Isaac Laquedem

Jakob Kryszek (1918-2019) and the American dream: He who dies with the most joys wins

The most religious of rabbis might have forgiven Jakob Kryszek if he had become an agnostic.  Born in the small Polish town of Poddębice in 1918, the fourth of six children in a devout Jewish family, he moved to Lodz in 1937 after his father died.  There he went to work for an uncle who knitted socks - until Nazi Germany invaded Poland and sent the Jews of Poland first to ghettos and then to the concentration camps that became death camps.  He never again saw his mother and his siblings.

That Jakob Kryszek was not among the six million Jews killed in the death camps or elsewhere in the war was a matter of improbable chance.  He was working in a Lodz factory when Germany began to bomb Lodz.  Later in the Lodz ghetto he volunteered to work on the crews building the Autobahn because he was told that his siblings who remained in the ghetto would get extra food rations.  When the ghetto residents were sent to the death camps he was at first sent to a work camp because of his experience on the highway crews.  As he later passed through death camps -- Birkenau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz among them - one  happenstance after another kept him alive.  Once when bombers attacked the camp he ran to the fields instead of going to the bomb shelters, which the planes destroyed.  Later when he and other prisoners were in rail cars, Allied airplanes strafed the cars and a bullet passed through his leg and broke his femur.  A friendly Polish doctor was able to pin the broken pieces together, creatively but without anesthesia.

Years later, as Mr. Kryszek recalled his years in the camps, he said that in the camps, "to remain alive was really absolutely circumstantial. We could not figure out [how to remain alive]; it was not a matter of figuring out how to do it to stay alive. It was fate."

Fate brought him through the war and gave him another three quarters of a century.  Mr. Kryszek died not in Poland in 1939 from German bombs nor in 1945 from Allied bullets and battlefield surgery but in Portland this Wednesday from the ills of age, having lived to celebrate his one hundredth birthday last year and then to greet his first great-grandchild two months ago.  Along the way he came to America and moved to Portland, where he went to work for an old-line knitting mill, Columbia Knit.  (It is unrelated to the younger and larger Columbia Sportswear.)  He later bought and expanded Columbia Knit, using knowledge that he had acquired from his uncle in that vanished European world of long ago, and achieved the American dream.  In civic life he became active in ensuring that the Holocaust is remembered, first by contributing to the Oregon Holocaust Memorial and later by speaking about his family and his own experience.

His time in the death camps made him fearless in the commercial world.  Once he had a disagreement with a business connection, who told him, "If you don't settle this dispute on my terms, I will sic my lawyers on you and they will tie you up in court for years. It will be the worst experience of your life!"  Mr. Kryszek smiled benignly as he replied, "I was in Auschwitz for a year. What can your lawyers do that's worse than that?"

His war experience also made him quirky with his time.  He would occasionally bring a small project to a lawyer and then sit placidly in the lawyer's office watching the lawyer type the document he wanted instead of going about his business.  Did he want to ensure that he wouldn't be overcharged?  He was thrifty in small things; one who didn't know Mr. Kryszek's life story might have taken his thrift as a sign of parsimony.  He was actually quite generous: the same fate that had taken his brothers and sisters from the world of his youth gave him nearly 75 years to preserve their memory, and he freely shared the richness of time with the world around him.  And every year, every month, every day, every minute that he enjoyed of his long and vibrant life after the war was both a joy in itself and his own private victory over the nation that, 75 years ago, had done its best to try to kill him.

יעקב בן אברהם

תהא נפשו צרורה בצרור החיים

T.T. "Saki" Tzantarmas (1936-2017), the New Copper Penny, and the American Dream

The unlikely life of Theodosios T. Tzantarmas began in 1936 in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece and one with a lively reputation for challenging the government: it was the locus of the original Young Turks, who started the revolution that ultimately overthrew the Ottoman Empire.  Not everyone born in Thessaloniki becomes a revolutionary, but neither does everyone born there become a boxer, a pipefitter, a tavern owner, and a thorn in the side of city government.  In his 81 years, T.T. Tzantarmas, known as "Saki," did all of those things.

