by Ed Stack
I played briefly in the farm league, then moved up to Little League. I loved every minute of it. My favorite part of catching came when an opposing player tried to steal second or third. My dad’s drills had included “hot potato,” in which I’d try to get the ball out of my glove and back to him as quickly as possible, and in games I enjoyed the payoff, getting the ball out and firing it to second. Sometimes, the ball got there before the runner—sometimes it didn’t. Unfortunately, as good as I was behind the plate, I couldn’t hit worth a lick—I treated every pitch as a potential home run and swung at it with all my might, which is rarely a formula for success in the batter’s box.
The games were a big deal in Binghamton. The newspaper ran box scores. Playoffs earned bona fide coverage by real reporters and stories in the sports section. The stands were always packed. Dad, Mom, Gramp, and my grandmother never missed seeing me play.
After our games, if we won—and often when we didn’t—one of the team parents would give the coach a few bucks to take us to the Tastee Freez on Court Street. The ice cream tasted even better when I got to eat it in uniform with my teammates, on those hot, muggy nights in Binghamton.
* * *
Let’s jump ahead four years to 1968, when I was thirteen. Playing ball was all I cared about, and that would remain the case for years to come. School was a distraction. I did well enough to earn C’s and the occasional B, but classwork didn’t interest me, and it didn’t seem terribly important to my parents. I regret it now, but I didn’t apply myself.
I’d graduated from Little League to muni league teenage baseball by then and was the catcher for the Cortese Restaurant team. Of all the things I miss in Binghamton, that restaurant is near the top—a little hole-in-the-wall, family-run place a couple of blocks from the store, with food that is still out of this world.
Anyway, I was playing for Cortese’s, and we were good. Not great, but solid. Among my teammates was Tim Myers, another kid who lived on the East Side. He was a year behind me in school and played shortstop and first base. We played summer baseball together, starting when he was nine and I was ten, as well as for Binghamton North High School. He was almost as bad a hitter as I was. We became great friends.
Baseball wasn’t my sole obsession. From about the time I started Little League, I’d played pickup football on the sprawling grounds of a state mental hospital at the end of Ardsley Road. It was full-tackle play; we’d wear helmets and shoulder pads over shorts and sneakers. I loved the physicality of football, the tackling, the hits. I loved running the ball and throwing passes.
I’d started playing peewee football when I was twelve, and I can still picture details of my first game. I played linebacker. When the first whistle blew I was sure that I was about to be killed. In the third or fourth play I got hit. A play later, I hit somebody. And I recall thinking: Hey, this is cool. I’m going to like this.
So by that summer of 1968, I was looking forward to a joyful sixteen games of muni league baseball, followed without pause by football training camp in August. I was torn between the two sports and didn’t know which I loved more. My dreams were no longer restricted to making it into the big leagues to play catcher for the Yankees. Now I pictured myself as the starting quarterback for the New York Giants.
That’s where my head was when, with school just ended and the summer stretching languidly ahead, my dad made an announcement at dinner one night. “You’re thirteen,” he said. “It’s time for you to get some responsibility. Be at the store at eight thirty tomorrow. You’re going to work.”
The next morning I rode my bike from Ardsley Road to Dick’s. I’d never ridden on Court Street; to get to school or any points west of home, I was required to take quiet, two-lane Robinson Street, which ran parallel to Court. But that would have taken me out of the way, and my dad had made it clear that I’d better not be late. Court Street was four lanes wide and jammed with traffic, and I remember thinking as cars whizzed by that I probably shouldn’t be there. I survived, needless to say, and made it to the store on time, and that ride became my summertime ritual for years.
