December 24, 2005--Saturday Story: "Litwin The Tire King"

Litwin The Tire King

Basically all losers, Brooklyn’s true royalty were the Dodgers, gangsters, and anyone who managed to eke out more than a living. But men in the latter category, men who had their own businesses, who were their own bosses, even if they made less that a Fuller Brush man, they could at least think about themselves as royal. Especially if they managed to earn enough to buy a one-family house (and not a semi-attached version), get a new new car every three years, particularly if they didn’t need one (as opposed to buying a used new car), and could buy their wife a mink coat (not just a stole) from I. J. Fox, before she was fifty and weighed 200 pounds. But a mink not from Cousin Moritz, who had a few pelts stashed away in a rickety loft building in Manhattan.

There was, for example, Willy who owned his own store, Willy’s Fine Fruits. Not that he ever had much fruit—it appeared that he specialized in root vegetables because they did not require refrigeration or ice and thus he did not need to incur those unnecessary expenses. But this also meant that he did almost no business. Since the mothers were doing some aspiring of their own, they had only limited interest in a steady diet that emphasized potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, and beets. Though Willy did display some cabbage, at times celery, and tomatoes from New Jersey for three weeks in August (there was as a result an annual rush of customers), his basic offering of fruit was two bushels of apples (indistinguishable in taste the women said from his potatoes), and a few bunches of bananas. You can then imagine that Willy and Mrs. Willy not only didn’t have even an attached house of their own but still lived in a third floor walkup.

So much for the alleged transformative magic of having your own business. From Willy I knew that more was involved than just that.

Then as another example, there were the machies--what we called refugees from Poland. They owned a Dairy. I didn’t exactly know what machie meant but when I referred to them that way on one shopping excursion for my mother—I think to get four eggs—they told her what I called them the next time she came into their store, and subsequently I painfully learned that some things were to be kept private because for the first and only time in my life my mother smacked me a few times when she got home.

The machies, I mean the Wilnitzskis, were considerably more entrepreneurial than Willy. They had a fully stocked store that was heated and had wire baskets into which to load canned goods. They even used an adding machine to calculate what was owed as opposed to Willy who did his tallying with a crayon on the same brown paper bag in which he loaded your potatoes. And though the Wilnitzskis barely spoke a word of English, the atmosphere in the store was so welcoming that the women would gather there to exchange family stories as an alternative to the literally more toxic environment available to them at the beauty parlor.

But it was quite a marginal business. Though many in the neighborhood wanted very much to shop there, in truth more as a way to help them get started in America after having spent three years in The Camps in Poland, the last six months at Auschwitz, their prices were a little high (there was a competitive A&P three blocks down Church Avenue) and that sadly trumped any desire to show solidarity or benevolence. Twenty-five instead of thirty-five cents for a loaf of white bread made the three block walk irresistible, as well as guilt-provoking. What after all had we suffered—rations on the amount of meat we were able to buy each month? Thus, the Wilnitzskis began to grow bitter and the atmosphere in the store began to darken. There were even days when, muttering incomprehensibly, they would wave their arms and hands around not only out of frustration but also, the women were beginning to say, to flash their concentration camp tattoos in our faces. Talk about guilt!

Their son Nathan was in my class and though his English was halting and heavily accented and he wore funny clothes (it was rumored, from over there), we attempted to draw him into the gang. He wasn’t that bad in comparison to some of the other refugee children in the neighborhood who either ran wild or kept morosely to themselves. Nathan at least tried to fit in, and was tireless in chasing the girls away from where we would gather to play, which made him at least useful.

It was during an extra hot day one August when my mother was too exhausted to even think about going out, and because she had pity on me not to demand I go all the way to the A&P, that she sent me to the Dairy to get some milk and a half pound of cream cheese with scallions. It was then that I discovered that the Wilnitzskis were gone.

The store was abandoned and shuttered and I could see that a window had been shattered. Peering through the opening I could also see that all those careful displays of paper towels and canned soup had been toppled over. Something had been written on the wall above the ice chest, but it was too dark for me to make out what it said. Though it did look to me like very angry writing.

And when in the afternoon I went over to the schoolyard to play some ball there was no Nathan. No one knew where he was or what had happened. Later it was rumored they had moved away to stay with some relatives in Toronto.

Years later I wondered if they had opened another dairy there. And if they were still living in an apartment or had made enough money to buy a one-family house. I suspected the latter.

The Vets were clearly the most successful. They came back from the army where they had been in the Radio Corps and immediately started to build all sorts of homemade electrical things—portable radios, walkie-talkies, and even a hand-wired television which flickered away in their basement apartment and which we all instantly knew was more than just magic—it was the future. And as such, when they decided to turn this hobby into a business, their store, called The Vets, became a place to which people were drawn. At first to stand in the street outside to peer at the TV in the window that was always turned on. And although we could not hear any sound we were still entranced by the images and later by the silent play of the Dodgers on TV or the Friday Night Fights broadcast live from Madison Square Garden. When there was a championship bout, one had to fight to get close enough to be able to see the tiny figures squaring off on the bug-eyed 10 inch screen. Especially if the challenger was Jewish.

