The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession

by Mark Obmascik

  If Levantin was trying to bird by ear, I couldn’t tell. My heart was pounding too loudly to hear. He had biked thirty miles the day before and hiked up a mountain the day before that. He was older than my father. He was turning my legs into marshmallows.

  We finally reached the ridgetop. Far below our feet snowmelt rushed down the Roaring Fork River. Behind us was the knife-edge of 14,000-foot Capitol Peak. To our right in the distance was the city of Aspen; to our left rose the snow cone of majestic Mount Sopris. Levantin had hiked to this spot a million times before. He grinned as if this time were his first.

  That was the thing with Levantin: he loved the birds, but he really loved the places they brought him. When you spend your career in the confines of a gray suit, the pipits at dawn above timberline are even more wondrous. He lived to be in the field. He may not have been the world’s most expert birder—he could hardly identify the song of anything—but he clearly was one of the most spirited. Through the sage of a dry meadow we chased some kind of sparrow. We drew closer; it took off. Closer, off. We followed the creature thirty feet at a time this way for at least a quarter mile. We never did get a close enough look to clearly identify that bird. But halfway through our chase, Levantin chortled. I reminded myself: this man ran one of the biggest divisions of one of the biggest corporations in the world. A bird made him giggle.

  Levantin could talk and laugh at the same time. At the end of a good story, a sentence became a blurt, as if his tongue had lost a race with his funny bone. He bubbled. He teased. He was the guy you wanted at your cocktail party.

  He even had some true grit. While we were being outsmarted by that sparrow in the sage, I saw Levantin doing something odd with his binoculars. He wore the strap on his shoulder, like a purse. How come? Let me tell you a story, Levantin said, which is what he always said when he was about to poke fun at himself. One day Levantin had woken up and felt something terribly wrong with his right hand. He could barely move it. He couldn’t make a fist, he couldn’t write his name, he couldn’t even shake hands. He went straight to the doctor, who suspected a stroke. But tests said no. He feared a neuromuscular disorder. No evidence of that, though. So Levantin submitted to an MRI, which found damage to his C-7 neck vertebra. The doctors were mystified. Had the patient suffered some kind of spinal trauma? Then Levantin remembered: he had just driven from Philadelphia to Colorado and, like any good birder traveling beneath three different flyways, had looped his binoculars around his neck the whole way. Levantin even found a story in a birder’s magazine identifying the malady—binocular neck.

  “See!” Levantin blurted. “I risked paralysis to be a birdwatcher!”

  In the heart of an aspen grove, on a bluebird day of summer, there was no risk in sight. Levantin lived in Snowmass with some pinnacles of the business world—turn left at the gate on his road and you arrive at the magic kingdom of Michael Eisner; go straight and it’s the mansion of the widow of the National Enquirer publisher—but Levantin still wasn’t beyond rubbernecking. At lunch in a slopeside restaurant, Levantin and I watched a dozen or so people grab a table across from us. Levantin kept eyeballing them, eyeballing them, until something finally registered. He grabbed my pen and reporter’s notepad from across the table and wrote: Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys owner.

  Levantin was so excited that I thought he would go over for a handshake. But I had misread him. Levantin was a Philadelphia Eagles fan. He wanted to jeer Jones.

  But he didn’t. Levantin may have been a fervent fan, but he believed in social niceties, too. Of course, if Sandy Komito had been at the next table, the Cowboys owner would have been in big trouble. Greg Miller, I suspected, might have asked for an autograph.

  I wondered if there was an unlikelier group of competitors than these three Big Year men—Sandy Komito, Greg Miller, Al Levantin. Sure, they all had the same wonderful, boyish sense of enthusiasm. But I couldn’t imagine what else a New Jersey industrial contractor, a nuclear power worker, and a corporate chief executive could hold in common.

  If you had a year of your life to do anything you wanted, and you could do only that thing for a year, what would you do? These three guys all chose to chase birds. Something deep in their backgrounds must have made them so susceptible to an ornithological takeover.

