Life as a small businessman in San Diego

By Ira Spector

SAN DIEGO — My wife, Suzi, and I, together with our eight-month-old son Bruce, were struggling to find our niche in the minuscule commercial San Diego art market of the early 1960s. Suzi was the talented illustrator. I was her sales representative.

When we started we had $350 in the bank. (There was very little freelance art in town in 1962.) We took any job that came along at just about any price that would generate some income. The first job was copying, in calligraphy style, a poem a sweet old woman composed in memory of her deceased sister. I delivered the poem to her home and walked a few blocks to her bank to cash the fifteen dollar check she gave me in payment. The check bounced and I walked back to her home and collected cash. I wondered at the time if this was an omen. Another of our earliest commissions was for a Mexican Restaurant. It was a black and white ink illustration of a Mexican sombrero lying on a serape. Again We were paid 15 dollars. The restaurant repeatedly used that illustration in their advertising for 20 years.

The first year we were in business we grossed $6500. Upon the advice of a client, and to generate more income, I went to Los Angeles to call on architectural offices. I made an appointment with a friend of my client who was chief interior designer for Paul Luckman, one of the premier architects in the city. Their office was completing the plans for the new Los Angeles Airport. The designer carefully looked at Suzi’s portfolio and didn’t say much. When he finished, he went to his drawing board and returned with a mock-up of a mural. The mural was white line outlines of stylized classic Greek and Romanesque buildings, painted on a magenta pink background, and sponged over with soft orange paint. These were the signature colors used by the client, PSA Airlines. The mural was for the cocktail lounge in the airline satellite building. “Could your wife paint this mural?” he asked. “Yes,” I coolly replied, hoping the excitement I felt would not be too obvious. “Could she do it for $1000? That is our budget,” he said. “Yes she can,” I replied, looking for something to hold onto in case my shaking knees gave way.

We painted the mural, not realizing how fast it could be done. First, Suzi painted the white line work of stylized Greek and Roman classical buildings the entire length of the wall. I followed her and sponged a color lightly over her lines. Then she followed me with another sponged color and in short order we were finished. The entire project was completed in six hours. The client showed up shortly after we finished and remarked how pleased he was with the results. We celebrated in the evening with two bottles of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch. I remember it so well after all these years because I don’t drink alcohol. I’m always the designated driver.

I went to Los Angeles quite often the first few years. There was very little work in San Diego. I would arrive in LA, find a telephone with a Yellow Pages directory, and spend hours at a time cold-calling for appointments. Sometimes I stayed overnight, finding the cheapest hotel I could. One night I stayed in a fleabag near downtown LA for two and a half dollars. Bed bugs attacked me unmercifully. I spent an extra dollar per night after that.

In the first few months, I didn’t know anyone and felt quite alone. One late afternoon, I was driving 27 miles west on city streets from downtown LA towards Long Beach knowing nothing about the freeways. I studied the street map for the shortest distance. It took about an hour and a half. As I was driving in the waning sunlight, on unfamiliar and often unpleasant streets that all looked alike, I became quite depressed. I thought, if I get into a car crash and I’m killed, no one in this town would know me or care.

Little by little, phone booth by phone booth, I began to get more work. I was making bas-relief sand cast murals, stained glass windows, welded sculptures, wood carving made with powered routers, and various other constructions. After a couple of years, I was able to afford a workshop for our production. It was a beat-up unlivable house. I was there for six years. The rent was twenty-five dollars per month for four years, and then the landlord raised it to thirty-five for the remaining two years.

The house was located in the middle of the block. In front of my building was a small wooden modern designed building. A fellow from Oregon who manufactured “A” frame green houses used it as a sales office. He lived in a very large home in one of our most prestigious neighborhoods. We met every day in The Sea Gull Grill Restaurant next door to us, where I usually had my coffee breaks and lunch. His constant subject was criticizing the beach bums that panhandled in the streets. “They were deadbeats, and didn’t want to work and earn a living.” Ironically, in the middle of the night he moved out of his office, and home which was rented, and was never seen or heard from again.

