SCRAP: My American Family Story

By Stephen Allan Young and Alicia G. Copeland

With just $700 and a pickup truck, seventeen-year-old Steve Young created a multi-million dollar company in an industry that is fraught with crooks and gangsters but is also helping save the earth from environmental disaster.
Steve Young was too busy creating his multi-million dollar business, Allan Company, to spend much time thinking about his place in his or his family's history. Starting at the age of seventeen with just $700 and a pickup truck, Steve worked 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, to build his empire out of the stuff that people and industries got rid of: scrap.
Before 'recycling' became the mantra of environmentalists, scrap companies were doing just that and making money in the process, buying from companies eager to get rid of their production waste and selling to those eager to put it to use. Steve had been working in and around the industry since a kid and by the time he was a junior in high school, he was savvy enough to bet that he could create a future for himself in a crazy commodity that would always be plentiful.
But sooner or later money attracts a criminal element and that was the case in the scrap business, especially in California after 1986 when the California Beverage Container Recycling Program was passed. This program created the California Redemption Value (CRV), a program reimbursing consumers a fee paid when purchasing eligible plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Pretty quickly, mafia-style gangsters were taking over businesses and threatening law-abiding scrap dealers.
Steve Young has seen and done it all in the over 54 years since Allan Company's inception, from being one of the first West Coast scrap companies to sell to the very competitive mills in Asia to opening, buying or partnering in over 43 scrap and scrap-related businesses. He has stared down a gun-toting Russian-Chechen gangster with his own locked and loaded 9mm Glock. He is one of the most respected men in California's and the West Coast's scrap industry, has gone head-to-head with California's Environmental Protection Agency, worked on sting operations with the California Justice Department and lunched with the FBI.
And finally, at the age of 60, Steve, a long-time lover of history, decided to delve into his own family's past and weave it into his very personal story. A story that began in Scotland over 144 years ago when twenty-year-old David Herbertson Young made his way to Liverpool, England and hopped aboard a steamship bound for the United States of America to start a new life and seek his fortune.
Steve Young's story is a fascinating and timely subject sure to find a wide audience with lovers of the memoir as well as those interested in recycling, the environment and business in general. And for those seeking the formula for how to make their mark and fortune in business, this is definitely a true "rags to riches" story.
But more than a tutorial on the recycling industry or making a success in business, SCRAP is the personal journey of a man who believes in respecting and learning from the past, the nobility of hard work, the importance of education and the necessity of trustworthy, honorable people guiding our schools, businesses and country into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jun 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642373660

Book preview

2012.

PART ONE

MY AMERICAN FAMILY BEGINS

CHAPTER ONE

THE LOOM-FIXER

My great-grandfather David Herbertson Young was born in Scotland in April 1852. At the age of twenty, he emigrated to the United States, most likely in the hopes of making a better life for himself in this fabled land of opportunity. He was not the only one. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants left their homes in England, Scotland, and Europe during the 1800s to come here.

Though nothing is really known of my great-grandfather’s actual journey across the Atlantic, most immigrants of that decade made the passage on steamships, and most who hailed from England, Scotland, and Ireland departed from the port of Liverpool. David was fortunate. Only twenty years earlier, he might have suffered the misery described so well by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sailed aboard the packet ship New York in 1833. The road from Liverpool to New York, as they who have traveled it well know, is very long, crooked, rough and eminently disagreeable.² And wet - very, very wet. My great-grandfather’s steamship would definitely have been much more agreeable than the packet ships that were in use just a few years earlier for trans-Atlantic travel.

