Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  There were a few situations that called for dirtying cutlery, but certainly none that would require more than one implement to consume a full meal. As the avocado is believed to be nature’s perfect food, Dad believed the wooden spoon to be nature’s perfect cooking instrument—stir with it, serve with it, eat with it. He was a model of foresight, the Nostradamus of noshing. If we could see that we were going to require a piece of flatware to eat our food, then we’d just stir the pot with that same table knife or else flip a burger with the necessary soup spoon. In other words, think outside of the box—the silverware box.

  The last lesson Dad offered was that the secret weapon of no-cleanup cuisine is The Dish Towel. Before preparing any meal, Dad would gallantly fling a dish towel over his left shoulder so it’d be at the ready. If the wooden spoon was his sword, then the checked dish towel was his shield. It is to cooking what the Stetson is to the cowboy, explained Dad. It can act as a cutting board, place mat, salad spinner, trivet, spaghetti strainer, or napkin, and we could dry our wooden spoon with it after finishing the meal. In short, a properly used dish towel can save a life.

  Finally, it was time to eat. Dad topped off the coffee cup he’d been refilling since the end of the Korean War, and I removed the milk carton that doubled as my glass from the refrigerator. We stood side by side over the sink, one of us munching a sandwich and the other spooning down macaroni or scrambled eggs directly from the pan, and perhaps a little salad or toast off the dish towel.

  Sometimes there was nothing to clean (especially if Dad had covered the spatula with foil), and other times there was a pot and serving spoon or fork that needed to be rinsed. When I ate on my own, I soon realized that this was a task just as easily (and enthusiastically) accomplished by our dog. In science class I’d learned that dog saliva is cleaner than human saliva.

  From our positions over the sink we could contentedly gaze up at the carefully organized rows of Waterford crystal drinking glasses and decanters. Across from us, through glass doors, we could enjoy the sight of Grandma’s Royal Copenhagen china, complete with its eight-piece place settings and matching serving dishes. We felt secure knowing that directly behind us was a drawer chock-full of flatware, all lying clean, stacked, and dust free in plastic organizers. Everything was untouched and in its place; another perfect meal in our perfectly unsoiled kitchen. Mom would never even know we’d been there.

  Okay, so maybe Dad’s cooking lessons didn’t prepare me for hosting dinner parties. But it did equip me for my first five years in

  Manhattan—living on low-budget fare made in closet-sized dwellings where the speck of a kitchen served as a storage area for boots and bikes.

  Manhattan was on the cutting edge of the prepared-foods revolution. Food in paper cartons with disposable wooden chopsticks? Absolutely brilliant! And what about burritos? The ultimate sandwich—a complete meal served in its own disposable wrapper, no utensils necessary. They’d improved upon Dad’s system! And he hasn’t missed the innovation. Last time I visited him in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, my dinner was—surprise—a burrito. Dad served this modern miracle with his 1,000-watt, no-cook, no-crumbs, no-cleanup, no-kidding smile.

  Sixteen

  The Birth of an Entrepreneur…

  From Socks to Stocks…The Wizard of Odds

  By the age of eleven, I always had money in my pocket, earned from a variety of endeavors. If I needed more there was always a way to make it. For instance, the candy-bar racket arose because there was no access to chocolate at school, and it was particularly in demand during study hall, after lunch, and before the athletic practices that immediately followed the last class. So I purchased candy in bulk at a warehouse on Main Street. This inventory was taken to school and sold at a markup equivalent to that charged by the neighborhood 7-Eleven.

  I admit to getting a little carried away sometimes. Having read numerous books about famous industrialists and how they’d made their own opportunities, I purchased a stockpile of canned food with an eye toward a bad snowstorm. When the blizzard of ’77 hit unexpectedly and closed the city down for almost a week, I sold my stash to my mom and a few neighbors at a 25 percent markup. In retrospect, I should have sold Mom the food at the wholesale cost since she was using some of it to feed me (and she made up for the loss by charging me a storage fee).