My workshop building was painted pink with white trim. It had a bedroom, large living-room (after I tore down a wall of another bedroom), an absolutely filthy toilet that was both unusable, and eligible for immediate condemnation, and a kitchen stripped bare of any appliances or plumbing. In front was a large sandlot with the heartiest daffodils on Earth. Over the years, the ground was a receptacle for plaster, piss, concrete, muriatic acid, copper sulfate, and numerous other chemicals and compounds. Yet every April, the most beautiful hearty yellow blooms arose to welcome spring. In the back of the building, on a lower level, was a leaky corrugated tin shed with open lattice walls. “Oly,” the town drunk congenial welder slept in the shed on an old navy bunk bed, a spring sticking out of the middle of the mattress.

Employees
Bob was one of my earliest hires. He was 25, a college graduate, very handsome, extremely personable, 6’3″ tall, and had a marvelous physique, developed from daily surfing. Women chased after him with their tongues hanging out. One fair young maiden brought a sack lunch to him every day at noon. I never knew her name. He always referred to her as “Lunch.”

We kept in touch over the years. Bob became a banker, and then a few years later bought a catamaran franchise, which he made into a financial success. Tragedy came crashing down on his life at the age off 42. He was riding his bicycle down a very steep highway in a terribly dehydrated condition, and suffered a stroke. He was found paralyzed in the deep brush off to the side of the road and hospitalized for weeks. He emerged with a permanent gimpy leg and a hand that curled. His wife, a circus trapeze artist, couldn’t handle the idea of her Greek-God not having a perfect body, and divorced him. Bob later inherited a huge fortune, as the sole heir of his father, who was president of an oil company. He would have gladly given up all that money to have his health back.

I had another Adonis employee. One evening, while I was home in Coronado, the doorbell rang. In came a tall six-foot-inch, dark haired, extremely handsome young man in his 30s. “I’ve come to sell for you,” he said, And he did. His former high school coach sent him to me. the coach later told me that Tim was the best athlete Coronado ever produced. He was so good, that he was offered a tryout by Duke Snider of baseball fame with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Tim told him, “I’m sorry Duke, I’m too busy.” thus losing the opportunity of a lifetime. He was a product of the “Flower Child” age and morphed into drugs and alcohol, as did many of his contemporaries. When he rang my bell, he had just completed a three-year stint in prison for drug dealing. I hired him as a salesman, and he was so charming and good looking, that any women he encountered, were sucked like a vacuum cleaner into his spell. After a short while, I began to get personal calls for him, always from women. The calls came with increasing frequency. The climax was Valentine’s Day, when several baskets of flowers from his honeys arrived at the shop for him.

Another good-looking lad, Brian from Australia, came to work for me when he was eighteen. He was over six feet tall and quite a nice fellow. He too was a consummate surfer and had a great physique. He was attending college and had a straight “A” average for 3 1/2 years. The world was his oyster. It was the late 60’s and the Hippie movement was in full bloom. We had marvelous arguments about his-versus-my generation and each one’s influence on society. He was sacrosanct about his generation, and looked down his nose at mine as stodgy and too caught up in material possessions. He took the high road, until he was caught by the Feds. He was acting as a “mule,” carrying dope or cash from one drug dealer to another. The last time I saw him, he had jumped bail and was living under an assumed name. What a waste. He was so sure of himself, but didn’t have a clue.

In 1973, I moved the shop to a bigger building. It had housed the first national surfboard manufacturing company in the U.S. The floors were encrusted with drips of solidified polyester resin. For several years, when the employees arrived in the morning I had them scrape the resin from the floor with an ice scraper. When I sold the business and remodeled the building 22 years later, I had all the floors ground with a special machine to remove the remaining drippings.