Most of his Portland friends knew Saki Tzantarmas, who died in Portland on July 20, as the owner of the New Copper Penny Bar & Grill, a rambling establishment devoted to drinking, betting, and celebration that until last year dominated the interchange of Interstate 205 and Foster Road.  Even people who never stepped inside recognized its sign as a Portland landmark, with its copper-colored profile of Abraham Lincoln in the style of a one-cent piece. Why a penny and not a dollar?  Mr. Tzantarmas came to this country, he said, without a dollar -- but he did have five pennies in his pocket.

By 1960 he had made his way to Portland, where he was working as a pipefitter, and the stories began.  He told friends that he had boxed professionally, and an image from 1965 shows Saki with noted Mexican welterweight Gaspar Ortega - but his boxing record at boxrec.com identifies him in just one match, with Don Marshall at the Portland Armory, which he lost in a technical knockout.

Boxing was not Saki's future, though he retained the fighter's stance and build the rest of his life.  A few years after his boxing match he bought a rundown tavern, which he named the Copper Penny.  When the business was forced to relocate in 1973, he moved the tavern to Southeast Foster Road just east of 92nd Avenue, renaming it the New Copper Penny.

Saki himself lived a life of contradictions.  Expressive verbally, he disliked writing.  Elegant in dress when he wished -- he could make a purple tie look impressively masculine -- he could also appear in the New Copper Penny looking like a patron who was about to be thrown out, instead of as the owner who even in his late 70s could still do the throwing.  Thrifty in business -- some might say tightfisted -- he was personally generous to friends and family, quietly helping friends in need.  Even his family name carried its own puzzle: nominally Greek, it might have derived from the Italian surname Zantani, or from a similar Turkish name.

As he expanded his business onto the entire block on Foster Road, he built the contradictions of his own life story into the New Copper Penny.  The oldest part of the business was a clean plain room with a concrete floor, stark like the Greece of his youth.  A middle section contained the off-track betting parlor and video poker machines, a nod to the practicalities of running a tavern in Oregon.  And a dilapidated passage with fraying carpet led to the elegant Pantheon Room (pictured here), a classically-decorated banquet hall, with Greek pillars lining the walls, reminiscent of the ancient glory of his homeland.

Under pressure from the Portland Development Commission to get out of the way of gentrification, Saki sold the New Copper Penny site, and the tavern, club, and banquet hall closed last year to make way for apartments.

An old story tells of the man who came to this country with nothing, started a business, became a success, and sent his son to college to become an accountant.  After graduating, the son examined the father's books and told his father that he couldn't tell from the books what the father's profit was.  The father said, "I came to this country with five dollars.  Take five dollars out of the till.  Everything else you see is the profit."  When Willamette Week interviewed Saki Tzantarmas in 2014, he pulled five copper pennies out of his pocket and showed them to the reporter.  The five coins were what he had brought to America sixty years ago.  Everything else -- his family, his friends, his property, and his story -- was the profit that he shared with the city that he adopted.  It would be a fitting memorial to T.T. Tzantarmas if, somewhere in the foundation of the monolith that is replacing the New Copper Penny, the developer would embed five copper pennies.

 

Portland's parting gift to a generous citizen

 

On this day in 1919, when Tom Moyer was born in an upstairs bedroom of this unassuming building in Sellwood, his father, who had boxed as "Silk Hat" Harry Moyer, might have imagined that Tom would himself become a boxer some day, and so Tom did, being for a while the second-best amateur boxer in the United States.  Harry Moyer might not have envisioned, however, that his son would go on to success in the business world as the founder of the Luxury Theatres chain, which grew to 190 screens before being acquired by Norman Lear's company Act III in 1988.  (It's now part of the Regal Cinemas chain.)  Nor would Harry Moyer have pictured his son becoming a Portland real estate tycoon, and then a quiet philanthropist who gave millions of dollars back to the city in which he lived and prospered, and donated the land and part of the construction cost for Director Park.