Unlike the newer steamships, packet ships were sailing vessels; if they had power at all, it was limited mostly for maneuvering in and out of ports. And since most immigrants couldn’t afford the few cabins available, they usually found themselves below decks in steerage - a dank, crowded and unsanitary area of the ship which they unfortunately also shared with mice, rats, and other vermin. Even in the best of circumstances, many passengers arrived at our shores in a much weaker state than when they had left home. I’m grateful that my ancestor, David H. Young, stepped off his steamship onto our shores young and vibrant and healthy. Healthy enough at any rate to father eleven children, eight of whom survived beyond childhood. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

When my great-grandfather stepped onto the dock in New York Harbor³, he could not have arrived during a more exciting decade of our history. Preparations were already in the works for a grand Centennial Celebration, our country’s first. We were quickly making our mark on the world stage as an industrial world power with some of our country’s latest achievements soon to be showcased in the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Included in this World’s Fair celebrating our 100th birthday were Thomas Edison’s phonograph and megaphone, a newly patented telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, air brakes by Westinghouse, and the amazing Corliss Engine - a steam engine so big that it actually powered the entire Centennial Exhibition.⁴ I like to think that my great-grandfather might have taken his new bride, Elizabeth Murdock Gilchrist, to see the many exhibits at the Fair, but it is likely that he and his young wife (they were wed in 1876) were too busy making a living and setting up their home in Massachusetts.

David was a loom-fixer according to the census data that Anne Rodda collected for me. I’m not sure if this was his trade while he lived in Scotland, but it certainly could have been, for Scotland was known for its fine woolens. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, the eastern United States became a mecca of invention and manufacturing. Enormous progress had been achieved in the manufacture of everything from silk and cotton fabrics to steam locomotives. In the textile industry especially, the ability to use steam engines instead of water power increased production and quality of fabrics. But with this greater and increased mechanization came the need for highly skilled laborers to keep the looms up and running.⁵

And in case anyone thinks this is a skill no longer needed in our age of computers, social media, and the World Wide Web, the career of loom-fixer is easily located on the internet today and only those with a working knowledge of industrial production and processing machinery or refinery and pipeline distribution systems need apply.⁶

* * *

I wish I could say I discovered a lot more about my great-grandfather. I do know that he did well enough keeping those looms running smoothly to support and educate a large family. I also know that he moved from New Jersey where he first settled to Massachusetts. But any journal or diary he might have written has long been lost to time. Of his eleven children, eight survived to adulthood:

Samuel D. Young: born February 1878 in Massachusetts.

David Herbertson Young: born March 1881 in Massachusetts; married to Blanche L. in 1905.

Lizzie M. Young: born July 1883 in Massachusetts.

Arthur C. Young: born July 1887 in Massachusetts; married to Lillian in 1927.

John E. Young: born April 1889 or 1890 in Massachusetts; married to Emma L. Hull in 1910. Daughter Dorothy (1912-1936). Died in 1965.

**Gordon Custer Young: born June 2, 1891, in Patterson, New Jersey; married to Antoinette Catharine Butz (born in 1891 in Crefeld, Germany) March 9, 1918. Daughter Elsa/Elsie, born in 1922 in New Jersey. Also fathered Gordon John Young out of wedlock with Grace Marie Lee/Williams. **This is where things get interesting because Gordon John Young is my father.

Herbert D. Young: born December 1892 in New Jersey; married to Lillian Mather. Son Herbert Douglas Young (1919-1998). Died July 1944.

Charles Roderick Young: born April 1896 in New Jersey; married Helen in 1915 and had children, Charles, born 1916, and Janet, born 1919.

* * *

I tried hard to discover what had happened to many of these great-uncles and aunts and their children (distant cousins of mine) but with little success. Turns out some of my great-uncles died with no heirs at all. And of those who had heirs, it appears that many of their children died at young ages. That was a common tragedy in the 1800s and first half of the twentieth century before the discovery of antibiotics.

This was the frustrating part of my research. I was especially anxious to find out things about my grandfather, Gordon Custer Young, because my own father, Gordon John Young, had never lived with him and knew so little about him. I did learn that he, like his father David, had been in the textile and silk industry. He eventually became the CFO to a firm on Park Avenue in New York. He had a home on Park Avenue as well as a nice home in New Jersey, so it appears that at least one son of the loom-fixer did very well for himself.