My business started to grow and peaked with 24 employees. Theft was an all too frequent problem. One 19-year-old kid would steal from the 7-Eleven store around the corner three times each day, at lunch and on his two breaks. Others would also steal supplies and tools. I caught some, but not all, of them. I employed a 40-year-old former stockbroker as a carpenter and was grooming him to run the shop. I invited his family and him to our home one weekend for a picnic lunch and a boat ride. My wife and I left for a three-week vacation to Australia and New Zealand and I felt quite comfortable leaving left him in charge of the shop. When the trip was over, I walked into the shop with a present for him. He handed me the keys, and quit with no explanation. Within a short time, I found out he had thrown a party for the employees the day after I left for vacation and charged all the food and drink to me. He also had the party while the employees were on the clock. Three were on overtime, including him.

I had a part-time female bookkeeper who worked for seven months. She lived locally, was in her late 40s, plain faced, and extremely quiet. Sometime after she left my employ, I was audited for the state sales tax. I handed the books to the examiner and left him alone. About an hour later, he came to me and said, “Mr. Spector, where are your other books, the ones with entries in them?” Apparently this woman had spent seven months, four hours per day, and not made any entries.

Another shop supervisor was a 25-year-old fellow named Allan who had a master’s degree in Geology. He was an extraordinary carpenter and had an interesting amorous situation. It was not a ménage de trois, but something similar. He shared an apartment with his girlfriend Julie. She was a technician on a research vessel. She would routinely be away for months at a time on the ship. While at sea, she became involved with another crew member. However when she was ashore, she went back to living with Allan, who was aware of the other lover. This didn’t bother him and the two men became best of friends. The arrangement was so satisfactory that the three of them bought a piece of land in a rural area and built a house on it. The three of them lived there in complete harmony. After a couple of years, Julie became pregnant, and since this was long before DNA, she was not sure who the father was. This was not important to her. She solved her dilemma with ease. “One of you is the father, and our baby will need a parent. Which one of you will marry me?” The other fellow said he would and Allan moved out.

The smartest, most pleasant, and productive employee I ever had was Eric. As he entered the door into my office for an interview, all the light was gone. Eric stood 6’6″ tall, and weighed 505 pounds. I sized him up, read his impressive resume, and said, “Eric, I’ll be glad to hire you under one condition: with your size, and girth, my biggest concern is your being able to give me eight hours of work, for eight hours of pay.” He assured me he would, and I never ever had one moment’s concern about him in the five years he worked for me, which ended when I sold the business.

Ed was my bony sixty nine-year-old male secretary for a while. He was a wonderful retired shoe salesman who biked to work every day. He was attentive, bright, and very pleasant. He had only one failing; he was incredibly clumsy. He would bang around the office, knocking things off desks and the like. One day he knocked a typewriter off his desk and broke it. He insisted on paying for it. He said, “Ira, my wife Dorothy is my lover, my best friend, and the mother of my children. We have been happily married for 51 faithful years, but she told me, “If someone comes along with the littlest bit of practical repair knowledge, she’d run-off with him without hesitation.”

Millie, my little wizened 65-year-old friend, helped me from time to time. She’d go out in front of my original shop and squat to pee when the weeds were tall enough. Millie never knew a stranger. She would greet new people like they were old friends. She would go right up to them as if they were continuing an earlier conversation. One day, she spontaneously climbed into a station wagon with a guitar player and his wife and went as far as they were going in the Midwest. When they dropped her off, she decided to see some more of the country and started thumbing rides. She went all around the U.S. for four months and had a grand adventure. One night she boarded a bus somewhere in Texas to get some sleep and distance. The bus left her off in the middle of the wide-open plains at 4 a.m. There wasn’t a building or cow in sight. I asked her if she was scared. “No,” she said. She started walking and knew eventually someone would stop and pick her up. An old couple did just that, even buying her breakfast and dropping her off miles out of their way.

Jack maintained all the motors in my shop and the restaurant I owned. He was a round, wizened character in his late 60s, who was never stumped by any problem in the shop. He always spoke deliberately and with wisdom. He could fix any problem. He also invented a process called “Epoxolating,” dripping hot epoxy on copper motor windings to keep them from corroding. The shop was a couple of blocks from the ocean with corrosive salt-air always a factor, so this was a great help. One Saturday morning, Jack and I were in the shop working on our fifty-inch belt sander. He was having trouble with a stubbornly rusted screw. He kept twisting it until he finally erupted, “This … damn screw is tighter than a cow’s ass in fly time!” That comment dropped me to the floor.

