The people who take opinion polls will tell you that the quality of their findings is a function of the questions that are asked. If you ask the wrong question, you will get a misleading answer. This essay has to do with asking the right questions.
In this general vicinity of suburban New York towns, if someone were to ask, “Do you know Anthony Vincendese?” the respondents would answer with blank stares. On the other hand, if those same respondents were asked, “Do you know Lefty?” the answer would be quick, friendly, and perhaps voluminous. People would say that they have not seen him in his hardware store for some months and that they were concerned about that absence. In short, there is a genuine affection for Lefty, who ran Berkeley Hardware for many years.
I came to know Lefty in the spring of 1955 after my employer decided that I should move from Chicago and take a job in New York. I lacked sufficient funds to afford a house and so I was required to rent. One of the answers to my advertisement seeking a rental property was from a fellow in New Providence, New Jersey, who seemed to own a small five-acre farm called The Rickenbacher Place. Apparently he was going to attend a seminary and he wished to rent his property while he was gone. I had grown up on a farm in Missouri during the early part of my life. The property to be rented was within my price range and I thought it might be a pleasant experience to see what farm life would be like now that I had reached the advanced age of 32 or thereabouts. The prospective seminarian was not very good with tools which showed in certain elements of disrepair of the Richenbacher farm. Our next door neighbor, Jesse, became a good friend and told us of a fellow in the neighboring town of Berkeley Heights who had a hardware store.
The fact is that when the Navy released Lefty in 1945 or 1946, he had savings of something on the order of $700. Lefty was not a college man and, for one reason or another, he elected to invest it in a hardware store.
The thing that distinguished Berkeley Hardware, which is what Lefty called his place, was the personal attention given to each shopper. If you had a problem, Lefty would set out to learn what corrective action should be taken to fix the problem. The job consumed him and he worked at least six days a week.
Judging from his birthday in 1927, I concluded that Lefty had either graduated high school at a very early age or that he had dropped out. In any case, he became a crew man on a ship of LSTs which has to do with “landing ship tanks.” During his time in service with the United States Navy, Lefty was involved in the landings at Omaha Beach and in southern France. His tour of duty with the Navy was not a walk in the park.
When Lefty started his hardware store, he provided employment to other members of his family. Jean, a very lovely woman, was a cashier as was Anne, who was vindictive to the core. Lefty also employed Angela, a woman of few words who seemed to spend her time studying books presumably about the hardware business. I knew Lefty for the better part of 50 years and I never figured out what Angela was doing with her time. But in the end, she produced a son, for whom Lefty provided the financial means to get through medical school.
Then in staffing the store Lefty made a fatal mistake. He employed his younger brother, called Chuck, to in effect work with him and to be sort of a partner. I knew the Vincendese brothers reasonably well and I will tell you that Chuck never pulled his own weight. He would take extensive vacations during the winter and he seemed to spend the rest of his time conversing on the telephone to make what he considered “a big deal.” Those big deals never came off. In the end, Chuck more or less stabbed his benefactor, Lefty, in the back.
This is not the happiest of tales but it is not the saddest one either. In the final analysis, there seems to be a moral to this story. We will get to that point in due time.
In the course of time, other things have taken place. I moved from the farm to a house in New Providence and then to a job in Washington for four years, followed by a return to New York. Upon returning to New York, one of my first trips was to Lefty’s place to buy birdseed for the feeder we had outside our kitchen window.
Over this period of time, Jean, Lefty’s sister, was her lovely self and was warm and accommodating. Anne seemed to glorify in nastiness and Angela had very little to say while she studied books about the hardware business. Chuck came and went, and I never asked Chuck for a solution to anything. As far as I can tell, no one else did either. The focal point of the whole effort of the hardware business in Berkeley Heights had to do with Lefty. He was the dynamo who provided the spark for the place and who was available to answer questions and provide solutions at all times of the day.
But in the end, the hiring of his siblings did old Lefty in. Lefty had survived the landings on Omaha Beach and in southern France and the long work day at Berkeley Hardware. But then as Lefty’s age marched toward 80, there was a blockage in his heart and a stent had to be inserted. Curiously, the cardiologist who supplied the stents and installed them was Lefty’s nephew, Angela’s son. Then after a time Lefty came down with Crohn’s disease. I gather that Crohn’s is a debilitating disease with considerable pain.
Lefty took some time off to have his medical problems attended to, which apparently convinced his siblings, mostly Chuck, that he was not fit to run the store anymore. It is true that instead of patrolling the aisles in the store, he took a seat at the entrance where people could tell him of their hardware problems. One way or another, Chuck seemed to sense this as his opportunity to wrest control from Lefty. So a meeting of the five siblings took place and Chuck, Angela, and the vindictive Anne voted in favor of Chuck to run the store from that point forward. Jean and Lefty were in the minority. In the end, Lefty received a relatively small sum of money and he was no longer associated with the store that he had founded.
I know that I have taken you through the travails of the Vincendese family but there is a point which I will call Lefty’s lament. During the period when Lefty was trying to live with Crohn’s disease, one day Judy, my wife, asked him how he was feeling. This was shortly after Lefty’s 80th birthday. Lefty replied, “I will never feel well again.” It seems to me that Lefty’s lament captured a thought that has haunted me. As the veterans of World War II near their 90th birthday, it would be surprising to hear them say that they feel great. More than likely, they would probably say, “I am hanging in there,” or, if they were struck by a moment of candor, they might echo Lefty’s thought and say, “I won’t feel good again for the rest of my life.”
I hate to leave you with the final sentences in this essay being ones of gloom. On the other hand, as men age and contract all of the ailments that age brings, their outlook on life and their health simply have to be affected. Look at what Lefty said. He was asking for no sympathy whatsoever. He was providing an honest answer to the question that had been asked. In this respect, he is very much like the opening sentences of this essay where I spoke of needing to ask the proper question. For the veterans of the Second World War, it would be unlikely for them to be turning handsprings in answer to questions about their health. Good old Lefty had a response that I suspect will be understood by those of us who are closing in on our 90th birthday and at least two of my friends who have already passed this marker. To that extent, perhaps we are all indebted to Lefty for putting his answer into a single sentence.
Now as to the name that Lefty called himself. As a youngster, Lefty was a left-handed baseball player. In those days, which I remember well, left-handers were encountered only occasionally. It would be normal for someone in an opposing club to mention that one of his opponents was a left-handed pitcher, for example.
Now, having settled the origin of Lefty’s name, I will tell you that we had dinner with Lefty a short while back and that his outlook on life is very positive. He knows of his problems and he is intent upon living with them. For me, it was a lucky day back in 1955 when Jesse, my neighbor, sent me to a hardware store in a neighboring town. More than 50 years of friendship have evolved, for which I am very grateful.
E. E. CARR
November 25, 2009
Essay 421
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Kevin’s commentary: I feel pretty bad for what happened to ol’ Lefty. He seemed like a genuinely good guy who got screwed by people close to him. I guess the secondary moral of this story is to always incorporate, issue stock, and retain a controlling founder’s share. Maybe it’s “never hire your family.” Who knows. At the end of the day I’m just impressed that anyone could found anything with $700, even if they were deflated all the way back to that time.