Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The Abe Zion Story

                                                    The Abe Zion Story
                                                          1960
                 Some of the lessons I learned from the smartest person I ever met.                                     Written 2011 and Re-rewritten 1/2016
                                                      Howard Yasgar
When I look back at all of the interesting and super intelligent people that I have been involved with over the years, I have to put Abe Zion at the top of the list.
We can all learn by observing others, either we can then copy what we see they have done correctly and we can utilize that in our own lives, or we can also watch what others have done incorrectly and we can do the opposite of what they did, either way it’s learning.
The story of my experience with Abe Zion is a perfect example of exactly that type of learning experience.
I had the good fortune to meet Abe Zion in the early 1960’s, and I was able to work with him, and allow him to mentor me for several years.
During that time, I was able to closely observe him, and watch the way he operated.
I saw both the good and the bad, and I was able learn quite a few valuable lessons.
In 1960, I was operating a small auto wrecking yard in Stamford Connecticut, it was a business that I had leased from my former employer Lenny, at Milford Auto Wrecking in Milford Connecticut.
I had worked at Milford Auto Wrecking part time during my college days.
The yard Lenny leased me in Stamford, was called West Side Auto Trading, and it was located right off of Stamford’s West Main Street exit on the Connecticut turnpike, when heading for New York.
After attending New Haven College, I thought that I was smart enough to make that small Stamford auto wrecking yard into a successful business.
The reason I thought that was because I had, for a short time run a small auto wrecking company in New Haven Connecticut with my good friend Tommy Letis, and also I had learned quite a bit about the auto wrecking business from working part time at Milford Auto Wrecking.     
I had started out working at Milford Auto Wrecking, cutting up car chassis into three foot long pieces for scrap iron.
I had always thought that cutting up steel with an oxygen acetylene torch was the best part time job ever.
However, that job didn’t last long, I was soon promoted into managing the junk yards used parts recovery operation, and later I ran their starter and generator rebuilding shop.
I had always had thought Milford Auto Wrecking was a pretty well organized business, and I have to admit I learned a lot from them.
Unfortunately, just before I quit, I learned that they were stealing cars, so I was happy to leave when I did.
At the end, my boss Lenny had used me to haul late model cars from Milford Connecticut to a small wrecking yard in Stamford that they called West Side Auto Trading.
I found out that those cars I delivered were destined to be taken apart by auto wreckers in New York.  
Once I was in the Stamford yard I picked up cars that had come from New York, they were destined to be taken apart at the Milford Auto Wrecking yard.
I have to admit, that hauling cars was a fun job for me, that was until I realized all the cars I was hauling were stolen.
Once I graduated College, in 1960, I learned that Milford was no longer using the WestSide Auto Trading yard in Stamford, and since I was looking for something to do, I drove to Milford auto Wrecking to see my former boss Lenny.
Lenny happily agreed to lease the Stamford yard to me for a $1200.00, license fee, and a rent of $200.00 a month.
Naturally Lenny wanted it all in cash, with no receipt.
Unfortunately at the time there were quite a few things I didn’t know about leasing junkyards.
I didn’t realize that it was illegal to transfer a junkyard license, and also I didn’t know that Lenny really didn’t own West Side Auto Trading in the first place.
I ran the business in Stamford for over a year, which proved to be a disaster.
I didn’t  have the knowledge, or the finances, to run the operation, and then I found out that most of the potential parts customers in Stamford were much smarter than I was.
On Saturdays and Sundays when I was closed, the customers would climb over the fence and steal whatever parts they needed.
Then one day a wrecking yard inspector came by and threatened to close me down, he said I was running the yard illegally, and he was going to put a stop to it.
So after that, I was pretty disgusted with the whole thing, and I was planning on leaving and looking for something else to do.
That’s when a lucky break happened, I met Abe Zion.
One day, I was approached by a short, mid-eastern looking fellow, he came jauntily walking down the concrete ramp that led from West Main Street down into the West Side wrecking yard.
The Arabic looking fellow was about five foot seven inches tall, with a slight build.
He was wearing a dark pinstriped business suit, black pointy shoes, a long sleeved white dress shirt, and a nice red striped necktie, and he looked to be around forty or so.
