by Ed Stack
One day at the store I noticed Tim wasn’t around and asked the other guys if they’d seen him. They all looked at me weirdly, until I demanded to know what was going on. “He’s in Denver,” one said.
“Denver? Why’s he in Denver?” I asked. It took a few seconds for me to realize that this relationship was a lot more serious than I’d thought. I wasn’t displeased that one of my oldest buddies was dating my sister, though it violated the age-old Guys’ Code that says you don’t do that. But I sure was surprised, and even more so when I learned that Tim had already asked Kim several times to marry him. She’d put him off, but while he was in Colorado she finally told him yes. She moved back to Binghamton in March. They married five months later.
* * *
Okay: so my dad wasn’t going to sell out to me any time soon, and until he did, there seemed little chance that he’d let me open any new stores. The one thing we could do in the meantime was grow the stores we had, so I suggested expanding the Vestal store to him. It was still a minuscule 2,800 square feet, in a suburb that had grown up fast around it. We had a lot of customers out that way and simply couldn’t serve them well with a store we couldn’t cram any fuller.
He was in Florida when we talked about it on the phone, and he didn’t seem dead set against it, which was about as much as I could hope for with any of my proposals. Over the next few months I had a friend of his draw up plans to boost the store’s size to 7,500 square feet. We were ready to break ground when I sent the plans down to him.
Kim and Tim had just had their first child, Timmy, and were visiting Dad at the time. A few days after I mailed the plans, I got a frantic call from my sister. “Dad’s lost his mind over the Vestal store,” she told me. Tim got on the phone. “Your father’s locked himself in his room,” he said. “He’s really pissed, and he says he’s not coming out until you get your ass down here.”
The next day I got on a plane and flew down to Florida. He was mad as hell with me, wanting to know why I thought I could nearly triple the size of the Vestal store when it was doing just fine the way it was. “Dad,” I told him, “we have to do this. It’s not fine the way it is.” Vestal wasn’t the little, out-of-the-way town it had been when he bought the store. It was the epicenter of the population growth in the Triple Cities. In other words, I said, this isn’t like Hillcrest. This is nothing like Hillcrest. We’ve got the customers there to support a much bigger store.
He calmed down. We expanded the store. Business took off immediately, and Vestal was soon outperforming 345 Court Street, which none of us had seen coming. That was a signal that it was long past time to expand our original store, too. The Sports Mate Diner had moved out, which had opened up some floor space, but we’d already filled it. We needed more room; five thousand square feet was just too tight for all the merchandise I wanted to carry. My dad went along with that expansion. We knocked out the back wall and boosted the store’s area to ten thousand square feet. Business exploded.
The relationship between my father and me was one of constant push and pull. I was bothered, for example, that some of our inventory would sit unsold on the shelves for years. That’s no exaggeration. We had a pile of blue Levi’s corduroy pants that occupied a couple feet of shelf space when I was in college, and when I graduated, and that were still there four years after that. They’d fallen completely out of fashion, and we were asking way too much for them. This was a twofold problem. First, we had capital tied up in inventory we weren’t selling. And two, this stuff was taking up space that we could better use displaying stuff that would sell.
My dad didn’t mind that those cords and equally ancient merchandise were gathering dust. He didn’t want to lose money on them; by his way of thinking, he had to sell them for at least as much as he’d paid. But the value of inventory drops with time, and keeps dropping until it’s virtually worthless. You have to keep it moving. So without talking to him first, I put together a warehouse sale, piled those cords and a variety of other dated merchandise on tables out in the parking lot, and slashed the price on all of it. People showed up in droves to take it off our hands. The sale was under way when my dad pulled up in his car and barked at me, “What the hell are you doing?”
“We have to get rid of this stuff,” I told him.
He looked like his head might explode. “I can’t believe you did this,” he said, and sped off. At day’s end we’d sold almost everything, including the cords. I phoned him to report how we’d done. The numbers cooled his jets so much that starting then, we set clothes aside at the end of each season and augmented the pile with the closeouts I bought from Woolrich. We rented a closed-down grocery store not far from Dick’s for the month of January and held a fire sale for ten days, with everything marked down by half. It was a huge hit.
The bigger stores and special events, along with the bigger margins we made on apparel, translated into big increases in the bottom line. Our sales climbed from $2.5 million to $3.1 million, then to $4 million and beyond. Those are big jumps. We still spent most of the year in debt to the bank and our vendors, but cash crunches came far less often.
In 1984, the Acme next door to 345 Court Street closed, and we moved Dick’s into that space, increasing our square footage by more than a third, to 13,500. My dad was okay with that, especially when sales again jumped. We posted earnings of $1 million on those sales—ten times what we’d been earning when I graduated from college.
We still have that store, by the way. If you look at our sales reports, you’ll see that old Acme building that my father built is listed as Store Number 1. We’ll never close it. It’s a direct connection to our past, a constant reminder of where we started.
* * *
One weekend in January 1983 I went skiing in Vermont with Tim and a couple of other friends. We were staying at a Holiday Inn and were talking in the bar when I noticed a young woman a few feet away, her back to me. What I could see looked great; she had lovely, long dark hair. I glanced her way time and again, hoping she’d turn around. I was still seeing Gail on and off, in roughly equal portions, and at the time we were off. I told the guys at the table I was going to ask this girl to dance.
