by Ed Stack
The decision didn’t suddenly transform me into the greatest of college prospects, however. Decades later, my daughter Katie was preparing to take the SATs and asked me whether I scored higher in the test’s math or verbal section. I answered accurately: “Sports, honey.”
One high school course I did enjoy, and that had a tremendous impact on me, was a public speaking class taught by a mild-mannered guy named Lawrence Feltham. Had it not been for him, and for what I learned in that class, I don’t know that I’d be able to do what I do today, because speaking in front of an audience is part of leading any big company. One of my favorite movies is Mr. Holland’s Opus, about a teacher who devotes his life to teaching in a public high school and leaves a mark on generations of students. Whenever I see it, I think of Mr. Feltham. I suspect he had no idea how much he affected me.
Many of my courses didn’t go so well. I was taking a lot of New York Regents classes—something like today’s advanced placement—but not bringing glory to the family name in any. So I knew I wouldn’t be going to Notre Dame, Penn, or Syracuse. I applied to smaller schools and was accepted by Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—not too far away, but far enough, and I could play football there; by Widener College, just south of Philadelphia; and by St. John Fisher, a small, private liberal arts college outside Rochester.
I was struggling in French, among other subjects, while I mulled these choices. My French teacher was a young woman named Katie Madigan, whose dad had been good friends with my uncle Ed. She recognized that I had more scholastic potential than my grades let on, but she was also realistic. She pulled me aside after class one day. “You’re never going to pass the French Regents final,” she told me.
“Ms. Madigan, I know,” I said. Understood was that if I didn’t pass French, I wouldn’t have enough credits for a Regents Diploma.
“I’m going to help you out here,” she said. “I want you to write me a paper on a French author, French artist, French philosopher—I don’t care which. Just write me three pages on any one of these, and I’ll excuse you from the final. Under one condition.”
That sounded great to me. “What’s the condition?” I asked.
She answered: “That you promise to never take another French class.”
In another conversation, she asked where I wanted to go to college. I hemmed and hawed. “You should go to St. John Fisher,” she declared. Her brother, Freddie, was a student there. Her sister, Mary, went to Nazareth College, which was more or less a sister school to St. John Fisher. They both liked Rochester. “Go up there,” she said, “and spend a weekend with Freddie. See what it’s like.”
I did. I had a wonderful weekend at the school and fell hard for her sister. Mary Madigan was a year ahead of me, and gorgeous, and went out of her way to be nice to me. In retrospect, her sister probably told her to be, but I didn’t think that at the time. I chose to attend St. John Fisher because I was interested in Mary Madigan. I’m sure there are worse reasons to pick a college. It’s possible that there are better ones, too.
As my senior year ended, I faced a dilemma. Binghamton North doled out four graduation tickets for each member of the class; without a ticket, you didn’t get in. I invited my mom and my dad, and there was no way I wasn’t inviting Gramp and my grandmother, but that left out Donna. I didn’t know what to do. My dad lost his mind that I was even thinking about leaving her out, but he didn’t have any ideas about how to get out of the dilemma. I decided the ceremony wasn’t worth the anguish it was causing everyone and announced I wouldn’t attend my graduation.
As it happened, I ended up going. My dad skipped it.
That summer I again worked at Dick’s for twelve hours a day. My only comfort was that I no longer imagined Tim Myers out having fun while I was stuck inside. My dad asked me one day whether I had any friends who might want to work at the store, and when I asked Tim, he said sure, he’d love a job there. So while I worked the floor, helping customers, Tim was now across the back parking lot in the warehouse.
Spoiler alert: he kept working for Dick’s. He still works for the company. He’s never worked anywhere else. Besides me, he might be our most senior employee, with forty-five years on the job and counting.
I couldn’t wait for the summer to end. My plan was to spend a year at St. John Fisher, work my tail off, then transfer to Notre Dame, where I’d decided I really wanted to be. I wouldn’t go out for any intercollegiate sports; I had no future in the pros, so I had to get serious about my studies—not only because that might help me get to South Bend, but because I’d have to get a real job once I graduated.