He had a dark Mediterranean complexion and sort of a distinct Arabic looking face.
His hair was jet black and combed back slick.
If it wasn’t for the fact that he looked somewhat like a mid-eastern Arab, I would have thought him to be an executive from some office on Wall Street.
It was a hot day, and his suite jacket was open, as he walked down the concrete ramp towards me with an outstretched hand, and a big smile.
He greeted me as if he had known me all his life.
“You are Howard he asked?” Yes, I replied.
“My name is Abe Zion, he said, and what are you doing in my junk yard?”
As I really didn't know who actually owned the West Side Auto Trading land, all knew was that I was not the owner of anything.
So at the time I really had no idea if this guy was telling me the truth or not.
After we shook hands, we walked back up the concrete ramp, to West Main Street, where there was a small office building.
I saw that Abe already had his key in the front door of the tiny office building.
The office was a small wooden building about ten feet wide and twenty five feet deep, and it was divided into two rooms.
The front room had an old scratched wood desk and three old chairs.
The back room, was completely filled with crates of nails that someone had stored there.
As we walked inside the front office, I saw an elderly gentleman was sitting in a chair, both his hands were folded together on his lap.
The fellow looked to be around 75 years old and was looking forlornly at the floor.
Abe Zion introduced me to Eichel Blumenstock who he said was his partner.
Eichel stood up, and with a big smile, he shook my hand with both of his.
Well, here I was, I was certainly in a funny position.
I didn’t know if  I was going to be kicked off the property or what, so I shook Eichel’s hand and gave him a big smile.
Abe said, “Well Howard, what are you going to do now”? Nothing, I said.
Once I said that, and as I really had nothing better to do, I felt it would be best to listen to what Abe had to say.
In a way, I think I was kind of excited because I hoped something interesting might happen.
It was already pretty clear to me, that doing the auto wrecking business in Stamford was not for me.
As I sat down in one of the old chairs, it came to my mind, how did Abe know my name?
I could only surmise that Abe had dealings with Lenny of Milford Auto Wrecking.
At the time I was twenty one years old, and my Stamford experience, had now shown me that I needed to learn a lot more about doing business.
So at that very moment, I decided that any association with these two guys couldn't possibly hurt me, and perhaps I could learn something from them.
Abe turned out to be a very competent talker as well as an excellent salesman, he had his feet up on the well scratched desk, it was just like he was the CEO of a major corporation.
He ended our first conversation saying, “OK let’s make some money Howard”.
Now, I thought that was a pretty good statement, it was about time that I made some money.
Then, over the next several weeks, we all met every day at the Stamford office, with Abe laying out plans for doing all types of future business ventures.
Then, when the meetings were over we started traveling.
We drove everywhere with Abe driving his brand new Ford sedan.
I sat in the passenger seat as Eichel Blumenstock dozed in the back seat.
I soon learned that Abe was an idea man, as well as a teacher, and Eichel was his “Yes” man.
As he drove, Abe said, I was going to be the leg man, I was the person that would make all of Abe’s idea’s happen, I must admit, it was an exciting prospect.
As we were driving, Abe never stopped to sit and eat.
He always bought take-out food, and we ate in the car as he drove with only one hand on the steering wheel.
All the while, as he drove, Abe never stopped talking and teaching me.
He constantly suggested all kinds of new business ventures we needed to try, and he carefully laid out each new idea, mixed with history lessons, and lectures.
To me, Abe was the ultimate teacher and entrepreneur, and I was now his student, he was to be my mentor.
Abe said that every two years he bought a brand new car.
He said, he quickly sold cars new tires for cash, replacing them with good used junk yard tires.
He also said that he never changed the oil in the engine, why waste money when I trade in the car every two years anyway, let the next guy pay for changing the oil”.
Sometimes, I wondered if I was listening to a brilliant person or a crazy person.
Every day Abe was throwing out new ideas, and he always wanted my feedback.
I always gave Abe my thoughts as best, and as fast as I could.
Eichel, always sat quietly in the back seat, only speaking when he was asked a question by Abe.
The answer coming from Eichel, was always the very one Abe was waiting for.
I had never really known a “Yes man” before, but Eichel was an absolute perfect one.
