Bruce Sheftel, May 31st, 2017

Interview with Bruce Sheftel, May 31st, 2017

BRUCE SHEFTEL: Hello, we're testing to see if the air conditioning can be heard.

SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: Yes, it can be heard. Just keep turning it up to 90 and we'll deal with it. There you go.

BS: Is that better?

SC: Yes, it is. That's fine. Okay. Today is May 31st, 2017, an interview with Bruce Sheftel. And Bruce, I'm going to start by asking you your information, then go back to your family history. So what is your full name? Where were you born and where do you live?

BS: My full name is Bruce Howard Sheftel. I was born in Allentown and I've lived now in- outside of Philadelphia and in- I have a small apartment in New York. And yeah.

SC: What town outside of Philadelphia?

BS: BlueBell -- BlueBell, Pennsylvania.

SC: What is your education history?

BS: I started in Allentown with elementary school at the Jewish Community Center and then Muhlenberg Elementary School and the Wright School, which was a nursery school. And my- I think my education was sort of like a woodier sampler. I went from there to the Jewish Day School for six years and on to Raub Junior High School. In Raub Junior High School, I was hit by a car in my ninth year, the beginning of my ninth year, and spent that year at home with a broken leg. So in the year of what would have been my- the end of my ninth grade, I went to summer 00:02:00school at Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey. They conditionally accepted me, and I went there for ninth grade again and left after a year, which- came back to Allentown, went to Moravian Prep and made sure we closed that school down. And I was in the last graduating class, but I didn't have two credits, had a disagreement with the school about what classes I was permitted to take, so I then went to Philadelphia and got my high school degree from- with two credits from Penn Charter School, I think it was, at 13th and Arch. So I was a little independent. I didn't go to college in the traditional way. I think, ten or fifteen years later, I went to, first, Harvard Business School -- [they] had a 00:03:00special program. And while I was there, I enrolled- found myself accepted at Antioch College in an extension program. And I was- I graduated in the last year that they operated. So I have sort of a history of closing schools or at least attending the last year that they- they operate. So I graduated with a degree in business from Antioch -- Business Administration. Then the Harvard experience was not degreed, it was predicated on experience and it was called the OPM Program--Owner/ President Management, which was an extension of their School of Advanced Management.

SC: Testing, testing, talking.

BS: You want me to talk? I don't really...

SC: Let me just say-- Let me just try- a red dot came up.

GAIL EISENBERG: No, that's what we want. That's for record.

SC: That's what we want -- okay. I get so frightened of this thing anymore.

GE: So the earlier part, that had the red dot, right?

SC: It did, yes, it did.

BS: Did you want to listen to it?

SC: No, that's okay.

BS: This is the time to re-do it.

SC: Yeah, but we'd have to go back.

GE: Yeah, I don't know [how].

BS: Should we call Marcus in here?

GE: Jeff.

SC: Jeff.

BS: Jeff.

GE: We have a new camera, we're not- we haven't done it for years so we're not as familiar.

SC: Yeah, I think we're okay.

BS: Marcus!

GE: As long as it was on.

SC: It was on, I just all of a sudden got-.

GE: We understand.

SC: I always get-

BS: We understand your reason.

SC: Because I turned it off and he turned it on. So, could you talk now about 00:05:00where you have work -- you were talking a little bit about your education and if you have more, go on -- but then where you have worked and the type of work that you did and do?

BS: Yeah. When I was finishing high school, the world that we lived in had a war in Vietnam that I had no real interest in visiting. I liked traveling, but the accommodations and the body bag coming back seemed a little cramped for me. So I left high school in the summer of I think it was 1969 and traveled across the 00:06:00country. I took my parents' car, left them mine, and traveled across the country. And when I came back I met a psychiatrist I had been seeing through most of my senior year of school who told me about a square rig sailing ship, which was equivalent to the Coast Guard Eagle. This was a large training vessel for Merchant Marines. And what I didn't know was that he had put his two children on this boat, two of his three- four children. And I didn't know they were having lots of trouble -- and the kinds of trouble, I mean, really almost mimicked what was going on in the country in 1970. And he had me meet the director who encouraged me to join the program as a paraprofessional. And I 00:07:00agreed, only to discover -- and these were all large issues in those years about independence -- that they were actually soliciting my father for three thousand dollar contribution to the program, which I had been led to believe was not the case. The case was I would be selected on my own. This economy was really a large deal for us in those years. So I started my engagement with them by confronting the director. I created a telephone call where my father said he wasn't going to give any money, and I asked her, so am I still coming? And she said, yes, of course. And then somewhere between Madrid and Dakar, I met her in 00:08:00the- near the head of the 747 and she grabbed my lapel and said, "You know, you're a little [expletive]." And I said, "Hey, you told me I was coming for me." So that was the start of that trip, and that was about two years -- I was on the program with the Norwegians about a year after, sailed to Senegal and generally had the kind of education that if you go back and read the popular magazines of the 1970s, people were talking about. I didn't go to college at the time, and I went and experienced the world, and I didn't do it with the military, which, looking back on it, was pretty, pretty interesting.

I came back to the United States in 1972 and I was looking for work. I was very concerned with connecting my head to my hands, and I had become a carpenter in the meantime and started building furniture. And long- this is probably '72, 00:09:00'74, I kind of wandered around the country and worked in various jobs, built furniture, as I said, built houses, but mostly moving towards art. And sometime in the- around '73, '74, after staying a year in New Hampshire building furniture, I revisited an old interest, which was photography, and found myself in New York City, 1974, an apartment on the Bowery -- not an apartment, a loft -- and spent the next- well, until today, photographing. But I was the town photographer for Huntington, Long Island, and studied with a woman who -- for those people in the photography industry would know her, she was Diane Arbus's mentor, teacher, friend -- and that was Lisette Model. And Lisette had a master 00:10:00class I knew very little about, and when I went to show her my pictures, I didn't realize I was like number 19 in line, and there were two-hundred forty people outside that I didn't realize. And she- I was the first person she chose to join her class and that really set the stage for me. This is the first person who recognized that there was something I was- I was about that was of interest to them.

And I studied with her for a year or two, and when she- in her own history and career, she really did not get along with authority figures. And when she heard that my family had a business, she encouraged me to return to that business, but to continue photographing; and the way she constructed that was that commercial photography would sap the creative juice from you, and if you could prevent that 00:11:00from happening, by working elsewhere and not depending on working as a photographer, but photographing life as a photographer -- we would call that being an artist today -- that was the better trip. And she didn't know my family, she didn't know what she was telling me to do, and I followed her advice, much to my own chagrin at various times. So by around about 1978 or '79, I believe I began working formy family in an office they had in New York City, came back to Allentown really over my objections, but now as part of the family, so I did what the business in the end did. I came back, worked in the factory in Allentown, understood what was going on. And I did understand that I was a 00:12:00creative and I don't- and I always thought that my family was creative, which- we had a reputation in the business, which I didn't understand, but it sounded to me like we were creative. And so that's what I saw. And in 1981, we expanded a collection facility that we had in South Carolina to become a full production facility, and I went to South Carolina to make that happen. The man who had been there was reaching retirement age, and I went from Allentown, left my cousin's father, uncle here and began to operate this South Carolina factory and did that until -- that was 1980 or '81 -- I did that until sometime at the end of the- beginning of the '90s.

SC: And from there?

