I love the atmosphere of New York, and I love New Yorkers.
They are straight and direct, and also incredibly hospitable and fun to be
with. Back in the day, probably around 1993, I was visiting a machinery dealership
whose offices were a stone’s throw from Shay Stadium. My journey to their
office was a little fraught because the Yugoslavian yellow cab driver seemed
not to have a clue where he was going, and had an insufficient command of
English to be able to put right the wrong turnings I knew he was making, and he
seemed happy that the bill was mounting up . I had driven before along those self-same,
tyre-pitted roads that had been worn in grooves by countless articulated
trucks, and my limited knowledge of how to get to my destination from there
just about carried me through. No gratuity. He wasn’t very happy but that’s tough!
In the end, with a little help from the people I was meeting, the cab driver
was sent packing.
After a quick calm-down coffee (if there is such a thing), their
President, Richard Bass, promptly took me to their ‘warehouse’, a ramshackled
but large building somewhere on the New York dockside, ostensibly to look at
their vast stock of second hand woodworking machines. None of them were in
especially saleable condition and many were probably beyond any form of
economic repair. However, there were some useful component parts and Richard
was interested in selling our reconditioned British machinery because of their
reputation for durability. Fascinatingly, in one corner of this huge space were
43 British phone boxes that he had acquired over the years for their antique
and curiosity value. Even at that time he was making a very good living from
them, and had sold them to customers across the USA to decorate their back
yards, some converted to working order and others just there as a conversation
piece around the barbecue grill.
We got on famously, both in business and on a personal level
and spent a good number of hours together between warehouse and office putting
together whatever deals we could. I met his father who had many years of
experience in the woodworking machinery sector and there was little or nothing
he did not know about the machines, their tooling, and their many applications.
After my Yugoslavian cab driver experience, Richard kindly offered to drive me
to Newark Airport via a late afternoon / early evening meal in ‘a special part
of town’. “You’ll love it” he said, and how right he was. We talked more as we
drove through horrendous traffic, eventually parking up on a smart street of
large terraced houses with their entrances raised several steps above street
level, from which I assumed he was taking me for dinner at his house, to meet
his family, his friends, and maybe family pets. But no, not his family.
This was Little Italy and we walked into what felt like the
front door of someone’s home into a most fabulously intimate, family run, New
York Italian restaurant. It felt just like being on a film set. We were guided
to our table by a young man in his late teens, who took our drinks orders. Then
a thiry-something man took our starter order, and following that a man in his
late fifties took our main course order. Finally we were joined for a brandy by
the grandfather figure, a man who must have been in his eighties who smoked
like a chimney and entertained us with his gravelly but wholly assured voice
for a good half hour. Four generations of one family had attended to our table
in one way or another. So there was family, good food, warmth and respect, but
being where it was I could not help wondering how legitimately they had
developed their restaurant business! “You don’t ask” was Richard’s view. And
after that once-in-a-lifetime experience, Richard drove me to Newark Airport.
Except that when I arrived and looked at my tickets, I was supposed to fly to
Philadelphia from La Guardia!
I had a meeting in Philadelphia scheduled for 7am, so I
simply had to get there but by the time I could have arrived at La Guardia by
cab (with my cab experience earlier in
the day having not left a good taste), the Philly flights would all have left.
So I decided to drink a lot of coffee for a few hours, hire a car and drive the
three hour journey, finally arriving at my hotel there around 1am. It wasn’t
the greatest preparation for an important meeting with someone I had never met
before, but the Little Italy experience will live long in my memory. And the
Philadelphia meeting went well.
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