Late in Mr. Moyer's life, the city recognized his civic contributions, and some awards followed -- not many, for he disliked talking in public, even in the form of the words of gratitude that audiences expect honorees to utter from the stage.  "Thank you very much" was one of his longer speeches.

In 2014, on the gray November morning on which he died in his downtown apartment, the city had one final farewell gift for Mr. Moyer: it ticketed his hearse.

Immigration: if this is the way we treat our friends . . .

A year ago I'd written about Richard See and Paul Gold, who dominated downtown real estate for decades and whose exploits included acquiring and assembling the block where the Georgia-Pacific Building (now the Standard Insurance Center) became downtown's first modern tower.  Messrs. See and Gold were both immigrants, Richard See from Germany and Paul Gold from Russian Poland.  In 2011 I'd written about the three remarkable sons of Italian immigrant Carlo Piacentini, who landed on August 16, 1913.  Carlo's sons - John, Frank, and Carl - all became prominent in our city.

Last week I discovered an interesting coincidence.  On March 4, 1931 Paul Gold and Carlo Piacentini stood together in a Portland courtroom to be sworn in as citizens of the United States.  Messrs. Gold and Piacentini, as aliens, had served in the United States army, and qualified for expedited citizenship, and March 4 was the last day on which alien veterans could be naturalized without waiting out the arduous process prescribed for other would-be citizens. 

I thought the story of Paul Gold and Carlo Piacentini especially poignant when I read of Hameed Darweesh, the Iraqi man who had served as a translator for the United States army, and who had acquired the proper permits to enter the United States because of his service, who was stopped and detained by the Customs and Border Patrol last week solely because of President Trump's sudden change of policy.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if this is the way the new leaders of our government choose treat the foreigners on whom our troops depend to communicate, we don't deserve to have any.

Richard See and Paul Gold, the accidental millionaires of downtown Portland

            In 1903 Richard See, age 19, came to America from Frankfurt, settling in New York, where he became a hat buyer for a large department store. Three years later a Russian emigrant arrived in Portland to pursue the American dream. He took the surname of “Gold,” though not because of the legend that American streets were paved with gold. In 1908 his wife Rose and their four small children joined him. A fifth child was born here in 1910 in a house on now-vanished SW Baker Street. Joe and Rose Gold gave their children plain American names – Jack, Paul, Sam, Sarah, and Dave – and raised them in the Jewish and Italian quarter of South Portland, where Joe Gold was a junk dealer.

            In 1921 Meier & Frank lured Richard See to leave New York for Portland, and placed him in charge of the millinery department. Meier & Frank’s hat sales soared when Mr. See carried out his promise to, in his words, “make at least ten trips a year to New York, to give the women of Portland the new styles as fast as they originate.”

            Around 1927 Paul Gold opened his first millinery store with his younger brother Dave. A gregarious man, Paul readily accumulated friends in Portland’s retail community, including Richard See, who was still buying and selling hats at Meier & Frank. In 1941 another friend, a shopkeeper in the Goodnough (sometimes spelled "Goodnaugh") Building at 5^th and Yamhill, told Paul that his landlord was raising the rent and he didn’t know if he and the other Goodnough tenants could pay the increase. By coincidence, at about the same time Mr. See, who was planning for retirement, told Mr. Gold that he had saved some money and didn’t think that government bonds paid a high enough return. Perhaps, if Paul invested some of his money for him, Paul could do better?

            Mr. Gold did do better. “Paul saw what would grow,” his rabbi said when Mr. Gold died in 1981, and so he did, starting with the Goodnough. According to legend, Mr. Gold (pictured at right, foreground) approached the worried Goodnough tenants and promised that if they would pay him three months’ rent in advance, he would buy the building and not raise their rent for two years. The tenants pungled up, Mr. See wrote a check, and soon the Goodnough Building had become the first acquisition of the new firm of See, Gold & Associates. A few months later they bought a second building, the Kraemer Building at SW 2^nd and Washington.

