by Ed Stack
Dick Stack was a proud man, and he refused to declare bankruptcy. He could not abide the thought of making others pay for what he saw as his mistake. Instead, he returned what merchandise he could, then sold virtually everything he had—the house he’d only recently bought, his car, anything he could liquidate—to pay off his creditors. He succeeded: none of his suppliers lost money when Dick’s folded. For my dad, and our family, his insistence on protecting everyone else promised a bleak future. He and my mom had no choice but to return to living with their parents. Four months pregnant, my mom moved herself and me into her folks’ place on McNamara Avenue. My dad couldn’t bring himself to live with his in-laws—in his heartsick state, that represented a step down that might have finished him off. He moved in with his mom, my Nana, just up the street.
Broke and desperate, he found a job at Montgomery Ward in downtown Binghamton. And there this story could have ended. At twenty-six, my dad could have chosen the safety of a sure paycheck over any further risk. A lot of men, with the responsibilities he faced, would have taken that route. But my dad, for all of his shortcomings, was a resilient guy, toughened by the deprivations of his childhood and the uncertainties of his early years in business. He had that chip on his shoulder, that need to prove himself among friends and classmates who he thought were doing better. He had guts. “When you get knocked on your ass,” I heard him say a million times, “you get back up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fight.”
Not exactly original, maybe, but true enough. When you dig down into the roots of success, it has little to do with brilliance. I’ve known plenty of geniuses who didn’t amount to much, and quite a few numbskulls who’ve done well. We all have. Life teaches that success also has little to do with talent—we’ve all met really talented, creative people who can’t translate that talent into a successful career.
No, success is all about what’s inside you, and the most important element of success is simple perseverance—often tedious, sometimes soul crushing, but the great differentiator in whether smarts, talent, and education add up to something bigger. Great musicians practice to perfection. Engineers refine and test, refine and test again. Athletes never stop training. And my dad, knocked on his ass, got up, dusted himself off, and got back in the fight.
The turning point came while he was on the sales floor in the Montgomery Ward sports department. A stranger approached—my dad had never seen him before, and never saw him after, but the guy had evidently known Ed Sr., my bootlegging grandfather, and recognized his son. “If you had half the guts your father had,” this mystery man said, “you’d be doing this for yourself.”
Then he walked off, leaving my dad stunned. The stranger’s words, he told me, sliced straight into his soul. Emboldened, or maybe embarrassed, or a little of both, he quit Montgomery Ward a couple of days later and hit the streets to find a way to get back into business. He found a friendly ear at an East Side bank, whose lenders knew that he’d been successful on Court Street and were willing to underwrite his second chance, provided he returned to that part of town. His former suppliers, impressed by how he’d made them whole after the Hillcrest failure, stepped up to say they’d do business with him. In late August he was again advertising in the Press and Sun-Bulletin. This time, the ad featured a picture of my dad standing in front of a long rack of rifles and shotguns, under the heading “Dick is Back!” The address for the new Dick’s Clothing and Sporting Goods was the same as the old: 389 Court Street. He reopened on September 1. His resurrection had taken just six weeks.
But the Hillcrest debacle never really left him. My dad carried scar tissue from that experience for the rest of his life, and it affected every aspect of his conduct in business. He was terrified of failure. He was deathly afraid of going broke.
He was not averse to spending money; to the contrary, he lived pretty large for a guy who ran a small local business. When I was old enough to have a clue about what was going on around me, I noticed that my dad bought a new car every two years, always a Cadillac Sedan de Ville. He kept a rustic weekend cottage on Page Lake, a few miles across the Pennsylvania line. He had boats and snowmobiles. And starting when I was very young, he and my mom spent a couple of months each winter in Florida. They left me, and the kids who came later, in the care of neighbors, who’d move into our house for the duration.
I don’t know that my dad allowed himself to enjoy much of it. He was preoccupied. I’d come to see and feel that up close in the years ahead, and it could be enormously frustrating.
Then again, I didn’t experience his close brush with ruin. I was busy learning to walk.
