My Father's Business Was Not For Me

My Internet feed brought a story of children relating how embarrassed they were when young to say their father sold bras (https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/whiteplains/embarrassed-by-dads-bra-business-as-kids-siblings-built-a-lingerie-empire-women-swear-by/)

I can relate to that. 

My father’s primary business was manufacturing ladies’ panties and half-slips. T the start of an academic year everyone had to stand up before our elementary school classmates and relate what their father did. I would cringe. I was embarrassed to say he made panties. When I related that to my parents they suggested I say he made  lingerie.

That worked until one year I had to explain lingerie meant half-slips and panties. Tee-hees from the rest of the students embarrassed me into demanding a different vocation from my parents. Instead, they told me to just say they were “in business.” No further details were necessary. Just “in business.” 

It must have been a magical solution because no one ever questioned what “in business” meant. They could have been part of a holdover of Murder, Inc. for all the kids knew, Murder, Inc. having been a thriving Jewish-Italian Brooklyn enterprise of the 1920s-1940s.

Whatever. “Business” continued to be my parents’ occupations on all official school  forms for the rest of their working lives. 

Of course, my little secret had its shortcoming. Every year around Hanukkah it was customary to give teachers presents. Children brought in books, candy, stationery items. Nothing too expensive. We all oohed and aahed when our teacher revealed the gifts. 

My gift—my parents’ pride and joy—was a clear plastic handbag filled with colorful panties and slips!

Thankfully, gift-giving ended about fifth grade. I was spared further embarrassment until my first trip to Israel, Italy and France when I was 17. Half of my luggage for my eight-week trip contained clothing, especially lingerie, intended for my father’s friends and relatives. 

If you linked the article above you would have read that the children’s angst turned into a lucrative business for them as adults selling bras. Though my father entertained the idea of my joining him in the “business,” I demurred. I just couldn’t work for him, aside from wanting a career in journalism.

Let me explain: One of my jobs as a teenager at his factory on Broadway north of Houston Street was to assemble boxes of half-slips of assorted colors, a dozen colors to a box. On a long cutting table he would line up boxes of each color and, going left to right, instruct me to pull from each box one half-slip. Black, then red, then peach, and so on till the dozen was completed with a white half slip.

Easy enough, repetitively boring though it may be. To relieve some of the banality of my task I reasoned that once I got to the end of the line I could begin a new assortment by starting with white and making my way back to black.

My formula worked efficiently enough until Dad checked my progress. All hell broke loose as he reprimanded me for failing to follow his instructions. He wanted the white slip to be on top, black on the bottom.

I countered that all I had to do was flip the slips upside down in the assorted box, but that did not mollify him. You couldn’t argue with him. It was his way, all the way, all the time. It was an example of why my brother nicknamed him “The Boss.” 

It was also a key reason why my brother as well never considered joining him in the business.

It turned out to be fortuitous. Dad’s business, based on panties and the more lucrative half-slips, dissipated in the late 1960s as women shifted from wearing skirts and dresses to dress pants and blue jeans. Stores my father sold to, companies like JCPenney, Sears, Levine’s, C.R. Anthony, Macy’s, no longer ordered half-slips by the gross. 

Knowing the names and histories of those retail companies made my transition to editor and publisher of Chain Store Age that much easier. 

But my appreciation of his “business” did not engender personal satisfaction until my college years. I was finally able to turn embarrassment into a comic retort when asked what I did during school breaks.  “I had my hand in ladies’ panties,” I would say. 

I Sinned Therefore I Am

Here’s why copy-reading your own writing can be viciously amusing, why relying on spellcheck, A. I. or other programs is not infallible, why copy editors should be treasured, not discarded. 

As midnight approached Tuesday night I hastened to compose and transmit a wrap-up the evening’s poker game.  Four players, including yours truly, achieved double digit wins. Three players lost more than $30 apiece. 

I chose a simple opening sentence: “Big winners. Big losers.”