            Pleased with their purchases, Messrs. See and Gold bought more, and eventually gave up the hat business to focus on buying downtown property. In 1944 they were able to buy the Hotel Oregon, at Broadway and Stark, for the amount of the unpaid property taxes. In 1945 they bought the Portland Garage, a parking structure at 5th and Taylor, later acquiring the rest of the block.  They acquired so much real estate that by 1956 the society page of the Palm Springs newspaper could describe them as “realtors from Portland, Oregon.”

            They became famous for never making counteroffers. If you quoted them a price for your building, they would say only “yes” or “no.” Would-be sellers learned to name their best price first. See, Gold & Associates continued to buy downtown property – like potato chips, no one can stop with just one – sometimes trading up, rarely selling. One exception was when they sold the block at 5^th and Taylor to Georgia-Pacific for an office tower, a deviation that Mr. Gold rationalized to his partners by pointing out that the property across the street that See, Gold & Associates owned would go up in value when G-P built its skyscraper.

            Messrs. See and Gold transacted their business from offices in the New Fliedner Building at 10^th and Washington. (It was called the New Fliedner Building because it had replaced the original Fliedner Building in 1907.) Mr. Gold could often be found at a corner table at Danny’s Delicatessen at 5^th and Yamhill across from the Farmers Market, where thick pastrami sandwiches fueled negotiations. In between acquiring buildings See, Gold & Associates found time for other ventures, including buying and operating the Pacific Department Store and Powers Furniture Company. Mr. Gold also flirted with the restaurant business, investing in one of Portland’s first Japanese restaurants and operating a downtown bar called the Harvester.

            Richard See died in 1979 and Paul Gold died in 1981. In their 40 years in business, they had owned buildings, separately or together, on every downtown avenue from 1^st to 11^th and on every downtown street from Salmon to Stark.  Last week the final property was sold, bringing to a quiet close a remarkable 75-year story of Portland real estate history.

            Messrs. See and Gold owed their success to Portland’s postwar growth – the streets of downtown Portland turned out to be paved with gold after all – but also to the happy accident of both being in the hat business. Had Mr. See bought shoes, or had Mr. Gold sold suits, they might never have joined forces to become rich together. Sometimes clothes really do make the man.

Tom Moyer (1919-2014), the Portland Development Commission, and the American Dream

In 1933 Tom Moyer dropped out of the ninth grade to pursue his dream of becoming a boxer.  Boxing was one of the family businesses; his father, Harry Moyer, had been a boxer, his older brother (also named Harry) boxed, his younger brother Larry would box for a while, and two nephews then unborn, Denny Moyer and Phil Moyer, would become nationally famous as boxers.  Boxing had an element of theater to it; Tom's father Harry acquired the nickname "Silk Hat Harry" by showing up for matches wearing a silk hat and daring his opponent to knock it off.  When his opponent punched at his silk hat, Harry Moyer would slide under and aim for the chin.

By 1940 "Tommy" Moyer was the second-best amateur welterweight boxer in the United States, ranking behind only Sugar Ray Robinson.  He became the top-ranked amateur when Robinson turned pro.  Later turning professional himself, he won 22 professional bouts, losing none.

He left boxing behind to work in the other Moyer family business, operating movie houses.  Years before, his father had become a projectionist, and then rented a theatre to operate with the help of his wife and children.  In 1964 a dispute about whether to build more theatres split the family, and Tom Moyer (no longer called "Tommy") started in business for himself.  He quickly took advantage of two trends: the suburbs were growing, and people in other cities were building multiplex theatres.  He built the Eastgate Theatre (the first multiscreen theatre in the area), then the Southgate and the Westgate.  And he kept on building; by the time he sold the business twenty-five years later, his chain had become the 10th-largest theatre chain in the United States and the largest held privately by one family.