* * *
In the hands of my haunted, driven father, Dick’s Clothing and Sporting Goods reestablished itself as Binghamton’s go-to source for fishing and hunting gear, camping supplies, and outdoor clothes. I don’t mean that it made anyone rich. That, it did not do. Dick’s was always in debt to the bank and to the vendors that supplied the store with merchandise, and it always seemed to have too much inventory or too little. Throughout my childhood, the business was a bad month away from collapsing under the weight of that debt, so even as the store’s reputation and clientele grew, there was a palpable air of nervous struggle about the place. My dad would sometimes ruminate on the dicey state of affairs and say to me—and I heard this many times—“Ed, if I had what I owe, I’d truly be a wealthy man.” Even so, he almost immediately bought a new house—a split-level place with a walk-out basement, bigger than the last but far from large, at 16 Ardsley Road, on Binghamton’s East Side.
My sister Kim came along in the midst of the store’s rebirth, in January 1957. I’d just turned two. And pretty regularly for the six years after, my parents had kids roughly two years apart: my brother Rick, then my brother Marty, and finally, when I was eight, my sister Nancy. Our house had one bathroom and three bedrooms: one that my parents shared, another for my sisters, and the third into which I was shoehorned with my two brothers—a small room with a ceiling so low, and sloped so acutely, that even as kids, we could stand straight only in the middle.
We all worked, on and off, at Dick’s during our formative years, but from early on it was clear that my dad expected me to join him in the business, and that assumption was woven into my entire upbringing. My childhood is inseparable from “the store,” as it was always called at home. Some of my earliest memories are wrapped up in the place. I remember the garage stuffed with merchandise that wouldn’t fit in the store’s back room—Coleman coolers stacked high, Sorel winter boots, snowmobile oil, and case after case of propane tanks and white gas. The whole place was a tinderbox: one spark would have leveled the entire block. Nowadays, the state would take your kids away from you for less.
My dad broke me in early on retail. When I was five, and my mom had her hands full with the younger kids, she’d sometimes have my dad take me into Dick’s for the day. My dad had no time to babysit, so he planted me in the store’s basement, where he kept the back stock of clothes and gear, along with ammo and gunpowder, and put me to work. My job: attaching prices to heavy cotton work pants, which involved pins and paper tags—not the easiest task for so little a kid. By the end of the day, my thumbs would be bleeding from dozens of pinpricks.
From about the same period, I remember going down to the store with him on Sundays, when the place was closed, and sitting beside him in his office while he did paperwork—stamping and signing checks, gathering deposits, filling out orders. During the winter, he’d have the TV tuned to football. I can picture watching the Giants on that small black-and-white screen.
When I wasn’t at the store, I was hearing about it at the dinner table, where the conversations followed predictable themes: In the summer and fall, we talked about the Yankees and the store. In the fall and winter, we talked about the Giants and the store. If you couldn’t jump in with a contribution to one of those subjects, you were pretty much shut out. Weather came up, but only because it had such an impact on the business: my dad always
hoped for cold days in the fall, because it would bring in hunters looking to gear up on hats, coats, and long underwear.
The store came up during my parents’ arguments, too. My siblings and I witnessed a lot of those. My mom wanted my dad home more, though looking back, it’s clear that my folks were mismatched. My dad was self-absorbed and obsessed with his work. My mom, raised by doting, demonstrative parents and accustomed to constant attention, didn’t get the devotion she expected. They bickered constantly. At night, as I drifted off to sleep, it was often to a soundtrack of loud, angry voices.
Alcohol looms large in my early memories, too: When I was five, Dad taught me how to fix his standard cocktail, a perfect CC Manhattan. He gave me a shot glass and told me to fill it up twice from the brown bottle—that’d be Canadian Club—and once from the green bottle of sweet vermouth. I’d add a splash of water and a cherry and take it to him. As I got older, I came to see that when he got into his third Manhattan of the night—with six shots of booze already in him, and three more headed that way—trouble was coming. He wasn’t a happy drinker. He grew sullen, and sometimes flat-out mean. His patience, never ample, vanished entirely. He could blow without provocation. I made myself scarce.
