Threshold Resistance (2 page)

I
was born in 1924, five years before the start of the Great Depression, in Pontiac, Michigan, to German Jewish immigrants Fannie and Philip Taubman. Talk about threshold resistance. My parents surely encountered their fair share.

The story of how my parents came to America is a little hazy, as many immigrant stories are. From what I recall, my paternal grandfather was in the hardwood business in Bialystok, a city in what is today northeastern Poland that was known at the time for its textile industry and hardworking Russian, Polish, Jewish, and German population. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the story goes, he sent my father to the United States to find supplies of wood. My father came via boat up the Mississippi River and landed in Davenport, Iowa, where he was to meet an agent who would take him to Wisconsin and Minnesota. But my father, who spoke not a word of English, arrived on a Sunday, and the agent didn't show up, so he was promptly put in jail. The agent eventually showed up, got him out of jail, and helped him get a job as a gear grinder in a factory. After about a year, his parents were concerned that he might marry a non-Jewish woman, and so they sent over his second cousin—my mother—to keep him from straying.

They married, settled down in Davenport, and started a family. My oldest sister, Goldye, was born in 1913 followed by two boys, Sam and Lester, in 1915 and 1920. My father worked for the Wilson Foundry Company, and after World War I he was transferred to Wilson's Pontiac plant on Saginaw Street. My father had a good job with Wilson. The company thought highly enough of him to transfer him to its growing Michigan operation. But my father never felt satisfied or safe. He never fit in with the top executives, who certainly were not Jewish immigrants and were not about to invite him to join their country clubs. My father had dreams, ambition, and a desire to provide the best for his family. Call it entrepreneurial intuition: he knew there were at least as many barriers to his success at Wilson as there were opportunities.

Blessed with true entrepreneurial guts and spirit, my dad left the relative safety of the corporate world to start small fruit farms in nearby towns like Rochester and Orion. Later, he built modest commercial real estate projects and custom homes, including the comfortable four-bedroom Tudor-style home at 300 Ottawa Drive in which I was born. He also built the first synagogue in Pontiac. Both the house and the synagogue still stand.

The region was booming in the 1920s, as companies like Pontiac Motor, Oakland Motor, and Ford built plants that created thousands of well-paying jobs. A guy from New York named Shutzie had talked my father into building houses on some land just north of Pontiac, so he and my father borrowed money from the bank and put up a bunch of homes. Then the crash came, bringing widespread unemployment. In those days, the name of the original home builder remained on a mortgage even after the house was sold. If the home owner stopped making the mortgage payments, the bank looked to the builder for the funds. (Later, legislation was passed to include exculpatory clauses in mortgages to limit the builder's responsibility to the bank once the house was sold.) So when people who were unable to pay their mortgages walked away from their homes, the bank
looked to my father for repayment. Shutzie left town and went to Los Angeles.

My father was stuck with these vacant houses, which he couldn't sell or rent out. But he refused to abandon his financial obligations. For a period, he tended his orchards in northern Oakland County and moved us into a modest cottage on Sylvan Lake. Though it took him many years, my father made good on every precrash debt he owed, even though dozens of clients had left him holding the bag. It was a big lesson to us all. I remember those years as a very difficult period. I recall visiting a friend of mine—his father was an architect—and seeing him burning furniture in the fireplace for heat because their gas had been cut off.

School was not easy for me, either. To the best of their ability, my siblings helped pave the way for me. Back then, dyslexia, which I have struggled with all my life, was diagnosed as slowness or stupidity. As a kid I also stuttered. Add the fact that I was always big and a bit awkward for my age, and you get the idea that I was not a model student.