And when they began to carry televisions that were affordable, that could be paid off five dollars a week, their radio repair shop turned into a business. And the more they were able to sell the more repair work they had since these early sets needed to be constantly in the shop or, if you bought one with a service contract, one of the Vets would actually come to your apartment and dismantle the TV on the living room rug. A version of a doctor’s house call, but much more a young boy’s fantasy—to have all those tubes and capacitors and transformers stacked up right there. It made missing Kukla, Fran and Ollie tolerable, and it sure beat getting a penicillin shot.

They did very well and so we were not surprised when one of the Vets, the marred one, was the first to buy his own house—just around the corner from the store. Attached to be sure, but a private house nonetheless. And his wife showed up one day at Willy’s in a Persian Lamb jacket. Clearly on the way to the mink.

Except that in an act of overreaching, the Vets, if you can believe it, added dozens of tanks of tropical fish to the unused front of the store, feeling this would bring in more customers. And it did for a time so they expanded that part of the business, investing in the most delicate and exotic and expensive fish from the Amazon that the Aquarium in Coney Island didn’t even have. It brought them to the attention to the Brooklyn section of the Daily News where there was a story and a picture of them in the army caps standing in front of the Beta tank. But the whole enterprise came crashing down when one weekend in November there was a power failure and all the heaters in the tanks failed and, as a result, when they arrived at the store Monday morning, they found every single fish belly up and dead.

So were the Vets—they too went belly up, bankrupt. And they too, like the Wilnitzskis before them, for very different reasons, slipped away one night to avoid their creditors, taking with them all the TVs they had in the back awaiting repair. Thanks to this, in many apartments throughout East Flatbush there was considerable despair and no Uncle Milty for quiet some time.

Then there was Litwin. The Tire King, who made a comfortable living during the War selling retread tires on the Black Market. But his fortunes really soared, when after the War, he got the first Firestone Tire franchise in Brooklyn. He was very quick on his feet and got a jump start on the competition by arranging to buy hundreds of fresh-off-the-line Firestones and had them trucked directly to him from Toledo.

So when the word spread that Litwin had a supply or real tires there (as opposed to retreads), there was a line around the corner on Ralph Avenue as everyone from the neighborhood as well as from as far away as Lakewood, New Jersey raced over there. My father included—to buy four new black walls plus a spare.

Litwin’s business flourished, he did so well that he was able to get a new Caddy every year, bought Mrs. Litwin a full length mink, so huge that it looked like Joe Lewis’ bathrobe, which thus almost managed to obscure Yetta, his wife, who was quite extra large herself. And most enviably, Litwin also was the first to buy a totally detached private house on an acre of land, if you can believe it, on Long Island!

My father was fascinated by Litwin, feeling that as a businessman himself, there were lessons to be gleaned from Litwin’s success.

Dad was a failed businessman—his first venture was a bar and grill that he, a Jew, owned in an Irish neighborhood (he failed there because he was principled and refused to sell drinks to anyone after they had “had enough”—when the profits unfortunately kicked in). With his Uncle Herman he owned a parking garage in Park Slope before Park Slope was Park Slope and there were still plenty of places to park safely on the street for free. And then he opened a laundromat in the middle of Flatbush just at the time when everyone in that neighborhood was beginning to be able to buy washers and driers of their own.

So as an admirer of Litwin, my dad would load me into the car every Saturday, whether we needed tires or not, to visit The King to see what we could learn about his business that my father could apply to his own--at the time he had both the bar and the garage—since he too was in a version of the Automotive Industry.

One thing my father gleaned from Litwin was that he not only had the latest model tires direct from the factory, but he also sold them at a discount. Aha, my father thought, that’s the secret—cut the price. And so he did, offering beers at half price before seven and after eleven. But that didn’t work. Actually it had the opposite effect since his regulars had just so much capacity and no matter what Dad charged when they reached that capacity or “had enough,” they either stopped on the own or my father refused to serve them. So the Seven-Eleven Club went the way of the laundromat. And at the garage, no matter how much he would discount the price for monthly space, pre alternate-side-of-the-street parking, there were not enough customers to rent them. Thus the garage too was on the brink of collapse and Uncle Herman, who had put up the money, was in the early stages of looting the fixtures.

Maybe, maybe there was something else besides cutting prices that could be learned from Litwin. And so one Saturday, after we hadn’t been there for a few weeks, we ventured over. When we turned off Kings Highway toward Ralph, we immediately needed to slam on the breaks because there was at least a three-block long line waiting to get onto the lot. This was most unusual. After the pent up postwar demand had been met, there were never more than a half dozen cars there. Maybe, my father thought, Litwin had a supply of dazzling new White Walls we had been hearing about. Dad in fact was eager to get a set for his new used sleek black Chrysler, so maybe that was what was going on.

We crept toward the station and in about half an hour, in addition to the familiar mountains of used tires heaped before the garage that were icons of the King’s fortune, we noticed something very new—at least a dozen gas pumps had been installed in front of the tire shed since we had been there and everyone in line was waiting to get filled up. But why such a lineup?