When provoked, my dad sometimes forgot that he stood five-eight and weighed 150 pounds. Once, while attending a sporting goods convention, he was in the restaurant at a hotel in New York City. A group of guys sat at the next table over, and one, who was talking loud enough that my dad could hear, told his buddies, “That Dick Stack, at Dick’s Sporting Goods, he doesn’t pay his bills on time.” He probably said more, but he’d already crossed a line. If there was one thing my dad was a stickler for, it was paying bills on time.
My dad’s friend and coworker, Frank Gehrlein, was sitting with him, along with a few others from Dick’s, and Frank could see that he was steaming. A while later, the loudmouth—evidently a manufacturer’s rep—got up and crossed the restaurant to the bathroom. My father waited a minute or so, then got up and made for the bathroom himself. It took a few seconds for Frank to put together what was about to happen, and to hurry after both. He watched as the loudmouth stepped out of the bathroom and started back across the lobby. My dad stopped him halfway across, said a few words, then punched him right in the face. The guy flew backward over a couch, where my dad pounced on him. They were whaling away at each other when Frank pried them apart. “I knew what was going to happen,” Frank told me long after. “I just couldn’t get there fast enough.”
That wasn’t the only time my dad got into a fistfight. Truth be told, he was in quite a few.
* * *
I don’t mean to paint Dick Stack as a bad man. I think he was self-medicating when he drank, trying to escape the suffocating anxiety that gripped him. And I don’t mean to make it sound as if I had a Dickensian childhood, because like a lot of kids in the early to mid sixties, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the house, anyway. Every morning from age five on, I was outside minutes after I woke. At first, my friends and I were small enough to squeeze our play into the backyard at 16 Ardsley. Though it seemed plenty big at the time, it was a tiny space, dominated by a weeping willow tree that dropped leaves and spiders constantly. A rusty swing set took up some space, too, but we scratched out a miniature baseball diamond in the remaining grass and managed to play some truncated form of the game.
The backyard was bordered by hedges, in most places so thick that you couldn’t get through them, but thinner in spots. If you hit a ball to the left, it would end up in the Bagostas’ yard, and you’d have to push through one of those thin stretches of hedge to get it. A shot into center landed in the Risleys’ yard, and you’d go through the same routine of wading through the bushes. Ah, but if you hit to the right, and the ball sailed into the Laytons’ yard, you were screwed, because if Mr. Layton saw our ball land on his property, he’d snatch it up and wouldn’t give it back. One day my dad came home at dinner and wanted to play catch. I told him we couldn’t—Mr. Layton had kept our ball. My dad walked into the backyard and through the bushes into Mr. Layton’s yard. A few minutes later he came back with the ball. His knuckles were covered with blood.
We’d play Wiffle ball out front in the street, too. The center field fence was our roof: hit the ball on the porch for a double, onto the shingles above for a home run. As I got a little older, I’d jump on my bike and pedal to Fairview Park, about a half mile away, and spend the morning playing ball. I came home long enough to wolf down a peanut butter sandwich, a couple of Oreos, and a glass of milk, then rode back to the park to play more. My parents never worried about me during my long hours away. The East Side of my childhood was a close-knit neighborhood in which all knew their neighbors. Most were one-income households—policemen, insurance salesmen, IBM workers—with a parent at home during the day. Little happened outside without an adult taking notice. We had a lot of eyes on us. Then as now, Fairview Park had a full-size Little League diamond, a wading pool, and a big blacktop playground. It was the center of my universe. Between eight thirty a.m. and six p.m., I might have been home for half an hour.