There were two things we always had in abundant supply at home during those challenging years: our love and our faith. In Pontiac we were part of a small but tightly knit Jewish community of about sixty families. My parents would send my sister to the West Side of Detroit once a week to get kosher meat. Most years at school, I was the only Jewish kid in my class. My parents spoke German at home. And with my name—I was called Adolph Alfred after my two grandfathers, who were both named Avram—I definitely had the sense of being an outsider. I was a big kid, though, which helped keep me out of a lot of fights. And thanks to some gifted, dedicated teachers in the Pontiac public schools, I never lost my sense of curiosity and desire to learn. Where others saw challenges, my teachers saw potential. I think that's why I so respect the teaching profession and have made education a major focus of my philanthropy.

Even at a very young age I was aware of the barriers—threshold
resistance—I would have to overcome to enjoy the level of success I could only dream about. Early on, I discovered that hard work broke through a lot of those hurdles. If it took me all night to read a simple chapter in a textbook, I put in the time. For spending money I cad-died at local golf courses when I was nine years old. You could make $1.10 for eighteen holes.

I also learned some early lessons about what works in retail. From age eleven through high school I worked afternoons and weekends in Sims, a discount department store on Saginaw Street in Pontiac. They were smart merchants, selling inexpensive goods for working people. I learned a valuable lesson one day when an irate mother came into the store to complain about a pair of shoes I had sold her for her young son a few weeks earlier. The boy had very narrow feet, and I had fit him terribly. I gave her a new pair and offered to have the cost taken out of my pay. The Simon brothers, who owned the store, immediately took me up on my offer.

At Sims I learned how to seductively display a tie with a new shirt, suggest a second pair of shoes, and recommend a color to complement a particular skin type. Selling was fun, and I was good at it. I also learned to recognize the difference in quality between one garment and another. Single-stitch sewing made all the difference in a dress shirt's look and life. Cheaper double-stitched shirts, which creased and bunched at the seams, became rags after a few washings. Unless a customer needed his new shirt only for church on Sundays, the savings for a cheaper shirt never made sense. It was satisfying to help shoppers through these important decisions and earn their trust. It was a great feeling to have customers come into the store and specifically ask for me—especially if they asked one of the Simon brothers!

After graduating high school in 1942, I enrolled at the University of Michigan to study art and architecture. But before I could learn the words to the fight song, geopolitics altered my agenda. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, my buddies and I
couldn't wait to enlist. We naively feared that the war would pass us by if we didn't hurry. There certainly was no lack of clarity regarding our country's reasons for taking on the Japanese and the Germans. It was around this time that I stopped using my first name, Adolph.

I entered the Army Air Corps in 1942, hoping to become a pilot. But a near-fatal accident during flight training in Oklahoma convinced me I was better off and more useful to Uncle Sam in intelligence, principally charting, mapping, and taking aerial photographs to assess after-action damage. My service with the Thirteenth Air Force was in the Pacific theater—New Caledonia, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. We'd fly out several times each week and come back exhausted. And in the middle of the night, Japanese planes would come and drop a few antipersonnel bombs, just to keep us up. My most vivid memory is of the devastation I saw and reported over Hiroshima, Japan, in the weeks after the first atom bomb was dropped in August 1945 (a second bomb would be deployed over Nagasaki three days later). Typically, I could confirm hits and damage to key targets by identifying landmarks and lining up street grids. That day in the heart of the city there were no surviving landmarks and no street grid. Seen from ground level, the destruction in Japan was even worse. I remember driving from Tokyo to Yokohama in a jeep. There were no highways, so we followed the surface streets. The street patterns were immaculate. All the houses had burned down, and only the chimneys remained standing. We drove for miles and miles and didn't see any people. I pray that our planet will never see anything like that again.

When I came home from the war at the end of 1945, I returned to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with some assistance from the GI Bill. It wasn't the typical college experience. To begin with, I was twenty-one and in a hurry to get on with my life. I joined a fraternity, Phi Sigma Delta, and became head of the food department, which meant I got free meals. I enrolled in the architecture school
and enjoyed the classes. At the time, the architects teaching us had been trained in the Beaux-Arts school, so we were taught to draw the great cathedrals like Chartres and Notre-Dame, with their flying buttresses and trusses. I also dabbled a little in painting.