  Storms were good money makers in other ways. They backed up traffic on the expressway that ran past the end of my street, so it was easy to walk from car to car and sell doughnuts from a box and coffee out of a big thermos. Though I didn’t believe in gouging, I could pretty much charge whatever I wanted. Not only that, but this was way before cell phones, so people would write down phone numbers with messages and give me a dollar to make the calls when I returned home. I didn’t feel guilty taking their money, even though the Good Samaritan would have performed such services for free, because such charitable souls were few and far between in blinding snowstorms with a twenty-below-zero windchill factor. Furthermore, I always delivered the messages, even if it meant trying the line twenty times. The best part was hearing, “Tell me again. Who are you?”

  However my favorite job was working with animals. I love dogs, and so I enjoyed walking and grooming those owned by neighbors. For the females, I added little touches, such as fire-engine red toenail polish and matching ribbons, according to the seasons and holidays.

  I also cared for pets while their owners were away. The exception was for Chester and Mary Ruth Kiser, who lived across the street; I watched their black poodle, Poupon, when Chester was actually still at home. When Mary Ruth went out of town, dog care apparently did not fall under his jurisdiction. Chet, as Mary Ruth called him, was smart and funny, and for a time ran the English Department at the University of Buffalo. He was perennially tan (no small accomplishment in Western New York), handsome in a rugged way, and bore more than a passing resemblance to Ernest Hemingway.

  Mr. Kiser kept late hours when Mrs. Kiser was off visiting their children and grandchildren down in Maryland. At seven in the morning I’d go across the street, walk around the car, which was parked a little bit on the lawn, and slip into the house as quietly as possible, but inevitably Poupon was nowhere to be found. This meant the dog was in the master bedroom, on the side of the bed farthest from the door, where Mrs. Kiser normally slept. I could hear Mr. Kiser snoring from the bottom of the stairs. I’d tiptoe to the bedroom door, get down on my hands and knees, and crawl around the bed on the floor to where Poupon was also snoring. The other thing that Poupon and Mr. Kiser had in common was that they both slept naked.

  Just as I reached the dog, Mr. Kiser would awaken slightly and mumble, “Hello?” And I’d always say, “It’s just me, Mr. Kiser, coming to get Poupon.” And he’d go, “Hmmm,” and pull the sheet over himself, and fall back to sleep as if it was perfectly normal to have the girl across the street crawling around the floor next to his bed with his wife’s poodle under her arm.

  Babysitting for a dollar an hour was always a good job because the families usually had some snacks in the cupboard. During the

  wintertime, their thermostat could be cranked up, so long as I didn’t fall asleep and let the parents come home to find their house warm. Inevitably, babysitters did fall asleep after jacking up the heat, because our bodies were so unaccustomed to warmth that we went into a light coma. In such cases, when I heard the car pull into the driveway, I had to make a mad dash to the thermostat, and then explain how I’d just turned it up for a few minutes because I’d felt sick. It was common knowledge that the only Buffalonians under sixty-five who had a legal right to heat were the ill and infirm.

  If Mary and I were both babysitting, we’d call each other’s houses, let the kids pick up the phone, and then dictate incredibly long messages. These involved appointments for their mothers with lots of directions, recipes, and long lists of items to bring to fictitious meetings. After the kids went to bed we’d be sure to throw the notes away. We liked to think these exercises improved the compre
hension and writing skills of our young charges.

  When Mary and I babysat late at night, her brothers would often come over and set the pile of leaves out front on fire or bang garbage cans next to the garage so we thought the house was about to be robbed. Or else a serial killer was trying to trick us into coming outside.

