Coming Home

There’s a world where I can go

And tell my troubles to

In my room, in my room

The Beach Boys, 1963

Alberta and I just returned from what for me was a restorative and emotionally powerful two-week trip to New York. No, not because she got to see seven movies at the International Film Festival in the Hamptons or four shows in the city. But she took pictures of me standing in front of five of the commercial buildings my family owned some fifty years ago. And primarily because I visited the house I grew up in on the south shore of Long Island in the 1950s and sixties.

I know how my father came to real estate—my mother inherited two apartment buildings—but never could and still can’t fathom how he accumulated a slew of commercial properties. He emigrated from Romania in 1915 when he was two. Virtually penniless, his parents raised him and his sister in a small Bronx tenement. His father became a painter and the family managed to make ends meet.

Whether by luck or by shrewdness my father hopped on the gravy train of the TV pandemonium of mid-century. Although not as revolutionary as the arrival of the computer, this successor to the radio rapidly became a staple of America’s family rooms. After World War II, our military was awash with electronic equipment it no longer needed. At considerable business risk, my father gambled on the burgeoning TV phenomenon and scooped up a healthy chunk of the country’s surplus TV-compatible parts for pennies on the dollar.

By the time the Korean War erupted about five years later, demand for components that could enhance viewers’ TV experience soared and along with it the value of my father’s components.. Fortuitously for our family, the military was required to again ramp up production of electronically-driven weaponry. The government repurchased much of the goods from my father at the then prevailing market price.

Soon competition emerged and the more efficient transistor rendered my father’s bulky vacuum tubes obsolete, a development whose significance my father underestimated and substantially devalued his inventory. He was rescued by my mother’s misfortune, when my grandfather passed away and left her two profitable apartment buildings. Having lived in an apartment until just a few years prior, my father knew virtually nothing about amortization, deductions and property tax or even how to write a lease.

Undaunted and true to his nickname of Wild Bill, my father proceeded to manage the apartment buildings and deploy the cash he had saved from the electronics business to buy more. A quick study, he concentrated on promising areas of Manhattan calling out for incidental repairs or cosmetic defects and offered by distressed sellers.

Ultimately, his holdings included three properties on Broadway and two on Fifth Avenue. In truth, I came to hate those buildings and the Saturdays he would pull me from televised Dodger games to accompany him to monitor developments. Not enough time or interest was devoted to encouraging my softer passions like writing and reading. And it seemed like much more effort was reserved for my younger brother, whose attentiveness to the properties and obvious admiration for my father culminated in a law degree specializing in real estate.

At seventy-nine and chastened by the lessons of life, I am aware of how the rent thrown off by the buildings paid for my education and my sports car. Last week I was standing in front of them,  paying homage and wishing I could tell my father how much I now appreciate all the sacrifices he made for us kids.

This experience could only be eclipsed by a visit to my old home and to my room. I spent my entire childhood there, recalling driving off for college at eighteen in a silver Corvette and a bravado that belied a spoiled teenager’s fear of failing the developmental task of making it on his own.

I am by nature socially avoidant. My plan was simply to show up at the front door, knock and take my chances that someone would be at home. More socially astute, Alberta identified the current owners online and cajoled me into writing a personal letter introducing myself and explaining why I was contacting them. I labeled myself as an overly sentimental codger on a quest for self-awareness and emotional closure.

A week went by and we hadn’t heard back. I resigned myself to driving by and taking it all in from the street. Then, a few days later, my cell rang and a phone number with the prefix for Nassau County streamed across the top. It was the owners’ son. His parents were out of town but he lived nearby and would be more than glad to walk us through the house. Now thirty-eight, his name also was Steve and my old room had been his. It later came out that much like me he had a strained relationship with his father. How serendipitous can life be?

When Alberta and I turned onto the street I could barely recognize the houses. After more than half a century, the foliage had grown in and several were partly hidden from view. They were larger and more grand than I remembered and mine was the least imposing. Turning onto the entrance way, I was overcome with a curious sense of detachment. Some of that undoubtedly reflected the reality that the exterior color was different and the landscaping was magnificent. Not surprisingly, we subsequently learned that the family owned several florist shops. But a piece of the distancing must have been a defense against the overwhelming emotion of the moment.

By the time Steve opened the front door for us, I was already misty-eyed. But when I went up the stairs to the room I last saw over sixty years ago, I burst out crying. The shelves that were home to issues of Sports Illustrated  and The Complete Sherlock Holmes were gone and of course so was the desk and Underwood typewriter that had conspired with me to knock out all those high school essays the night before they were due. The privacy, secrets, joys and inevitable troubles that define a kid’s room are never completely erased.

Before I left, I had to catch a glimpse of the basement, which had been finished with wood paneling, a jukebox and a pinball machine. It had been a mecca for my friends, who feasted on my mother’s patented English muffin-and-cheddar mini-pizzas. The pinball machine had been removed and no longer were Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly belting out rock-and-roll, but apparently the current residents were still playing billiards.

Not enough time has yet past for me to know all the ways in which the experience will enrich my life. I’m already better able to see how I underappreciated my father at least as much as he rejected me. He wounded me emotionally, but he was a loyal and steadfast parent and a prescient businessman. I have his street smarts though not the daring and cunning. I have a newfound pride in what he and my mother accomplished and aware of just how materially advantaged my life has been.

It is humbling to see how much of my worldly success I owe to others whose childhood was stark and at times foreboding. As we drove off, Alberta turned to me and said, “Stephen, you’ve just blown your cover. I lived in apartments and a tract house and you were far more privileged than you’ve let on to me and to your friends. But saddest of all, you lied to yourself. You don’t have to do that anymore.”