It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  I went home for the holiday break with this operation looming. As always, I worked at the store. Toward the end of my time home, I decided to drive up to Rochester to spend a weekend with my girlfriend. I asked Bob Aiken if I could have Saturday off. He said it would be no problem. But it was—for my dad. He was at home, restricted to bed rest in anticipation of the surgery, but he found out about my conversation with Bob. “You’re not taking Saturday off,” he told me. “We’re open. You’re staying here.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going. Bob said I could go, and I’m going.”

  “You’re not going,” he growled back.

  For the first time in my life, I stood my ground. “Yeah, I am,” I said. I felt like I had nothing to lose. If he fired me, he’d be doing me a favor. And besides, nothing was going to keep me from my girlfriend that weekend. With that, I drove up to Rochester.

  A week later, I was leaving Binghamton to return to school for the spring semester. My father was in his room, sitting in bed. His operation was scheduled for a few days later. I paused outside his door. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again. “Dad,” I said, “good luck with your operation. And I just want you to know that I love you.” That was radical talk in the Stack household. My dad had never once told me he loved me. I half-expected that he might say it now. Instead, he grumped: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have taken last Saturday off.”

  A few days later he went under the knife. In the recovery room after the surgery, he started bleeding, so they wheeled him back into the operating room. His heart stopped. They revived him. But he never returned to his old self after that. He went back to work and remained nominally in charge, but my dad never made it all the way back, emotionally or physically, from that close call.

  Seventeen months later I graduated, having not gone on a single job interview during my last semester in school. I loved Rochester and would have loved to stay there, and I felt confident that I could find work with an accounting firm in the city. But all of that was trumped by the reality of what was going on back in Binghamton. My father was sick. I was the oldest kid. I had to go to work in the family business.

  At nine on the Tuesday morning after graduation, I opened the store.

  CHAPTER 6 “WE’D BE DOING A LOT BETTER IF WE WEREN’T GETTING DICKED TO DEATH”

  So it was that at age twenty-two I assumed my place at Dick’s. In the wake of his surgery, my dad was operating at well under 100 percent and spent more time in Florida—he bought a house in Jupiter and was down there for more than half the year now, from October to May, with a brief visit home around Christmas—so running the business was pretty much up to Bob Aiken and me.

  I already knew that in terms of record keeping, the stores were a mess. Now I looked around and saw more room for improvement. In fiscal 1977, the company did $2,090,000 in business. Before taxes, it cleared $100,000, which was a very thin profit, indeed. I realized that with a few small changes we could improve our sales, our margins, and our merchandising. I went through our financial statements and found ways we could trim expenses. I studied our advertising, compared it to the advertising other stores did, and dreamed up different approaches.

  Bob could be gruff, as I said earlier. Example: A few years before, I’d worked at the store during spring break. Golf-A-Thon was happening across town. “Youngblood,” Bob said, using his nickname for me. “Take this truck over to St. Michael’s.” He pointed to a truck outside that was loaded with merchandise. It had a manual transmission. “Bob,” I told him, “I’ve never driven a stick.”

  “You better learn fast,” he replied. “Get that damn truck over to St. Michael’s.” It wasn’t pretty, but I jerked and stalled my way across town and delivered the goods, as ordered.

  Now, years later, the boss’s kid was suggesting changes to a guy accustomed to running the business while my dad was away. Another man might have resented my arrival and ignored my input. Bob welcomed it. “Youngblood,” he’d say when I pointed out how we might improve the bottom line, “let’s do it.” He didn’t hesitate to share the organization’s leadership. So arriving at the store each morning didn’t promise a long day of drudgery. Rather, it offered interesting problems to solve. And of all the surprises I’ve experienced in my life, perhaps the biggest unfolded over my first several months back at Dick’s. I fell in love with the place.

