Family – Page 4 – The Bernard Olcott Story

1990s/Business school case study/Dementia/Family/Family Business/History of Patent Annuities

BUCKED OFF!

May 11, 2017May 11, 2017 James B. Olcott8 Comments

‘Twas not all gloom and doom at Olcott International.

Upon my return to the office that spring of 1992, I started hearing odd noises upstairs and soon met Bobby Edwards, the Jewish cowboy. This wisecracker could make Dad laugh endlessly. Soon Dad asked me to get involved with his (minor) investments in the Kansas oil patch. “PANOLPY OF SWAGGER” recounts these welcome diversions. I remain grateful to the Jewish cowboy to this day.

Speaking of foreign countries, Japan has always been an important client base for Olcott International. I’ve written a number of posts about how my Dad conquered the land of the rising sun in the 1970s, a country where American culture was imported wholesale, albeit with many local twists.

GREEN EGGS AND HAM

April 27, 2017April 27, 2017 James B. Olcott6 Comments

In April 1992, I had one foot in two worlds.

One foot was planted in the familiar lush flagship Polo Ralph Lauren store on Madison Avenue, a marvel of seductive, dazzling, stylish, and pricey eye-candy. The other was a run-down office precariously hugging a cliff on the anus-side¹ of the Lincoln Tunnel, overlooking the double helix resounding with the roar of vehicular traffic. I dubbed that sound in my post “THE NIGHT IS DARK AND FULL OF TERRORS,” as the ‘soul grinder.’

The first was glamorous, but offered me little future career growth. The second was pretty much its antithesis on both counts (except, sometimes, for the travel).

To aspire to my greatest future potential, I had to risk the crushing of my essence.

ALL MY ROADS LEAD TO ROME

April 6, 2017April 6, 2017 James B. Olcott11 Comments

Ahhh! April flowers. The trees are budding. Boids are choiping psychotically.

Springtime, it’s often said, brings together hopes and promises. Well, why not? April’s the month of my birthday. Sometimes, when the weather is right, the trees bud and bloom in the latter part of the month, right around when I appeared at Mount Sinai Hospital, 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue some 50 (or so) years ago.

Spring in 1992 was an exceptionally golden era for me, especially at Polo Ralph Lauren, a company I never expected to end up in after leaving the family business and graduating from Business School. It was survival by wit, guile, charm, and, to speak plainly, a shitload of style. Ralph made sure of that! And it was often a lot of effortless fun as well!

In addition to my triumph at Polo, several other things were going very well in my life in early 1992.

Read More “ALL MY ROADS LEAD TO ROME”

1980s/Business school case study/Family/Family Business

RUNNING OF THE BULLS

February 16, 2017February 17, 2017 James B. Olcott7 Comments

As an MBA business school student in the fall of 1987, in the middle of a raging bull stock market, I was in receipt of a very strong sell signal. In all honesty, I had been for a long time.

Was it from Herby Fischer, my own (and Dad’s) stock broker? (I had a very small account with one holding, Wix, which promptly went down after Herby bought it for me). No.

Was it from Ira Kawaller, Jimmy Rogers, Jim Freeman, John Whitney or any of the other great business school professors at Columbia Business School? Nope.

How about my pal, Arch Crawford, the famous stock prognosticator who predicted future DJIA index levels by Astrology? Nice try. But wrong.

Ok. Ya think the source could have been someone who had no experience whatsoever in portfolio theory, Elliot wave, or value investing? Someone who never quoted Peter Lynch, Warren Buffet, or even read Alan Abelson’s column in Barron’s?

Yes, it was. None other than the namesake of this blog. My own Dad, Bernard Olcott. Only problem was, he was predicting that the stock market was going to crash. Every. Single. Day. So each evening, I would review the financial news and remark to myself, boy oh boy, that stock market just keeps climbing like gangbusters!

MY FRIEND IN JERSEY

November 3, 2016November 3, 2016 James B. Olcott7 Comments

Astute readers will notice that, in the last few posts, I have been jumping back and forth from the 1980s to the 1990s and back again. At the core of these stories is my conflicted search to reconcile my Father with the very different man in front of me. After all, parents are our archetypes. They are part of us.

I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I started working in the 1980s. It was convenient to ignore or turn a blind eye to Dad’s episodic incongruent behavior, especially at first. Back then I was young and inexperienced with no idea of what happens in offices around the world. People can be strange sometimes and certainly this can be reflected in the workplace.

Now, in 2016, as an IT consultant, I can look back at my career. I have worked in more than 26 companies from Polo Ralph Lauren to Heineken to AmerisourceBergen to Mitsubishi. I have had my own desk in Ankara, Tokyo, Sydney, Prestwick, and Totowa (New Jersey). Without a doubt, what I witnessed in Weehawken during the 1980s and 1990s was truly staggering. And that’s leaving aside the emotional component that my bullying boss was my cherished parent! The man who took me to the heights of the heliport, England, and exclusivity.

BUSINESS PARTNERS

October 20, 2016October 20, 2016 James B. Olcott5 Comments

The events in my last post, “TWO RABBITS, ONE DEAD,” recount the events of one bleak day in January 1995.

Everyone is entitled to a bad day once in a while. If those events of 21 years ago had represented just one isolated blip in the story of a triumphal family saga, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

Sadly, it wasn’t just a one-off but was part of a frequently distressing pattern.

