We showed everybody some photos we had taken the last time we were down there. It seemed unreal to some of them. Well, half the time it still seemed unreal to me! Part of the reason Big Bob and Harriet were so enthusiastic about the idea was that they were taking the first trip. When we flew down on the Friday after Christmas, we took them along. Their vacation included a flight on the G-II that Taylor had chartered for us. For once they left the kids home. Even the youngest was now six years old, and there were enough older kids at home to watch them for a week. Winter was the slow season for Lefleur Homes anyways, so they could take off.
I think a big part of the reason we offered to bring them and they agreed to come was to see if it was all true. Were the photos real? Did we actually have a place on the beach? Was this bullshit? For a long time, Big Bob and Harriet had figured that they were going to have to support their idiot son-in-law who couldn't get a real job and ended up in the Army. The idea of me owning an investment company and supporting Marilyn on my own was just barely sinking in. The idea I was worth so much more than that really hadn't registered at all!
Taylor had made sure the jet was stocked with a couple of bottles of champagne. Big Bob drank some, but he was much more of a beer kind of guy. Harriet and Marilyn got a little tanked, on the other hand, but not out of control. Charlie was very excited by it all; the twins slept the entire trip. That was a blessing in and of itself! They were now teething, and when one would start crying, she would set off the other one. When I die and go to hell, it will be packed with teething twin daughters! A minivan and a Cadillac were waiting for us at the airport, so that we could split apart and drive separately if we wanted to. From there, we drove to Hougomont and I fished the keys from my pocket.
Well, if we were trying to impress the relatives, it worked! It reminded me of the time when Marilyn and I had lived in northern New Jersey on the first go-around, and her brother Mark and her Aunt Lynnette came down to visit us. We took them to Rod's 1890s for dinner, a very nice place Marilyn and I liked to go to, with a private Pullman dining car on one side, and a two story bar/dining room with an open well connecting the rooms. The pair of them had just gawked like a pair of rubes right off the farm. We got the same impression this time around from Marilyn's folks.
As vacations go, it was nice and went well, although I would have preferred more alone time with my wife. We hadn't done a parents-only vacation since before the girls were born. Still, there were a couple of nights we wanted to go out on our own, and her parents played babysitter, and they went out a night or two on their own also. If we were trying to impress them, it worked. Yes, I know they had been to our home in Hereford, but that simply looked like a nice suburban rancher. Hougomont was a lot more impressive, and we obviously owned it. For one thing, they came with us one day to buy some furniture; the furniture in the place wasn't ours, but was the demo stuff from when it was still a demo unit.
Big Bob and I talked business and politics several times. He was a die-hard and hard core liberal Democrat; I was a much more moderate Republican. He didn't think much of Reagan. I think Big Bob was hoping for the return of FDR! I was more ambivalent on the subject, and kept my mouth shut. If you want to keep your friends, don't talk religion or politics. Some of what Reagan did I liked, some I didn't, and the guy tended to invent the truth he wanted to believe in. Maybe that's just part of being a politician.
On business I was on a lot firmer ground. For one thing, back on my first try, I had spent as much time in the trailer business as he had, and could speak with some authority. I knew a lot of the history of the business and how it operated and why, and could speak intelligently, and my money made him at least consider my opinions.
It was still strange, though. Way back when, I had first started working for Lefleur Homes in the summer of 1984. Back then, I had been an industrial chemist. That was what my degree was in, and even my MBA was geared towards running a factory. Unfortunately, my specialty was in specialty organics and pharmaceuticals, and I ran head first into an industrial nightmare.
A few years before, Congress had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that Puerto Rico needed more jobs and that the best way to do that was to give tax breaks to pharmaceutical companies who put up factories in Puerto Rico. Well, that certainly sounded good at the time. Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S. and jobs are good, right? Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences! Cue the drum roll. Half the pharmaceutical companies in America built brand new factories in Puerto Rico, got them running, and then shut down all the old factories back on the mainland! New factories could be depreciated faster and had lower operating costs, and the new employees got paid peanuts compared to older (now unemployed) unionized employees in the northeast.
Lots of Congressmen got free vacations to Puerto Rico courtesy of the pharmaceutical companies, too. They were called fact finding tours. It's surprising how many facts are hidden in the beach sand and at the Bacardi refinery.
I bounced from factory to factory, company to company for seven years, getting laid off as companies shut down. Eventually I landed at a German chemical company as a junior foreman, and worked my way back to the top of the QC department. I was the only guy on the line with one college degree, let alone two, but since German chemical companies are run and managed by chemists with PhDs, I was told I would never rise higher than a senior foreman.
I threw in the towel at that point and got out of the business, selling insurance for a brief period. Big Bob offered me a job at his Cooperstown office, his first satellite office, and I jumped at it. I was never sorry, at least not until the Great Recession hit, and even then I knew that if I was an employee and not an owner, I wouldn't have survived.
I worked for Matthew in the office as a salesman for that first year, learning the business, with the understanding that if I worked out, I would eventually run the office. I worked out better than they expected, and took it over in January of 1985 - right now, in fact. Matthew went back to being the dispatcher and driver. On this trip through, Matthew was still running the office and unhappy about it. Big Bob's problem was that he didn't trust anybody but family to run things (for one thing, he could treat family like shit and get away with it!) and all the older boys had been put into the delivery and setup sides of the business. Only Mark had gone into sales, and he ran the Utica lot. The next available boys were Gabriel and Rafael, still in college, and Michael, still in high school.
Big Bob asked me what he should do, and I told him he would either have to hire outside sales professionals or promote an existing salesperson. He nodded and agreed, but I already knew what would happen. He ended up doing both over the years, never trusting a one of them, and would fire them all within six months. Eventually his younger sons got through school and he put them in, treated them like shit, and was happy. Hell of a way to run a railroad!
House trailers are not necessarily a good product or a bad product. Like most things in business, it comes down to a question of who you're dealing with. In that regard, the trailer industry has nobody to blame but themselves! Some of the homes are built as nicely as any stick-built home, and some of the dealers are as honest and trustworthy as you can ask for. Big Bob had a good reputation in that regard, and he only sold high end homes. However, as a whole, for most of their past, trailers had been rickety death traps sold by salesmen who failed the ethics qualifications to sell used cars. The factories all knew it, but they didn't care; they just pumped out tin boxes as fast as they could and as cheap as they could to whoever lined up at the back door with a truck and a check. The death trap part ended in 1976 when Congress began to regulate the business and put in a building code, but the damage had been done. They were still being sold by dealers who were crooks and that never really changed.