  I signed up for a paper route the day I turned eleven, the minimum age to apply. Back then, newspapers were delivered by kids pulling wagons or riding bicycles, with big satchels over their shoulders. Lots of dogs lived on my route, and I carried plenty of biscuits to feed them, not so much to avoid attack, but just because I like dogs. As my creaky wagon rattled down the street, the dogs didn’t bark at me, but for me. And because people often saw a pack of panting and salivating hounds chasing me, sometimes even knocking me down, they often misunderstood the situation and boosted my tip, a type of canine-combat pay.

  I had to deliver the paper every day after school and on weekend mornings, and then collect the subscription money once a week and turn it over to a local dispatcher. It was necessary to keep track of who was going on vacation and also to hunt down the bill dodgers by trying to get them during dinner. I loved the independence and also the incentive system—the better I performed, the more money I made. Sure, the weather was lousy a lot of the time, but being born and raised in Buffalo, it didn’t occur to me that there was any other way to live—that elsewhere people walked around in November without a parka, hat, scarf, gloves, and boots.

  The only complaint I received as a papergirl was for my squeaky wagon, especially when it rumbled down tranquil suburban streets at six in the morning on weekends. I tried oiling the wheels, but nothing seemed to work. How was I supposed keep a wagon from squeaking in a place where there’s an inch of road salt on the streets and sidewalks? It’s amazing our knees and ankles didn’t rust out and start to squeak like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The salt disintegrated our shoes and pant bottoms. Mothers were constantly yelling, “Take off your shoes!” so that white pathways weren’t melted into otherwise beige carpeting.

  Canyonesque potholes wrought by the combination of freezing and plowing were enough to keep the roadside littered with hubcaps and the alignment shops in business year-round. Still, the greater fear was walkways that hadn’t been salted and were therefore likely to contain a glassy layer of ice under a deceptive coating of snow or on the surface, so thin as to be almost invisible (with the appropriate horror film name: black ice!). We never walked with our hands in our pockets after learning the hard way that force really does equal mass times acceleration. And a person could not possibly appear more foolish than when performing the Dance of Death on ice without skates.

  I gave up my route and most of my other entrepreneurial sidelines when I hit upon magic shows. This was an interest of my father’s, and as a young child I was constantly learning coin, rope, and card tricks. So when I was thirteen and overheard an adult complain that she’d paid fifty dollars to have a thirty-minute magic show for a children’s birthday party, I immediately hung out my shingle.

  Or rather, I placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing I would perform at children’s birthday parties for a mere forty dollars. Apparently children’s birthday parties are arduous enough when kids are able to go outside, but for those eight months of winter when they were trapped indoors, the phone rang off the hook.

  I purposely left my age out of the ad, and I must admit that clients were rather startled to discover that their Harriet Houdini was barely a teenager and had to be dropped off and picked up by her mother. But the show was satisfactory, and when the audience misbehaved I explained that I was very proficient at turning children into toads, yet hadn’t mastered the art of reversing that spell—in my closet at home I had six cardboard boxes filled with wart-covered toads waiting to be turned back into kids. They were good after that, although several volunteered fellow partygoers for me to practice on.

  Most of the children had never seen a female magician before, causing one precocious six-year-old to remark, “Hey, you’re half boy and half girl!”

  ***

  With the money earned from all of my jobs and business ventures, I began to invest in stocks. People regularly ask how I became interested in the market in the first place.

  Honestly, I can’t remember not being fascinated by Wall Street. And shoveling driveways for two dollars apiece as a kid gave me a lot of time to think that there must be easier ways of making money. For those who’ve not had direct encounters with copious amounts of snow, after it hits the ground and starts to accumulate, snow is not light and fluffy, the way it appears on televised Christmas specials and romantic comedies, but hernia heavy. When you shovel enough of it, your back and shoulders began to ache. You can feel muscles that you didn’t know you had and that don’t seem to be necessary for anything else. In fact, with the advent of professional snow removal, in a few years these muscles will probably be vestigial organs, like the appendix and wisdom teeth—no longer necessary for modern living.