My assignment was to unload trucks and stash the arriving merchandise in a little prefab metal warehouse my dad had erected behind the store a couple of years before. It was connected by an intercom to the sales floor, and if Dick’s sold the last of an item, or something too big to have on regular display, the staff would call over: “I need a Eureka twelve-by-twelve tent,” or whatever the item was. I or one of the other warehouse guys would hunt it down and carry it across the back parking lot into the store, or position it out front for easy loading by the customer. It was hot, hard, manual labor, and I freaking hated it—not because it was uncomfortable, but because I knew that Tim Myers and all of my other buddies were at Fairview Park, playing baseball. I worked from eight thirty a.m. to one p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. One o’clock couldn’t arrive fast enough.
I made no secret of the fact that I didn’t want to be there, but that didn’t dissuade my dad from keeping me on. On the contrary, sometimes he got annoyed that I was leaving at one. When I broached the idea that maybe working a kid through the summer was unjust, and that it was limiting my athletic development, he shut me down. “This is the family business,” he said, “which makes it your business. This is what puts food on the table. This is how you’re able to eat, and sleep with a roof over your head.”
The implicit message was “Toughen up.” The explicit message was “No.” I knew better than to raise the subject twice. And two summers later, Dad rewarded my lack of enthusiasm by extending my hours to full time: I now worked twelve hours a day, like everyone else.
I showed up before the store opened to move all the outdoor displays onto the sidewalk out front—Coleman coolers, canoes and johnboats, lawn furniture—and was stuck until it was time to move all the stuff back in after we closed. It was torture. None of my friends worked such hours, and I knew they were all shagging flies while I was trapped indoors, moving boxes around or applying price tags. The days seemed as if they’d never end. I couldn’t bear to be there.
I wasn’t off the hook with the end of summer. My dad put me to work through the Christmas break, as well, when my friends were out sledding and ice-skating or just enjoying a respite from school. Dick’s had a tradition each hunting season of weighing the deer shot by locals, keeping track of the weights, and awarding a prize at season’s end to the hunter who’d bagged the biggest buck. On the sidewalk outside the front doors was the contraption used to weigh the carcasses—a glorified engine hoist with a scale inserted between its boom and the straps from which the deer were suspended. Throughout the days during the season, guys would pull up outside with dead deer roped to their roofs or in the beds of their pickups, and we’d help muscle their prizes to the hoist and crank them off the ground.
No one liked the duty, as even sunny December days were cold in the Southern Tier, so if I was working, it was left to me to do it. The deer would bleed buckets while suspended on the device. We spread sawdust on the sidewalk to soak it up, or at least prevent people from slipping in the gore on their way into and out of the store. By the end of the day, the sidewalk would be heaped with sodden wood chips, which it was my sad duty to clean up.
One day I brought something in from the warehouse and saw a man in the golf department, looking at golf clubs. No one was helping him, so I walked over and asked if there was anything I could do for him. He looked askance at me for a moment—remember, I was then a skinny kid of fifteen—before saying he was looking for clubs but wasn’t sure what he wanted. We got to talking. I walked him through his options. Afterward he nodded, said he needed to think on it, and left.
A couple of days later I was back in the store, dropping something off that I’d lugged from the warehouse, and the man walked back in and headed for the golf department. My dad intercepted him and asked if he could help. The guy spotted me walking toward the back of the store and said: “Actually, I’d like to talk to that young man ri
ght there about these clubs.”
My dad, following his gaze, turned to find me standing there and let out a startled laugh. I walked over. “Yes,” I told him, “I remember.” And within minutes, the man walked out with a set of Wilson Black Heather golf clubs, retailing for $119.
Two things happened at that moment. I realized, with a thrill, that, holy smokes, I could sell—and I liked it. And my dad and the guys on the sales floor all realized that, holy shit, this fifteen-year-old kid could sell. “You’re going to stay on the sales floor now,” my dad told me. “Tomorrow, when you come in, you’re working on the floor.”