BS: I worked in the business until my father and his nephews -- his partner, his brother died in 1990 and my father, at that point, was probably in his 60s or 70s and really had no interest in retiring, really wasn't able to. We went through a series of consultations with outside people who were familiar with transitions and family businesses. I became actually quite interested in that. And I was accepted sometime in around 1987 or '88 into a program at Harvard University's Business School and actually had become interested in consulting to businesses. So we are an example of a family who took no advice from any of 00:14:00these people. And at the same time I was at Harvard, I was encouraged to go and get my undergraduate degree, which I had not done, because, as I said, in the '70s there was an idea that experiential education was far more enriching than sitting in a classroom. So I ironically went back and graduated in the last graduating class of Antioch University, continuing my-- well, whatever it is, I closed three high schools and now a college, so I suppose I thought I was progressing. And Harvard, Business School at Harvard, which brought quite a different perspective to operating family business in an industry that was, as 00:15:00my professor called it, an immigrant business. No, no barriers to entry and run basically on rat-like cunning.

That continued until my father sold his half of the business to my cousins in around 2005. And since that time I continued as a photographer, mostly an art photographer, portrait photographer. And the industry of wiping clothes, textile waste really left the United States; our manufacturing, which was the source of the material, left the United States. Papermaking that used that kind of process had already dwindled to almost only two factories. And they became- they came under pressure to bring some of the security elements that they were already 00:16:00selling in other countries to the American currency. So those things all kind of came together in about 2005. My cousins operated the- parts of the business individually, and I believe the trading of fiber pretty much came to an end in 2012. There is still a portion of the business that my cousin conducts, but ironically, there's no American presence. He has employees in Honduras and sells from Honduras to- whether it's Italy or Spain or- and- I'm not quite sure at this point how that all has migrated, but we really don't have that industry here any longer.

SC: Is that because some European countries want better quality paper, value 00:17:00ink? Rag-based?

BS: No. When we call paper "rag-based paper", they're really talking about cellulose fibers, so whether it comes from- our understanding of what cotton was went something along the lines that if you grow cotton, the best of it goes to the manufacture of thread and yarn, and what's left, the thrums and the portion of the cotton plant that has seeds and little pieces of dirt motes, that's what they were called, they were second grade and third grade fibers. And the paper companies used to buy this, clean it, and then process it as cotton- cotton rag 00:18:00paper. Our -- I don't think it was Sheftel & Sons particularly -- but the concept that we came to was- for many years, people used used clothing to make paper because all clothing was made from cotton. But as that became more complex, there were buttons which was great, you snip them off and you had a rag that was all cotton, put it in a big vat of caustic and it would come apart and the fibers would float and there you had the beginning of your paper. But as clothing became more complicated, the zippers replaced simple buttons, and sometime in the '60s and '70s -- I mean, already we had moved away from using 00:19:00used clothes -- but the company that made cotton-based social papers and our currency was Crane & Company, and Elias Crane went to the Congress and said no- no confederation can be a true country without their own control of currency, and sold them the idea that they should make paper. The Crane and- Crane & Comapny has made the currency for the United States ever since -- since 1873. They made it with used clothing, until I would think sometime in the '30s, I'm not really quite sure. I'm talking about, not historians, but people who made their living selling rags and many of them had no real interest in answering questions of a curious child who was under foot. I'm talking about myself in my 00:20:0030s. I was sort of, you know, "what are you asking, why do you care?"

So I don't know specifically, but at some point, my father began to understand that there was an edge, as they would say at Harvard, in selling the waste of the manufacturing process of underwear, which was all cotton, undershirts, which were all cotton, and that he could eliminate the difficulty that the paper companies would have with the plastic refuse or scraps of just unidentified waste in the process of making paper- you know, vatting the old rags and having, you know, a vat of fiber. If there was a button in there- or later on synthetic 00:21:00became quite a complex problem again and scared the paper makers, because you put what appeared to be a piece of cotton rag into the vat but the polyester would melt and float to the surface and ruin ten thousand pounds of what was perfectly good cotton fiber. So in this- in the early '70s, there was a great deal of fear that Sheftel Company would actually go out of business, and I think we got to about 11 days of cash, and miraculously there was some understanding that you could control the buying, you could identify where you were buying the waste from, you could separate out. They began to understand what was causing the problem, they didn't realize that they had been commingling cotton rag from 00:22:00nineteen different suppliers with one supplier who had started using this new wonderful wrinkle-free underwear, which was in fact polycotton and supposed to make your butt look nice. While doing that, it contaminated the after process that no one really cared about. So that, you know, that- and ironically, the company became very strong after that and sort of found its footing in the early '70s after what was, really, they were very close to bankruptcy after 30 years of my father's involvement.

So it shifted around and they- as I say, we operated until about 2005. And your question was, why did it shut down? In part, as I understand, they were forty 00:23:00seven mills making paper with rags, when my father came out of the army in 1946. Today was maybe one, depending on how you count. There is a company that will make, from rags, the fiber- the fiber product that the paper company can then put back into a vat. So if you say there's two, you know, you're sort of- they only work for the one, for Crane & Company. So most of the paper companies have moved on to using cellulose fiber from trees, where we get Weyerhaeuser and they kind of consider that a hundred percent cellulose product. And you will see 00:24:00cotton rag used for art papers and social papers, which was part of Crane & Company, but the appreciation of the tooth of the paper, how it feels, has been replaced by convenience. So the idea of something feeling wonderful in your hand, that you give to people on the anniversary or the invitation to a wedding, has changed dramatically. And it's not quite what it was in 1947, or 1950, or 1960. So on one hand, as Harvard taught, find a need and fill it. Paper companies had a need for this product, cotton, and our family was one of maybe a dozen companies in the United States that filled that need -- that need had been 00:25:00filled since 1787, but I believe Elias Crane asked the population of Massachusetts to contribute their used clothing to that need in the beginning. And by the time we, you know, were- were ramped up in the '70s and '80s, '80s and '90s, we were supplying rags to Spain, Italy, and they were using various kinds of rags as raw material and re-spinning yarn. So you'd have a factory with a two-million dollar machine and a father and a son, and they would make sock yarn in yellow from rags that we had separated into cotton or polycotton rags of one color. And- But as labor costs rose after the Second World War, and that 00:26:00probably tracked from '46 to the '80s, those companies began moving towards cheaper labor. So Spain and Italy, which have been centers for textile manufacturing, began to find that they could operate their factories cheaper in Guatemala or Honduras, and capital, not labor, became the organizing fundamental in the companies that we were selling to.

So where we provided a supply- a supply of raw material in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s; we also provided a service of removing the waste from the manufacturing companies that ran along the New York State Thruway up to Massachusetts, where they were producing underwear. We- Allentown was a center 00:27:00of underwear production and probably in the history, you'll see the Royale and a number of other manufacturers who made a living here in Allentown, quite a good living, that migrated into J.C. Penney and other companies. There were large underwear companies here and we received a great deal of- our company in particular tended to move out of Allentown and collect waste from upstate New York all the way down to South Carolina, and then we moved our main collection to South Carolina as the manufacturing companies moved out of the Hudson Valley and moved to South Carolina and North Carolina. We moved along with them. Our headquarters remained here, but we transferred merchandise into the Lehigh Valley for separating and sorting and preparation for use as a raw material and 00:28:00then shipped it north to Massachusetts, which is where most of the paper was being made. And when those textile factories closed in South Carolina and moved to Guatemala in the '80s and '90s, we tried to follow them. And of course, you know the story of the immigrant grandfather who would take a hip bottle of whiskey to some guy in Hamburg, and spend the afternoon drinking that bottle with him, and he came home and the contract --" what contract? Did you get the contract? Contract? He's selling us the rags. Well, yeah I'll go back with another bottle." That process, which I am old enough to have watched, probably moved to Guatemala, moved to Honduras, and it's very difficult to fly to 00:29:00Honduras to meet a guy.