Sadly, by the time I started doing my research, my grandfather had been dead for some time, and his daughter Elsie had died just three or four years earlier. I thought all my avenues for learning about my grandfather had closed, but then I discovered that Elsie had a daughter living in Palm Springs. That was great news! At last, someone who might be able to talk to me about my grandfather. But when I attempted to contact her, she had left Palm Springs for Phoenix. I was frustrated but not deterred.

David, a friend and business associate of mine in Phoenix, offered to go to her address, only to be told by her former roommates that she had left the week before for St. Louis. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, but David said not to worry; he had some business in St Louis in a few weeks’ time, and he would check things out for me then. But when he did, she had moved again. David and I were highly suspicious now, and he checked with the St. Louis Police Department. Seems she’d been having some run-ins with the law for writing bad checks. David suggested that maybe she wasn’t worth pursuing.

I told him, I don’t care what she’s done in the past. I’m a scrap dealer; we handle everything. I just want to talk to her.

My Aunt Gae finally located her, but my cousin refused to speak to me about our grandfather or anything else. I have no idea why she responded that way, but I do think now that it was her loss even more than mine. I am very grateful to my Aunt Gae for trying, though. She has been a constant resource for me in my quest to learn about my father’s family history.

What Anne Rodda’s and my research did show me is that quite a few of the early members of my father’s side of the family died young. Some I discovered may have been alcoholics who drank themselves to death (their death certificates stated they died of cirrhosis of the liver). Really all that’s left to show for many of their lives are the dates and locations of their births and deaths. I’ve never seen a better reason to write one’s autobiography. Who the hell wants their life summed up as a few statistics on some aging ledger or crumbling tombstone? Even though we aren’t all presidents and world leaders with biographies written by historians, that doesn’t mean we don’t have some great stories to tell. My grandmother, Grace Marie Lee Williams, is one who does.

* * *

First, suppose I were to tell you a story about my deceased Uncle Joe, and a few months later you told that story to someone else, then they relayed it to someone else the following year. Two years later, we all meet up for a reunion, and a cousin walks up to me and says, Hey, Steve, did you hear the one about our late Uncle Joe? and she proceeds to tell Joe’s story to me. Would you be surprised to discover that my original story had changed, perhaps considerably?

Most of us are natural-born storytellers, and oftentimes we embellish the stories that come our way in our retelling of them - sometimes to make the story more interesting, and sometimes to make us, the storyteller, more interesting. In that way we have become a collaborator to the story, giving us a stake in its future. It’s not that the story has now lost its core of truth—or more to the point, the storyteller’s truth—it’s that the story has lost some of its accuracy. Sometimes that can be rectified with legal documents, personal records, eyewitness accounts (though eyewitnesses also internalize the experience and interpret it in their own ways), and sometimes there is just no way to verify the truth.

And that’s what happened when I began to write down the stories I had heard about my amazing grandmother, Grace Marie Lee Williams. The first one about her that had been part of our family lore my whole life was that, at the age of twenty-one, she had crossed this country in a Model T Ford with only her four-month-old baby (my father, Gordon John Young) as her traveling companion. That made for an amazing tale. How brave, how bold, how gutsy! I loved telling that story—and I did, often.

But upon closer examination while writing this book, several things just didn’t make sense. For one, how did a young woman, especially back then, travel all by herself across the United States while nursing or bottle-feeding a baby who would be on a very demanding schedule, needing to be fed and changed every three to four hours? What’s more, in doing the research, I discovered that there were no interstate highways back then. No mini-marts, no 7-Eleven’s, no motels. How could a young woman even attempt such a trip by herself?