Baseball. I lived for baseball. It filled my days and at night, my dreams. In 1962, the year after Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, my uncle Harold took me to New York City to see the Yankees. We took the train out of Binghamton, and I’ll never forget walking the concourse and passing through a tunnel, and the concrete around us opening to reveal the field and that great bowl of stadium around us. I’d seen Yankee Stadium only on black-and-white TV. In person the grass was a surreal green, the brightest and most saturated color I’d ever seen, and the dirt of the baselines was a deep cinnamon brown and perfectly groomed. The foul lines gleamed white. It was breathtaking. I wanted nothing more than to play on that field.
Soon, all my heroes were there: Maris and Mickey Mantle. Yogi Berra. The Yankees’ catcher Elston Howard, who was the only player in the league—in those days before catchers wore helmets—to flip the brim of his hat up when he turned it around to put on his mask. I thought that was so cool.
Back home, I had a little transistor radio that I’d sneak into my bed, and on nights when the Yankees were playing out west I’d listen to the play-by-play. I couldn’t get enough. Even now I can recite the Yankees’ batting order from those days. In fact, in the bookcase behind my desk, I have a figurine collection of the 1961 Yankees’ lineup. I’m looking at my hero, Elston Howard, as I write this.
* * *
Back then, baseball games were televised only on weekends, and I never missed a Yankees game on TV. Which brings up the other great love of my childhood: my grandfather.
My mother’s parents had divorced when she was little, and her father, an Irishman named Thomas Boyle, had moved off to Florida. Her mom, Anna, had remarried an Austrian immigrant named Karl Krupitza, who’d moved to Binghamton in 1906, when he was nine. For reasons obscure, everyone called him “Dutch.”
My mom, six or seven when they married, adored him, and I could understand why. I called him Grampa or Gramp, and when things were tough at home I could always count on him. He listened when I was upset or excited. He didn’t say much but offered quiet advice when I needed it. And he was a master at companionable silence: we could spend long stretches of time watching the Yankees without a word passing between us, yet have a wonderful time together.
Gramp was my anchor, my refuge. He understood me when it seemed no one else did. He was a wonderful example to me in so many aspects of life. He was relentlessly upbeat. Unfailingly good-natured. Comfortable in his own skin. A true gentleman, too. I never once heard him say a bad word about another person. Never heard him swear. Never heard him boast. And his marriage was a revelation, because in stark contrast to my parents, he and my grandmother enjoyed each other like newlyweds. Every night after supper they went out to the Elks or Moose lodge for three beers apiece. They spent weeks each winter in Florida and flew to Las Vegas once or twice a year until he was ninety. My grandmother played bingo
and the slots. Gramp played blackjack and poker. You want proof that age is just a number? Karl Krupitza was it.
Something else about him awed me. He was a little guy, bespectacled and slight, not at all imposing to look at. But I’ll tell you what: he was a force to be reckoned with in any sport he took up. The first of those sports was baseball. In 1923 he started working as a “vacation fireman,” filling in for city firefighters who’d taken off work. Two years later, he was appointed full-time to the department. Binghamton firefighters had a baseball team that played in the adult city league, and Gramp earned a spot as third baseman. He was good enough to keep the assignment into the mid-thirties, and in 1936 was elected the team’s manager. By then he was taking an interest in bowling, and for more than twenty years he ranked among the city’s top competitors. During that reign, he picked up a golf club for the first time, at age thirty-five. Four years later, he broke one hundred for the first time. Five years after that, he won the Broome County amateur title.
One good thing about being a firefighter is that you get a lot of free time. Gramp worked two days on, three off, and with rare exceptions, he played a full round on those open days, and often bowled in a league a few hours later. By the time he made fire lieutenant, in 1949, he was among the region’s top amateur golfers; by the time I came along, years after he’d retired, he was playing five or six rounds a week.
I didn’t often join him on the golf course—I was too busy with baseball—but I’d stop by his house to watch golf on TV with him. At about the time we moved onto Ardsley, he and my grandmother had moved from McNamara to Sunset Avenue, little more than a block away. To get to their house, I walked out our front door and across the street, cut through two neighbors’ yards, and emerged on Riverview Avenue, right where it intersected with Sunset. I’m sure the neighbors didn’t care for my shortcut, because I practically wore a groove into their lawns.