My father used to receive a phone call- my father used to get into his car at five o'clock in the morning and leave on a two-day business trip and drive to as many of those forty-seven paper mills as he possibly could. Later on, he began to fly in a single engine airplane in weather that really terrorized his son, who he thought it would be nice to take along on these trips. All I can say is I never threw up. I'm not sure what kind of accomplishment that was. I did get my pilot's license eventually, probably because I was scared to death and thought, "I should be able to fly myself out of this." But nothing really stopped him, and if he got a phone call at nine o'clock in the morning- I think today people could understand what I'm saying. The call came from school and it was a teacher. No matter what the mother or father did, they'd be at the school within 00:30:00a half an hour. If you can understand that construct, but simply apply it to your business -- if my father got a call from the school, he'd call my mom. If he got a call from a paper-making company in Massachusetts, he rented the airplane and was there by two o'clock to take the guy to lunch. And eventually, you know, he had his own airplane and used it almost not at all for personal use, used it to go and visit these clients that he could be [with] two or three clients in a day and then be home for- well he didn't come home for dinner, but he was home by seven o'clock. And when the mills began to move away, there was no longer a need to process their waste, and the basis of the company, the basis of the business changed.

And I think that by the time my father sold the business, the- the- the company 00:31:00would have had to have morphed into some new business and recognize- I mean, the company would have had to change into a new business and would have had to have recognized that the cycle of business had come and called, and however long we had managed to extend and be the last standing provider, we did a good job at that. But, as the ashtray on my father's desk said, from "rags to riches to rags" -- in three generations, which used to scare the crap out of me, turned out to be quite prescient. And that- the answer to your question is that business changes, as does life, and companies that change and use the advantage 00:32:00of some business that they were in, continue. And people who identify, also from Harvard, you know, the bus companies never thought of themselves as transportation companies, they thought of themselves as bus companies. So when the airplane came, they found themselves quite empty when they could have been the ones to buy all the airlines. And in our business, that- that to some degree happened as well. I'm not sure that there is a-- a business that followed the use of the waste from the manufacturer of clothing and then went to something like- believe it or not, I mean, some of the products that we went to was not only paper, we sold and continue today to sell- the remnants of the company sells rags for making flock wallpaper, so every prostitute in America who works or worked in a- an office space or boudoir with the red flop wallpaper, you 00:33:00know, those are rags. If you look in the back of your car, there was a time when there'd be a pad, and if you look closely, you could see, you know, Uncle James' old t-shirt or John's shirt in there because those were rags pulled apart and made into a product that- I can't think of right now, but it's basically glue on top of rag fiber that soundproofed the inside of your car. So our rags- high quality is [how] we thought of it. Cotton products was not the only thing that rags were used for. Many of these other companies as- in a sense, they were falloffs from the most expensive use of the rag. And as the fiber companies left, as the rag- I mean, there are no rag companies, there are no fiber- I 00:34:00mean, there are fiber companies, but nobody makes rags, you know. When we used to, not joke, but lament that when you found a good use for a rag, you better be looking for the next use for the rag, because when the manufacturer- you can't call them up and say, "Continue making that waste!" And it was a very interesting business that you didn't really control the manufacturer of your raw material and you didn't control the person that you were selling it to. You are always working the angles to see- and I could share with you this little story quickly about- to conceptualize what this meant.

A railroad truck- track- a railroad car had sixty-thousand pounds that you could load into it. That's quite a- thousand pound bales, if you imagine those pictures from South Carolina [of] people shipping cotton, those were eight 00:35:00hundred pound bales. So we made a thousand pounds. Eventually we used a compressor so, so tight that we could put twelve hundred pounds in a-- in a fifty-four by twenty-four inch bale. And one of the companies that we bought waste from made athletic shirts, this nylon. We were a company that you wipe things up with cotton. Who knew anything about wiping rags made out of polyester? This was not possible. So what did all good rag dealers do was they piled it up. And I remember looking at a row and- you know, you're paying to take up space. I mean, it would be like somebody bringing plates into your kitchen, three, four plates a day, and keeping them there. I mean, after six or seven months, you know, you couldn't find anybody in the kitchen, though they were right next to you. I mean, they'd be behind all the plates, you're trying 00:36:00to deal with it. And that's what was fairly routine. You know, you wouldn't know what to do with it. And I had been a furniture builder, and I got a call one day, the guy wanted cotton rags. And I had this idea and I said, "I've got something that you might find useful. You're just spreading stain on wood, right?" "Yeah." "So I got an idea for you. Let me send you something and you tell me what you think." He called me back and said, "Wow, that's great! How much is it?" And now, we sold rags for maybe thirty-five cents, I mean there were lots of prices, thirty-five to a dollar thirty-five, and I said, "Well, I'd be happy to sell that to you for sixty-four cents." Now everybody had been trying to give this away, because the alternative was paying six cents to put it- and he said, "Well I can buy this other stuff for thirty-five cents, why would I pay sixty-five for this?" And I said, "Well do you have it in front of 00:37:00you?" He says, "Yeah." I said, "Well okay, cut off 12 inches and what- you know, by 6. Cut that in half, now you got like a six by six piece." "Yeah." "So I'll sell you small pieces." He says, "Why? Why is that better?" I said, "Well if you look at your garbage can, you're going to pull out a rag that one of the guys in your factory used, and one corner is going to be used and the rest you paid for but is perfectly good. So I'm going to limit your loss to that six inch piece." He goes, "But why sixty-five cents? That's twice as much." I said, "Yeah. Well, you know, all those holes? You're not paying for those." So I wound up selling all sixty-five thousand pounds of that for twice the price of white cotton wiping rags. All was well. It's a family business, so no one thought I was a genius. And then the day came when he said, "I need more." And we said, "Well, 00:38:00we don't buy from that- That company doesn't make athletic shirts anymore, Russell, Lee or for Nike, they lost the contract, so I can't order you that waste." And he goes, "But that was great!" I said, "Well then, the show closed and it was a great show, but book another play because I don't have anymore." And that was really typical. And I remember my father telling me at one point -- because we did some very, very large contracts for people -- that, you know, as soon as you find something that you can make a living on, start looking because it's not going to last. And that was really true.

SC: Great. Thank you.

BS: You're welcome.

SC: Do you want some water?

BS: Are you thirsty?

GE: In the right there -- yeah, yeah.

SC: I think you're doing a great job.

GE: So, let's just go to the beginning, the origins of the business as far back as you know. And I don't know if that starts with your father- grandfather, but if you just want to tell us a little bit the origins of the business and how that progressed, and then we'll talk more about the business as it was, the later incarnation of the business.

BS: You know in our family, we did not really speak about my grandfather's family, where he came from -- the interest in our historical origins is probably typical of other families? But what I understood was that my grandfather, who was born on the Russian border or Polish border, never quite clear, as a 16-17 00:40:00year old was pursued by the Red or the White Army and essentially was a draft dodger who had some brothers and sisters who had come to the United States. And as I understood it, he had some relatives in upstate New York around where the Concord Hotel used to be, and they were in the egg business. I don't know what the family business was, I am told that it may have been beef, but I- whether they had 10 cows or two steers in the front yard, I have never been able to clarify. But my grandfather came to this country in probably 1914 or 1917, and went to Chicago and worked as a butcher, and had some relatives who had a 00:41:00restaurant in New York called the Black Angus and somehow settled back in Allentown. And when he settled back in Allentown, he met a- or he was set up with a young woman, my grandmother and- who was born in the United States and- on 2nd Street. They met, and I'm not sure of how their engagement went, but they became married in Allentown. And the father-in-law, Mr. Malenovsky had a son, and as probably is typical, my grandfather and his brother-in-law formed a 00:42:00company with a horse and a buggy, and began peddling anything that they could find -- metal, fiber from textile mills, who knows.