  On his visits home, my dad reminded me that he was still the boss, and he didn’t do it gently. I was up in the office doing some paperwork one quiet afternoon when he stomped in, irritated that I wasn’t helping customers. “Get your ass down on that floor,” he snarled. I knew that the sales floor was everything to him and did what I was told. I’ll give you another example of his warm and loving style. It involved a kid named Jay Mininger who, one wintry day, walked in the store to apply for a job. He was sixteen years old and a tennis player; one look told you he was an athlete. “What are you doing now?” I asked him.

  “I work up at the Hess gas station,” he said, adding: “It’s cold.”

  We hired him. Jay would be an integral part of the company for decades. Early on, he wasn’t my protégé, exactly, but I took him under my wing on a variety of tasks. We got a lot done together. At one point, after careful study and lengthy debate, Jay and I decided it was time for Dick’s to go into the cross-country-ski business. There was usually snow in town for months each winter, and cross-country skiing had grown in popularity over the past couple of years, so the timing felt right. We went out and bought cross-country skis, boots, and poles, and built a big display of them stretching thirty feet across the back wall.

  It looked great. We were excited about it. At that point, in walked my dad. He was headed to Florida the next day and had stopped by for a last look around. He glared at the ski display for a moment before walking to a set of skis at one end and throwing it into the next set over. The entire display toppled like dominos. He shot me a glance and said, “Get these the hell out of here,” then stalked out.

  Poor Jay was rattled. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “What are we going to do?”

  “Let’s pick up the skis and put them back up,” I said. “He’s leaving tomorrow, and we’ll sell them all before he gets back.” Which is what happened—not only did we sell all the ski gear, we sold a lot more coats, hats, and gloves to go with it. The episode encouraged what became my strategy for introducing new products and ideas: unless I was pretty sure my dad would agree, I’d wait until he left town. Otherwise, I got nowhere, because he’d block me or simply blow me off.

  I wanted badly to get into the athletic footwear business. All through my teens, I’d been shopping at Irv’s Champion for my cleats because Dick’s didn’t carry the Puma and Adidas shoes that every kid wanted to wear. The only cleats we carried were old-fashioned, heavy leather Riddells. If you bought those, you might as well wear a leather helmet. Puma and Adidas made cool, modern sneakers, too. We carried canvas Converse high-tops and P.F. Flyers—not cool. We should be carrying the new stuff, I’d tell my dad. It’s what everyone wants.

  He didn’t want to hear it. He was comfortable in the outdoor category, augmented by a little golf and baseball. Why change? His mantra was, “This is what we do, and this is how we’ve done it.” Whatever its roots, his resistance to change was a gift to me. It forced me to think through my proposals to him, to really analyze the positives and negatives of an idea, to make it bulletproof. And it reinforced a truth that has been demonstrated to me time and again, which is that the moment a business stops evolving, the moment its leaders sit back and think, Everything’s good, that’s when it starts to fail.

  Maybe that’s especially true for retail. Change has to be a constant. Improvement can never end. You have to stay fresh to your customers, and to do that you have to be perpetually rethinking everything you do, questioning your every assumption. You have to be willing to sometimes blow up everything in the name of staying focused, and exciting, and better—and ahead of your competition.

&n
bsp; So dealing with my dad was a constant struggle, but it was always interesting. Many of the battles I won, I won by not fighting—I just didn’t ask ahead of time. Most head-on disagreements I lost. I loved the business a little less on those occasions, but the good days outnumbered the bad.

  That said, I came close to quitting a year after I graduated. In the summer of 1978, Mark Muench, who’d become my best friend while at St. John Fisher, was getting married in Rochester. He asked me to be in his wedding. So a week out I went to Bob Aiken, to let him know I’d be away for a weekend. “Bob, I’d like to leave Friday around noon,” I told him. “I’m in my buddy’s wedding on Saturday. It’s a three-hour drive and the rehearsal dinner is Friday night.”

  “Sure,” Bob said. “No problem.”

  My dad, home for the summer, caught wind of my plan and approached me in the store. “You’re not going to that wedding,” he said. “The store is open, so you’re working.”

  “What do you mean, I’m working?” I asked him. “It’s Muenchy’s wedding. He’s my best friend. I’m in the wedding.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” he said. “You’re working. End of conversation.”