I’ll give away how that turned out right now: I did not go to Notre Dame. At Fisher, I pulled something like a 2.75 grade-point average. In business courses, I managed a little north of 3.0. Not bad, but not setting the world on fire. A fellow student once remarked to me that “retail and real estate are the C student’s best friends,” and I have to say he was probably right.
At long last came the day when my dad and Donna drove me to Rochester and helped me carry my few belongings into the dorms. I remember watching as they drove off, the paraphrased words of Dr. Martin Luther King ringing in my head: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” I’d never have to work at Dick’s again. I was beyond happy.
St. John Fisher was a young school, founded in 1948. It occupied a tree-shaded campus with brown-brick dorms and classroom buildings, neither modern nor old-fashioned, on 150-odd acres of rolling hills in the southeast Rochester suburbs, an area of town largely given over to golf courses. Originally a Catholic college led by the Basilian Fathers, it had gone independent of the church five years before I arrived; still, priests accounted for a good share of the faculty and administration. The school had also started accepting women in the recent past, though the student body remained overwhelmingly male. All-female Nazareth College, and Mary Madigan, were a mile away. Each school served as the dating pool for the other.
Another spoiler: I got absolutely nowhere with Mary. She was unfailingly kind but had no romantic interest in me whatsoever. Instead, I dated a couple of her fellow Nazareth students. One taught me how to play the piano.
My first weeks in college introduced me to friends who’d be part of my life for years to come: great guys like Mark Muench, from Syracuse, and Bill Colombo, from Brooklyn, who’d later become a major part of Dick’s. My decision not to attempt a transfer to Notre Dame had little to do with my grades and everything to do with these friendships, and with the charms of Rochester, and with the relationships I had with my professors at Fisher. I quickly fell in love with the place.
* * *
Halfway through my freshman year I’d forged an outline for my future. I’d be a business lawyer. I’d major in accounting and learn everything I needed to know to properly manage a company’s books. Then I’d go to law school and pass the bar. The combination of business acumen and legal know-how would make me attractive to any business. I’d be sitting on a corporate board someday, or leading a meaningful company.
I finished my freshman year excited. I’d written a letter to a law firm in Binghamton and landed a summer job as a clerk there. I was proud and full of myself, and went to tell my dad of this first success on my road to becoming a lawyer. He didn’t want to hear about it. “You’re not going to work there,” he said.
“Sure I am,” I said. “I got the job. They’ve said yes.”
“No,” he said. “This business has put food on the table since you were a kid. It’s what’s helping you go to college. You’re going to get your ass down to the store, and that’s all there is to it.” Knowing that I couldn’t continue college without him, I did as I was told. I rubbed some dirt on the hurt and sucked it up. But my disdain for working at the store in high school was kid’s stuff next to my hatred for it now.
The one bright spot in my life that summer was a new game. I’d been in my midteens when Gramp first advised me to take up golf, and he’d kept up the pitch ever since
. I hadn’t been uninterested. I’d watched a lot of golf on TV with him, and I’d been riveted by some big coffee-table books he had that showed off golf holes located around the world. The colors of those fairways and greens reminded me of my almost overwhelming first glimpse of Yankee Stadium as a kid. So I’d been receptive; in fact, in high school I’d often doodled golf courses—drew doglegging fairways and diabolical water hazards and sand traps when I should have been paying attention to the teacher. What with baseball and football, though, I’d never had time for the game.
That now changed. Between my semesters away and my schedule at the store, I didn’t see Gramp nearly as often, and I missed our time together. So beginning that summer, I started playing golf with him on my Mondays off. I learned immediately that he was a very good player. I was not, but I learned the game from a quiet and patient teacher.
He usually had a simple solution to problems on and off the course. Once, I was hitting balls off the practice tee and complained, “Gramp, everything I’m hitting is going left.”