  For Sandy Komito, it began over the breakfast table in the Bronx during the Great Depression. His father, an $8-a-week printer, was out of work. His mother raised food money by making ladies’ hats. Komito wore knickers to school because the relief office was out of long pants. His younger brother would get the knickers when Komito outgrew them. For the past six months they had lived in this first-floor “concession” apartment—a home no one would lease unless they got the concession of six months’ free rent. If the father didn’t find a job soon, the family would move out in the middle of the night for the next concession. The Komitos had gone concession-hunting before. They didn’t want to do it again.

  The father worried about shame. A native of Austria, he had been a prisoner of war during World War I—he fought for the losers—and had moved to America hoping for a fresh start. Now he couldn’t even afford sausages. It was bad enough for a man to feel humiliation, but his sons, his two young sons—they deserved better. Though the boys might never have enough money to see the world, they could at least learn something about it.

  So everyone gathered over morning cereal to play a little game. The father started it by naming a bird. Then Komito named a different one. Next came his mother’s turn. (Komito’s brother was too young to play.) And so it went around the table until someone finally failed to come up with a new bird. That person was forced to drop out. The winner named the most species.

  Why this game required a bird’s name, Komito couldn’t say. His father never seemed more interested in birds than mammals or fish. He wasn’t even an outdoorsman. But in the concrete depths of the Bronx, the Komitos ate breakfast each morning with a spirited game of Name the Bird. His parents occasionally let him win.

  That wasn’t good enough for Komito. One day at home, he thumbed through the family’s biggest book, the dictionary, and found a word accompanied by an inked picture of a new bird. When the family game began the next morning, he let it progress in the usual fashion—“sparrow,” “pigeon,” “seagull,” “robin,” “hawk,” and so on—until the easy names were exhausted. Then Komito played out his prize.

  “Jackdaw.”

  “What?” asked his mother.

  “Jackdaw,” the boy repeated.

  “That’s not a bird,” chided his father. “You’re making that up.”

  Komito proudly whipped out the dictionary. The jackdaw was too a real bird, a crow that lived in Europe. It said so right there in the book. Nobody in his family had ever heard of it, but now nobody could ever dispute it.

  Even at age six, Komito couldn’t stand to lose a game about birds.

  The family moved in and out of three more Bronx apartments. When his father found work, he did it six and even seven days a week. But the jobs kept running out, and the boys had to help. In the winter, Komito prayed for snow days, when he could earn twenty-five cents shoveling storefront sidewalks. That was easy money. The rest of the year he struggled to elbow his way past other neighborhood kids for the prime spot in front of the subway elevated station, where he shined shoes for a nickel and hoped for a nickel tip. On a good Saturday, he could make $10, but $7.50 of that went straight into his parents’ pockets. He owned only one shirt, a white one, which he washed every night by himself. When he tired of wrestling for the prime shoe-shining position at the subway stop, he hired on as a delivery boy for local markets. Hauling groceries to the fifth floor of a walk-up was supposed to earn him a nickel tip, but times were so hard that mothers sometimes pretended they weren’t home. Komito learned to drop the groceries at the apartment door and then bang his feet on the stairs, as if he were walking away. Almost always, the door opened. Almost always, Komito embarrassed the mother into forking over his nickel. On
ce, a newcomer to the neighborhood made the mistake of asking Komito about the size of his average tip. It’s a dime, he told her, and she gave it to him. As far as Komito knew, she was the first mother in the history of the Bronx to pay a dime to a market delivery boy. He quit right there. On that day, his average tip truly was a dime.

  By the time he was twelve, Komito knew how to hustle business. He also knew he wanted something different.

  The same cereal, the same shirt, the same streets, the same tension—did it always have to be that way? He found himself spending more and more time in that green island of the Bronx, Van Cortlandt Park. There, he found the creatures that were free to leave the city whenever they wished.

  They weren’t the sparrows or pigeons of the streets. These birds were wild.

  On February 19, 1944, Sandy Komito made his first list. (He still has it today.) In the block-letter scrawl of a boy, he wrote: CANADA GOOSE. MALLARD DUCK. BLACK DUCK.