  Shoveling is hard on the psyche too. As soon as I made it to the end of the driveway, the street plow would groan past and fill the bottom back in again. But not with sidewalk snow. Oh no, onto the end of the driveway the plow packed a three-foot-high wall of the hard,

  pollution gray crust-and-ice mixture it’d been scraping off the roads. For this reason I’d have to dig a big V in the snowbank before the driveway entrance so the plow muck would get dumped in there. Only, that’s like boring through hardened cement. The other thing that inevitably happened was, as soon as I finished shoveling, it started snowing again—truly the Augean stables. There’s a reason that Buffalonians put snowblowers in their wills.

  Once, while doing some heavy-duty shoveling and feeling sad knowing I was probably too young to die from a heart attack or stroke and too old to be mercifully run over by the plow, I finally thought, Why not just go directly to where they make the cash? I remembered that when famous bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

  My parents were friends with a stockbroker named George Gregory, who went to our church. He kindly set up an account for me and listed my mother as the custodian, because I was under twenty-one and needed an adult to make the actual transactions. It wasn’t like today’s online trading where someone can pretend to be twenty-one. Mr. Gregory then passed on his copies of Forbes as soon as he was finished with them.

  My father’s mother, the big stock trader in the family, had died the year before, so she wasn’t a source of help on this project. Also, at that time I didn’t know much about her adventures in the market. People have often said I must have inherited this interest from her somehow, but it would seem we both arrived at trading independently, unless the Dow Jones can be transferred through a chromosome.

  My mom and dad knew nothing about the stock market. I made my own decisions, and then my mother called in the orders. These judgments

  were mostly formed by reading a government publication put out by the United States Bureau of Mines. It wasn’t intended as a newsletter for investors so much as a research report on what was happening in the mining industry. When it looked as if an area was going to attract particular interest or government backing, I would try to find out the companies involved in that type of business and invest in them. This was way before the Internet, and even before the television ran a ticker tape, so I had to go to the library to research companies in the Standard & Poor guides. And to find out how my stocks were doing, it was necessary to look up the closing prices from the day before in

  the newspaper.

  This strategy proved successful enough to earn a couple hundred dollars every few months—money for skiing and vacations to Florida and New York City. The rest of the profits I reinvested in the stock market or used to buy silver (bars, not jewelry), which I was also hoping would go up in value.

  Eventually, I was so flush that I became somewhat of a gambler as a teenager. Holi
day gatherings consisted of me and a small group of relatives in their forties. No one else had children. As a result, it didn’t exactly occur to anyone to get a touch-football game going or a round of I spy.

  I may have been the only kid to show up at the school bake sale with store-bought cookies (almost never done back then and a sign of domestic calamity), but I’ve always been grateful to my mom for teaching me to play poker when I was five.

  It was from playing cards with Uncle Jim, who worked as a police reporter, that I learned Damon Runyon–style lingo such as cut ’em deep and weep, cut ’em thin and win, cowboys (2 kings), and woolworths (a five and a ten). Members of the maternal side were also marathon slingers of profanity—strings of exotic words not found in any dictionary, combinations rhyming so beautifully that they rolled off the tongue and sounded like lyric poetry to my youthful ears. Absorbing these verbal gems not only made me popular in study hall, they would later come in handy on Wall Street.

  I don’t believe anyone in my family thought it was the least bit odd that on Christmas Eve, while most of my young friends were at church, I was perched atop a phone book, ordering the players, “Ante up, one-eyed jacks are wild.” And when the stakes rose they certainly didn’t treat me as a child. I clearly remember my uncle admonishing me, “Hold your cards up properly or you’ll spoil the hand!” in the way you tell a seven-year-old to stop flinging her peas. Uncle Jim also had a good system for teaching you to pay attention to your hand. If one of us dropped a card he’d say, “Whoops! Nobody saw that jack of spades,” thereby announcing it to the whole table, even if it was quickly snatched up while the others were preoccupied arranging their hands. Needless to say, to this day I don’t drop my cards, even if I’m just playing solitaire.