They were junkmen, from what I understand, and somewhere along the line, this is on 2nd Street in Allentown, somewhere- and there were other places on that street, scrap dealers, it was a fairly common Jewish occupation. What I've always thought was ironic was my grandfather didn't speak English. I don't know, at this point, how much English he had learned. But when I think about what made the family successful, it's ironic that, because my grandfather couldn't find work or there was a prejudice against Jews or whatever the circumstance was that caused him to start his own business, that was the magic key in America to being 00:43:00eventually financially successful or independent, I should say. And so it's always been fascinating to me that all of the negative- I mean, if you were in a WASP family with your great-aunt having come across the channel, you know, three generations before you were established and you were looking down at the rest of the people coming to America at the end of the 1800s, the irony is that the next generation would replace you because of all the things that these people looked at and thought, "Oh, how horrible!" And it's quite a lesson, I think that- wondered always about how brave my grandfather was. There was no talk of this in our family. But to come to a country where you didn't speak English -- now, he 00:44:00did have some relatives -- but it's really fascinating to me.

And he- he began with- the family story and, you know, there's two sides to it. I only know the one, and I'm quite sure the other is interesting. But the side is- that I came from said that the Malenovsky side of the family, that Jake Malenovsky was not as adventurous as my grandfather, and he- he didn't want a horse. I don't know how that makes any sense, but that's the story. But my grandfather insisted on the horse. I think it's the same story, I'm not sure, they just replaced the horse with the Hahn Truck -- H-A-H-N, I think it was. So the story of the family is that 1919 -- that dollar bill that's on the wall in 00:45:00the frame in the office with the title, that was for a Hahn Truck that Abraham insisted he was going to buy. And somewhere in all of this, they began to concentrate on taking the textile waste from the many, many, many mills that existed in Allentown, the textile mills that ran up and down that little Lehigh up through Shamokin, Hamburg. And these were- there were hundreds, if not tens of thousands of employees making all kinds of garments.

There's another side of the story which I'm very curious about and don't know the answer to, which is why the New York Jews came to the Lehigh Valley to establish the underwear companies, for instance, that the Lesavoys or other families did. Whether it was the labor pool or what, but my father was in a 00:46:00cycle of business that they created waste, he took the waste away, and there was a use for that waste -- it [was] truly recycling. Ironically, when people spoke about recycling in the '50s, '60s, '70s, my father had very little respect for the conversation because we're talking about a hundred million dollar companies where they were recycling scrap or steel, and rags were never mentioned -- fiber recycling, I don't think was ever mentioned in the- in the fiber industry news and some of these other publications. It was recycling of steel mostly. So it's kind of ironic that my father was truly in a recycling business that had a product, the client, purpose. But really no- no- no presence, even during a national recognition of this as being something valuable. So my grandfather 00:47:00simply found a need -- people needed to have this waste taken away and, on the other side, people had a raw material requirement, fiber, that was the waste of these other people. So, you know, it always was interesting when we filled out tax returns, were we manufacturers or were we distributors? And of course we answered the question in a way that was advantageous to us. If there was more tax to be paid for a manufacturer, we were distributors. If there were less taxes to be paid for manufacturer, then we manufactured. But the actual process was visualizing how the product that was waste from one industry could be used 00:48:00as the raw material in another.

And there are several stories that float through the family about fabric that we just had no idea what to do with, and many of these ideas precede me, although I did in my own time make use of this story. But a- it's a story of during the Second World War, when nylon was first produced, and my family had 30 truckloads of this material that no one knew what to do with, and they began taking it to the dump, which my grandfather started in 1917. This- we're talking about 1946. He already had a Cadillac. He had a- a building that he bought in 1931 during the Depression on 15th and Sumner Avenue. I suppose my grandfather thought of 00:49:00himself as quite a success, and the idea of taking something to the dump and paying to have it take- taken away was just antithetical. And the story goes that he began to delay and delay and delay, and my- my uncle who came into the business in 1946 -- this probably was around '47 or '48 -- said, "You know, I don't have any room here. I need to throw some of this into the dump." Finally after several months, he won the permission to do that, and after taking two or three truckloads to the dump, a man with a funny accent came to the business, saw this material, magic material, and offered- he asked how much we had. And in the typical peddler's way, you know, my father said, "I have three, maybe two, two and a half loads of this." And in actuality they probably had 40, but you 00:50:00don't say that, do you? So the man buys it and then comes again two weeks later and puts another order and they keep escalating the price. When they tell my grandfather, the story I heard is that he literally pulled hair out of his head. So who knows what- it was that it was a business that you ran by the seat of your pants.

And as I say, my grandfather got his truck probably in 1919. They had a building, I believe it was on Front Street in Allentown, by 1940- by 1931, they bought out of bankruptcy the Bear Manufacturing, which was a furniture company, at 15th and Sumner Avenue, and operated that until they bought a- a ribbon mill, which I think was operated by Haines, in Catasauqua --they bought that I think 00:51:00in 1951 or- they may have bought in Catasauqua before that, I'm not really quite sure, but in 1951 or '52, my father -- already seeing that the textile industry was leaving the Northeast -- traveled to South Carolina. He had been traveling to the South since he got out of the army in '46. And by '51 he hired a young man who was traveling in the South and he hired him to go to the mills and make an introduction into- now this was a pretty established business in the South because they were doing this with cotton waste, not clothing rags, but cotton waste, it was a very developed business -- people had minters and motes, a whole language and a whole process, and much of that went to papermaking or to other 00:52:00kinds of stuffing for pillows. So in a certain way they were Jewish and they were Yankees and they were coming into the South, and it wasn't a friendly time. It was difficult. And my father saw that there was a young Jewish man from Chattanooga who was living in Greenville, South Carolina, and he would give him cash, three thousand dollars, and he'd go out and buy rags. And eventually that man opened the facility with my dad there. After a year, that man said, "I can't take the pressure, buy me out." And that man worked for my father for another 40 years, and I think he resented that choice that he made there, but that was the southern operation that in 1981 I went down and expanded and replaced what we had built here in the East, essentially by move- we were twenty-five years late, but we moved our actual processing of the rags to the site of the waste. So we 00:53:00moved from Allentown. We still maintained a facility here, but we enlarged- I had at one point almost four-hundred people in that facility in South Carolina. We probably never had more than one hundred, one hundred twenty-five here.

GE: Okay. You want to tell us a little bit about the family in terms that it sounds like it started with your grandfather and the Malenovsky, his brother-in-law, then at some point it became just your grandfather and his sons. Right? And what kinds of roles did the different family members have in these businesses, you know, then your uncles, and you and your cousins and whatever?

BS: So my grandfather married Sarah Malenovsky. Her brother went to work with 00:54:00her husband. And I don't know if there ever was a peaceful time. Stories don't- family stories don't speak of a peaceful time. They speak of Abraham wanting to get ahead, he was more aggressive than Jacob. Jacob had two brothers in the business that I didn't know about until I was in my twenties. And another strange, ironic twist is that in 2012- 2012, I came to Allentown to sit with my parents who were looking for a new home and-- Next door neighbor who I had gone to elementary school with, showed them a house just catty-corner from their home on Main Street, which they had been in 50 years. So I was 12 when they bought 00:55:00that house. While we were in this house just across the street, I kept hearing something about "Uncle Jake, Uncle Jake." And I said, "What is- what's Uncle Jake got to do with the house?" And they said, "Well Uncle Jake lived here." And I'm not sure if I'm putting this together for you, but my father and his uncle, Jake, separated in business in probably 1960- No. My father came into the business in '46 and I believe they separated from Malenovsky in '51 or '52. So the uncle that they were speaking about was my father's uncle. I mean, the strange part of the story for me is that my relative, who I never got to know, 00:56:00didn't get to know that side of the family, lived one house away from me and I never knew it. And I mean, this is Allentown. It's not Manhattan. Just- So there's a flair in that story- tale of how these families united and then separated and what the ramifications in the community were. You know, in the synagogue that my grandfather helped to build at 17th and Hamilton, he had a row of seats with his name on it and his business partner had a row of seats with his name on it just across the aisle. Every holiday we would walk up that aisle and my father would graciously smile at the people on the other side. The people on the other side were my relatives who I never got to know because in the family, the business had separated.