The Clients

Most of my clients were decent people. I had personal friendships some some clients that last to this day. I was always honest with them. A number of times I returned double-payments I received. The largest duplicate checks were $11000, plus another time a check for $3000, from Big Bear Markets, a client for 20 years. The fellow to whom I eventually sold my business had been senior vice-president for a publicly traded company. He told me, “They averaged about $25,000. per year in duplicate payments and never returned a dime.”

I never offered kickbacks to my clients, and only had one who demanded it. He was an absolute crook. He was my biggest client, and gave me the most work. I wouldn’t have dealt with him if I could afford to turn down the amount of business he gave me. I had to hold onto my wallet when I was with him, and he often got inside of it anyway. He had two partners, yet he was the only one of the three who always demanded a payoff. He had me write the name of the check to another personal account, but not in his name. I was not aware if his partners knew he was stealing from the business or whether it was an agreed upon arrangement.

After a number of years of dealing with this goniff (thief), I was getting to the end of my rope. He was into me for almost $50,000 in one deal or another. I finally blew my stack when he screwed up a job in San Francisco. The customer was very happy with my work, but was holding back $40,000 for some of his other work. He told me I was not going to get paid because he wasn’t getting his final check. I yelled that wonderful self-righteous phrase at him, “I’ll see you in court!” There were also two other jobs his firm owed me money for as well for a total of $12,500. I was able to combine the three suits into the same court date in Small Claims Court in Los Angeles. I received judgment for two of the cases, totaling $10,000, and lost the third case worth $2500. Now the problem was collecting, the toughest part. As I anticipated he refused to pay me. However, I had an ace up my sleeve. I kept a photocopy, front and back, of every check received. I looked at the the last check received from him. Stamped on the back was the name of the bank` and the account number. I turned that information over to the marshal of the Court, who went to their bank with a court order, and withdrew the entire amount owed from their checking account. I thought we were done. The $2500. suit I lost was for work I did in a hotel that had gone belly-up. The money owed was really a commission he insisted on. He even wrote “commission,” for the first time into my contract. In the meantime, I kept getting notices from the bankruptcy receiver in Detroit. After I lost the case, another notice came in the mail. As I was opening the envelope, I said to myself, “Why bother reading these things, it’s all over, this is the last one I’ll open.” Out popped a check from the receiver for $2500. settling the bankruptcy…

Bureaucracy

After a number of years of doing architectural art, people kept asking us to make creative signs. The repeat business it generated soon took over our production and eventually that was all we did. This generated a whole new set of problems with various government agencies. Most signs needed a permit. When we were chosen by an owner to be a sign contractor for a new or remodeled shopping center, it was necessary to have an approved set of blueprints showing the design and location of all the signs.

The County of San Diego required 55 separate copies of the full-sized blueprints. After complying with this ridiculous requirement a few times, I began to wonder why the hell they needed all these plans. So one day I asked, and was told, “We have several mail distribution lists. There are many offices on each list. Each office, whether it needed the blueprints or not, had to have a set of prints.” In reality, only six copies of the blueprints were necessary, while forty-nine copies were thrown away. After pointing out this idiocy to them, they promptly changed the distribution.

The last job I want to talk about was a new shopping center in Escondido. The City of Escondido had an ordinance forbidding the hanging of wooden signs more than three feet off the ground, which would have been impossible to comply with. I asked city personnel “Why the three-foot height limit?” They replied, “In case a fire burned through the sign where it is mounted, it could cause the sign to fall on someone and injure them.” I went before the City council and argued, “Your ordinance means that if there was a fire and a sign was four foot-high, someone would have to get on their knees while the sign was burning and wait until it had burnt through and fallen on them.” The ordinance was changed.

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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection, with slight revisions, was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.