And then, looking deeper into various legal documents and records, I discovered a new truth, one that seemed to make much more sense. Her arrival date in California must have morphed over the years in my family’s telling and re-telling of her story. According to California documents regarding the first record of her arrival in 1918, my father was four years old when they reached California, not four months. Now that made much more sense to me, and it was also a helluva story. But it still wasn’t accurate. Here’s the more accurate version.

______________

2 Smithsonian Institution. National Museum of American History. Enterprise On The Water. Retrieved July 25, 2014 from amhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/2_3.html

3 Family Research Group. Retrieved on July 28, 2014 from http://familyresearchlibrary.com/resources/imm_records.htm (My Note: He was probably processed at a facility in lower Manhattan known as Castle Garden.)

4 Americasbesthistory.com . America’s Best History U.S. Timeline, The 1870s. Retrieved March 30, 2016 from http://americasbesthistory.com/abhtimeline1870.html

5 World History Project, USA. © 1995-2006. (Updated January 2007). Industrial Revolution. Retrieved July 28, 2014 from http://history-world.org/Industrial%20Intro.htm

6 My Majors, (n.d.) Loom Fixer Career. Retrieved July 28, 2014 and updated June 21, 2017 from http://www.mymajors.com/career/loom-fixer

CHAPTER TWO

THE GUTSY LADY AND THE

HOLLYWOOD DOG TRAINER

My paternal grandmother, Grace Marie Lee Williams, was born May 13, 1897, in Rochester, New York, to Elizabeth Heagerty and John V. Lee. I know very little of her early life or how she met my biological grandfather, Gordon Custer Young. I do know that she was only sixteen years old when she became pregnant with my father, Gordon John Young, giving birth to him on May 2, 1914, right before her seventeenth birthday. Gordon Custer was six years older than Grace Marie and likely either working in the textile mills or going to college. She would probably have been in school when she met Gordon Custer; though labor laws being quite different then, she may have been working fulltime to help her family at home. In either case, school or work would have been quite unacceptable for a teenage girl pregnant out of wedlock, especially one whose baby’s father either would not or could not marry her. And, truthfully, I have not found hard evidence to prove that Gordon Custer knew that Grace Marie was carrying his child. We do know from military records that his draft registration card was submitted on June 5, 1917, three years after my father’s birth, and that he served in Europe during World War I, where he met the woman he would marry in Germany in 1918.

When I was eleven or twelve, I recall going with my parents to Syracuse, New York, to visit with my great-aunt, Grace Marie’s sister Irene. She told us that a friend of hers had run into and spoken with Gordon Custer and mentioned that Grace Marie had passed away. He told her that he was sorry to hear that an old girlfriend of his had died but made no mention or inquiry regarding a child, and so with his own death in 1947, all hope of discovering whether he knew of or cared about the growing dynasty of Youngs out on the West Coast came to an end. However, both my Aunt Irene and my dad believed that he did know, and to his dying day, my dad remained unshaken in that belief and could never find it in his heart to forgive him.

But what a courageous young woman my grandmother Grace Marie must have been. I can only imagine the guts and courage it took for her to raise her baby on her own once it became clear that Gordon Custer Young either would not or could not marry her or legally recognize his child. I’m guessing the easier and more acceptable thing to do at that time would have been to place the baby for adoption. But Grace Marie didn’t do that. She was obviously one gutsy lady, and giving up her baby, no matter how much pressure polite society might have put on her, was obviously unacceptable to her. She was determined to raise Gordie on her own if need be, and by god, she was going to provide him with the best possible life, no matter what kinds of sacrifices that entailed. Grace Marie must have been fortunate to have an open-minded and supportive family to help her. I know she was close to her sister Irene, and there is reason to suspect that her mother was also helpful to her and little Gordie.

On January 15, 1917, in Vernon, Vermont, when my father Gordon John was three years old, Grace Marie married Gordon Alex Emslie. (Gordon must have been a very popular name at the time.) Records show that at the time of their marriage, Grace Marie was living in Springfield, Massachusetts, at 218 Pearl Street, a house that, sadly, no longer exists. I do know from documents seen by Gordon Emslie’s daughter, Gae, that Grace’s mother was living with them as of June 5, 1917, likely helping out with Gordie and also enabling Grace Marie to go to work.