I was sure- I tried to find various stories from that side of the family, but 00:57:00they- they started the business, I believe, in 1914, in 1917, bought the truck in 1919, bought the big building on Sumner Avenue in 1931. And my father and his brother, came out of the army in '46 and during that whole period there apparently were two other Malenovskys in the business -- uncles to my father and his brother who I really heard very little about, Uncle Abe and-- would have been Jake's brother and the other man, I'm not sure I know his name. So in 1946, when my father and his brother came into the company, the stories are that my 00:58:00grandfather and his brother-in-law routinely -- that would be daily -- would have yelling and screaming matches with each other. And my father would tell stories about how uncomfortable it was to take sides with his mother because his mother's brother was the partner and he was working in the company with his father and his father's partner. And how could he not take sides with his father? But then he was taking sides against his uncle, who he said he loved. So I'm sure it was very complicated for them. I'm sure this was an immigrant story repeated over and over and over again. But it did happen in our family. And by 1951, I believe, and I heard the story in several ways, Uncle Jake was sick in 00:59:00the hospital and my father went in and gave him a letter and sounds like it wasn't all that touchy feely. I don't know. I really don't. But there was a separation, and I know that it was obviously not amicable because we- they never spoke to us again.

Now, my father would graciously introduce me to my uncle and aunt in the synagogue aisle. Turn to me and always say this is my Aunt Rose, but they never really acknowledge that. And, you know, funny thing about my father was that it took me until I was in my forties to realize that, of course they didn't talk to him. You know, he stole their livelihood from them. Now, did he steal it? I don't know. But my father was pretty good at this representation that, until I 01:00:00was in my forties, I really never even questioned why they weren't speaking to him. Now, I went back and looked at the papers, and they paid them the equivalent of a million, one-hundred and forty-thousand or a million, one-hundred and sixty-thousand dollars from 1917 to 1951. What is that, you know, twenty to thirty, forty... little over twenty-five years to walk away with a paycheck in 1940- '51 of a million, one-hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Doesn't sound like it was really a rip off so I don't really know. But there is the tale.

GE: How- how about now, if you want to share with us a little bit about the Sheftel, that it was your father and his brother. What did each do in the business? How did that progress with the next generation?

BS: My father and his father were in business after '46. You know, my 01:01:00grandfather, according to my father, would regale him with stories of how unfair the other side of the family was and, you know, how he had been alone and had been fighting this battle. It almost sounds like my grandfather confused the- the battles of the First and Second World War with his business history, but now- now my grandfather had his son and his brother, and now it was a fair fight. My father led on one time that he thought it wasn't so very fair and that he was selfish and that he had not only been used as a tool with his father, but 01:02:00that he was happy to have been the blade. We never got back to that conversation. And when I defended him and said, "Well, Dad, you know, I mean, it was-" he really cut me off and, you know, it was a part of the history I wasn't really going to ever really get to.

And what I did learn from the Malenovskys is that Jake's son was eight years old, went into a new business, really didn't know anything about the business, and probably my understanding was more emotionally laden than his. I don't know about the sister of Jake, who maybe -- I guess that was Rose -- who thought it was unfair. But when they separated in '51, my father was they- appear to be the rainmaker and he came in as a salesman primarily. They at that point, as I 01:03:00understood it, already had the facility in- on 15th and Sumner Avenue, and they bought a building in Catasauqua, and they were- my father had obviously aspirations of a much greater size.

He would tell me that his father would constantly say to him, you know, if you hear- something about if you reach for the clouds, you'll wind up sleeping with the roaches. And I don't think that they got along so very well either. And I do remember my coming into the Catasauqua offices, which were really established, you know, you come up the steps, there's the woman sitting at the- at the switchboard with the cords and hallway of offices and bar. Looked pretty 01:04:00business-like, these guys were working hard. And my grandfather's office was at the very end of the hall. I do remember it had a little safe in it, but I also felt as a very young boy that there was some tragedy, some- something here that was unclear to me. And I think it was my father's probably unrelenting drive to succeed that I was experiencing.

So he took the helm of the business as a salesman, and I don't know if we really have a name for what he did. At Harvard, a salesman is not a very important role. They, you know, think that accountants are smarter and all of... But in my father's world, the salesman was the driving wheel. What my father didn't 01:05:00appreciate probably was that he was more than just the salesman, most salesmen he couldn't really- when we would hire people, he really didn't seem to understand that they didn't think like he did. They didn't really know how to make a dollar from- from 40 cents. He did, and I don't know whether he figured out that he had something else, and that's what built the business, that side of him. And I don't really- he wasn't an entrepreneur because he didn't start one business after another. But he kept, you know, this is a relatively small industry. I mean, the entire industry was probably less than- I mean, I remember used to looking was under a billion dollars when McDonald's was six billion, so that was the entire industry. Anything you could pull in that was regarded as recycling textiles. So he thought of himself as the man who provided white 01:06:00cotton rags to the papermakers in America- in America, and specifically, to Crane & Company for currency. And if you went into a factory that sold white underwear rags, you were going to have to deal with him. If he didn't own or if he didn't buy those rags, he was going to, and you were going to sell them to him. He always smiled, but that was his basic- that was the edge, as Harvard would have described it, that he- he carried. And he carried it in a way that, you know, I don't really see very often unless it's someone's own business, that the certain feeling that people have. And it's not a feeling about fairness, it's a feeling about-- you're divinely chosen to buy these rags and how dare 01:07:00anybody else not know that?

So that was my father's role. And in the beginning, the story was that he came home from a very successful selling trip and separated a pile of twenty thousand dollars between his brother and himself. And that was the story in the business, that they were equal, even though clearly my uncle was not a driving wheel. When in 1968 they moved out of Catasauqua and built their first- built their own facility, they built seventy two thousand square feet on 24th and Lehigh Street, and then a year or two later added a hundred- It had eventually a hundred and two thousand square feet there behind the Giant. My uncle enjoyed driving truck 01:08:00and working in the factory, and didn't really seem to- he wanted to be an architect, and really didn't see himself, as I understood it from him, as a manager. And yet that's what the business needed. And so my uncle became the manager, the "inside guy", just the way it was terminology- the terminology that people in those days used. "Who's the inside guy?" Was a guy who knew how the sewing machines worked and where to buy thread. Then there was the guy who went to the department stores and sold the bras or underwear or whatever it was. The inside guy and the outside guy -- and Harold was the inside guy, everybody loved him, he- and Milton was the outside guy.

And that those roles persisted until 1991. My- there were already signs that there were issues, but my uncle seemed to have accepted his role and the 01:09:00difficulty came when the- the sons, now the third generation, came into the business and were approaching their 40s and looked at their father and said, "Well why does he have to take this crap from our uncle?" And there was a very interesting dynamic because the uncles didn't really necessarily want to question it. It was in balance for them. And what tended to throw that out of balance was the family side of business and became quite, quite interesting, and in a funny way, probably was retelling a story that had existed before any of these children were in the business -- because, remember, the uncle was bought out! So how that got transferred into the next generation for me has been a- has 01:10:00been- has been very interesting to me. But I could see it happening, and I wrote in my journal what I thought would 10 years, 20 years down the line occur. I was quite accurate, much to my own disappointment and chagrin, because it was not what I would have wanted to happen.