When he sold in 1989 at the age of 70, he started a third career as a real estate developer.  He had built a lot of theatres, but no other large projects.  He started with a bang, participating in developing the 1000 Broadway Building in downtown Portland.  (People who don't know its name call it the "Ban Roll-On Building" after the shape of the silvery mechanical shelter on the roof.  It's the city's 14th-tallest tower.)  When his partner couldn't make the building pay, he took it over and turned it around.  Then in 1999 he built the Fox Tower, the fifth-tallest tower in Portland, and in 2009 broke ground on the Park Avenue West Tower, soon to be Portland's 4th-tallest building.

An unassuming man, he would casually say that he "lived above the shop," in the manner of a storekeeper.  "Above the shop" meant an apartment on the top floor of the Fox Tower, from where he could see most of the city in which he'd made his fortune, and where he died on November 28 at the age of 95, having lived long enough to see the first of the glass and wall panels being attached to his latest tower.

Mr. Moyer died two weeks too soon to read about the Portland Development Commission's decision to grant a $27 million subsidy to the Zidell family to redevelop the Zidells' industrial land near the Ross Island Bridge with 1.5 million square feet of new buildings.  That's a lot of space -- it's about 35 acres of floor area, to be laid out and financed with advice from the wisest and best-educated of our local consultants -- and the PDC members may be forgiven for believing that they've committed $27 million of tax money wisely.  In the midst of their self-congratulations the commissioners might reflect that Tom Moyer built 1.5 million square feet of office, retail, and residential space in downtown Portland, and achieved his brand of the American dream, with a government subsidy that was $27 million less than the Zidell project, that is to say, zero.

George Azumano (1918-2013) and the American Dream

Hatsutaro Azumano came to the United States from Japan in 1902 as a teenager to pursue the American dream.  In 1917 he married a recent immigrant from Japan, and in 1918 while living near Front Avenue and Main Street they had their first child, a boy whom they named Ichiro (a common Japanese first name for eldest sons).   Ichiro's parents may have remained traditional even as they pursued business -- Hatsutaro Azumano became a salesman for Fuji  Grocery and Produce a few years later and by 1930 had moved his family from the crowded Front Avenue lodging house to a private house on Williams Avenue -- but within a few years after his birth they had given their son the additional and very American name of George.

A young man with the good old American name of George, born in Portland, Oregon, who graduated from the University of Oregon in 1940 with a business degree, and who went into the United States Army in 1941, might be forgiven for thinking ill of his native country for imprisoning him with thousands of other Americans from 1942 to 1944 in the Minidoka camp simply because of where his parents had been born.  If Mr. Azumano resented his war experience, he rarely talked about it.

Had he wanted to, Mr. Azumano, who died this morning at the age of 95, could have told of the time that the city of Portland prohibited its Japanese-American citizens from leaving their homes between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., or of the other governmental restrictions on their lives before the trains left for the concentration camps.  He might have told of being penned in the old livestock yards in Portland with the persistent smell of cow dung in the air while he and his family awaited the trains east to the camps.  Instead, he mostly maintained a serene, and in his later years a stately, manner as he went about his business.

Or, more accurately, his businesses: in 1949 Mr. Azumano opened his own insurance agency, soon adding a travel agency, and grew both businesses over the 40 years that followed.  He also invested his time and money in civic enterprises, establishing scholarships for needy students, serving on commissions, and doing other things to benefit Portland, in a quiet way.  Eventually the awards and recognition followed: service as a trustee of Willamette University, the Order of the Rising Sun in 1982 from the Emperor of Japan, and many others. 