One of the first things Abe proposed was that we utilize West Side Auto Trading upper office, to sell used cars.
Abe said this was a good business for me to learn, all I had to do was listen to him.
We drove into White Plains New York and we all walked into the first big car dealership.
I could see that Abe was in fine form, he was on a mission.
I listened as Abe quickly purchased all the back row cars on their used car lot, and he only paid $50.00 per car.
These were all the cars that were tradein’s.
Some of the cars didn’t start and it would have cost the dealerships a lot of money to tow to the junk yards or auto auctions.
I saw that it was just that easy, on that morning we owned twenty cars, and Abe said that it was my job was to get them all running and back to Stamford yard, so I did it.
Abe and Eichel made “For Sale” signs to put in the cars windows.
We sold all the cars for between $99.00  to $125.00 each, and if a car didn't have a title, I looked through the hundreds of old titles from cars that had been cut up and junked years ago.
I looked until I found one that was close in year and appearance.
Sometimes I would thumb through stacks of hundreds of old titles, titles that had always been saved in a desk drawer.
I looked until I found one the same year, make and sometimes the same color, and that became the used cars new title.
Now, when Abe and I were on the road, Eichel was left in the little office to deal with any customers.
Eichel made out bills of sale, and he collected the money.
After six months, I sat down to do the books and I noticed 6 or 7 cars were missing, so I mentioned it to Abe and he became very disturbed.
Abe asked me how many cars were missing. I told him there were at least 6 that I couldn’t account for.
Abe called in Eichel and sat him down. He said sternly, “Eichel, Howard says there are six cars missing, where are the cars?”
Eichel looked up with blurry eyes and said to Abe, “They are on the highway in the Bronx.”
It appears that Eichel was a devote Jew, and when driving home to the Bronx on Friday evening, sometimes got stuck in traffic.
A devote Jew can’t do anything mechanical after sundown, so on Friday evenings, if Eichel was stuck in traffic, he would simply take the license plate off the car he was driving and walk home even if it took him all night.
Eichel was  just abandoning all our cars on the highway to the Bronx.
Abe looked at me, and he said that it appeared that God was on Eichel’s side, so he made arrangements to get Eichel home earlier on Friday.
The next week, Abe offered me a deal, it appears that he and Eichel had purchased a load of electroplating equipment at a Chase Brass and Copper Company auction in Naugatuck Connecticut.
They apparently had participated in this auction a long time before I had met them.
All the equipment and plating tanks that were not sold, were stored behind another electro plating company located in Waterbury Connecticut.
Now the plating company was complaining, about the junk and Abe  needed to clean up the mess.
Abe said I could earn 10% of everything that was sold, if I helped him clean it up.
I was eager to help, but I soon realized that Abe kind of suckered me into doing a lot of labor for him with little financial reward, but in retrospect I ended up learning quite a bit.
While we were removing some electroplating tanks, one of them was full of  orange mud, The mud was mixed with leaves from having set there over a year.
I asked Abe what I should do with it?
Abe said, “Find a five gallon bucket and shovel some red mud into it”.
I did as Abe said and as we were leaving he showed the red mud to the manager of the plating company.
The manager looked and said it was just old Chromate mud from a tank that was in the yard, He said it was worthless.
Abe told me to put the bucket of Chromate in the trunk of his car.
Once we were back at our office in Stamford, Abe put a tarp out on the ground and had me spread the red mud on it.
It took several days in the sun but the mud eventually dried up into a powder.
Abe removed a window screen and had  me sift the orange powder through it.
The resulting powder was now clean with no leaves in it.
Then Abe put some of the orange powder into a zip lock bag.     
It was several months later when Abe again showed the clean orange powder to the manager of the plating company.
The manager said, “That’s  powdered Chromate, how much do you have? We can pay you $3.50 a lb. for all you can supply”.
That was a powerful lesson I learned, Abe taught me that presentation is everything.
One day, while we were sitting in our office in Stamford, Abe suggested that we should buy and try to melt the lead out of junk car batteries.
I didn’t know, much about doing it, so we went out to local gas stations and bought a load of junk car batteries.
I wish I knew then what I know today, because we melted the lead in the batteries and we collected less money for the lead than we had paid for the batteries.