But the irony is that my father, in addition to not knowing exactly what to call him -- a salesman isn't really enough, entrepreneur is not really accurate; owner operator, well, he was a partner also -- and, you know, he was a bit of- I think he had a bit of a Napoleonic complex, which I think to some degree was necessary. But I don't know what the word was for all that and it was- it was, it was fascinating to watch it when it worked, it was. And the irony is that as my father, I looked at this man and was amazed at his sense of timing, which he 01:11:00never spoke with me about, no matter how many times I tried to create a conversation; he seemed not to be aware of it, but I found that to be really quite impossible to believe. And ironically, here we are at the end of an industry. Perfect timing. And he seemed to be one of these entrepreneurs, and again, there must have been many of them who just found themselves- this is not what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to be a raconteur -- I'm not sure he knew what that word meant, but what he thought it meant was he wanted to stay in Hollywood and produce talent. This is a guy who I never saw read a book or really go out to the movies unless he was asked to. And yet this is what he claimed that he- he really wanted to have done. And had he done it, he would have probably made hundreds of millions of dollars because of residuals that we 01:12:00didn't have in the rag business, you know? But he left the business in 2005, and there was really no business left. He- he really rode the horse... I mean, you know, he didn't know what business cycles were, didn't really care. But the irony is that he- his timing in life was perfect. There were no rag dealers in Allentown, there were no places to sell rags in Allentown, there were no places to sell rags in the United States -- except the one that he kept closer to himself and his children. The irony of that is fascinating. And-

GE: And now, when you described him as a "salesman", are you saying that at both ends that he was the one who really had the relationship with the textile factories as well as the relationship with Crane or whoever else was buying the product?

BS: Yeah. He purchased and sold.

GE: And he had both relationships?

BS: Both relationships. So maybe, more accurately, he was the relationship man and the other guy was the packing guy. I don't know. But it requires relationships on both sides.

GE: Right. And he did- And he was the person who really maintained and developed those relationships on both sides.

BS: Yeah. And as the business grew those relationships- you know, I remember that he came and said, "I took my first million dollar order." That was like a huge thing.

GE: Sure. So, Bruce, in terms of the industries that they sold to, we certainly have heard about Crane and paper -- who were some of the other major industries that they sold to? And then if you could explain a little bit, you were beginning- you did hit it somewhat, I'm not sure if I have it fully 01:14:00crystallized. In Europe, it sounded like it was a little bit different there; there they were separating the fibers. So if you wanted to just share with us, are there any other industries that use this as their raw material? And then also to just tell us a little bit about the difference with the European...

BS: So in the United States, we- there was, there was a- In the United States, we manufactured at a scale that the Europeans didn't recognize was much grander, and the advantage to that was if you were purchasing something that was waste, the volume of that waste was on a scale that Europe didn't operate at. In 01:15:00Europe, if somebody bought twenty-six bales of something, twenty six thousand pounds of something, [it] would be a big order. Their trucks were smaller. And, you know, in this period of time, we went from trucks that were thirty-six feet up to fifty -- fifty feet. Fifty-two feet. But in Europe, you found that there were many more manufacturers, users of textile, and after the war my speculation is that capital was less important than labor. So you had cities- towns- Prato, which was just north of Florence. You had Bella, which was just south of Lake Como in the north. And these cities- towns became specialty centers. So in 01:16:00Biella, they use cotton thread, cotton fiber. And they made a finer denier yarn. In... in Prato they used- made yarn that was heavier, like- and what would be the difference? So, for instance, the Germans were using this respun textile for making athletic socks or sweatshirts, where the refined nature of the yarn was not as important as the bulk, and you can hide in the bulk the impurities or inconsistencies that you might not have in a first quality yarn, which would be 01:17:00three times the price. So they're developed an industry. And I remember going to Prato, which was outside of Florence, north of Florence, and I would see a little two passenger truck with a flatbed and big potato sack on the back, like two-hundred pound sack. And they pull into a driveway of a residential area, the door would slide open, and what looked like the front of the house was, in fact, a concrete industrial space about the size of two or three garages. And I had the occasion to be invited, and what you saw was a family sitting on the floor, and what had happened was they had gone to the local rag dealer, bought a 01:18:00wholesale bag of rags, which was mixed t-shirt material, and then they would separate those colors into different colors and they would get different prices for it.

And when we saw them doing that in 1960, we had the idea of doing that on a much larger scale and began separating to color -- and not only separating to color, but separating to fiber. So we would- and then, they got- if that wasn't complicated enough, they got the idea that if they sold it to the paper company and the color was bleachable, instead of paying a premium -- thirty five cents for a piece of cotton that was all white -- they could pay twenty-two cents, put six cents of bleaching into it, and have a two cent discount. But that meant that Sheftel & Sons would have to be able to identify and sell bleachable colors 01:19:00in a packet- in a pack, packing. And then what would happen with the non-bleachable? Well, there's the beginning of the story of sorting to color for Europe. They didn't care about bleachability. They were looking to make yarn. So the dark blue that didn't bleach went to a blue that was not bleachable and was then sold by a salesman of ours who traveled to Europe twice a year to Bella, to Prato, called on these factories with a card of colors, with different shades. Why? Because different manufacturers had different shades of color and we were known for blending them. And we would make bales of one color, but we would pack them all into the same number. And these people were really quite genius and this is an opportunity to tell a story that won't get lost to history.

Many years into this process, towards the end, we had a salesman, a German, a man who had come from Germany and was- would never ask a question of a- a client. And I couldn't understand, you know, how do you learn what your client does? How do you know? I'm sure- I'm sure he had his ways, but you certainly didn't ask them. And I was naive and I would ask anybody anything, basically. So I asked one day about this. And this is now in Spain, in a company of maybe four people, maybe two and a half million dollars of borrowed money to buy- maybe not borrowed money, but they had a machine. And if you imagine walking into a- into an industrial facility that was so clean that you could have had lunch on the- on the concrete, they had a fork truck driver, five silos, and an area that had 01:21:00these cards that we would ship to them with different colors on them, and other people too. And I wanted to know how he made color- colored yarn. He'd get an order from Spain- he was in Spain. He'd get an order from Germany for blue socks and it would have a color swatch. And we went in, he asked me, I still remember, I said purple and he said, "Oh, purple's difficult." And he has this, you know, it looked like they took this out of his first I don't know what- factory or maybe he put this together when he was six years old. I don't know. It was cubby holes -- and the whole factory is absolutely modern, with no people in it. This is 1980s, so there's no robots yet, but-- spotless. And here's this old wooden 01:22:00thing nailed together, I don't know what, with a place for a set of hammers, and in this cloth stuck in each of these cubby holes -- yellows, reds, oranges -- he begins picking it out and putting it down on the table in front of him. I'm standing right there. And then he grabs two- I don't have the name for them, but everybody in America has probably seen this as a demonstration for how they shear sheep. It's these two kind of things that would- and it pulls open- it opens up the yarn, and he pulls it open, he's got now four piles of thread and he's talking in Italian. I don't understand a word he's telling me, but he thinks I understand him perfectly and he is pulling the support, and I'm thinking, "This is Picasso. I'm standing with Picasso." And then he starts picking it up and rolling it into it like a ball and twisting it. And right 01:23:00there in front of me, more miraculous than a perfect egg, he was [like], "Is that the right shade of purple?" Yoo! And I had actually come to ask him if he thought that we could do this with a computer. And you know, he said, "No, it would never happen." Now, he might have been right that it never would happen, because the industry vanished. But he wasn't right that a computer couldn't have taken the readings of all the different colors, blended them and told you what it was. I was right about that. But he couldn't even imagine this because this man was an artist. I mean, there's no real other question about his skills.