Through his long and remarkable life, Mr. Azumano was proud to be an American.  It says something about a man's character when he can  raise a family, succeed in business, contribute to civic life, help educate the poor, and still be loyal to the government that denied him the rights of his neighbors.  Portland will miss him.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Carlo Piacentini (1896-1976), the Piacentini brothers, and the American dream

When the teenaged Carlo Piacentini stepped off of the S.S. France at New York on August 16, 1913, he was on his way to join his brother Angelo in Portland.  A decade later, working in Portland as a stonemason and laborer, he proposed marriage to Margaret Colistro (1904-1999).  She turned him down because he didn't own his own home.  In 1926 he bought a small house on SE 42nd Avenue north of Division Street, and a month or two later they were married.  They lived there the rest of their lives.  Along the way they had three sons, naming one for family (Carl, in 1928), one for the church (John Baptist, in 1930) and one for the state (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born on his namesake's 52nd birthday, in 1934).  Carlo had little formal education, and wanted more for his children.  He and Margaret sent each to college, and to different parts of the American dream: one in public education, one in business, and one in the professions.  Carl taught in the public schools (universal free public education was one of the forces behind the American dream), becoming a Portland school principal.  John worked his way up to become a Safeway store manager before he was 30, then went into business for himself, starting the Plaid Pantry chain of convenience stores.  (His mother worked there as a bookkeeper well into her 80s.)  Frank went to dental school, earned a graduate degree in orthodontics, and became one of the city's two leading orthodontists as well as a prominent real estate developer.  All three sons also offered themselves to community service: Carl on the school board and Portland planning commission, and as an unsuccessful candidate for the city council; John as an early proponent of Oregon's bottle bill and (more quirkily) as the Republican nominee against Robert B. Duncan for the heavily Democratic seat now held by Earl Blumenauer; and Frank as a board member and volunteer for St. Mary's Academy, St. Vincent Hospital, and the Portland Japanese Garden. 

John Piacentini died in 1988, a few months after he sold the Plaid Pantry chain to a group of venture capitalists.  Carl Piacentini, already ill himself when John died, succumbed a few months later.  This past Tuesday, the legacy of Carlo Piacentini's American dream closed when Frank Piacentini died, ninety-eight years to the day after his father set foot on Ellis Island.

The Supreme Court misjudged Richard Inukai (1943-2011) before he was born

Richard Inukai didn't talk much about his experiences in the two years he spent in a federal prison, mainly because he didn't remember much about those two years, for they started in 1943 when he was born in Minidoka, Idaho.  Tule Lake, California.  His parents, residents of Hood River, were among the tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent uprooted when they were ordered by the federal government in 1942 to leave their homes in Washington, Oregon, and California and spend the rest of World War II in confinement.  Tule Lake was not called a prison, of course; its official name was the unassuming "Tule Lake War Relocation Center," a pleasant euphemism that made no difference to the men, women, and children confined there.  The Supreme Court, in the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases, had held that the constitution did not prohibit imposing special curfews on, and then relocating and imprisoning, United States citizens in wartime, including Richard Inukai and other newborns, strictly because of their race.

After the war his parents made their way back to Oregon, and then to Portland, where his father, Tom Inukai, operated a service station.  Richard Inukai, who died the morning of July 3, absorbed his father's work ethic -- Tom Inukai often worked seven days a week -- but after serving four years in the Marine Corps Reserve he went into a different part of the car business, first in the Ron Tonkin organization, where he rose to be the manager of Ron Tonkin Gran Turismo, then in the early 1970s as the operator of a used-car lot on 82nd Avenue, and later in that decade as the owner of Dick's Country Dodge in Hillsboro.  Over the years he added Ford, Chrysler, and Jeep franchises, also in Hillsboro, operating under the common name of Dick's Auto Group.

On the rare occasions that Mr. Inukai talked about the war years, he sometimes showed his anger, not for himself but for the other children locked in the camps.  That anger may have led him to become a generous contributor to the Boys and Girls Clubs, and to lead the funding of the near-tripling of the Hillsboro club, now named the Inukai Family Club.  It's not named after him, at least not exactly; and I suspect that in his own mind he thought of it as being named after his parents, so that they could, by proxy, give to the children of Hillsboro something that the United States government kept them from giving to their own.