CHAPTER 4 “GO PLAY BASEBALL—STAY OUT OF TROUBLE”
Though the store had always been a major presence in my life, until I started working the sales floor I had only a vague notion of what my dad did and whether he was good at it. The only thing I knew firsthand was that he had an almost paranormal awareness of what was on the shelves. Back when I’d been in fifth or sixth grade, Kim and I were assigned to help with the annual summer inventory. Dad would put us in the fishing tackle, where we were to count how many of each little item—lures, hooks, swivels, packets of line, and such—hung from each peg. We were to write down the tally, making sure that we didn’t mix different hook sizes, etc. As the day went on, it was tempting to eyeball a peg and guesstimate a number. If we did, he’d know it. “You wrote down ‘twelve,” he’d say, “and there are fourteen of those.” How did he know that? To this day, I have no idea.
Now I saw him in action every day. First observation: my dad’s management style was not by-the-book. In fact, it was a textbook lesson in how not to handle your employees. He played each of the guys against the others. One week, he’d buddy up to one, saying that his hard work had made him an obvious choice to lead the staff in my dad’s absence. A week later, it would be another guy who got the boss’s approval.
The result was a constant hum of tension in the store, with each employee jockeying for my dad’s attention and favor. Today we’d call it a toxic work environment. I’m betting the place might have blown apart at the seams had my dad not been spending months at a time in Florida, which gave everyone else a chance to settle down. Finally, he formalized Bob Aiken’s status as his number two. Bob’s level head and straightforward leadership were an antidote to the craziness.
Another insight of mine, which would be bolstered many times, was just how effective a salesman my dad was. He was the quintessential Irishman—jovial, a back slapper, full of… well, an ability to shoot the breeze. Sometimes I’d watch him from across the store, laughing with people. He could banter and bargain with anyone, and I could see that his customers enjoyed the exchange. He knew a lot about the merchandise, and that came through when he talked about it. He believed in what he was selling. He was also an expert at going for the added sale—if a customer bought a pair of sneakers, he made sure to push a pair of socks. This wasn’t a mere cash grab. He considered it a disservice to that shopper to have him leave the store without everything he needed to get the best possible results from his purchase.
He roamed the floor through the day, visiting with customers, making sure that each one felt, every minute he was in the store, that he was looked after. The moment the front door opened, we were to be on hand to greet the guy walking in and be ready to answer his questions or show him around. Treat him as you would a guest at your house, I remember him telling me: “If you had a visitor there, you wouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing. You’d drop it to say hello and make him feel at home.”
That was a lesson that stayed with me. You can have the greatest merchandise in town, but if you don’t throw your energy into customer service, you won’t keep people coming back. To this day, nothing annoys me more than to walk into a store unacknowledged. I hate having to roam the aisles looking for help. At 345 Court Street, that never happened.
Another lesson that stuck: never judge a customer by his looks—the way he’s dressed, the way he carries himself, whether his fingernails are clean. “He might be a farmer,” my dad told me, “and this might be the one day of the year he’s come into town to do his shopping.” Great point. To see it played out in everyday terms, look around you the next time you’re at a gym, and try to pick out who among the sweaty people around you showed up in a suit.
How good a salesman was my dad? Before I started working for him, he was in New York City for a sporting goods show at the old New York Coliseum. One evening he and some other guys were going to dinner at the Cattleman. The restaurant was a fair distance away, and it was raining, and they had zero luck hailing a cab. They’re standing at the curb, getting soaked, when a taxi pulls up and the driver climbs out and crosses the sidewalk, on his way into a corner grocery. My dad asked him, “Hey, could you give us a ride to the Cattleman?”
“Forget it,” the guy said. “I’m off duty.” Unnecessarily nasty.
My dad looked in the cab and saw the keys in the ignition, so he hustled everyone into the vehicle, climbed behind the wheel, and hit the gas. I’m not sure how far they got before they were pulled over, but soon enough, cops were all over them. And you know what? Dad talked his way out of it. Charmed the cops and even the cabbie to the point where he and his friends were allowed to go on their way, no charges pressed. They ate steak that night.
Now that I reflect on it, that’s probably a cautionary tale about alcohol, too, because I can’t imagine my dad would have stolen that cab without artificial courage. Still, when he laid on the charm, the guy could talk his way into or out of anything.