My step-grandfather, Gordon Alex Emslie, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on February 1, 1895. In his younger years, he lived in Vermont, but I don’t know much more than that about his youth. Like many young men and women at that time, he wanted to go to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. The motion picture business, though less than twenty years old, was already a thriving and commercially exciting industry, and Gordon Emslie wanted to be a part of it. That desire may have been the impetus for his and Grace Marie’s decision to travel by car across the country to California.

And though Grace Marie’s trip across America was no longer the harrowing journey accompanied only by her child that I had first been told, it was still a far cry from easy. And far more accurate than our original family legend.

* * *

Why wasn’t it easy? America’s highway system in 1917–1918—if you could even call it that—was a pieced-together network of unimproved packed dirt roads, many passable only when the weather was dry; a little rain and the roads could quickly become muddy and impassable. Where there was desert, winds might cover the roads with sand, completely obliterating the road from view.⁷

My grandparents likely started their journey on what was then called the Lincoln Highway. This highway was connected by many different roads. In those early days of automobile travel, roads were maintained by local towns or cities. In fact, many states were not allowed by their constitutions to even pay for road improvements. So, between the larger cities, the roads called market roads were supported—or not, as the case might be—by local communities. According to Richard F. Weingroff, who wrote an article for the Federal Highway Administration, [t]he country had approximately 2,199,600 miles of rural roads and only . . . 8.66% had improved surfaces of gravel, stone, sand-clay, brick, shells, oiled earth . . . or as a U.S. Bureau of Public Roads bulletin put it, ’etc.’⁸

Who knows what kinds of conditions Grace Marie and Gordon Emslie had to overcome along their journey? I do know that during the following year, 1919, a seventy-six-vehicle military convoy with 209 officers and enlisted men took off from New York to cross America along that same highway, and it turned out to be a pretty harrowing experience for them, taking them a punishing and arduous sixty-two days. This journey was conducted because, after World War I, where troops and munitions had to travel across Europe by horse or railcar due to that continent’s poor roads, our military leaders wanted to see firsthand the conditions of our own road systems.

A young Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower—twenty-nine at the time and barely older than my grandmother—was part of this contingent as an observer for the Army Tank Corps. In his post-trip report, he wrote: The dirt roads of Iowa are well graded and are good in dry weather, but would be impossible in wet weather. In Nebraska, the first real sand was encountered, and two days were lost in the western part of this state due to bad, sandy roads. Wyoming roads west of Cheyenne are poor dirt ones, with weak culverts and bridges. In one day, 14 of these were counted, broken through by the train. The desert roads in the southwest portion of this state are very poor. In western Utah, on the Salt Lake Desert, the road becomes almost impassable to heavy vehicles. From Orr’s Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits and holes. This stretch was not improved in any way and consisted only of a track across the desert. At many points on the road water is twenty miles distant, and parts of the road are ninety miles from the nearest railroad.⁹

And it was very likely Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower’s experience in 1919 that impelled an older and battle-hardened President Eisenhower to champion the creation of the nation’s Interstate Highway System. Authorized on June 29, 1956, by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the original system took a total of thirty-five years to complete. It has since been extended until, by 2013, it boasted a total length of 47,856 miles, the second-longest highway system in the world.¹⁰

I wish my grandmother had kept a diary of her journey. What an adventure, both exciting and frightening, she and her husband must have had. There were no motor inns—no motels—at that time, so most nights must have been spent sleeping in their Model T Ford, in a tent, or under the stars. How I wish I had had an opportunity to talk to her about her incredible experiences, but she passed away in Los Angeles in 1936, nine years before I was born.