That taught me that there was much more to learn about melting car batteries than meets the eye and it wasn’t a good business for us to get into. But it was a good lesson that I learned while working with Abe, and there were many more good and bad lessons to come.
Abe always took our losing money in stride, because he was already thinking of the next project for us to do to make money.
One day Abe said we had an order to supply good reconditioned car transmission gears to Israel, they were using the gears to make a farm tractor.
My job was to go to scrap yards in New York and buy hundreds of used Chrysler product automobile transmissions, then I brought them to our warehouse in Waterbury, where Abe had hired several men to completely disassemble them.
The used transmission gears were then sent to the electroplating company in Waterbury where they were cleaned, and electroplated like new. Then they were oiled, packaged and shipped off to Israel.
After that project we would all had time to sit in the Stamford office reading the New York newspapers, they listed all the interesting auctions going on in New York and New Jersey.
Abe said that our objective was to find something in an auction that we could buy and sell fairly quickly.
I could see that Abe was very familiar with doing the auction business, so I followed his every move.
The following week we were all at a big Auction in New York City.
That was where Abe introduced me to a whole bunch of New York Mafia guys.
Abe said the Mafia controlled all the big auctions in New York, and they were known to everyone as “The Band of 40 Thieves”.
When Abe introduced me to them, he said I was “A good kid from New Haven,” and by the end of the day the Mafia boss and his men were all my friends.
That’s when Abe said to me that I was  now number 41 in the band of 40 thieves.
So that was how I learned the auction business, and don’t ask me how Abe had befriended this group of New York mobsters, I will never know, but now at every auction we went to, they referred to me as “The kid from New Haven”.
Abe never ceased to amaze me, and I always was anxious to learn more from him, and about him.
As we drove from place to place, Abe told me the story of his childhood.
He said he was born to poor parents in Palestine, which at the time, was ruled by the British.
He said that at a young age went to work in a British recycled rubber factory. In those days he was lucky to have a job.
Abe said that at the rubber factory the British were reprocessing used tires and tubes making them into shoes.
Abe said that he worked twenty hours a day on a machine that molded the soft rubber into shoe soles.
He said the machine had always made crooked shoe soles, so Abe invented a wooden fixture to help do the job better.
His jealous foreman took the fixture from him, wanting to claim credit for inventing it himself.
That evening someone slipped a  bar of soap into Abe’s pocket, and he was arrested and fired from the job.
Fortunately, the same day,  Abe’s parents had heard about a newly arrived German Jew that was looking for a man servant, and they urged Abe to apply for the job.
That's how Abe met, Eichel Blumenstock.
Eichel Blumenstock, had come from an extremely wealthy family in Germany, they were the franchise holders for Michelin tires in Germany.
When the Nazi's took over Germany, one of the Blumenstock family's maids, saw them drinking red wine, so she testified that the family killed young German girls and drank their blood.
Because Eichel was Jewish, he and his Family were arrested immediately, and imprisoned. But they were able to eventually bribe the Nazi guards and escape to Palestine.
Once in Palestine Eichel, started buying and selling real estate, real estate in a land that was soon to become Israel.
So as a youth, Abe became Eichel’s servant, and he carried Eichel's brief case, opened doors for him, and attended to Eichel’s every need.
However Abe always watched and listened to how Eichel did his business, and as time went on, Eichel began to trust Abe, and started sending him on financial errands.
Little by little as Eichel got older, Abe ended up was doing most of their business, with Eichel  treating Abe as a partner.
Abe said Eichel would come to Abe's parent’s house, and leave a bag of gold, saying be sure to give to Abe, it is his share.
Months later Eichel basically told me the same tale. It was obviously all true.
Now in 1963 they were in America, Abe had become the business man and Eichel now carried Abe’s briefcase.                       
One day Abe came up with a new project, he said that he had met a customer that was recapping automobile tires and he needed a lot of good used tire casings to recap.
I knew little or nothing about the inner workings of the recapping business, so off we all went to a big tire recapping factory located in Waterbury, Connecticut.
Abe had arranged for a top level meeting with the owners there.
At the meeting, I listened as Abe promised to sell to them, thousands of prime, number 1 tire casings which at the time, were almost impossible to get.