  “I’m going,” I said. It seemed a repeat of our argument when I’d left town to see my girlfriend. “I’m going to the wedding.”

  “If you go,” he said, “don’t come back on Tuesday.”

  I should have told him to pound salt. With the advantage of hindsight, I suspect he might have respected that. I could have pointed out that he’d have to be stupid to fire me, because he’d have wasted the decade he’d already spent grooming me to take over someday. That might have shut him up. Then again, he was a hothead and used to getting his way. He might have canned me on the spot. I might be a lawyer in Syracuse today. Whatever the case, I caved. I called Muenchy with the news that I couldn’t come. “What do you mean, you’re not coming?” he asked.

  “My father won’t give me the day off,” I said.

  He was not happy. But Muenchy was not one to hold grudges. We’d stay great friends for forty years, until his death from a brain tumor at fifty-eight. Over all that time, I can count on one hand the number of times I saw him visibly upset and without a smile on his face. He was one of the most naturally upbeat and generous people I’ve ever known.

  So he got over it. I did not. I was angry with my dad and furious at myself. It was a defining moment. I wanted to stay at Dick’s, had come around to loving the business, but I saw that I couldn’t work for my father indefinitely. I was twenty-three, and it was clear that he and I were coming to a day of reckoning.

  * * *

  I’ve spent some time reflecting on why my dad seemed so hell-bent on busting my stones every chance he got. I used to be angry about it. Now I’m merely curious—it’s a puzzle that I’d like to solve. Playing armchair shrink, I’ve considered a wide range of possible answers. An obvious starting point is that he had no idea what he was doing as a father: his own dad was killed when he was seven, and he had no male role model besides my uncle Ed, whose example wasn’t reliably positive. He was twenty-five but still an unfinished kid when he married my mother, and eleven months later, I showed up to steal away all of my mom’s focus. Two years later, there was another baby, and suddenly he was twenty-seven years old and a father twice over, without a clue about how to handle the situation.

  My mom’s theory was that he was jealous of me—that he saw I was smarter than he was and a better athlete, too. But my mom was an iffy source when it came to my dad, and besides, he started in on me long before I displayed an aptitude for anything at all, so that explanation doesn’t wash. A simpler idea is that I happened to come along first, and his idea of rearing a boy (shared by many of his generation) was to toughen me up, above all else. To make a man of me. Can’t do that by coddling, he might have thought. Can’t do that by showing love.

  And maybe my response to that toughness was to become the serious, stoic, duty-bound youngster I was—and the very sort of straitlaced kid my dad hadn’t liked in his own youth. He wasn’t nearly as hard on my brothers, but they’d get into trouble now and then, and I think that he could relate to them more. I was a mystery to him. I did what I was supposed to do, when I was supposed to do it.

  I know this much for sure—I’m my father’s creation. We’re all products of our DNA, so there’s that, but in addition, I’m confident that had he not been tough on me, I wouldn’t be the same person today. I suppose I owe him thanks. But I’ll tell you what: when it comes to parenting my own kids, I’m different from my dad. I tell my kids I love them every chance I get. I’ve tried to support them, and reassure them, and leave no doubt that I’m proud of them and want them to be happy.

  True, none of them can make a perfect Canadian Club Manhattan. Otherwise, though, they’ve turned out pretty well.

  * * *

  Following a serious romantic relationship that didn’t end well, I wound up sharing an apartment with a good friend of mine, Ronnie Saul, whose family owned a men’s clothing store in downtown Binghamton. He, too, was in the process of taking charge of his family business. The apartment was on the South Side, on McNamara Avenue, just a few doors down from my dad’s mom, Nana. I’d drop in to see her from time to time. She loved it.

  Tim Myers and I were at a nightclub one night, and I couldn’t take my eyes off a young woman at the bar. Now, I wasn’t afraid of much in this world. But one thing that did scare me was a pretty woman. I was shy, tongue-tied. I had no game. This night was pretty typical. I stared. She eventually crossed the room to our table. “Are you just going to stare at me all night,” she asked, while wearing a big, confident smile, “or are you going to ask me to dance?”