I do know some things, however, about her remarkable life here in California. It’s already obvious what a bold and courageous woman she was. She was smart, too, and despite what might seem like the craziness of their trans-continental journey, she did have her own plan while Gordon was working on getting into acting. Assuming they arrived in San Francisco by way of the Lincoln Highway, they then made their way south to Los Angeles. Though up until that time San Francisco had been the center of California’s arts, commerce, industry, and population, by 1920 the population of Los Angeles had topped that of San Francisco. And though all of California would benefit from the major land and economic boom of the 1920s, Los Angeles probably benefitted more than any other part of the state. From the more than two million newcomers to the state in the 1920s, 1.3 million of them would settle in Southern California. Thanks in great part to the rising success of the automobile, Los Angeles was now the great place to start a new and successful business.

And that’s what my grandmother did. She opened a flower shop in Westwood. My grandmother was not afraid of hard work, and she put all her energies into making her flower shop a success. She got a contract with UCLA to provide for their floral needs, and to help her in the shop she hired UCLA students - mostly, as it turned out, football and basketball players. However, she soon discovered they were only reliable employees when their sport was not in season. My dad’s stepfather, Gordon Emslie, occasionally helped Grace Marie in the flower business, but mostly he was busy with his own work. My dad and his younger sister Mary (Emslie) helped when they were older. They would spend some mornings and most afternoons sweeping and cleaning the shop, preparing flowers for delivery, and often delivering them as well. My dad liked working in the store, but I guess Mary did not. She apparently didn’t care for the long hours and would rather have been spending time with her girlfriends.

My step-grandfather Gordon was successful in breaking into the movie business, though possibly not in the way he had intended. He became a movie double for the actor Wallace Reed. Wallace Reed (aka William W. Reid) was very handsome and quite famous during the silent movie era. However, he died tragically at the age of thirty-one in 1923. (That’s another interesting story, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to investigate.)

Like many in the acting profession back then (and today as well), Gordon also used a stage name, Gordon Williams. His choice of the name Williams has led to some confusion in our family as we often see Grace Marie’s name in legal documents listed as Grace Marie Lee/Williams. We know that her father’s last name was Lee, so we are not sure where the Williams name came from. Did Gordon Emslie choose it as a stage name because it was from someone in Grace Marie’s family, or did she choose to add it to her name because he had used it as a stage name? As of this writing, we still are not sure of the answer.

In addition to his movie work, Gordon Emslie also had another very fascinating job during the mid-to-late 1920s. He raised German shepherds to sell to the movie industry. He was a great dog handler, and he taught my father and Mary how to handle dogs, too. And when I say handle, I mean how to feed them, train them, take care of them - even how to help with the whelping of the puppies if there was a problem.

Around this same time, my grandmother was ready for a new experience and sold the flower shop. They sold it for $45,000 and took some of that money and bought about six acres in the Hollywood Hills to have more space to raise their German shepherds. They also bought nineteen to twenty acres in Newport Beach as a land speculation. Their business went very well at first. The movie business was really taking off, especially with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first movie with synchronized dialogue sequences. Trained dogs always seemed to be in demand for the movies, and Grandfather was able to sell at least one of them a week for around $500 each, an amazing price at that time. But then the Great Depression struck in 1929, and the California economic boom of the 1920s came to a sudden, calamitous end. Sadly, for my grandmother and step-grandfather, it meant watching their business fail and losing their Newport Beach property in a tax sale in 1931.

People did what they had to do back then to survive and, of all things, my grandfather became a motorcycle cop in Hermosa Beach. During that same time, he began to slowly lose his eyesight. Relatives believed that his eyes had been damaged by the very bright Klieg lights that were used by the movie studios, but that was a claim that was never proven. Regardless of the reason, by the late 1930s he was considered legally blind and had to use a cane. In fact, one of my fond memories of him as a boy of five or six (about 1951) was his hooking his cane around my arm and pulling me over to him to muss up my hair and grab me by the shoulder. He was always very nice to me and fun to be around.

