Month: August 2017

1970s/1980s/Dementia/Family/Father-Son/Foreign Adventure/Wife No. 4

SOMETHING ABOUT DAD, PART 2: FREE PARKING

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Part 2 of the “SOMETHING ABOUT DAD” series.  Continues from last week.

During Christmas break in 1979, a trip was planned to the family houseboat, which was permanently moored at the Hurricane Hole Marina, under the Paradise Island Bridge on Paradise Island in glistening Nassau, the Bahamas.  I had never been there before but had heard a lot about it from Gloria and Dad so I was looking forward to going.

A day or two before, Gloria went to the Shop Rite supermarket in less-than-glistening Union City, to shop for groceries to bring on the plane to the Bahamas.

“What?!  Bring groceries on the plane?  Are you sure we need to do this?” I asked.

She assured me that supermarkets in Nassau were both terrible and overpriced.  And this is what they had done on previous trips.  I suspected that this was my Dad’s idea but anyway she seemed to be completely on board.  I tried to imagine what a terrible supermarket looked like and immediately thought of Shop Rite.  Could it be any worse?  Besides, I was weirded out with the idea of lugging brown paper supermarket bags filled with chopped meat and such onto the plane.  This was just about the turning point when airplanes came to be thought of as buses with wings.  And board that flying bus we did, complete with our groceries from Shop Rite!

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1970s/Family/Family Business/Father-Son/Wife No. 4

SOMETHING ABOUT DAD, PART 1: THE ZINGER

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Today, another repeat for you.  You can also find this way down at the bottom of my home page, if you care to scroll all the way down.  It’s a two part series about how I could no longer deny that there really was “something” about my Dad that was, well, peculiar. 

1979 and 1980 were seminal years.  I was a senior in college and it was time to contemplate a career.  Of course, I had no idea what it was I wanted to do.  My roommate Dan, on the other hand, was feverishly interviewing at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.  He ultimately scored a great job and is now in charge of some place like Europe.  But for me, all I knew is that I wanted “something international” but was undecided between the public service arena (like the Foreign Service or the United Nations) or international business (I would land my dream internship at United Nations within 2 years to try it out).  My Dad had made many off-handed remarks to people over the years that I was to join him at Olcott International and “take it over.”  I think I was 6 the first time he said that to someone in my presence.  So I had grown up with this as a possible notion.  But now at 21 years of age, I was suddenly ambivalent.  There was something peculiar about Dad.

Over the last few years, things had changed between my Dad and his 4th wife Gloria.  When I first met Gloria in 1971, I was 13.  I was hardly mature but I could tell that they seemed to be happy together and the Olcott household was a cheerful one.  Gloria was funny, with it, traveled with Dad to Brazil and Japan, and even wrote me a poem for my 14th birthday, dedicated to me as the “stalwart lad.”  On top of that, they left me a stash of Playboys in my bedroom, though Gloria removed certain issues she felt were too racy.  It certainly seemed that just maybe Dad had turned a corner from 3 failed marriages and that the future was going to be more stable.  Hope had sprung eternal.  After all, Hope was Gloria’s middle name.

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1980s/Family Business/Father-Son/Wife No. 5

YES DEPOSIT, YES RETURN

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While I am busy writing my next story “PAIR OF DEUCES,” I offer up my very first post, written 3 years ago.  In fact, you can find it if you scroll all the way to the bottom.  I’m not sure if many readers do, so here it is.  It’s an amusing story about my Dad and some business he needed to conduct at Shop Rite one day in the 1980s.  I never saw this coming.  Not in a million years.  Hope you enjoy it!

No matter the routine, things could get crazy.  Fast.

Lunch with Bernard Olcott at Olcott International in 1983 followed a familiar routine.  At around maybe 11:45 AM, after a few hunger pangs had already hit me pretty hard, I would head up to the top floor, the level that actually connected to the street, and ask if he was ready to grab some lunch.  He would typically wave me off for another 10 to 15 minutes while he finished up some correspondence.  Finally, he would call me back upstairs.   We would then spend another 10 to 15 minutes looking for a pack-of-cards sized contraption holding perhaps 50 keys for the car, the house, the office, the boat, and God knew what else.  Oddly they were never in the same place twice.  And if not retrieved, well, that would have been the end of the world, as we knew it.

The next part of the routine would be to drive over to the Shop Rite supermarket on JFK Boulevard in Union City, New Jersey.  This was located in a bustling area with a huge parking lot in front.  However, it was only sensibly approachable from the southbound lane.  This presented an engineering problem to Dad, the kind he loved to solve.

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1930s/1940s/Family

HONOR THY FATHERS

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Just a special post this evening to render homage to my Father and Uncle — no matter their faults, quirks, or eccentricities.

When World War II presented our world with the fugly head of enslavement under fascism and nazism, Bernard Olcott joined the US Army, and his older brother Edward Olcott, the US Navy.

They heeded the call of patriotism and brought the fight to the doorstep of militarist Japan and Germany.

Today, because of their efforts and those of countless fighting men and women, Japan and Germany are free and civilized countries.

Thank you Dad and Uncle Ed, for your contribution as part of the US military against the purveyors of tyranny and slavery!

 

1990s/Business school case study/Family/Family Business/Father-Son

DUEL AND DEATH, THE AFTERMATH

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This post continues the story from the last two week’s posts, “MINOU’S PREDICTION” and “REPRIEVE DENIED!“

Yoshi marched outside with me hot on his heels. We took our positions out in the middle of Hackensack Plank Road like Hamilton vs. Burr almost 2 centuries before, me facing north, with the actual dueling grounds maybe a half mile away to my right. Yoshi was uphill from me looking south towards “The Shades” neighborhood of Weehawken, always in afternoon shadow at the extreme southern end of the Palisade Cliffs.

Fists raised, we glared at each other.

“C’mon James, take your best shot!” Yoshi taunted, lowering his arms and motioning me to take a swing. We started circling around each other like boxers, ready to land or parry a blow.

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1990s/Business school case study/Family Business

REPRIEVE DENIED!

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This post continues the story from last week’s “MINOU’S PREDICTION.”

“E-A-S-Y!” I said to Yoshi on the phone, “It’s just a report.”

It was February 3rd, 1994 in Weehawken, New Jersey.  It was rapidly turning into a bad day.

The line was, however, already dead. Behind me, I heard and felt a massive weight flying up the stairs from the basement. In an instant the door burst open, and there was Yoshi in my face, ranting and raving. Again, he repeated the line about me abusing my family name; just because it was “Olcott,” I had the right to treat others poorly.

Strange how that never occurred to me.  If he only knew what my last name really entitled me to!

But how could he, of course?

In any event, I saw an apoplectic 250 pound man in front of me, acting like he just got sprung from Dannemora, smashing his fist in his other hand repeatedly, all the while screaming at me. He wasn‘t just angry. This was harsher than the “if you want my sneakers, take ‘em” stare. This was “your ass, his foot.” I was being threatened.  Physically.

At least, I was used to being shouted at.

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