Only, spellcheck failed to alert me that I had not correctly spelled “winners.” I had correctly spelled “sinners.” 

Eighteen hours after sending out the recap, only one caught the mistake or, perhaps, matter-of-factly accepted their respective characterization as a sinner. I know I am guilty of transgressions, at least some of the time.  

Water Walking, Bird War, Unmasking America

I walked on water yesterday.

Oops. That was a typo. I walked “in” water, though technically I did walk on water, water at the bottom of the pool at the Lifetime gym.

Tuesday was my first day not wearing a rehabilitation boot since I incurred a hairline foot fracture and severe ankle sprain six weeks ago playing pickleball. Gilda has been touting the benefits of walking in water. As I am still several weeks away from court competition, I finally agreed to join her in the pool.

She regularly walks for 90 minutes. I managed 60 minutes. Was it fun? Eh! Will I do it again? Sure. At least until I am pickleball ready. 

Did the birds see me waving a white flag?

I have given up our annual fight, the birds almost daily starting construction of nests at the extreme ends of our retracted patio awning, me spending mornings yanking down their would-be habitats. Loyal readers of this blog may recall past confrontations. 

This year the birds won. Chalk it up to laziness, or the weariness of my Sisyphusian task. So instead of building just two nests at the extremes, they have further humiliated me by feathering a nest in the middle of the awning superstructure. Gracious victors they are not.

Sadly, the birds have a predator more dangerous that I to worry about. Twice in the last week corpses of decomposed birds have been left on our property, one on the patio, the other on our backyard lawn. I suspect the killer is a cat new to our neighborhood that has recently prowled our yard. In our 40-plus years in our home we have never witnessed such carnage. I hope it stops. 

Back to Reality: Musings aside, each day brings more hints we live during the possible last days of our democratic republic, not because a despot cowered the populace into submission, but rather because everyday citizens have accepted neuterization. 

Several months ago a friend, Harold Brooks, posted this commentary from one of his friends. I find it tragically coherent: 

“It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

“Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: ‘He says the things I’m thinking.’

“And that’s the part that should chill us.

“Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

“Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.

“Now the mask is off. Now we know.

“And knowing is a far more dangerous place to be.”

 

News From the Far East Stirs Memories

When my family visited Japan in 1991 we were amused by the transaction process in department stores. Upon approaching a cash register, a woman would take our merchandise, hand it to another employee (usually a woman) who would then convey it to the cashier (another woman). After receiving our money she would pass along the merchandise to another woman who would gingerly wrap it in a bag before giving it to us. 

Women working in seemingly tedious, non-essential jobs were ubiquitous throughout the store. At each escalator, a woman oversaw entry and exit. So, too, at elevators. 

One could only marvel at the extreme customer service Japanese stores provided compared to their American counterparts. 

Ah, but that “luxury” service was a condition manifested by Japan’s full employment strategy, guaranteeing “work”—not meaningful work, just employment—to all. Japan had been riding a wave of economic vitality based on automotive and consumer electronics successes. Guaranteeing a job was deemed culturally appropriate.

Within a few years of our family’s visit, an economic tsunami hit Japan, the effects of which the country is still suffering through (https://share.google/aimode/cakQdcIIwMfFAXymW)

I’m reminded of this “Asian economics disaster” by an article in The New York Times detailing a court ruling in China that protects workers displaced by artificial intelligence (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemployment.html?smid=em-share). 

Long-term, it seems improbable that China will be able to accommodate the millions of workers, perhaps tens of millions, who will be made redundant by A.I. What amounts to forced retirement, even with a steady paycheck, will create a population seething with repressed energies. 

Unlike Japan, China’s goal of Asian, if not world, hegemony lies beyond its borders. A.I. is not making gameplanning any easier for Chinese officials or their American counterparts.

During that same trip to Japan, organized around interviews with executives of Ito-Yokado, Japan’s most profitable retail company, I met with Toshifumi Suzuki, mastermind behind Seven-Eleven Japan.  Suzuki’s passing at age 93 was reported last week (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/business/toshifumi-suzuki-dead.html?smid=em-share).