But, getting back to the Depression, my grandmother Grace Marie began to take in laundry to help feed and support the family. Dad went to work in a grocery store after school, but soon the owner of the store was instructing him to add something to every checkout; you know, add something to the bill that hadn’t been purchased. Dad didn’t like this at all. He thought it wasn’t right and certainly a bad deal for the customers who were struggling just like he and his own family were. He didn’t last long at that store, especially when the owner realized he wasn’t complying with his instructions. After that, he worked as an assistant gardener but that paid next to nothing. His sister Mary pitched in, too, by working in a clothing store. My dad said they ate spaghetti every day of the week, though on the weekend they were able to toss in a little hamburger meat. Those were definitely difficult times. Very tough times.

On November 3, 1936, when my grandmother Grace Marie was only thirty-nine years old, she died suddenly. It had started out to be a really nice day. My dad, his mother, step-father, and his sister Mary were out enjoying one of those sunny Southern California November days—we do have plenty of them—with an afternoon picnic. Shortly after they finished eating, my grandmother became very ill. As they quickly dismantled the picnic, she doubled over in pain, and they carried her to the car, jumped in and rushed to the closest hospital. But the doctor who was called in to do the surgery had apparently been drinking before arriving there. The family didn’t realize this until after it was too late to stop him from operating on my grandmother. Of course, it’s certainly possible that there might not have been anyone else available to even try to save her. Perhaps her appendix had already burst, and the infection was just too much for her in her weakened condition. Perhaps her death was unavoidable. Sadly, antibiotics were not successfully used to treat infections until 1942 and not outside the Allied military until 1945.¹¹ But my family has always suspected that an inebriated surgeon contributed greatly to her sudden and untimely death.

The lady with so much spunk, courage, and determination, who had made a life journey almost as remarkable and daring as my great-grandfather’s 2,900-mile voyage across the Atlantic, was gone, leaving my dad and the rest of the family devastated. But her legacy of hard, honest work and generosity of spirit and self lived on. I only wish I could have been able to thank her for the many lessons she taught my father because he was soon to become a very good dad to me. A very good dad, indeed.

______________

7 Illinois Department of Transportation. (n.d.) Eisenhower And The 1919 Army Convoy. Retrieved August 2, 2014 from http://www.dot.state.il.us/il50/1919convoy.html (Removed)

8 Federal Highway Administration. (n.d.) Weingroff, Richard F. The Lincoln Highway. Retrieved from http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/lincoln.cfm

9 Illinois Department of Transportation. (n.d.) Eisenhower And The 1919 Army Convoy. Retrieved from http://www.dot.state.il.us/il50/1919convoy.html (Removed)

10 Interstate Highway System. (2016, April 3). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:06, April 4, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Interstate_Highway_System&oldid=713267820

11 Antibiotics. (2016, March 31). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:43, April 4, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antibiotics&oldid=712806046

CHAPTER THREE

THE MATH GUY AND THE

MAY COMPANY GIRL

Like I said, one of the things my dad, Gordon John Young, learned early from his mother Grace Marie and her husband Gordon Emslie was the value of working hard to make your life and the lives of your loved ones better. The hard times of the Depression, as difficult as they had been for my dad and his family, only ingrained in him a determination never to stop believing in his capacity to learn more, to do better, and to continue to improve his life and the lives of the people he cared about.

To that end, my dad not only worked diligently to help his parents during the Depression when they were struggling, he did the same in school as well. He used to tell me that he was a product of the Los Angeles schools, and though I have strong feelings about some of their failings today, he was pretty darn impressed with them, or at least with Fairfax High School.

