An old Florida farmer decided to visit a pond in the back of his property that he had not visited in a long time. As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer, he discovered a bunch of young women were skinny dipping in his pond. He politely made the women aware of his presence, and they all went to the deep end of the pond. One of the women shouted to him, “We’re not coming out until you leave!” The farmer replied, “I didn’t come down here to see you skinny dipping. I’m just here to feed the alligator.”
Moral: Old age, cunning and treachery will triumph over youth and enthusiasm every time.
About the time I got to writing this part of the book, I had another lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and yet another fortune cookie read: “Love truths, but pardon error.” I certainly love the truth. That’s what this book is all about. I also pardon error, to use an old Procter & Gamble advertising slogan 99.9/100 percent of the time, but there is one error that my father made that took me years to forgive. I was sure naïve to agree to that little provision about Scranton in my agreement to buy the company in 1998. He might as well have said, “Thanks a million,” when I signed off.
That’s what he got: $3.75 million to be exact. And little did I know the whole time my competitor in Scranton had GE Capital behind him.
The sale of Scranton came in just under the wire of my father’s deadline of December 31, 1984. The last thing that you want are phone calls from your employees thrown out of their jobs on Christmas Eve. It’s not the best time to hear that one of your companies had been sold and your employees sent home to celebrate their jobless status on Christmas with their families. I found it impossible to believe that my father would construct an agreement to sell me the company, after he was in negotiation to sell a third of it to my competitor. It was beyond comprehension that a father would do that to his son, but I should have realized that if the possibility was even mentioned by him, it was already fact. I had trusted him but should have known better. There were no opportunities my father missed.
It’s one thing to sell a company and another to sell it to the competitor your father had pitted you against. The terrible thought crossed my mind that the entire reason the money had been spent to upgrade Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, eliminate the union, and make massive capital improvements to bring national business back in was to make the company more valuable for a sale.
But I mentioned that this was his error. It was mine to be duped, but the irony of the entire deal was that the proceeds of $3.75 million were reinvested in buying and expanding a building housing a bank in Ithaca. The building was a white elephant. When I was assigned to sell it after my father died, the most we could get was $1,250,000, and it had to be put in the hands of a real estate holding company to get even that. On the other hand, the Scranton operation is now probably worth some $75 million, based on some industry valuations. Funny how things work out, and I would have to consider it one of my father’s worst management decisions. Of course, the entire burden of that bad decision was carried by his son.
I would not like to believe that Christmas Eve was the date chosen by my father for the cruel exodus wreaked on my employees. But the timing was perfect for my former competitor to crush my employees and demoralize me. It sent the meanest message possible and totally ruined one of the few Christmases that our family was to spend together.
During the brutal sweep when the employees were fired and escorted out the door with no time to gather their personal belongings, most of them were told they would be invited back to interview and apply for a job. Over the next several weeks, those who had exhibited the most disdain for my competitor and his methods were not asked back or not rehired after an interview. My former competitor’s game plan was geared to make them hurt. Former employees of my company who had held positions not requiring competitive contact with him in their day-to-day jobs were hired back.
I quickly made an effort to hire the people he rejected in our division closest to Scranton. Those who accepted were put on our payroll in Binghamton, NY. Our operations foreman, Willard Piatt, commuted faithfully from Scranton into our central New York territory for years. One of our former sales people made the decision that the commute would be too much to handle and found other employment in Scranton. The other, a young man I hired directly out of college and who served with me in leasing before sales, remained with the surviving company in Scranton but ended up joining us a number of years later after the Scranton operation was resold. At the time, he became vice president and general manager of our Binghamton division.