* * *
Over the course of many years, Dad inspired in me a building aversion to drink, but there were a few key moments that cemented it. It must have been in the late summer of 1968, the same year I started working in the warehouse, that we held a Stack family reunion at my dad’s house, and a lot of my paternal aunts, uncles, and cousins came. Among them was my favorite, Uncle Ed. Of all my father’s relatives, he was probably the best to me, and I’d bet my siblings and cousins felt the same way. He could make anyone he was with feel like the most important person around. Each of us thought we were his favorite.
Uncle Ed was a wild man, however—he liked to drink, to a degree my dad never approached. Ed was a happy drinker but a dangerous one. So, this reunion lasted all day, until the warm afternoon turned cool and darkness was coming on, by which time Uncle Ed had thrown down quite a few. We walked him out to his car, watched as he headed down the hill, and were strolling back into the house when we heard an enormous crash. The sound of it was catastrophic—it was so loud, and so violent, that it seemed a sure bet someone had just been killed.
Automobile travel hadn’t been good to the Stacks. My grandfather had died in that 1935 car accident. My cousin Diane was eighteen when she, too, collided with a truck, in 1961. Another cousin had been hit by a car and gravely injured, and my own brother Rick had been hurt by a runaway car in a parking lot earlier that year—a vehicle left unattended with the motor running. The car had shaken itself out of park and rolled over Rick, breaking his leg and causing other injuries that put him in a full-body cast for months.
So when we heard this explosive bang down the hill, my father fell to his knees screaming, “Oh, my God! Not my brother now, too!” I took off like a shot toward the sound, fearing the worst. I was sure I’d find my uncle’s car mangled and smoking, and his lifeless body inside.
But, no. I was shocked to discover that Uncle Ed was unhurt. He’d plowed into a parked car, then careened into the woods. He was trying to back his car out of the trees when I reached him, my dad pulling up just behind me in a stripped-down green van. He’d bought it after Rick’s accident, because wearing that full-body cast, my brother wouldn’t fit in my dad’s car.
We loaded Uncle Ed into the van and drove him home. On our way back, my dad said, “Listen. I know you love your uncle, that you think he’s a great guy—and he is. But he drinks too much, and someday he’s going to break all of our hearts. We’re going to g
et a phone call that he’s killed himself in a car accident.
“I just want you to be ready for it,” he said, “because it’s going to happen.”
You’re allowed to raise an eyebrow here over my dad’s commenting on someone else’s drinking. But he was right. In May 1969, when I was fourteen, my uncle was driving home drunk after a round of golf, went off the road, and hit a tree. My dad called me with the news that he might not make it. At the least, he’d be paralyzed from the neck down.
Uncle Ed spent a long time in a local hospital before he was transferred to a Veterans Administration center in Beacon, New York, 140 miles away. I went to see him there a few months later. I remember the horror I felt when I walked into his room: He was held fast by braces and straps, and by a huge iron halo bolted to his head. He couldn’t speak. I must have worn my shock on my face, because when he saw my reaction, tears streamed down his cheeks.
He’d been a bigger-than-life presence—a war veteran, a successful businessman, and a loving and lovable mentor. It was a terrible moment.
He died at the VA fourteen months after the accident.
A second episode contributed to my development as a lightweight drinker: When I was seventeen, Dave Polosky, the golf guy, convinced my dad to hold a one-day springtime sale of golf clubs and equipment away from the store, and to advertise the daylights out of it. They called it Golf-A-Thon. That first year they held it at an American Legion post, but for several years after it took place at St. Michael’s Hall, the community center attached to a Russian Orthodox church on the West Side, about three miles from Dick’s. We’d clear out the golf department and buy a pile of additional merchandise, truck it over to St. Michael’s, and open for a few hours on a Sunday in late March or early April. Golf-A-Thon became a huge event. Customers would swarm in. One year in the early seventies, we did $75,000 in sales. For an operation the size of Dick’s, that was a very big day.