“Well, Eddie,” he responded, “aim a little more to the right.”
Another day we were playing at En-Joie Golf Club—its “E-J” abbreviation is a clue that it was developed by Endicott Johnson for the company’s employees, back in the 1920s—and on the third tee I hit a bad drive. I was steamed about it as we walked the fairway, and as he strode past me Gramp slapped me on the back. “Hey, Eddie,” he said, “who you mad at?” He kept walking, and I realized I’d been ticked off at the golf course, and my clubs, and the weather, and the fates, when of course none of those were to blame for that lousy shot. I was being a jerk, and he made me laugh at myself. I hollered after him: “I got it!”
He downplayed his own skills. He made nine holes-in-one, all after he’d turned fifty, but I didn’t learn that from him—I read it in the newspaper. The same went for his most remarkable achievement. Beginning at age seventy-one, he shot his age for nineteen years straight; in other words, when he was seventy-one, he shot a seventy-one or lower. More often than not, he did it several times per year. If you’re not a golfer, let me assure you, that’s a big deal. If you said anything about how amazing it was, he’d wave off the compliment. “It gets easier every year,” he said, “because I get one more shot to play with.”
When he was seventy-four, he felt a stabbing pain in his back while playing a round in Florida and underwent spinal disc surgery a short time later. It kept him away from the game for three months. He was pretty sure he managed to shoot a seventy-three that year, regardless, but admitted that he might have snapped his string. Otherwise, the feat was amply documented.
Gramp never stopped offering me insight into a life well lived. When he was halfway through his eighties, he and my grandmother came home from one of their regular trips to Las Vegas, during which they held themselves to a few hard-and-fast rules. They went out every night. They never returned to their room before eleven and never stayed out past two. This time, Grandma arrived back in Binghamton with her arm in a cast. “What happened?” I asked her.
“I broke my arm,” she said.
“How’d you do that?”
“We were doing the Bump,” she said. That was a disco dance popular at the time in which dancers bumped butts. “And your grampa missed.”
Bottom line, so to speak: that summer Gramp rescued me, as he had so often in my childhood. He salvaged what otherwise would have been three months spent stewing in purgatory and plotting my escape. As it was, I still thought a lot about my future. Three more years of school, and I’d be done with Dick’s, and Binghamton, and my mercurial father.
* * *
My stay in the dorms ended after two years. There was this kid—I won’t mention his name, but let’s call him “Ralph”—who hung around with us. We couldn’t figure out why, because we had nothing in common. One day in February of my sophomore year, a few of us in the dorm decided it would be a good idea to grab Ralph while he took a shower, wrap him up in the shower curtain, carry him to the elevator, and send him down to the lobby.
Streaking was the big rage at the time, and at St. John Fisher this prank had become a sidebar to the wider craze. It wasn’t my idea to subject Ralph to it, and I certainly wasn’t the ringleader, but I joined in on the plan once it was already hatched. The mission was a failure: we never got Ralph into the elevator.
Unfortunately, he called his father, just the same, and his father called the school. We were in big trouble. We were summoned to the dean of student housing. I was the last to walk in, and when I did the dean looked me in the eye and muttered, “Fucking Stack. I should have known.” I have no idea why he said that.
There was talk of suspending us, which eventually was dropped—the administration came to see that we were all decent students and had merely been playing a prank. But the matter wasn’t finished. Father Joe Dorsey, the dean of students, taught English, and I was taking a class with him. I loved the guy. Father Dorsey was kind and smart, and the glue that held Fisher together. After a class in late April, near the end of the semester, he asked me, “Mr. Stack, can I see you in my office?”
I took up a position in front of his desk. He looked at me over his half glasses and asked, “Ed, have you and your friends ever thought of moving off campus?”
“You know what, Father? We have,” I answered. “We’ve been thinking about it.”
He nodded. “My son, I would strongly suggest that.” He paused before continuing: “There is no on-campus housing for you and the other boys next semester.”
