I should say, you can’t keep three good women down, because my great aunt and mother were Dom’s active partners.)

They leased a dilapidated structure built on pilings in the Carrabelle River in the town of the same name, located several miles west of Camp Gordon Johnson. The Edgewater Bar and Grill was born.

Both food and drink were served in the establishment but the best selling product, I would wager, was beer.

The railroad went by on tracks right next to the Edgewater and trains would stop there to off load beer for the bar. According to Mary, The soldiers would buy beer right off the train without waiting for it to be put on ice and cooled.

In the years that followed, Mary would from time to time recount one war story or another from this episode in her life. Mary wanted to be a writer like her brother Bill, and she went on a writing binge now and then. She even had a literary agent in Chicago that Bill had hooked her up with. But success eluded her.

I suggested that she write something which featured those stories from the war years in Carrabelle.

She did so but when I read it I found that there was little of the war stories and much about the love lives of some local characters. (I can assure you, there was nothing racey involved.)

In addition to Edgewater they took over a building in the Carrabelle Beach area which became Pop’s Place, primarily another outlet for selling beer.

I’m sure that both Edgewater and Pop’s Place had juke boxes. I