Suzuki was a dynamic, creative retailer. Though his haed-driving demeanor was not universally revered, his leadership made 7-Eleven a Japanese mainstay. When Ito-Yokado became a franchisee of Dallas-based Southland it opened one store in Tokyo in 1974. When I interviewed Suzuki it operated 4,300 highly-profitable units with extensive services beyond traditional convenience store fare, such as in-store banking. He also introduced bento boxes and seaweed-wrapped rice balls that were replenished several times a day in a store’s 24-hour operations. He also pioneered implementing the first large-scale point-of-sale system for item-by-item inventory management in Japan.

Thanks to Suzuki’s innovations Ito-Yokado was able to buy Southland. 

Suzuki disdained market research undertaken by American companies. “American research doesn’t really capture the consumer market,” he told me for an article in Chain Store Age. “Americans look at point of sale data to make merchandise assortments and they think they’re filling market needs. POS data only shows what’s on the store shelf.

“Marketing means to elicit and realize their potential needs.” 

In words as current today as they were in 1991, Suzuki said, “Convenience stores in the United States should be where customers want to shop and buy what they want.” He decried past practices that turned c-stores into soft drinks, beer and cigarette shacks. “That’s not a c-store,” he said. “People have illusions that these are c-stores.” 

Fondly Recalling Saloons of Chicago

Chicago is a great restaurant town.  Perhaps an even greater saloon town. 

Before retirement almost 17 years ago I visited the Windy City three to five times a year for nearly three decades. I enjoyed many a good meal there. 

Not being a big drinker I did not quench many thirsts at the numerous, friendly local bars throughout the city’s varied ethnic neighborhoods. Not even at the storied Billy Goat Tavern located behind Lebhar-Friedmnan/Chain Store Age’s offices at 444 North Michigan Avenue. A frequent hangout of my Chicago-based associates, I never got to meet Sam Sianis, Billy Goat’s effusive bartender-owner whose passing was noted on the front page of Fridays’ New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/dining/sam-sianis-dead.html?smid=em-share). 

I did, however, have a memorable meal in another Chicago landmark saloon, not because the food was extraordinary, but rather because Schulien’s was known for magic performed tableside for your exclusive amazement. 

Ernie Arms, the public relations chief of Sears, Roebuck and Co., took me to  Schulien’s, a tavern in the Albany Park section of Chicago run by the family from the time its first drink was sold in 1881 until it closed in 1999. 

Details of the meal elude my recall, but after dessert and dinner drinks were enjoyed, Charlie Schulien joined our table. The performance was about to start. 

His sleight of hand card tricks were sufficient to earn my appreciation, but his final act of wizardry truly caught my breadth. 

At his request I pulled a card from a deck without showing it to him, then tucked it back into the pack he was holding in his hand. I focused on the cards, consciously ignoring the spiel he was spewing intended to distract me. 

After a few minutes it was time for the big reveal. He asked what card I had picked and put back into the deck. 

Ten of diamonds, I said. 

Charlie took a glass of water and poured some onto the white tablecloth. It became translucent, revealing … the ten of diamonds!  

I was dumbstruck. Forget about getting the correct card. How could have slid the card under the tablecloth without my noticing? 

Naturally, an explanation of the trick was not forthcoming. It is now more than three decades since that magical night. Schulien’s is long since closed. But I fondly recall my meal with magic. 

No Longer a Tiffany Network, CBS Chases Change

What’s your tolerance of change? Do you automatically resist it, or do you give change a sporting chance to alter your life for the better? 

“The only constant in life is change.”

I cannot count the number of times I heard that bromide spouted by speakers at numerous retail industry conferences. They were quoting Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived some 2,500 years ago. 

“He famously taught that the world is in constant motion, noting that ‘Nothing endures but change.’ He is also widely remembered for his river analogy: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man.’