They scoffed at me. “You’re not going to ask her,” my buddy Dave Ziebarth said. “You never do that.” I replied that I just might surprise them. But for the moment, I remained in my chair—until someone elsewhere in the bar sent drinks to this young woman and her aunt, who was sitting with her, and she turned around to face us. And holy smokes, she was drop-dead gorgeous: big brown eyes, dark complexion, and a smile that would light all the Southern Tier. She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. “Who do I thank for this drink?” she asked.
None of us had sent it, but I realized I had to move—if I didn’t ask her to dance, I’d be kicking myself for years to come. That face would haunt me. So I worked up my courage and asked her, and she said yes.
Her name was Denise. We danced a couple of fast dances, followed by a slow one, then sat and talked. I had a rare few drinks that night, and the time flew; too soon, the bar closed. Denise was staying in the hotel with her family, and it turned out we were all staying on the same floor, so we rode the elevator together, then said good night. As I watched her walk down the hall, I turned to Dave Ziebarth. “Z,” I told him, “I’m in love.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but she heard me. The next morning, Z found a note slipped under our door. “My name is Denise Prenosil,” it read. “This is my address. If you ever get to Boston, look me up.” As soon as we got back to Binghamton, I wrote her a letter. By week’s end she’d written back. Through the rest of January, into February and March, our letters grew longer and more frequent. I learned that she was twenty-three, had grown up in western Massachusetts, and had graduated magna cum laude from Boston College, with a dual degree in accounting and marketing. She was smart and had big plans: she was working at a drugstore, learning the business on the sales floor, but saw herself rising through the ranks into high-level re
tail and living in a penthouse apartment overlooking New York. For now, she lived with a couple of roommates.
We kept exchanging letters until, in late May, I phoned her to say that I was coming to see her. On Friday, June 3, I stepped off a puddle jumper with a long-stemmed red rose in my hand, and there she was, waiting on the tarmac in a pink dress. I had never even imagined so beautiful a woman. We spent a fantastic weekend together, exploring Boston and talking for hours. When Ronnie Saul picked me up at the airport back in Binghamton, I told him: “I’m going to marry that girl.”
I went back the following month, and she came to Binghamton in August. I couldn’t pick her up—work interfered—so she took a cab to the apartment Ronnie and I shared on McNamara Avenue. Ronnie opened the door to find an absolute knockout standing before him. “Please,” he blurted, “tell me your name is not Denise.”
After that, I flew to Boston every Friday night and back to Binghamton late on Sunday. I knew I’d found the One. She mentioned one evening at dinner that her career was important to her and she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to marry. I wasn’t dissuaded. Another time she told me that if she did marry, she wasn’t sure she wanted kids. I was undeterred. In yet another conversation, she said that she could see herself chickening out of marriage as she walked down the aisle. I didn’t care. I wanted to marry her, and she knew it, but she needed time. I was patient.
Still, I had my limits. After months of being put off, I called her one day while she was at work. “If my love for you is so strong that I can be there in ten minutes, will you promise that you’ll marry me?” I asked.
“What?”
“If my love is so strong that I can magically appear before you in ten minutes,” I repeated, “will you marry me?”
“Fine,” she said. It goes without saying that I’d flown to Boston and was standing at a pay phone outside the drugstore. I walked in and found her in an aisle, stocking shelves. She about died when she saw me. She did not commit, however. That November, she was headed to West Springfield to spend Thanksgiving with her family and agreed to detour to Pittsfield to meet me. There, finally, we talked in concrete terms about getting married, and over the holiday she told her parents she thought she’d say yes. I talked to her father. A week later I was back in Boston to propose.
Meanwhile, I was still playing golf every Monday with Gramp. One event we never missed was a spring fund-raiser for the American Heart Association, the Golf Fore Your Heart Tournament, held in Binghamton. My grandfather loved playing in it, and I was always partnered with him. As my wedding to Denise approached, I broke the news to him that the ceremony was going to take place the same weekend as the tournament, and we wouldn’t be able to play.
“Well,” he said, “can the date be changed?”
“Gramp, I don’t think so,” I replied. “I mean, the tournament has reserved the golf course, and everything’s set.”
He squinted at me. “I’m not talking about the golf tournament.”
“I don’t think so, Gramp,” I said. “We’re kind of committed to this date.”
Spring came, and Denise walked to the altar on her father’s arm, smiling—my nickname for her was Sunshine, because that smile brightened any room she entered. I’m not sure I looked so ecstatic. I was scared to death that she’d bolt.
She didn’t.
I’d bought a house a while before, a little contemporary with multiple levels. Ronnie moved out, and we brought Denise’s stuff down from Boston in a U-Haul. The realities of living in a smallish, out-of-the-way city hit her while we were unloading. She went missing, and when I went looking for her I was alarmed to hear the sound of her crying. I found her in the bedroom, distraught. She looked up at me with tears streaming down her cheeks and asked, “Do you think that they’ll ever build any big buildings in Binghamton?”