Carlos Lopez was one of my favorite professors at the University of Michigan. He taught a painting course in the fine arts department and was an accomplished artist himself. Unfortunately, much of the time I should have been in class learning from Professor Lopez, I was on the golf course or looking after one of my fledgling campus businesses. Nevertheless, I loved his course and enjoyed painting very much.

At the end of the semester, as grades were being finalized, Professor Lopez called me to his office to give me two things I'll never forget: a C and a drawing. The C, he explained, was the highest grade he could muster, given my regular absence from class. The drawing, one of his own india ink and wash depictions of a falconer, was a gift to encourage my continued interest in art.

“You have promise, Alfred,” I remember him saying, “but you will not find it on the golf course.”

The wonderful drawing, the first piece of art I ever owned, still hangs in my home. And the professor's words still ring in my ears. Since that humbling meeting more than a half-century ago, my golf game has shown more deterioration than brilliance, but my love of art has blossomed into one of the joys of my life.

I did spend some time on the golf course, but I also spent a lot of time working. I always had a few jobs during school. With no money for anything other than tuition, I immediately visited the local shoe store and offered the proprietor a proposition that was either creative or desperate. Instinctively understanding that convenience trumps threshold resistance, I would visit the on-campus sorority houses just after dinner with an assortment of stylish women's shoes from the store's inventory. With the permission of the housemoth
ers, I displayed the shoes on the stairway leading up to the girls' rooms. As they finished dinner, they would pass by my display, I would take orders, and they would pay for and pick up their new shoes at the store in town over the next few days. I would hand the girls a slip of paper designating the style and size of their shoes. I always guessed their size correctly (honestly, I never missed), but the girls didn't see the size on my order slip. I had devised a graph (styles down one column, sizes across the top) with the store owner to create a code only we could decipher. Believe me, nothing kills a sale faster than suggesting to a girl who wants to be a size six that she really is a size nine.

Shoes at that time ran about $18 to $26. I could sell a dozen pairs each night, netting $1 per pair. If the shoe was a slow-selling model, the store owner gave me a bonus of 50¢. Not a bad way to make ends meet and meet girls at the same time!

My experience as a shoe salesman came up decades later in 2003 at a conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center. Professor Peter Linemann invited me to participate on a “Living Legends” panel with real estate giants Gerald Hines and Walter Shorenstein. And it turned out that the three of us had worked as shoe salesmen early in our careers. Linemann asked if there was some lesson to be learned from our shared experience. Gerry and Walter did their best to stay serious, but I couldn't help myself. “Looking back,” I answered, “I can say that the best thing about being a shoe salesman was the view.” After a few awkward seconds of pondering my reply, the audience roared with laughter. Thank goodness.

I also got into the wholesale business. Around prom season at the University of Michigan I assembled a sales force of fellow undergraduates to stream through the dormitories and fraternity houses, taking orders for corsages, which I priced well below the local florist. On prom day, I would drive to Detroit's Eastern Market to buy the cor
sages wholesale, rush back to campus (at least, as fast as my finicky 1940 Ford would take me), where my sales team was waiting, equipped with a fleet of bicycles. Orders were delivered fresh right to the customers' doors.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was developing my own theory of threshold resistance throughout these formative years. I saw opportunities where others hadn't. I learned the value of service and convenience, as well as presentation and delivery to pull the customer toward a new opportunity. I learned that a lack of capital was no barrier to entry if you had a good idea. And I learned that my strengths were far more important than my shortcomings, and that even the most difficult personal and business challenges—whether physical or psychological—could be overcome if understood and confronted forcefully.

I learned something else about myself in those years, too: I was impatient. I was eager to get out and take advantage of what I saw as a world of opportunity. And so I left Ann Arbor (with three years of credits, thanks to my war service) and enrolled in night school closer to Detroit at Lawrence Tech to continue my architectural training. I proposed to my college sweetheart, Reva Kolodney, and went to work for Charles N. Agree.