As I didn’t know anything about the used tire casing business, Abe said he would teach me.
We then drove to the outskirts of New Haven Connecticut, where there was a very large scrap tire company, it was one of the largest in New England, Abe knew the owner.
Abe introduced me to him, and they both taught me how to use a hand tire spreading tool, it was used to open a used tire casing to be able to inspect the inside.
Abe had a plan up his sleeve, he said I was to inspect thousands of #2 casings that had already been rejected, and if they looked good to me, I was to mark them as # 1 first class casings.
It was a very interesting problem, and I did it the best I could.
We all knew what Abe was doing was bad business, but I did what he told me to do
The owner of the used tire company said that I got so good at inspecting tires that he wanted me to quit working with Abe and come work with him.
Now, Abe had promised the recapping company in Waterbury that he would deliver thousands of #1 tire casings, which, I found to be an almost impossible task.
Soon after we delivered the first of several truckloads of the tires that I had handpicked, the recapping company inspected them again and kept about 50 percent.
Personally I felt that in itself it was a miracle.
But the re-capper wasn’t happy with a 50% recovery rate and they physically ejected Abe and Eichel from their building, calling them every name in the book.
It was the first time that I knew that Abe hadn’t told someone the 100% truth, and I didn’t like what he did.
But the results were that I became a pretty good tire inspector, and I had learned the recapping and tire casing business due to Abe.
Undaunted with the tire fiasco, Abe announced that he had just had a meeting with a trailer manufacturer in New York. He said, they needed hundreds of good used tires mounted on Ford wheels.
As the new trailers moved through the factory, they were being welded, and sometimes the welders would accidentally burn the rubber on the new tires.
Abe had convinced them to put used tires on the trailers, and at the end of the production line they could replace them with new tires.
The story as told to me by Abe sounded more than a little strange, but Abe had the order in hand and he was determined to fill it.
Abe sent me to wrecking yards to buy good used Ford wheels, and then he sent me to New York to buy hundreds of good used inner tubes.
Now we again needed to find tires, but this time the tires actually needed to look good.
Where do you find lots of good used tires cheap, well the truth is you can’t find them.
Abe said I was not to worry, He said we could buy lots of tires worn out only on one side, and he would teach me how to re-groove the worn out side.
I thought Abe would get us in trouble again, by promising what he couldn’t deliver, but he taught me how to use a hot re-grooving tool, which when  properly used cut new grooves into a worn tire.
I was amazed to see how it was done, so now I learned from Abe how to cut the tires so they looked beautiful, and I did hundreds of them.
When we assembled the tires on the used Ford rims, Abe had the electroplating company in Waterbury clean, plate and paint the wheels like new, and that gave Abe another new idea.
Several weeks later, we were having a meeting in the office at Stamford and Abe asked me to come up with a catchy name for our company. He wanted a business card with an impressive name on it so he could call on some big automotive parts companies.
But the problem was, I had no Idea as to how to invent a name for a corporation, I had never done it before.
However, as we were doing several projects at the electroplating company in Waterbury Connecticut , and they were called “Southern New England electroplating”, I suggested that we call ourselves “Southern New England Automotive Rebuilders”.
Abe loved the idea, and off he went  to the printer.
Two days later, a red faced Abe Zion, was ready to kill me.
He said he had the cards printed and gave them out at a meeting with the board of directors of a large company in New York City.
He said that when he passed out his business cards everyone began laughing at him.
He said the abbreviation of our company, “Southern New England Automotive Rebuilders,” was “SNEAR”, and he was really embarrassed.
Abe was right I had made a mistake, and I accepted the responsibility. I now had learned to watch what the letters spelled when you invent a company name.
Well, the name SNEAR didn’t stop Abe, and he soon reported that he had a high level meeting with a group in New York, and he had a huge order for rebuilt car wheels.
Abe had shown them a sample Ford wheel we had made for the trailer company, and they liked it.
The electroplating work that done by Southern New England Electro Platers was beautiful and they also now wanted more business from us.
Abe asked me what I thought about going into the rebuilt wheel business.
The idea was a good one, people could buy two rebuilt wheels and have their snow tires mounted on them. Then every winter they could have the wheels and tires in their garage ready to install.
