CHAPTER 134. SOAP SUDS AND HARD DRIVES 1973-1978
While we were engaging in sexual pursuits enough to take my mind off the downward turn at Olson Brothers, Lois was becoming concerned with where this adventure was headed. One evening after she and I had finished intercourse, Bunny sat down on the bed with a cloth of warm water and washed my privates. This felt very good, but Lois began to fear us becoming involved in wife-swapping. We decided to leave Bunny and Wayne as unemployed as Olson’s was about to leave me.
Olson Brothers’ Eastern Regional Operations had collapsed, the Blue Anchor plant would never be built. All the employees had been laid off. Only the Production Manager, the General Manager and I remained to do the final functions of closing it down. So suddenly I also found myself unemployed and in a high rise apartment in New Jersey.
Lois had left the University of Pennsylvania’s chemistry department when we moved across the Delaware River, so we were in somewhat tenuous shape that January of 1973. I received a few week’s severances pay, hardly enough to see us through the month. I had immediately gone to the Pennsylvania Labor Office and applied for unemployment. (I was now living in New Jersey, but the job had been located in Pennsylvania.)
Unlike the difficulties I would someday face with the Delaware
Employment Insurance, Pennsylvania approved me very quickly. Meanwhile I was sending out resumes and checking the want ads. One ad that caught my eye was for something named Bestline, whichclaimed to be hiring. I called the number and they gave me a date and time to go to the Cherry Hill Inn for an interview.
I went expecting an interview. Instead I was ushered down a hallway outside a large ballroom filled with chairs. There were finger foods and drinks on tables lining this corridor. A man with a clipboard greeted me, took my name and invited me to indulge in the edibles. There were quite a number of people doing so and ambling about. After a while we were each handed a folder and directed to find seats in the ballroom. The folder contained a small booklet and several forms. Once seated the lights dimmed. A well-dressed fellow stepped out on the stage down at one end and began explaining Bestline to us. The products were cleaners and waxes. We would be selling these items like some scrub-it-up Amway peddlers.
A sales job, I had no interest in a sales job. I had tried training to sell Encyclopedias door to door for Colliers a few years earlier and left the training after a week. I did not consider myself any kind of salesman.
Yet w e weren’t sales staff and this was not some salaried position. This was a “great opportunity”. As they say on TV, there’s more. This wasn’t just a peddler’s position. We were like little franchises for Bestline. We would be local distributors and independent contractors. It wasn’t that we would take customer orders and Bestline would ship out the product to fill what we sold. No, we were expected to buy the products up front, like a whole garage full of the stuff, of course at a discount beneath the retail price. The initial discount was 30%. The greater your sales, the higher discount you would receive, up to 52%. Sure, Bestline would get their money, but we would have to actually sell all the junk to get back our investment plus a profit.
Yet, that wasn’t all at all! Selling wasn’t the main point. If you really wanted to make money then you would sponsor other local distributors. You yourself wouldn’t wear out your shoes going door to door, you would recruit your friends and neighbors into the scheme to order their own supply to sell and you would collect a portion of their sales. You only needed to recruit ten people to do it and then convince them to get ten of their acquaintances to also do it. Those ten would sent a cut to your original ten, and in turn your ten would pass on a percentage to you. Of all these people, you would soon be rich as Bill Gates.
It was clear to me this was a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme. If you were at the top of the pyramid perhaps you would make something, but there would be diminishing returns down the line as each spin off group attempted to find ten suckers to be their own salesmen. For the scheme to work each person involved had to hook up ten more people. Think about it. If I got ten people and they got 10 people each, then I’d have 110 people passing a share up to me. And if those additional 100 people each got 10 recruits there would be 1010 people sharing the loot with me. But for those people to earn anything they would have to keep recruiting. Twelve layers down and you would need to have 100 Billion Bestline dealers. You’d have to be recruiting on other planets because the population of Earth in 1970’s was only 7 Billion.
angrily stomped out. I came believing it was a real job ad and here it was a scam. I also contacted the Better Business Bureau (Part of BBB Letter below.). Bestline was taken to court more than once and judgments brought against them for fraud and false claims.
People v. Bestline Products, Inc.
[Civ. No. 46034. Court of Appeals of California, Second Appellate District, Division Three. August 25, 1976.]
THE PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. BESTLINE PRODUCTS, INC., et al., Defendants and Appellants
(Opinion by Potter, J., with Allport, Acting P. J., and Cobey, J., concurring.)
COUNSEL
Humphreys, Berger & Pitto, P. C., Donald A. Drumright, Cotchett, Hutchinson & Dyer, Joseph W. Cotchett, Meis & O'Donnell, Owen P. O'Donnell, Gallucci, White & Kelley, Thomas E. White and Irving Reifman for Defendants and Appellants.
Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, E. Clement Shute, Assistant Attorney General, Herschel T. Elkins and Michael R. Botwin, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
OPINION
POTTER, J.
Appellants Bestline Products, Inc. (hereinafter "Bestline Products"), Bestline Corporation (hereinafter "Bestline Corp."), William E. Bailey, Robert W. Depew, David L. Eastis, James Rohn and Larry D. Huff appeal from a judgment dated December 21, 1973, in favor of plaintiff the People of the State of California. The judgment (1) permanently restrained defendants from operating or participating in a marketing program embodying proscribed features which the court found were in violation of Business and Professions Code section 17500 fn. 1 prohibiting "untrue or misleading" statements; (2) required defendants Bestline Products, Bestline Corp., and Bailey to offer to make restitution to victims of the Bestline marketing program, and (3) imposed civil penalties of $1 million jointly and severally, upon defendants Bestline Corp. and Bestline, Inc., $250,000 upon defendant Bailey, $100,000 upon defendant Eastis, and $50,000 each upon defendants Depew, Huff and Rohn. [61 Cal. App. 3d 885]
I needed have fretted. Three weeks after I applied for unemployment compensation my first check came. However, by then I had acquired a job with Welded Tube Company of America. I went from nothing to having a good salary and the extra bonus of three weeks of unemployment checks. (On the right, me at my Welded Tube desk.)