One of his favorite subjects was math, and he was damn good at it. So good that after taking two years of accounting at UCLA, he landed a job at Merrill Lynch, moving up quickly to the position of securities analyst. One of his first assignments was to analyze the merits of recommending McKesson & Robbins, once an old and well-respected pharmaceutical company, now a major liquor and cigarette distributor as well as distributor of crude drugs. They had recently been under investigation, not only in Los Angeles, but also in at least eight separate investigations (federal, state, and city) nationwide. But before my dad had even concluded his research, the president and treasurer of the company, Dr. Frank D. Coster (real name Philip Musica) committed suicide on December 16, 1938.

Right before Coster killed himself, trading in McKesson & Robbins stock had been suspended. When it resumed, it had dropped from the $7.50 it had been before suspension to 50¢. But my dad recommended a buy because he was sure the stock would bounce back up. In fact, Dad was so sure of his analysis, he hocked his Elgin watch so that he could buy twenty shares of the stock. As it turned out, in its last year before Coster’s death, the company was actually profitable, based on $150,000,000 of legitimate sales and only $19,000,000 in fictitious sales. Dad’s bosses were impressed with his detailed analysis, especially when it proved to be correct.

At the time that Dad told me this story, I didn’t question him about what was going on with McKesson & Robbins, Coster, and the SEC investigations. But in the writing of this book I became curious and did a little research into it on my own. And, let me tell you, this is a tale of a calculating scoundrel who committed fraud, both receivables and inventory fraud, on the grandest of scales. The total incompetence of the accounting profession at the time allowed this to continue for years and eventually resulted in changes in the laws and protocols regulating the accounting profession. As stated in the abstract of Auditing Cases That Made A Difference: McKesson & Robbins, Spanning more than a decade, two continents, two generations and at least four surnames, this case clearly shows students that fraud is not limited to today’s corporations and that there is, indeed, little that is new under the sun.¹²

Dad’s next assignment for Merrill Lynch was to analyze the size of the car market for General Motors vehicles. General Motors was a huge global company with their fingers in a lot of markets, even way back in the 1930s, and after some research, my dad recommended a definite buy.¹³ He could only see the increase in demand for more cars and better roads. Mind you, the country was still in the grips of the Depression, but he believed that the economy had nowhere to go but up and that soon people would want to replace old and falling-apart vehicles or would be buying new ones for the first time. But the SEC, newly established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to restore investor confidence in . . . capital markets by providing investors and the markets with more reliable information and clear rules of honest dealing¹⁴ rejected Merrill Lynch’s petition to recommend GM to their investors.

Of course, within a few short years, the country would be gearing up for World War II, and the need for vehicles of all kinds would turn idle factories and manufacturing plants into humming 24/7 enterprises. However, that didn’t help Dad, who disappointed Merrill Lynch with three more insightful predictions that proved correct but that Merrill Lynch could not get approved by the SEC. Merrill Lynch then fired him.

Dad was a shy man, not very outgoing, but he knew how to spend his time. Writing reports on companies was his forte. He could read through all their marketing crap, analyze all the numbers, and damn if it didn’t seem like he could predict the future. He was just damn good at what he did. But after he got fired from Merrill Lynch, he became disgusted. He looked in other directions for work.

In 1938, jobs were still hard to come by and Dad found a job as a pipe fitter at the Consolidated Shipping Yards. I asked him one time what he did during the war, and he told me that he, like so many young men, went to the Army Recruitment Office to enlist. When the recruitment officer asked what he did for a living, Dad replied that he was a pipe fitter working in the shipyards. Young man, the officer said, the Army needs you as a pipe fitter building our ships more than we need you as an enlisted man. Consider yourself already in the Army; you’re just not getting the reduced Army pay.

Because Dad was still an accountant, he had a number of clients, some of them his fellow ship builders, some of them people he knew from his time with Merrill Lynch. If these clients were getting income tax refunds, he would ask them what they wanted to do with their money. Did they want to invest or buy government bonds or stocks? Surprisingly—well, surprisingly for our day and age—they would often reply, Nothing; the government needs the money more than I do. Let Uncle Sam keep it. Man, you sure wouldn’t hear that today. But back then we were a very united country.