  “Would you like to dance?” I asked.

  “I’d love to,” she answered.

  That was Gail. We dated on and off for years.

  Meanwhile, my growing role at the store was introducing me to aspects of the business I’d never learned in school. One was the way we got our merchandise. A few brands, such as Woolrich, dealt with us directly. Most hired reps who’d handle goods produced by several companies; a rep might have both McGregor golf clubs and Timberland boots, for instance. They’d swing through Binghamton, show off the products, offer us a price, discuss the terms.

  A price listed in their paperwork wasn’t necessarily what they expected to get for an item, so negotiation was a big piece of the ritual. My dad’s long-standing rule was that you never met with a rep during business hours—it would distract you from your focus on the customer—so these meetings with the reps happened early in the morning or fairly late in the evening. The reps never complained. And in truth, these off-hours meetings might have been fairly standard among sporting goods retailers at the time, because we were part of a small, fragmented industry. No big players dominated the market; most were like us, with a store or two. Off the top of my head, I can think of just a couple regional chains that had more than a half-dozen stores in the seventies and early eighties—Oshman’s, out of Houston, and Herman’s World of Sporting Goods in New York.

  A meeting with a product rep usually took place at a local motel, where he’d get two adjoining rooms and use one to set up his merchandise. I’d had no training before my first try at buying. About all I knew for certain was that we made a lot more money on clothes than we did on guns and tackle.

  One day in February, which is when we did the bulk of our buying for the fall, Bob Aiken said to me, “Youngblood, Paul Grossman’s over at the Holiday Inn. He’ll be expecting you at nine thirty to look at next year’s Raven and Comfy lines.” Raven and Comfy were winter jackets. Bob handed me a two-page order sheet that reflected our buying for the previous year. “Here’s what we bought last time,” he said. “Go over there and see what they’ve got for next year.”

  So I went to the Holiday Inn and met Paul, who was considerably older than me and a big, bearish guy with jet-black hair and a kind, patient manner. He had samples of his new clothing lines laid out
on the beds and hanging on portable racks. I looked over the jackets. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I pointed out a jacket I liked. “Let’s start with this one,” I said. “I’ll take it in black. I’ll take two small, four medium, four large, two extra-large.” He nodded okay. I moved on to other colors, ordering a similar selection of each, then another jacket. “I like this one, too,” I said. “In blue. I’ll take two small, four medium, four large, two extra-large.” We moved on to a third style, and as I listed what I wanted, he looked over his glasses at me and said, “Son, you don’t have enough money to buy all the stuff you’re trying to buy. Let me help you.”

  With that, he went through his lines and helped me pare down my list to a reasonable size. He didn’t have to do that. He could have figured, Hey, this is the boss’s son, and I have a chance to take these guys to the cleaners. But he was honorable and smart, and valued the relationship he’d forged over years of working with us. He spent a long time with me that night, walking me through how to place the order. We stayed friends. He was a guy I always trusted.

  Others helped educate me, too. Mike Rich of Woolrich, our single biggest vendor back in those days, was one—he wouldn’t let me get too far out over my skis. I met with him at the Holiday Inn for years, and once a year I drove a large truck down to Woolrich’s Pennsylvania headquarters to buy closeouts. I’d meet with him and go over shirts and jackets that hadn’t sold or that they’d overproduced, and haggle out discounted prices on the stuff. He’d say, “This was originally forty dollars, but we’ll sell it to you for twenty.” And I’d respond, “Mike, you know what? I’ll take all you have left for fifteen apiece.” As often as not, he’d go along with me.

  We both enjoyed those meetings. I think he often agreed to drop his price simply to help us out. It wasn’t going to make a big difference to his bottom line, but he knew it would make an impact on ours, and I suspect he enjoyed giving us a little push. After we’d finished, his crew would load up the truck and I’d make the three-hour drive back to Binghamton. We’d either sell it at the end of the season or pack it away for the next year.