Elusive Fortune

After a few years of getting nowhere working for my father and all the extra time I had to devote to helping him out on the grove, for which I received no remuneration, I opened my own real estate offices in Davie and Hollywood. That was the late 60s and it was a good move. I started my own development company which I syndicated with money from investors. Most of them were doctors and lawyers so they had a lot more money than I did. And I still had the overhead of a lot of medical bills for my son Richard.

During that time I developed Glenview Acres in Western North Carolina, which consisted of 500 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a great place but it was a lot of work and I was not getting a lot of cooperation from my dad, who joined me as a working partner. He stayed in South Florida and the idea was for him to send customers to me in NC. It was a lot of waiting with very few customers showing up. And in the meantime, I was building roads, putting in drainage and I surveyed and platted one to five acre homesites. I also put a few small trailers on some of the lots.

The local sheriff visited me when I first set up shop there and made sure I understood his policy which was, he was the only authorized moonshiner in that county and everyone had to come to him for their whiskey. And he also wanted to make very sure I understood that there were no black people living in that town, and while he was sheriff it would stay that way. He said the last "nigger" who came to town "hung under that tree over there." That was my introduction to rural Southern life in North Carolina.

I developed the property there for several years, until one summer when I found my German Shephard hacked up by a tobacco knife. There was a Klu Klux Klan presence there in those days and they didn't like Jews either. We saw a vet there but we were concerned about the dog having gangrine and I knew we could get better medical care for my dog in Florida so we packed up our car and headed south.

In some respects it was not much better in Davie in those days. The very first doctor to go there to practice was a friend of ours, a Doctor Cohen, but nobody remembers him or that he was Jewish. When he couldn't get paid except with grapefruit and chickens he moved his office back to Miami.

The project in NC didn't make it. My regret however was what I did to my son, John. I gave him 5-acres up there and he felt good about it, but I convinced him that it was necessary for him to sell him property to a buyer who wanted to buy my brothers acreage there and since John's piece was adjacent to it, he wanted both parcels. John didn't want to sell but did because his grandfather put pressure on me to get John to sell. My brother was the only one to come out of that deal with a real gain. John's contribution from the sale was not enough compensation because he always resented the pressure put on him to sell by his grandfather and his father.

Jane had a wonderful time on our skiing trip.

During the mid-70s Jane and I went skiing in the Laurentian Mountains in Canada and I had an accident while hotdogging it down one of the slopes, which at first led only to a bad case of blood poisoning, but after three weeks it turned into phlebitis. While working out in a gym I started to get pain in my chest. Blood clots had broken lose in my leg and travelled through my heart into my lungs. I spent 3 weeks in the hospital and 6 months on blood thinners while I recuperated from plebitis and a myocardial infarction. That was the first of two heart attacks that I have had. In the 90s I had a rhyzotomy and brain surgery for tic dourloureux (painful tic/nerve seisures). In 2003, I had a Hemmroidectomy when my red blood cell count dropped to 8.5 from bleeding; and I had a cancer removed (pre-invasive carcinoma in situ) from my chest, which was the size of a golf ball. From 2002-2004, I had 5 caths, the second heart attack (from an arterial embolism), an arterial stent, and radiation (brachey therapy). It is true, you do see a light.

My father was always making money for his brothers and his sister and his son for which he also profited. When I sold his brother some apartments I built they cost me more than I sold them to him for. He wouldn't agree to pay the difference and insisted it was an object lesson, even though it was a couple of months of my time and my expenses that went into them. That was my experience with this lovely family. Just like providing my property at my cost for my brother to have his tax-free-exchange so he could get his packing house.

A good friend of mine was also shot to death in Davie, for selling land to a black family, even though it was in an undeveloped area in West Broward County. My friend, Walter Dufresne was a good man and did the right thing but it cost him his life. I always kept guns and it should be obvious why. I wasn't concerned about the government so much as I was about the red necks. They never caught the guys killed my friend, but they knew who they were. That was the kind of justice we had in the 60s and 70s.

I also owned some apartments in Ft. Lauderdale about that same time. They were nine four-plexes and I had a lot of my money tied up in them. I saw the neighborhood deteriorate with drugs and prostitution, and when undercover cops wanted my cooperation to break up a drug/prostituion ring which was using my apartments (even though they paid their rent on time), the informants were worst than any tenants I ever had and they busted up my property. The cops arrested my good-paying tenants and after that it was all down-hill. I couldn't get anyone in there to pay rent and eventually lost the apartments and over $100,000 which was a lot of money then and everything I made in real estate for a decade.

I remained a licensed real estate broker for 40 years and I was a charter member of the National Society of Fee Appraisers and a land developer and builder, including development of property in Western NC and Western Broward County. I've built homes in South Florida and participated in several large projects, involving the development and marketing of properties and orange groves in Broward County, Fl.

And there were other things going on. There is no denying that we had a good live in South Florida. We had a lot of friends and we were always having parties and it seems like there was always something going on all the time.

My mother came to me and asked me to talk to my brother about his wife. There were rumors that she was seeing her hair dresser or some such. I don't know anything else about it and it wouldn't matter. But mom asked me to talk to Bob so I did and that was a very big mistake. She heard about it and we never talked after that. And it was unfortunate because Jane and Terry were very close friends and as a family we did a lot of things together, but never again. My mother never told Bob that she asked me to interfere and dad knew also and even years later he would not say anything because they didn't want to mess up their relationship with my brother's family. It was a betrayal because they ruined Jane's relationship with Terry and her family. We lost over 20 years and it was only after Terry died recently of cancer that Bob and I have reunited. And it is a strange uniting. For him it is as-if nother ever happened but Jane and I can't forget how all those years were takened from us as a family.

That was not the end of it. When mom was in the hospital after her cancer surgery and she was on oxygen Terry and Bob were there and Terry was smoking. I had just gotten out of the hospital myself for plebitis and a myocardial infarction (a heart attack) where blood clots had lodged in my lungs and I had difficulty breathing around smoke. I told Terry to put out her cigarette. She refused. It was my tone. I should have asked politely, but I didn't and when she refused and it was also causing me pain in my chest I yelled some choice epithets at her. That was my second mistake. Even when Terry was sick with cancer and we were in Florida and tried to see her she refused to see us and that was at least 10-15 years later. The rift was never healed.

I worked as a builder and real estate broker through the 70s when I also opened up a University Bookstore, which was off-campus and we did rather well for several years, but the some professors at the University consistently changed their book choices after they placed the orders. I couldn't return old editions and only up to 40% on new editions and I too often would end up eating the losses. When I finally realized I was not about to change their ordering habits I quit. They believed that I could absorb the cost of their capricious ordering, referring to it as "my cost of doing business", which was becoming a fast track to bankruptcy. Real estate was taking a down turn also so we left South Florida and moved to New England. I took my kids and Jane and we were off to the Berkshires where we bought a 140 year old house on 42 acres adjoining the national forest, in Western Ma. This was our new adventure and we lived self-sufficiently for the next couple of years. Our only heat was a big wood box I installed in one of the chimneys. With my son, John, we cut all our own wood for heat. We raised and grew our own food and traded bread which I made at the country store for sugar and salt and flour.