Category — Toby

My dad, Toby, was a big fan of California. He and every other Ohioan in the 1960s.

His cosmetics company, which he started in the basement, was Ovation of California.  It was a franchise.  The franchisor, based in California, was simply “Ovation.”  Toby added the “of California.”  Toby sold moisturizers, shampoos, eyebrow pencils, lipsticks and bases.

Bases were war paint for women.  My mother, who wore the stuff on sales pitches, looked like a Claymation figure.  My parents gave presentations at Cleveland hotels, trying to recruit women to do home sales parties.  Better yet, become sub-franchisees.  My parents had a carousel-tray slide show with an LP sound track that synched to the slides.  Beep.

Ovation went bust. Avon Products was the powerhouse back then.

Californian dreamin’ . . . it’s part of  the Midwestern mentality.  My family took the station wagon trip to California in the sixties.  Our “station wagon” was a 1961 Pontiac Catalina sedan with no A/C.  Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red (My Love)” was on the radio.

We wound up in San Francisco — the home of Daniel Ducoff, Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader.  I didn’t even know that!

Daniel’s father was a rabbi in Frisco. While I was growing up in standard-issue Ohio, Li’l Danny was being raised in the Haight, or more exactly, three miles from it.  To this day, Daniel wears a T-shirt that says “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?”  Daniel is Cali Man.  He has many different sun glasses.

Daniel — when he’s out in California for a high school reunion or something — will phone me: “They’d love Yiddishe Cup’s bizarre humor here!  Why aren’t we playing here?”

Daniel played several tracks from Yiddishe Cup’s Meshugeneh Mambo CD for Grateful Dead guys.  Not exactly Grateful Dead musicians.  It was for Mickey Hart’s ex-wife and the Dead’s ex-manager.  They danced to “K’nock Around the Clock.”  Nothing came of it.

Daniel does not have the Midwesterner’s sense of limited possibilities.

Get real, Daniel.  Get us a gig in Kentucky.  Get us a gig in Columbus, Ohio.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/26/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert:  7:45 p.m. Sun., Sept. 6 at Orange Village (Ohio) gazebo.
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Watch a new YouTube video of Yiddishe Cup singing the Barry Sisters’  “Zug es mir nokhamol.”  Good harmonies.

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This post is for everybody who read my recent Wall Street Journal article about my dad and wants more info on him. (The WSJ article is linked here.)

My father, Toby, got a letter from a Piney Woods Arkansas man, extolling my dad’s homemade foot powder: “Mr. Lesbert: Do NOT stop making the powdor! Do NOT stop!!” Toby used to make the foot powder in the basement. The company was Lesbert Drug Co., named after my sister, Leslie, and me. My dad stopped making the powder. The Arkansas man was about his only customer.

Then Toby started selling cosmetics. Then he starting buying buildings . . . on and on.  He was the Jewish Willy Loman. (Kind of like how klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras was the Jewish Benny Goodman.)

My dad schlepped me to banks. I remember a banker who called my dad “Teddy.” That was weird. My father’s given name was Theodore and his Jewish nickname was Toby. This banker liked to talk Tribe (baseball) and his wife’s spaghetti recipes. The banker was a “people’s person,” he said. (Maybe he was a dogs’ person too.)

My father was not a people’s person.  He was the Lone Ranger. He got the mortgage and we got out of there.

My dad owned one LP record, of the Ohio State marching band. My dad had stock records. Toby bought his first stock, Seaboard Air Line, when he was at Ohio State. Air line meant train line back then. Air line was the shortest distance between two points — the way the crow flies. My dad never made money on stocks. He was too busy buying and selling and not holding. Toby was even a stockbroker for about six months in the 1950s at Bache & Co.

He liked numbers. He was a numbers guy. Totally.

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My father, Toby, was never shy about discussing money— who had it and who didn’t.  He never hid his salary.  On our street he topped all the Italian bricklayers.  Toby excluded polka star Frankie Yankovic from the calculations.  Yankovic was several streets over, where the big houses were.

Our neighborhood was Levittown-plus living: 3-bedroom/1½ bath colonials.  The paradox was our neighbor, right across the street. He had a freaking airplane (Piper Cub).  And six kids too.  This neighbor, Mr. Cermak, was a second- or third-generation drugstore owner.  (Odd: a Christian with a drugstore.  All the other pharmacists my family knew were Yidn.)

You could make big money before the Revcos came in, particularly if you were the storeowner and the pharmacist.  Mr. Cermak was both.  Mr. Cermak was his own boss.  My dad took note of that.
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Where are they now? . . . Mr. Cermak lives in the same house.  He has been there 60 years.  The plane is gone.  So is Yankovic.   So is my father.

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Never take less than the equivalent of two months’ rent on move in. If a person can’t pay that, you’ll be chasing that person from the get-go.

I once had a custodian who took a ring instead of a security deposit. The renter was an elderly retired nurse from Houston. Also, a felon. But we didn’t know that. She conned her way into the apartment with a dime store ring.

I did a little “self-help” — legal-talk for evicting her without the court’s permission. I got a couple guys, and we moved her stuff into the basement. Her lawyer took several thousand from me. That was my last self-help.

I’m not “mom and pop” — I have a layer between me and the tenants: my on-site building managers/custodians.

How did I get to be bigger than “mom and pop.” First off, it helped my father was Toby Stratton. He bought a six-store, 21-suiter in 1965. He put down 8 percent and got two second mortgages. That’s heavy leverage. Gambling.

The band biz — we’re not “mom and pop” either. “Mom and pop” in the music biz would be a bar band — $100 per night per guy. Yiddishe Cup is above that. We’ve played the soft-seat auditoriums. That’s what the music biz calls the college auditoriums with cushy chairs.

For example, we played Loras College in Iowa and ate at the Ground Round afterward — the only place in Dubuque that was open after 10 p.m.

We’ve played Mt. Union College, Beloit College, Michigan State, UNC-Greensboro, Chautauqua Institution, City of El Paso (Tex.), Kenyon, Wabash, Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. That’s the gateway to the Ozarks. A lot of places.

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