Month: August 2015

1980s

PIRATES’ WILD RIDE!

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Photo courtesy of Victoria Olcott.

By the age of 19, my sister Victoria had seen the world with her mother Graciela Levi Castillo.  She was particularly fond of Italy, and early in the summer of 1982, she debuted at the Ball des Rosenkavaliers in Vienna.  Her mother was a world-class journalist and knew most if not all of Ecuador’s foreign legations from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro.  Travel was not simply in her blood but in her work as well.  In Victoria’s case, the fruit did not fall from the tree.

There was however, just one small complication in all that itinerary planning.  Because of her mother’s antagonistic divorce from a certain New Yorker, Bernard Olcott, Graciela (not Victoria) was forbidden from landing at any US airport.  Victoria herself was born in New York from an American father.  However, she was spirited away to Guayaquil at the age of 14 months, and had never been back.   When traveling with her Mom, they were obliged to hop over the US and avoid travel hubs like JFK, Miami, or LA.

Even though technically a gringo, she grew up as a local in her native South America.  It must have been strange to have been an American – with a US passport – yet, due to no fault of her own, could not stop off in the land of her birth.  She claims it wasn’t so – to her it was fun!!!  Victoria is lots of kicks!

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1960s/1980s

19 YEARS

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My beguiling sister Victoria, with an admirer, sometime in the late 1980s.

As related in my post “Fear and Loathing on Second Avenue,” when I returned to New York in June 1965 for summer vacation, my stepmother Graciela was no longer there.  Dad’s third marriage had collapsed, fully and fitfully, a few months previously.  Her father had broken his hip in Ecuador that January and she had raced down there to be at his side.  From her point of view, what was the point in coming back to New York?

So Graciela became yet another void in my Dad’s life, one of many.  Whether it was the missing family in Lithuania, the Einstein letter, or the mystery of wife no. 1 (the one before my Mom), these black holes of his intrigued me, beckoning me to jump in.  I was learning that my leaps inside were dazzling experiences.

As for the mystery of wife no. 3, Graciela was actually one of two voids; with her on her trip home that winter was my infant sister Victoria.  I could remember her as a swaddling babe in her crib from the year before.  Little did I know that I would not see her again for 19 years!

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1950s/1980s

A MAN OF LETTERS

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Dad was a man of letters.  He loved to write to anybody and everybody.  Whether he was writing to one of the greatest minds of all time (Albert Einstein) or the Chief Patent Counsel of Apple Computers (Paul Carmichael), I was often astonished at the response rate (at least at the onset).

In fact, writing letters was his preferred and (for a while) just about sole marketing tactic for Olcott International in the 1980s and 1990s.  I recall that he really got started by composing a 4 page template on an Olivetti electric typewriter around 1982.  This sample letter, into which he could drop hundreds of names and addresses via mail-merge, was a direct and personal appeal to the Chief Patent Counsels of large corporations, the ultimate decision makers on the customer side.  Dad’s letters would, without much of an introduction, launch into 1) not-so-brief technical descriptions of his helicopter and air conditioning patents, 2) how he pioneered the concept of calendaring and paying patent renewals by computer in the early 1960s, and 3) how the Chief Patent Counsel’s company could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by delegating such to Olcott International.

For the convenience of the reader, I have boiled the letter down into those three sections.  In reality, it was a difficult-to-read, long, rambling, monster of a letter, replete with malapropisms.

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1960s/Family/Wife No. 3

FEAR AND LOATHING ON SECOND AVENUE

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Storm clouds gather over Yorkshire Towers

Graciela Levi Castillo was Dad’s wife no. 3 – and my first stepmother.  Their marriage was very short, from January 1963 until January 1965.  Only a few memories of her remain intact from the summer of 1964.  You see, in 1963, my folks had just split up and had not yet worked out all the details.  Dad even came down with Graciela to see me in Orlando once or twice.  My Mom tells me she was very gracious with Graciela during those visits; still, it had to have been somewhat awkward with both parents parading their new spouses in front of the other.

What I remember most about Graciela was that she was as kind to me as she was garrulous.  Meaning, she was very, very kind!

In order to start his life anew with Graciela, Dad quit his apartment at 1050 Fifth Avenue (that he had shared with my Mom) and they moved into Yorkshire Towers, 305 East 86th Street, an immense white brick postwar building on the northeast corner of Second Avenue (see above picture).  As a newly completed building in 1964, deals were always available to new tenants willing to move in during construction.  Dad found such kind of bargains to be irresistible.  The new apartment had much of the same furniture as previously with my Mom, so it had an air of familiarity about it. 

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