  One day Komito was poking around the park when he saw a boy gaping up at the clouds.

  “There’s a red-tailed hawk,” the boy told him matter-of-factly.

  Komito saw nothing. But the other boy, only a few years older than Komito, held in his hands a powerful black magic—binoculars. The boy offered his prized possession to Komito, who took a breath, pointed the glass at the sky, and saw a regal bird soaring on a distinctive roan fantail. It was Komito’s first glimpse at a new world.

  The boy with the binoculars was Harold Feinberg, who turned out to be a leader of a Bronx Boy Scout troop. Komito took the hint. He joined and found a troop full of other boys who also were interested in life, wildlife, outside the Bronx. The Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for anyone who could learn and identify forty birds. Komito learned one hundred. He was off to the races.

  He visited the public library often enough to memorize Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. (When he wrote a long book report on it for school, his teacher was impressed—until she found out that half the Field Guide was pictures.) Komito saved his shoe-shine money and bought a pair of used binoculars for $30. He took the trolley to Pelham Bay for his first greater scaup, the train and a bus to Jones Beach for his first American avocet, and the bus to the Palisades over the Hudson River for his first peregrine falcon. On one winter subway trip to Atlantic Beach, he found a great black-backed gull dead in the flotsam. He couldn’t just walk away from it. He brought it home, gutted it, and suspended the five-foot skin above his bed. People walking outside on Davidson Avenue would stop and stare through the window at that dead seagull skin. Komito didn’t care. He fell asleep every night looking up at proof that something could soar above those streets.

  If his parents worried about this sudden change in their oldest boy, they didn’t say anything. That Name the Bird game was turning into a Find the Son challenge. Komito was out chasing birds all the time. But his grades were good and he still brought home work money, so the parents let the boy indulge his obsession.

  His mother, however, drew the line when the gull carcass in the bedroom finally was claimed by maggots.

  Soon Komito began to feel his birding being cramped by the New York subway system. One summer day, when he was sixteen, he read in a magazine about some islands off the coast of Maine. He and a friend, a fisherman, started hitchhiking north. They made it in three days to Rockland, Maine, where it was 2 A.M. Too broke for a hotel room and to«o tired to roll out their sleeping bags, the teens walked in the open door of a lobster cannery and huddled for warmth. Within minutes, the night watchman turned them in to the night patrol cop. He let the teens sleep in jail, with the cell door open, until 6:30 A.M. The boys walked out with empty stomachs and hitched thirty miles with a lobsterman—the old salt understood the kid who wanted to catch pollack, but wasn’t too sure about the one who wanted to see birds—on the waves of the North Atlantic to the Coast Guard station at Matinicus Rock. Komito may as well have landed in heaven. Every rock crevice on Matinicus Rock was filled with an Atlantic puffin, the penguinlike seabird with the massive orange bill that came to land only once a year to breed. Komito was thrilled: his first offshore species. The Coast Guard was so enamored of the visiting Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the Bronx that the teens were allowed to sleep in an old lighthouse barracks. During his first night, though, Komito kept hearing an eerie whoosh. He walked outside to investigate—and was struck upside the head by a Leach’s storm-petrel. The bird fell unconscious at his feet. Komito’s head had a bump, but he felt knighted. He knelt down and memorized the look and location of every feather on that black storm-petrel, eight inches long with a twenty-inch wingspan, before it flew off again into the night.

  From the Maine trip Komito learned that the best adventures were unscheduled. He loved to go places on the spur of the moment. He prided himself on his ability to stay unfrazzled.

  Drafted by the army during the Korean War, he spent a year and a half training in Texas. The birds were amazing—the fields were full of the orioles, buntings, and jays that he could only read about in New York—but the birding was brutal. Other soldiers mocked him. Birdwatching was for sissies and little old ladies in big, floppy hats and the bachelor dandies who still lived with their mothers. Komito was distressed. South Texas was supposed to be the promised land for birders. Who’d have thought that it would be easier to watch warblers in the Bronx? He survived the army by hiding his binoculars in the legs of his five-pocket fatigues.