The offices and plant are still there (pictured), but the sign says Hyundai Rodan, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with cars. But across Weccacoe it is no longer some wasteland, it is a large shopping center containing a Lowe’s, a Best Buy and an Ikea.
Welded Tube. had another plant in Chicago, but Philadelphia was the headquarters. The founder was a native Philadelphia named Lou Baylis. He had started out in business with a push cart collecting and selling scrap metal. From that he built the largest manufacturer of structural steel tubing in the USA.
were all Jewish and mostly his relatives. It had stock, but it was all privately held by the management. The vice-president was Lou’s son, Melvin Baylis. Another executive was Allen Baylis, either a nephew or cousin. Didn’t see him much. Melvin often put him down. The real force though was Jean Wexler (right) She was the Secretary, both to Mr. Baylis and a member of the Board. She is who hired me and she was a tough cookie who carried out Lou Baylis orders with an iron hand. Her brother, Sam Wexler was the main salesman and Ann Cooper, a sister also worked there. The controller was Dick Shafritz.
The rest of us were gentiles.
My first position was as an assistant bookkeeper and I reported to the Head Bookkeeper, an older man whose name escapes me. On the left is a Christmas outing the company provided, a show and dinner at Palumbo’s Night Club. Facing the camera are Dick Shafritz and Jean Wexler. I am the fellow with the beard and tan coat on the left.
Even in this lowly position my salary was higher than what I had been making at Olson Brothers. For some lucky reason, every time I changed jobs I began at a higher wage. I had been making $7,800 a year when Olson’s closed; I started at Welded Tube at $8,060 a year. When I left Welded Tube 6 years later in 1978 I was making $17,000. My next position was with a medical center and I started at $18,200. Two years later I got my first position at Wilmington Trust at $20,000. That was 1980 and when I retired from Wilmington Trust my salary was $65,000 plus an $8,000 Bonus and a number of stock options.
I was at Welded three months when the head bookkeeper left the company suddenly. Dick Shafritz, (left) the Controller, who ran the clerical and accounting operations put out an ad for a new bookkeeper, but I went to him and told him I didn’t think he needed do that because I was sure I could handle the full bookkeeping. He therefore took me up on my offer and I was doing all the book work.
Anyway, as I began keeping all the books right up to preparing the Balance Sheet and Income Statement, I noticed a persistent discrepancy in the figures. This was constantly being noted as a balance adjustment in the overall reporting. It bugged me and I began searching through the records stored in a side room. I had time to do this because I once again brought my organization skills to improving the processes. Finally, I uncovered the initial reporting errors and corrected the books and brought everything into balance.
Controller. In this position I continued with all the bookkeeping and accounting functions I had been doing, but now I also worked with the auditors and the preparation of the annual report. Lou Baylis did hire an Accounting Manager and I now reported directly to him. His name was James Schlief (right). He came from the accounting firm of Ernst & Young and had his CPA. He and I hit it off great and I loved working for him. This affinity toward each other would pay off eventually.
We had a computer system, the main piece being an IBM System 3. There was an Operation System Manager, another person whose name I can’t recall, even though he and I got along well. In the picture on the left he is the fellow kneeling down in front of the Christmas Tree. (I’m not in the picture because I took the picture.)
There were a number of malfunctions with the computer and Lou Baylis got so worked up about this he fired the computer. He hadn’t liked the idea of getting the thing to begin with, but once he fired it he realized we probably did need some modern technology. He had already booted the Operations System Manager out, though. Next thing I knew I was off to IBM for schooling in the System 3 Computer, and when I completed the course, I was named Operations System Manager. I got a raise, but did not stop being the Assistant Controller. I was now doing both jobs, a situation that gave our outside Accounting Firm, which was Ernst and Young, fits. They argued that it was a conflict of interest, but Baylis wouldn’t be budged.
despite having got me trained on that machine, he decided to get rid of it and replace it with a Sperry Univac BC/7 System. I was sent off now to the Sperry Rand Corporation in King of Prussia to learn the BC/7 operation and how to program in a language called RPG-II.
I came back and reorganized the Computer Department, did all the programming for the system and wrote the procedure manuals. I had two young women performing all the daily jobs, while I attended to keeping the books up to date. One was named Margie and she is pictured on the left. The name of the
other was Maria Tulli, and that is her on the right.
One of my most firm rules was backing up the system. They were to do this at the end of each day. Storage was done of these large hard disks and the backup did take a bit of time to perform. One day there was a bad thunderstorm and lightning struck a transformer on the roof of the plant. It fried the hard disks in the computer. My workers were very upset, but I told them not to worry, just get the backup. They kind of turned pale. It turned out they hated backing up so much they had skipped doing it. We now had to reconstruct our billing and other information from paper records. If they hated to do backup, they didn’t after that. They found working late fixing the system was much more tedious than the backup had been.
I did very well at Welded Tube and it became my longest job since leaving ARCo, I was to be there 6 years. The picture on the right is me (most of me, also minus my beard) at the BC/7 console in the Operations Center.
A lot will change in my life during the time I worked for Welded
Tube, a whole lot!(On the right is me in 1981 standing before the gates before the former Welded Tube Office.)
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