Abe knew that New York junk yards, were just loaded with huge piles of used wheels that we could buy by the ton at scrap metal prices.
Then, once we fine tuned the idea, Abe went to several more big automotive parts buying agencies in New York and he came back with orders for thousands of rebuilt wheels.
Our first customers were the big discount tire stores that were selling snow tires.
Abe told them all that we could supply all the wheels they wanted, which was not exactly true.
In actuality we could only buy wheels that came off cars that were in the auto junk yards, and those wheels were all from cars at least ten years old.
I took our truck to several of the big tire junk yards in New York City, and there I hand picked and bought tons of good used automobile wheels.
Naturally I looked for as many later model wheels as I could find, but to do this I had to pick up and move thousands of older model wheels.
I ended up spending many days, sorting and inspecting thousands of wheels in the New York junk yards.
Then I hauled them all to our Waterbury Connecticut electroplater.
Once there I again closely inspected the wheels and removed all the minor dents and dings.
Once a wheel had passed my inspection the electroplating company cleaned electroplated and painted them.
So all that summer, my days were spent, removing the dents and dings from used wheels, and then we all had to spend time learning what wheels fit what.
The rebuilt wheel was a really turning out to be a good business.
However, the orders were coming in much too fast, so Abe had Eichel in the warehouse boxing the wheels.
When we were running out of certain part numbers,  Eichel simply changed the label on the boxes.
Then the complaint phone calls started coming in.
They all were saying the same thing, they wanted more wheels, but they wanted the right ones,
It got to the point that  Abe didn’t want to talk to them.
The pressure was now all on me, every call was a complaint.
On one cold winter evening, before I left the Waterbury warehouse, an automotive chain store had called, they said they were running a snow tire sale, and they were out of wheels, could I make an emergency delivery, on my way home to New Haven.
I filled our delivery van with eighty rebuilt Chevrolet wheels, and  I stopped at the chain store and unloaded the wheels outside their tire department.
It was a freezing cold that night so I got a large coffee and parked the van where I could see what was happening to the wheels.
Within two hours all the wheels were sold.  
Then after winter, the rebuilt wheel business came to a halt.
That’s when three large boxes from Israel arrived at our office in Stamford.
Abe carefully unpacked them as Eichel and I watched.
Inside the crates were pieces of hand cut lead crystal glass, some of them were ornate decanters, and some were cut glass bowls and ashtrays.
The entire shipment was an assortment of beautiful cut crystal glass items.
Abe said, “Tomorrow I would like you and Eichel to go call on a few jewelry stores around Stamford, and see if they are interested in buying this cut crystal glass from Israel.
So, the next day, we made the rounds of several jewelry stores and gift shops around the Stamford area.
We received positive responses from everyone.
The next day, as we told our findings to Abe, he said the Israeli’s wanted to enter the U.S. market, and he would have the first chance to do something with it.
Later that day, after Abe and Eichel had left the office, I saw what looked like a thick and very old report laying on the desk Abe used.
I opened the repost and read it.
It was a proposal to the Government of Israel, it was written a just a few years after Israel became an independent country.
The proposal written by a group of men of which Abe Zion was one. Another name I recognized was Moshe Dyan, who was once the Defense Minister of Israel.
The report was titled “Making Lead Glass, using the Sands of the Negev Desert”.
The report was so interesting, that I sat down and read the entire proposal.
Besides from using the sand from the Negev desert, it proposed to train Israeli women in the art of cutting lead glass in their homes, once they learned how to do it, their children would learn the art of glass cutting by watching their mother, developing a home industry for Israel.
It was fascinating, My friend Abe Zion had made the proposal to Israel many years ago, and here sitting in our office were the results, beautiful lead crystal glass from Israel.
In January of 1961, my father unexpectedly died, and my entire life was about to change as well.
At the time I was also engaged to be married.
So while my education with Abe, had been extremely rewarding in many ways, I was always left with the burden of straightening out the problems he left behind.
I was just worn out managing all of Abe’s ventures.
So finally, I drew up an official letter of resignation, and I sent it to Abe.
I have to admit I enjoyed the craziness of working with him, and learning from him, I was his student, and he was a great teacher.
My mother once said to me, you could never get an education like that in any university, and she was right.