  In January 1957, he was at a buddy’s wedding in the Bronx when he spied the maid of honor across the ballroom. He told her stories. He made her laugh. He invited her to another friend’s wedding the next Saturday in Manhattan. But when they arrived, they learned that the wedding actually was the following day, Sunday. So there they were, downtown on a Saturday night, and Komito had no money for a real date. He took her to the courthouse to watch criminal arraignments as entertainment, then walked her to Chinatown for fried rice. She thought he was funny, honest, and hardworking. Her friends, however, weren’t too sure. Komito always spoke his mind, which wasn’t always pretty. One friend told her, if Dale Carnegie had ever met Sandy Komito, he would simply have given up. But a man who thrived on the blunt truth would never be boring. They were in love. Eleven months after they met, Sandy and Bobbye Komito married.

  He tried night school at the City College of New York, but it wasn’t for him. Too slow, not practical enough. He hired on with an industrial supplies company and became the number one salesman, in a sales force of 150, in just three years. He demanded to start being paid on commission, but the boss told him to go jump. So he did. In the garage of his home in suburban New Jersey, Komito began mixing his own epoxies and sealants. He ordered ten tons of sand for flooring material and had it dumped on his driveway. When the neighbors started nosing around, Komito painted his garage windows black. He was in the garage by 6 A.M. , and many days he stayed there until 11 P.M. Industrial Resurfacing Co. was born.

  He had a partner for the first three months, but they busted up because Komito kept calling all the shots. Komito did the purchasing and the mixing and the cold-calling factories and warehouses across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Komito refused to go union; too many rules. Komito refused to work Manhattan; too much hassle. Komito refused to ply clients with sports tickets or dinners; too expensive. In New Jersey, especially, the Mob and corrupt politicians wanted their palms greased, but Komito refused to pay bribes. When a businessman told Komito that no one could work industrial roofing without payoffs, Komito snapped, “The only people who believe that have no faith in themselves.” He took no guff. When one customer refused to pay a $2,400 bill, Komito spent $13,000 on lawyers to stick it to the bastard. He liked being thought of as a maniac. Industrial Resurfacing Co. was the Sandy show, and you could take it or you could leave it. He wrote so many client letters that he learned to type eighty words per minute. His wife tried to help by addressing sales-pitch letters to prospective clients, but Komito ripped up dozens of her envelopes. Bobbye’
s mistake: she had failed to center the stamps perfectly with an exact eighth-inch border to the edge of the envelope. You can never make another first impression, Komito scolded, and the front of an envelope is the first thing a customer sees.

  He was a perfectionist’s perfectionist. It drove his family nuts, but it also made them rich.

  Though he had not grown up dreaming of becoming an industrial contractor, he learned to enjoy it. He wanted to be a success, but he believed the easy businesses already were taken. Roofing, flooring, and waterproofing were some of the hardest. Spend a day on the roof of a chemical factory near the swamps of the Meadowlands in August and nobody called you a sissy. Once a six-foot-nine college football lineman ducked into Komito’s doorway and asked for a roofing job to keep him in shape during the off-season. He lasted one day. At first Komito tried hiring the traditional roofers—the felons, the Hell’s Angels—but grew frustrated with all the unexplained absences. He needed more dependable people, but only the desperate would accept such hot, dirty, backbreaking work. He started hiring Latinos. Soon almost everyone on a Komito crew spoke Spanish; Komito spoke Spanglish with a Bronx accent. He gave them twelve months of work and all the overtime they could handle.

  During certain times of the year he’d go on a nearby factory roof with binoculars. Sometimes he’d look for signs that his crews were dogging it. Sometimes he’d look for shorebirds on migration.

  Usually, though, he was hustling sales. Komito loved to sell. He was one man, focused like a laser, piercing the corporate flab of secretaries and engineers and middle managers until he finally found the one person with the power to hire him. Nobody was more dogged than Komito, and nobody had a thicker skin. His motto: Your sale starts with the first no. He sent out a thousand letters a month with hopes of getting twenty back. Komito may have been selling the same service as dozens of competitors, but he could soften even the toughest factory man with his own secret weapon—slapstick humor.