And, you know, fascinatingly, I want to add one other story. I say that he stood in front of this wall of color that he had received from- it was only at this point two or three other providers like us. And we would be in America, someone 01:24:00would send us a truck of waste, we'd open the truck, take out a bag, thirty five pounds, and we put it on a pallet, put it on- the next one was yellow, we put that on a pallet. But there may be three or four shades of t-shirts being made. How did you know where it went? Now, I don't think anybody really cared about this, but I said that I was a photographer living in New York and I was a color photographer. And that was- my teacher said to me, "Sweetheart, I'm not-" I'm sorry. She said, "Darling, nobody ever makes serious pictures in color." And well, that was that. I nevertheless had this passion for color. And when I came to work in the company, I simply looked at the rags and thought about it through my curiosity. And I wondered how my uncle, who separated the colors and 01:25:00organized them on the charts, how he did that, because when I'd go to Europe, they'd say of all the four people that we get color cards from, yours are the best. Really? It's a commodity item, what are we doing? It couldn't possibly be because my uncle is colorblind. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. And I thought about this for a long time, and I took a Kodak Rattin 12 filter, which allows you to see color the way black and white film sees it. So if you see something red, it's much lighter than something that's blue because the film sees it that way. And I began looking at the colors in the factory that we would store in bins like they would have in the post office or in a commercial 01:26:00laundry. Two hundred pounds at a time until we got a thousand pounds and then we put it together. Now sometimes my uncle would call me out into the factory and say, do these two colors go together? Now there's four people around them and everybody's keeping their mouth shut because he's looking at a yellow bin of two hundred pounds with green. But to him, in his color blindness, they look the same. And he'd look at me and smile and I'd sort of smile and he'd say, "Okay, well, we don't want to put these together." But there was something going on that I sort of was touching on that he couldn't have cared less about. And what I realized was that what my uncle was seeing was color without hue. He was seeing the structure underneath. So when the textile guys in Europe would blend the colors that- they didn't see the color yellow or red or green, they saw the value. They wanted it to be consistent. Without knowing it, my uncle had become a star because he was colorblind and couldn't see the distraction of the color. 01:27:00He actually saw the hue. And I tried to congratulate him to no avail, but I found it fascinating and hope sometime someone else will.

GE: Okay. All right, so let me turn this-

BS: And the employees who work for that guy are in the factory that's producing the t-shirts, but they're now assigned to just the waist part, and it's as big an operation, I think, as we had over in our hundred and two thousand square feet. But it's-

GE: And he still sells it to Crane or whoever?

BS: Well, he doesn't sell to Crane anymore. Crane is no longer buying-

GE: It's hardly a paper business.

BS: Right. So it's not going for paper. It's going, ironically, I think for the fiber content for yarn manufacture.

GE: So it's going back to thread.

BS: To what we were talking about this, yes.

SC: I turned it on and I got a little nervous about that. Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about your family's [history], as far back as you know.

BS: Did we get the products? Did I- we didn't talk about wiping rags and all that sort of stuff. I may have missed that.

GE: Tell me what you mean about the products.

BS: You were asking about where did this stuff go and... you know. So I told some anecdotes about one portion of the business, but when that truck would arrive and the door would open and we began to separate out what the cloth was, some went for fiber recycling that we just described; but the larger pieces, they went for wiping cloths, and that was an entirely different industry in America. You know, there was- there's a wiping rag association called I Whack 'Em [?]. We never were quite sure who they whacked, but...

GE: And so that would be the rags that you'd buy at Home Depot?

BS: Yes. Now they- now they're buying basically cloth made in Pakistan, but- you still can see a bag of rags, especially at the paint stores, is where you'll see them. Yeah. And so that's- that's a business that's probably seventy to a hundred million dollars, probably dominated by one or two guys. So that's where that would come from. So in other words, you're separating by- by color, by fiber content, by size. And, you know, you're doing this with people who didn't graduate junior high school -- and weren't appreciated, I don't think, except that they came to work.

SC: Yeah, okay. Should we start with the history?

BS: Ah, you wanna- Are we going back to the history?

SC: Yeah, let's go back, just go back to your- you've talked about your father's history to a certain extent, so we should start with him and then go to your mother's family. So what do you know about your father's family as far back- You talked a little bit about that, but as far back as you know?

BS: As I said that my father did not dwell in the land of reminiscence, I didn't- I was young when my grandfather died, I was about eight or ten, so I didn't have that opportunity to question them; and when I did question them, my father wasn't especially interested. What I learned was that they came from Vilna, I believe, or in a town near Vilna. And my grandfather had left to follow 01:31:00his older cousin- older sister and maybe her husband. And he did that because he was avoiding inscription in the- either the White or the Red Army. So that would have been around, I'm assuming, 1917 [or] 1914 during the revolution. I heard that they were in the cattle business, but as I said, I don't know whether that meant they had a cow in the front yard of the shtetl or whether they had ten cows. I have a side of my family that went to Rhodesia and then eventually back to the United States, and they were in the cattle business. They were cousins in New York who owned the Black Angus Restaurant in the '40s and '50s, and is that an accident or did they know something about beef? I know he didn't know much about women because he gave one prospective date a piece of beef, couldn't 01:32:00understand why she wouldn't answer his calls. He said, "It was a nice piece of meat!" Yeah, so I don't know.

My uncles or whoever they were on the West Coast were really kind of interesting, wild kind of guys. They owned a lot of cattle, they had large herds, and they were just sort of fun guys. I don't know. I didn't know them very well. My father had gone during the war to California and then Seattle to train to become a mechanic on B-29s. And he had not finished college, he'd gone to Temple for a year, and then they conscripted him in some kind of military program where he did mechanics, learned how to become a- an engine mechanic, and then he was selected for B-29 training. So he didn't see action which was very, 01:33:00very okay with him. I wouldn't say he was unpatriotic, but I don't think he was a man who wanted to die in the war. He wanted to live. And he became very close to- I don't know if she was his cousin or whatever, but a- to- to a relative on the West Coast, and they remained lifelong friends. So she was- her maiden name was Sheftel, and these were her two brothers, and I believe that they came to the United States from South Africa, obviously before the war, because she was 01:34:00married and a little older than my dad.

So he came back to the- to the East Coast to go to work with his father --I think he wanted to stay in Hollywood -- and met my mother. And he met my mother on a blind date, I believe that a local Allentownian- Max Stettner had a date with my mother, but somehow or another Max Stettner and the real estate developer, good- Goodman, I can't remember Mr. Goodman's first name, but I know his father was quite successful during the Prohibition with the Bermans. And so 01:35:00Bernie Berman and Max Stettner and- that's not Jerry- Murray Goodman! Were all kind of buddies and they met someone in New York and one thing led to another, my mother was invited to a date and Max Stettner- he didn't stand her up, but he couldn't make the date. And, somehow or another, my father's name was injected in there and she was sick and couldn't make the date. And I don't know, I think it was- the Kobrovskys She met somebody who invited her to come back to Allentown, that there were a lot of single men, and somehow or another in the story my father came up and one thing led to the next, and they did go on this date. I think they were in- in New York. My father told my mother he was going 01:36:00to marry her, and six months later they got engaged and were married very soon after that.