My buddies and I had to convince our parents that we were moving off campus because it was the mature thing to do—we’d learn how to cook, clean, pay bills, run a real household. We didn’t mention that we had no choice. The only place we could afford was a rambling two-and-a-half-story wood-frame house on what was, at the time, a rough street in one of the rougher neighborhoods in Rochester. Put it this way: a candidate for city office campaigned on cleaning up the area.
So there, in a Rochester battle zone, is where I spent my nights for the second half of my time in college. Despite numerous distractions, most self-inflicted, I did all right. Accounting is a tough major, but I found I had an affinity for numbers, and I was able to stay sharp by applying what I learned at Dick’s over the summer.
My college years coincided with high interest rates in the United States. The prime was 10 percent the month I started classes, rose as high as 12 percent in July 1974, and was still bouncing around 10 percent the following January. It would get a lot higher a few years later, but at the time, those rates seemed ruinous, and they did a number on consumer spending. Business was terrible. My dad, still scarred by his long-ago brush with disaster, was so depressed that on some mornings he didn’t get out of bed. I’d come home and he’d ask what we’d posted in sales for the day, and when I told him he’d groan that the end was near.
But my summers home revealed that the prime rate was a minor concern next to some in-house challenges at Dick’s. Remember how, when I was a kid, our garage was always stuffed with overstock? I saw now that one reason for that was that my dad played his hunches when buying merchandise. If he liked a product and believed it would sell well, he simply bought a lot of it. Following his gut usually paid off, but sometimes the only way to get rid of all the overstock was to discount it to the point where we made little, if any, money from its sale. My dad, I came to see, didn’t have any real buying strategy or program in place. He wasn’t financially disciplined. We could limp along by the seat of our pants for only so long.
His lack of basic planning was never more apparent than during our annual inventory, which he conducted each July, just after the June 30 close of the store’s fiscal year. It took a week or so to go through the store, tallying up everything we had and figuring out what we had sold. It wasn’t until we did that, and extended the inventory into dollars and cents, that my dad knew whether he’d made money during the year. He had no idea. He used a line of credit from the
bank to buy merchandise, pay out salaries, and cover the stores’ utilities, and all the while didn’t know until the end of the year whether he’d break even. As I got deeper into my education in accounting, this flying-blind approach to running a business seemed ever more dangerous. It invited failure.
I worked part-time jobs in Rochester that opened my eyes to how well-run companies behaved. I was a gofer at Xerox for a semester, a secretary’s secretary, given odd jobs and numbers to crunch—the smallest of cogs in a huge machine. Even so, it was clear that the machine was well designed and oiled. I worked at Wegmans, a grocery store. I held a job at the Oak Hill Country Club near campus. The bosses at all of these enterprises, I was sure, knew whether they were making money.
My dad’s weaknesses as an administrator only stiffened my resolve to find a career of my own. I wanted no part of the family business. As soon as I graduated, I’d be gone.
Then one day my dad’s doctor, Peter Zayac, was in the store and spotted my dad walking up the stairs to the office. He was dragging a leg. Get yourself to the hospital, the doctor ordered.
* * *
Dad’s illness was all but inevitable. Dick Stack had plenty of habits that weren’t good for his heart. He’d smoked a lot of cigarettes every day since his teens, and if you suggested he might want to cut back, he’d say: “Anybody can quit smoking. It takes a real man to die of lung cancer.” He didn’t exercise. He guzzled those Manhattans. He ate badly—toast, coffee, and Pall Malls for breakfast, next to nothing at lunch, and dinner late in the night. He ate a bowl of ice cream in bed before turning off the light.
Now, though he was only forty-seven, he required a double bypass—today all but routine, but in 1976 a major operation, with no sure prospect of success. A lot of people died on the table during heart surgery. It’s a measure of how serious it was that he was having the procedure at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, one of the leading centers for surgery in the East.