If it isn’t broken don’t fix it. That’s a classic reason to be change averse. Well, maybe a tinker or two would do wonders. 

Sports teams know that stagnation may lead to losing, or at least, non title seasons. Very few stagnant-roster teams secure consecutive championships. 

I grew up watching CBS News. Even before Walter Cronkite sat in the anchor’s chair, I listened as Douglas Edwards delivered 15 minutes of news each night on our black and white television in Brooklyn. Edwards sat in the anchor’s chair beginning in 1947, replaced by Cronkite in 1962. 

I’ve stayed loyal to CBS through the years, through evolving anchors, even and up to Tony Dokoupil.  

Poor Tony. A handsome face, for sure, but a lightweight, no doubt, when compared to all of his predecessors, I’d say. It has not helped his standing that he has been plagued by misfortune after misfortune, from opening night technical difficulties, which periodically continue to show up during a telecast, to the faux pas of not securing a visa to enter China to cover Donald Trump’s recent visit there. 

Without explaining why he was in Taiwan, 100 miles away from China, while anchors from competing networks reported from Beijing, Dokoupil also had to endure the misfortune of having to abruptly end a telecast as a cameraman had an emergency medical incident while he was wrapping up his first broadcast in Taiwan. The next day Dokoupil failed to provide an update on the condition of the cameraman. 

Why do I stay with CBS? For sure, inertia plays a part, a big part, of the reason. From time to time Gilda and I sample the news on NBC and ABC. The news is just as depressing on those networks. And, even after lots of CBS correspondents have been let go under Bari Weiss’ regime, we prefer digesting the news from those still at what once was rightfully called the “Tiffany Network.” 

The luster has definitely and definitively lost its sheen at CBS. Thursday night, when Stephen Colbert signs off, it will mark the final “Late Show” broadcast dating back to David Letterman’s tenure. Letterman and Colbert combined for 33 years of entertainment, 22 years for Letterman, 11 for Colbert. 

Colbert brought a more political sensibility to the show. The times—the Age of Trump—demanded it. 

CBS, the network under William Paley and Edward R. Murrow that stood up to Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, that under Paley and Cronkite sounded the futility of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s American involvement in Vietnam and helped expose President Richard Nixon’s Watergate crimes, no longer has ownership and management that unfailingly seeks to shine light on truth, not in its news division, and not through its late night entertainment. 

Media reports suggest that Bari Weiss is planning changes to two of the crown jewels of CBS News, its “Sunday Morning” show with Jane Pauley and the multi-anchored Sunday evening “60 Minutes.”

I started this blog by recognizing change is an essential part of any organism’s existence. Evolution. We are today vastly different from our ancestors—decades, centuries, millennia ago. 

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776. Paine, of course, was writing about the darkest days of the American Revolution, the need to strengthen the resolve of the men and women seeking a separation, a change, from what they had known before. They had no models to aspire to, no compass to discern their proper direction.

We, on the other hand, know that in our 250 year history as a nation, no previous president grifted as much as Trump, none created a slush fund for his family and cohorts, none bullied our allies as he does, none sought to overturn an election or instigated a mob assault on our Capitol. 

The pendulum of history will swing away from Trump. 

I look forward to that change. 

Ramblings About Our Present and Future

 Who will follow Donald Trump? JD or Marco? 

Forget straw polls of the Trumpian horde. The party populace will not choose the next Trumpian presidential candidate. That task will be reserved for his lordship,  (assuming, of course, the artificially-bronzed golden man-child doesn’t declare a national emergency to dissolve the 2028 election so he can stay in office).

Polls like the one recently released by AtlasIntel are meaningless. The nomination will go to whomever Trump prefers. That is, whomever promises to exalt him more (https://dailyvoice.com/md/bethesda/rubio-or-vance-new-poll-reveals-early-gop-preferences-for-possible-2028-presidential-race/).