So, you know, it's kind of another one of these mythical tales that actually are not mythical. And they lived together for their entire adult life. My mother is 89, still alive. My father... it's 2017, is 93. He has dementia, but lives in the same facility as my mother and doesn't- it's peculiar to speak with him because he- he- he's not- he doesn't- he doesn't remember. Anybody who's lived with someone with dementia, you know, it's a jumbled up, mess of scraps. And 01:37:00it's odd to look at him -- but he continues to talk. My mother says it's gibberish, but he chats away, he's in good health. He had a hip replaced just as he slipped into a deeper dementia -- in that would have been four years ago, May 22nd, 2013. And he's still alive and has no clue why you want to ask him about his leg and he's still fascinating. You know he- he is some kind of weird charmer. And that's- I think that was part of his business success, is that he- he had a temper, he had a personality and a temperament, I know that he wanted 01:38:00to succeed, and whatever else you might say about how he lived his life, there was a magic to how he ran his business. You know, right now we're living through a- administration with Donald Trump as our president, and there are certain traits which Donald Trump seems to have on exhibition. And my mother and I often talk about my father maybe having similar traits, magic thinking or whatever. In my father's case, they were linked to- you may have had some magic thoughts, but more of his thoughts were actually completed and created. And how he got there, maybe it shared a certain resemblance, but seems universally to have been thought of as "charming". But now I find that a lot of people think he was 01:39:00something other than that. But you could still compress it under the title, you know, "determined".

So my mother lived in Allentown, participated in Hadassah, she was president of Hadassah. And I think if we look at the city today, which will not resemble the city I grew up in, all the West End and what appeared to be very modest homes are the homes of people who ran businesses, employed a hundred people or two hundred people, and I think the modesty belies some kind of- these people operated their businesses, they- they weren't looking to sell out and be bought out, they- they operated them. And the complexion of the city is quite different, unrecognizable really, to the days that I grew up when the sign said, 01:40:00" Allentown, 1960, All American City." You know, it was a city of people making things, doing- having people working for them. And we- what did we do? We made rags. I mean- it's very- it's a peculiar transition for someone like- like myself who's thoughtful about it because we- we don't seem to be making anything. And it's ironic how the industry that I caught the tail end of would really- well, you know, what was it? And yet it was really quite fascinating, all the different things that people made from fiber.

SC: How about your mother's past? Do you have anything to add about your mother's background? Not really?

BS: My mother, you know, grew up in- my mother grew up in Brooklyn. She was the 01:41:00daughter and sister of Jack Lobell, who was also a merchant. He had his own business, he sold Pearl buttons and apparently was quite a character, you know -- he had- his first wife and two children died in the 1914, 1917 flu epidemic. And then he began dating my mother's mother and she died in 1945, leaving Gene and Ronnie, who was 17 -- my mother was 17. And then he remarried about six weeks later-- my mother's mother's brother's wife, so her aunt. And my mother 01:42:00resented that for a good part of her life and not quite sure why, but he- you know she- she loved him very much, and he apparently was quite a character. He was a salesman on the road, but a businessman, independent. And he- there's a story that they called him in Chicago and told him that Hilda was quite ill and he should come as quickly as he could. And he was home that evening and no one 01:43:00seemed to notice because, you know, she recovered from whatever it was and- It was a long- apparently, it was a long and not very nice illness. She was in the house for quite a few years with some caretakers, and he tried to have a- as my mother says, a "quack doctor" take care of her in a rented hotel room. So when the end came, my grandfather took my mother and her sisters to Atlantic City the day that her mother died. And he said, "Look, you know, I want to live." Now, remember, it was after the war, 1945, and- and so him marrying this woman -- who he knew, her husband had died -- probably is not so awful, but for some reason 01:44:00it was devastating for my mother. And I think my mother set her sights on a man who would provide security for her. And when she met my father in 1950 he loaned her or left his car with her the first night. And the story that she tells is that her brother leaned out the window in Brooklyn, saw the Cadillac or Buick convertible and said, "What did you do for that?" And that sort of started their relationship. I mean, looking at the pictures, they had a great time. So I think that she brought with her a certain sense of tenacity, of you know," I'm going to do what I need to do to get this done." And I think she provided a balance to him that maybe looking back, we could miss, but that during the time I think 01:45:00they thought they were doing quite well. In the pictures of where they went, you know 1954 they took a 17 hour trip -- for my father it was business, but my mother was excitement. They went to Italy, to Spain. When I went back in 1980- something, I met with a man who, when he recognized the name and put my father together with my name, began patting me on the back and laughing and remembering a trip they took through the Alpine- Alpine Mountains between Bella and Florence. That apparently was a bit of a rip roaring trip. Apparently a lot of grappa was drunk on that trip, and I don't mean on the side of the road. So, you 01:46:00know, it was- they did business, but they also seem to be living a life that was really quite exciting. I hear they were in Europe and I don't know how many people travel to Europe. I remember my father and mother taking me to- in- in Milan, to the opera house, to the- I remember the opera house, I don't have to remember the name. But yeah, it was pretty- I think quite an interesting life for a man who was selling rags, you know. That's kind of the inside joke.

SC: So-

BS: Textile Reclamation Engineer, I think, was the title.

SC: That's perfect. So I have two questions for you. The first one is, what do you value most in life?

BS: Me personally? I think probably honesty. Trustfulness. Telling- Telling 01:47:00what's honest, but in the context that it was- I can understand that your- your truth may be different, but tell me it, unadorned, and you'll have my respect.

SC: And secondly, what has made you feel the most creative in life?

BS: It's an interesting question because I've been in situations where I didn't understand that I was creative -- which really is kind of silly when you look 01:48:00back over- I was a drummer in a band here in Allentown, photographer -- I photographed Queen Elizabeth, I think I was twelve, I was the youngest photographer to commercially do that. But I never thought of myself, per se, as creative; I never been given that permission. I thought that was a- an exalted role that I wasn't worthy of. So it's interesting that you would ask me that. And I- I must say that having worked with photographers in New York and not working as a photographer in the- at the local level, but, you know, with a connection to Richard Avedon and Lisette Model, people who are in museums at this point, the story of understanding how my uncle saw color is very gratifying 01:49:00for me, to understand that creativity is in the person and we bring it to anything and everywhere that people go, and that creative people are not necessarily creative no matter what they do -- or the opposite, that they are in fact creative no matter what they're doing. And I've lived pretty much without this idea that if you- you know what, you remind me of a story. When I was in South Carolina running the factory in the '80s, I met a young woman who was working for the television station and she explained to me that she was working in a very creative field. And I said to her, "What field is that?" She said, 01:50:00"Television!" I looked at her and I said, "You know, you sort of surprised me." She goes, "Why? Everybody knows television's creative." I said, "Really? I don't know a lot about electronics. I'm fascinated by how we found brass and copper in the mountains. I mean, some men have a vision of a big cooking pot. I don't know how that happened, but I always thought of television as electrons running through a wire and that- not really seeming too creative." And she said, "What, are you kidding?" I said, "Actually, I'm not kidding at all. I don't think what- television by itself is creative. It's- It's who's using it and how they're doing it." And she said, "Well, that's just silly." I said, "Really?" And then I think I told her the story of my uncle.

So, yeah, I think creativity and what made me feel accomplished was recognizing 01:51:00the creativity that my uncle brought to his work without any- And you know, I have a hard time with the artists of New York with describing pictures. It seems to me that the picture should be able to speak for itself, and that's why we use the camera to communicate that way. We seem now to be explaining why the photographer's picture is interesting. My uncle had no consciousness about what he was doing as creative, but it was. And my uncle was celebrated in that he could sit at a piano and play a tune by ear. So clearly the man had a creative consciousness. He didn't get the encouragement in his life. He didn't live what we would call a creative life. But clearly he was, and I think recognizing that 01:52:00was a really big deal for me.

SC: Yes. And this is the history that speaks for itself, what we're doing. Yes. Thank you so much.

BS: All the questions answered?

SC: Yes.

GE: Thank you. It's a good story, and that's what it's all about.

SC: So I'm just going to wait for about 10 seconds.

GE: First did you stop recording.