“Honey, I don’t,” I told her.
“Will you promise,” she asked, “that we’ll move to a big city someday?”
“Yes,” I said. “I promise.”
* * *
I think that it was about this time that my uncle Joe, along with my dad’s accountant and other friends who had his ear, started telling him that maybe it was time for him to step aside. I doubt that’s the way they put it—I think my uncle probably convinced him that, given his continuing poor health, he needed to do some succession planning, and the conversation went from there.
My dad was fifty-five and had been running the family business for thirty-six years. Though I know he still considered it his baby and took great satisfaction from its success, I think he was ready to slow down and was sick of arguing with me. I was making changes in the business that I don’t think he much enjoyed, aimed at professionalizing how Dick’s intersected with the world. I remember inviting him to join me on a business meeting—to a vendor, or perhaps the bank; I no longer remember with whom—and telling him he had to wear a tie and a sport coat.
Dick Stack was not a fan of neckties, and I doubt he owned a suit. He was the salt of the earth, as unpretentious in his appearance as a man can be. He stepped out of his house wearing an old burgundy sport coat—his favorite—and a white, three-button golf shirt. A clip-on tie was hooked to the throat. “Dad, you can’t wear that,” I said. “You have to wear a dress shirt.”
“The hell you mean, I have to wear a dress shirt?” he grumbled. “This looks fine.”
“You have to wear a dress shirt,” I insisted. He went back inside and put on a dress shirt.
Anyway, my uncle Joe helped convince my dad that it was time to sell the company to his kids, and after a great deal of back-and-forth, my dad agreed—with specific conditions that would keep him at least peripherally involved in Dick’s for years to come, and with a pretty big income stream, to boot.
First: He owned the Court Street and Vestal stores. We’d lease them from him for twenty-five years, at a rent much higher than the market, and we could not terminate the leases without his consent. Second: He’d sell us the business itself for $1.25 million. No cash would change hands at the time of the sale; instead, we’d make monthly payments at 12 percent interest per year, for twenty years. We could not pay off the note early, either. The arrangement would give him a comfortable income for the rest of his life.
All of us kids would be equity owners of the company, with an equal piece, but because Uncle Joe argued that someone had to be in charge, my dad created two classes of stock and gave me 51 percent of the voting stock. My uncle introduced us to an up-and-coming young Binghamton lawyer named Larry Schorr to put the deal together. He was about my age and an impressively smart guy. He’d been to law school, as I’d wanted to do, and was enjoying the career I’d wanted to have. We met at the Vestal Steakhouse to discuss the business’s transfer. As I understand it, it was Larry who suggested the arrangement that gave me effective control of the company.
So it was that in the summer of 1984, I married Denise and took over Dick’s. It was a crazy, whirlwind few months. I was twenty-nine.
I was committed to setting the company on a new course but first had to address an urgent need. The little prefab metal warehouse out back of Court Street was bulging at the seams. It had been crowded when I’d started working there at thirteen; in the nearly seventeen years since, we’d tripled the size of our stores and broadened the goods we stocked. We used the old store at 345 Court Street to store the overflow of merchandise, but our growth outpaced our capacity. Storage was now a crisis.
Knowing that we’d continue to grow, we rented our first bona fide distribution center about ten minutes from the Court Street store. It was tiny—twenty thousand square feet for both warehouse space and a small suite of offices. We set up our bookkeeping, accounts payable, and other financial functions there. I had an office, and so did our buyers: Bob Aiken handled hunting, fishing, and camping gear; Jay Mininger bought footwear and apparel. Tim went to work as our first technology officer, though that’s stretching the term, because in the mid-1980s, computers were slow and
stupid next to a smartphone of today. Denise served as our first human resources officer and organized our record-keeping on payroll, employee benefits, and insurance.
My dad lost his mind that we weren’t going to be in the stores whenever they were open. A retailer should be in the store! Everything happens in the store! How the hell can you know what’s going on, sitting on your ass at a desk? He thought it marked the end of days. He believed we were doomed.
We squeezed into our new space, which felt overcrowded almost as soon as we moved in, and started plotting our growth between phone tirades from Florida. But I have to admit, I found it weird not being able to walk five steps from my office to the sales floor or across the parking lot to the warehouse.
So I made it a point to spend a lot of time at Court Street. Those visits were the beginning of a habit I’ve followed since. My dad was right: You can’t run a retail operation remotely. You have to spend time meeting with customers and listening to your sales staff. That’s where you find out what’s working and what isn’t, what sells and what doesn’t. That’s where you get ideas for how to improve. That’s where your business thrives or dies.
Besides, you have to keep close to your customers and associates if you’re to have any authenticity with either. It was with that in mind that I was working the floor one Christmas Eve when a woman walked in about two hours before close. She came up to me and said: “I need a gift for my sister-in-law.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me help you.” I took her to a table piled with Woolrich sweaters. “We’ve got these,” I said. “Woolrich makes a really nice sweater, and we’ve just marked them down.”
She scanned the sweaters, then looked back at me. “Those are the ugliest sweaters I’ve ever seen.”