As with all other gas stations, Litwin had surrounded the place with huge signs not only advertising the type of gas being offered, in his case Texaco, but also the price per gallon. And Litwin, completely in character, was selling his gas for two cents a gallon less than anyone else. My father immediately knew this was a brilliant strategy—to announce to all that that wizard Litwin was now not only the King of tires but he was also a General in the Gas War! And my dad also knew that he could not make a profit selling gas at these prices and he was doing it as a loss leader, a new concept for me; and that by next weekend he would raise his prices, but by having attracted new customers for gas he would thereby increase his already booming tire business. Litwin was a genius! And if my father could only figure out how to do something equivalent he too would be in the Caddy, mink, and private house business!

Through the following week my father was in a continuous state of agitation and anticipation—he couldn’t wait to get back there to see how Litwin would in fact be doing after he raised his gas prices and what effect that would have on his overall business. At five in the morning on Saturday my father roused me and said, “Get dressed. We’re going first to Garfield’s to get something to eat and then we’re going over to Litwin’s to see what’s going on.”

In truth I was more interested in the breakfast at Garfield’s where I knew they had the best lox and eggs and onion rolls in the city, and it was additionally special to be included among the other early-rising men of Brooklyn. Real men who did real work and were thus out and about on their own before dawn.

But my father was so eager to get over to Litwin’s that he made me bolt down the food and yanked me out of there before I was able to finish my fourth roll. But the car wouldn’t start; and it took so long to get a taxi to give us a push, that by the time we got to Ralph Avenue there was a two-block line!

My father was totally perplexed. “What’s he up to? What’s going on over there? Is he selling something else beside tires and gas?” He wondered out loud that maybe Litwin had been so successful pumping gas below the margin that those in line were waiting for both gas and tires. “What a genius, what a mensch. If only he might be willing to share some of his secrets with me. If only . . . “

This time the line moved forward much faster because Litwin himself, as nattily dressed as ever, was actually there at the pumps directing cars to either fill up or move over toward the lifts so they could get new tires. So it was working my father mused. “He’s amazing!” But just as he uttered this praise, he noticed that Litwin was still selling gas for two cents a gallon less than anyone else. He was still at war.

So this wasn’t a temporary pricing scheme to lure business his way. “What is he up to? What is he thinking and how can I do a version of the same thing?”

We pulled over to one of the bays and got out, peering over at what was going on. Marveling at Litwin’s acumen and energy. After a bit, Litwin looked up and saw my father waiting, wanting to approach him, and with a royal gesture indicated it was all right to step closer. He turned to his son who was a genetic duplicate of Mrs. Litwin, (which was not a good thing for a single 26 year old), and signaled for him to take over directing the flow of cars as Litwin hoped he would on day take over everything else so he and Yetta could move permanently to Miami Beach where, with the same sense of vision he had for business, some years earlier had bought waterfront property.

He nodded to my father that he would speak with him, a colleague in the Business, for just a minute, “You can see how busy I am.”

“Yes indeed I can. This is wonderful. And that’s why I want to have a brief word with you. Tell me, please tell me, how do you do it?”

“I do not understand. How do I do what?”

“I know from the tires. That I understand. You knew that business from the War and then from Firestone. But gas? What do you know about gas.”

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he guffawed, “living with Mrs. Litwin, I know gas! But I get what you mean—gas for cars.”

“Yes, gas for the cars. In my garage I have a pump and I sell gas. Not very much, to tell you the truth, but I know how much it costs to buy from the distributor and I therefore know the margins. That’s what I want to know, how you can make money from the gas? Yes, I can see that by selling it so cheap you get more people coming in to by the tires. But I do not get how it works with the gas.”

Litwin moved closer to him and reached up as if to whisper in my father’s ear (Litwin was no more than five-two, my father was five-eleven, and so he needed to stand on his toes). I approached them as well, two old Jews about to share some ancient hermetic knowledge that I also would need to know before too long—Tires? Gas? Parking? Beer? Washing machines? Medical school?

“Well Dave, since we’re in the same business I’ll tell you.” My father was quivering. Litwin’s mouth was almost touching his ear, “It’s true that I sell my gas for less than I pay for it. And I do lose two cents on every gallon.”

“Yes? And?” My father almost fell over onto Litwin.

“It’s simple. Though I lose two-cents a gallon, I make it up on the volume.”

“That’s it?

“Yes, that’s what I’ve learned and you can see for yourself what I’ve achieved.” With a sweeping gesture that took in his empire—the four bays for tire changing, the sixteen gas pumps, and by implication the house, Caddies, and mink. (But it was also clear that this achievement did not include his schlemiel of a son.)

My father didn’t understand and was forever frustrated by that, by what Litwin had revealed to him and that he would never fully figure out or be able to apply. And so we lived on in our small apartment, Dad never did manage to buy a real new car, and though my mother never got her mink coat (she in truth didn’t want one), she did one day come home to find a very nice stole that my father bought from Cousin Moritz.

But it was the great Tao of Business that Litwin had discovered right there on humble Ralph Avenue right next to the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. A King among his peers.

After a few years, he and Mrs. Litwin did move to Miami and lived into their nineties, though their son did manage to bankrupt the business when he opened a restaurant midway between the garage and the gas works.