Who Shot the Sheriff? I suspect skepticism about assassinations—actual and attempted—began after questions arose as to how Lee Harvey Oswald was able to shoot President John F. Kennedy all by himself. And how it was so easy for Jack Ruby to gun down Oswald in the Dallas police department parking garage. And how James Earl Ray was able to escape to England after shooting Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

So, it’s not surprising that lots of people have to swallow hard to believe repeated assassinations attempts of Donald Trump were real and not staged

(https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/whiteplains/new-poll-reveals-how-many-americans-think-trump-assassination-attempts-were-staged/). 

The Washington Post put it thusly: “About 1 in 4 say the correspondents’ dinner shooting was staged, the poll found, including roughly a third of Democrats, as conspiracy theories spread widely online.”

Sadly, we live in an age not of reason but of skepticism, fueled by the power of the Internet to shape public opinion. Even before all facts are known, rumor-mongers bombard our senses. This credibility crisis was aided and abetted by Trump’s first term mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway who coined the phrase “alternative facts” to explain away Trump’s frequent misrepresentations, lies, untruths and fabrications. 

Here’s a current example of his just plain dumbness that relies for support on an uninformed and misinformed MAGA nation: Commenting on the economic fallout from Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said because the U.S. doesn’t need oil imported through the Strait, America would not be harmed. Apparently he doesn’t understand that U.S. gasoline prices are based on international Brent Crude oil prices which is affected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And, as we are learning every day, oil and its byproducts are the foundation of many industries. Thus, an oil shortage affects prices in all sectors of the economy at home and abroad.

Future Shock: I want to be and stay informed. I really do. But the more I read about what the future has in store for humanity, the more depressed I become, not necessarily for my 77-year-old self but for the futures of my children and grandchildren.  

Every day, it seems, technologies heretofore depicted in Terminator-type movies of the future are closer to reality even before the first third of the 21st century has elapsed. Case in point: Read Thomas Friedman’s article (but only if you don’t mind becoming depressed)—https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/opinion/trump-iran-artificial-intelligence-china.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share. 

I don’t mean to depress you, or have you worry about my depression. I share this anxiety with you to assure you that if you are feeling similar emotions you are not alone. 

It doesn’t help relieve my depression that my foot injury will keep me from playing pickleball for another several weeks (at least). 

Independence Day Glories: When did MMA (Mixed Martial Arts, for those wondering) become our national past-time?

 

With the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country coming up, thoughts naturally arise to how we will celebrate national achievements that have benefitted mankind. 

Successes like development of the polio vaccine, the discovery of penicillin, creation of Covid vaccines. Invention of the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the telephone, television, the Internet, the personal computer.  

Americans invented baseball. Football (American style). Basketball. 

With a heritage like that, why would any well-grounded person choose to feature an MMA competition June 14 on the South Lawn of the White House? It’s as if Trump fashions himself as a latter day Roman Caesar arranging circus games to pacify the masses to make them forget that bread costs more every day since he started his war with Iran.

He is not tethered to reality. When you are untethered, when you truly believe you do no wrong, when you do not believe any negative reports, when you are convinced God has installed you as his emissary …

Yet your belief in yourself is so fragile that you cannot let a disparaging comment go unanswered …

You tilt at windmills. Literally and figuratively. 

Trump acts as if he believes the U.S. is impervious to penetration by the physical and metaphysical. Yes, he could bar legal, and illegal, entry of humans to American soil, but his ability to keep global warming and pollutants from our atmosphere is illusory. Instead of being a world leader in saving the environment, he is a world leader in abetting its destruction. 

He repeatedly has tried to shut down wind and solar energy projects plus electric car production in favor of more coal plants and gas-guzzling trucks and automobiles. He threatens mass transit projects. While the rest of the world, especially China, embraces a cleaner future, Trump cozies up to polluters and frees up restraints on their environmentally dangerous actions. 

More than ever I am trying to limit my driving to less than 40 miles a day, the battery-powered range of my plug-in hybrid Ford Escape. It’s an admittedly small contribution to saving the planet. Now, it’s your turn—what can you specifically cite as your contribution?