It didn’t start off that way, of course, when I began my career at Olcott International a different January a dozen years before that, in 1983.

As I have written in various posts like “SOMETHING ABOUT DAD, PARTS 1 AND 2” and “HEARTBREAKER,” Dad wanted me to join the family business even though various warning signs made me ambivalent toward the idea. After all, you should always know who your business partners are. If they’re your parents, you don’t need to do a background check to find out.

As an example, I can perform due diligence in my case by asking a few questions:

IS YOUR MEXICAN DIVORCE LEGAL?

August 4, 2016January 23, 2019 James B. Olcott10 Comments

Above: A beautiful view of Cuidad Juárez from El Paso earlier this week. Photo by DLynne Morin.

By mid-1982, Dad’s marriage with Gloria had devolved into crass posturing for litigation in a divorce action. After all, he had plenty of experience as he had been through this experience three times already.

The first had been 32 years earlier, in 1950. His newly wed wife, Pat, returned home one evening to their Beekman Place neighborhood apartment. As soon as she walked in, Bern hung up the phone. “Who are you on the phone with, Dear?” she asked. Oddly, Dad declined to say. It took her a while to find out and it turned out to be her former best friend Connie Richards. Pat had the marriage annulled within a few weeks via an expedited petition direct to the Vatican.

Dad never told me anything about his marriage with Pat. Or Connie Richards, for that matter. I had to find Pat 60 years later to ask her personally. Remember, she was wife number one and my Mom was only the second. Does that make Pat a stepmother? The English language does not have a term to describe our relationship.

In any event, Pat was very annoyed with Bern (and went on to marry four more times herself).

1970s/Family/Family Business/Parents/Wife No. 4

PAYING THE COST

July 28, 2016February 24, 2017 James B. Olcott8 Comments

A reader commented last week “James, you had a very difficult childhood/teenage. Your father obviously had some issues.”

I disagree with the first statement. Leaving aside the fact that my Dad had divorced and remarried twice by the time I reached my 18th birthday, I think my childhood was often charmed, even privileged. As you can see from my picture in last week’s post “WHEN A CHORE IS NOT A CHORE PART 2,” Dad and I had a lot of fun together.

The Father who took that picture is the man I miss terribly today.

It was only in my later adolescence that ominous signs about Dad became known to me from the new vibrant presence in our lives, Gloria. Like any child, I refused to believe at first that my Dad could have had issues.

WHEN A CHORE IS NOT A CHORE PART 2

July 21, 2016July 21, 2016 James B. Olcott16 Comments

Oddly, though, within a year or two of marriage to Gloria, Dad took on this disconcerting habit of assigning all kinds of imposing chores to me, typically without any advance notice. Almost always when I was just about out the door to explore the world and to create my own life as a teenager.

Case in point. Dad and Gloria built a summer house in Shinnecock Hills in 1973. It was a prefab Lindal homemade of cedar planks looking more like a Hunter Mountain ski chalet than a tumbledown wood-shingled cottage with white shutters. No Hamptons-style lawn either; the grounds were entangled with bittersweet vines, nasty and thorny.

On one of our very first weekends there, the lot was still somewhat of a construction site. I had invited one of my friends over, Dee Dee, to celebrate the move-in by spending the night. After breakfast the next morning, as we were both getting ready to go to the beach, Dad came over to ask — I mean, insist — that we take two shovels “as strong men” and plough down a huge pile of sand left behind by the excavation of the foundation from the past Spring, when the house was built.

“Huh, what?” I said, looking at the 15 foot high pile. It was the first weekend of summer and Dee Dee and I were both anxious to go see our seasonal friends after a long school year of drudgery.

“Gloria wants you to do it!” he snapped. Of course, Gloria and Rosemary never had anything to do with such spontaneous insanity.

Did I mention that Dee Dee and I thought we were on our way to the beach?

1970s/Business school case study/Family/Horatio Alger/Parents

WHEN A CHORE IS NOT A CHORE PART 1

July 14, 2016July 21, 2016 James B. Olcott10 Comments

After a few months at 974 Boulevard East in 1970, Dad found a new location for both his residence and the offices of Olcott International. It was in a triple decker, similar to the millions that form the housing stock of Boston and environs. But unlike the wooden ones in Massachusetts, this was constructed out of gold brick. According to Dad, there were three layers of outer walls. No wolf was ever gonna blow that house down!

It was on Weehawken’s eponymous Hamilton Avenue, the road atop the cliffs. Across the street from the house, the cracked sidewalk and the rusting iron wrought fence gave way to an expansive view of the Hudson River and the west side of Manhattan.

Dad rented the first floor for the office and staked out the top floor, the third, as the residence. The landlord lived in the apartment on the second, sandwiched, as it were, by Olcott rentals.

For years, Dad had rented bachelor style accommodations in New York and then in New Jersey when he moved to 974 Boulevard East. No more. The third floor was like the Taj Mahal in terms of spaciousness compared to the cramped quarters of times past. There were multiple bedrooms, a central hall as well as separate living and dining rooms. As this was the top floor, the ceiling everywhere was gabled into sharp points.

And yes, there was a kitchen! A real one!

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Category: Family