My Box of Chocolates: An Anecdotal Biography

By Walter W. Bregman

You must be a hundred years old to have done everything you have done.
These were the dumbfounded words of a friend when he read a draft of this amazing book.
Walter Bregman has done it all from running a defense plant when he was in grade school to founding and managing what became the best small resort in the US Virgin Islands.
In between he flew airplanes, founded an airline, climbed mountains, shot rapids, played the drums at a jazz club in Manhattan, golfed with the pros, raced sports cars, literally traveled the world and much, much more.
In this hugely entertaining, down to earth, highly personal tell all biography you will laugh and cry with this remarkable man.
Open this book and get ready for an experience you wont soon forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504958714

Walter W. Bregman

Walter Bregman began his professional career in the lowly position of media research analyst with the Leo Burnett Company and concluded it as Worldwide President of International Playtex, Inc. In between, he served as President of Norman, Craig and Kummel – Europe, President of NCK US and Worldwide and V.P. Advertising and Marketing for the E & J Gallo Winery. He has lived in Chicago, London, Modesto, CA, and Westport CT. He has consulted extensively and served on numerous corporate boards. He was also Chairman of the Board of the San Diego Chamber Orchestra for five years and on the Board for an additional five years. He authored Spray the Bear; Reminiscences from the Golden Age; of Advertising and co-authored Seven Friends, Sixty Years Later”. Mr. Bregman is a graduate of Harvard University and was married to his college sweetheart for fifty-nine and a half years. He has three sons and five grandchildren and lives in Del Mar, CA, where he divides his time between volunteering, golf, writing and traveling.

Book preview

My Box of Chocolates

An Anecdotal Biography

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WALTER W. BREGMAN

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2015 Walter W. Bregman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/05/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5870-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5869-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5871-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015917824

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Prologue

Timeline

My Grandparents

My Mother

My Father

Early Schooling

The Defense Plant

Natty but Not Ostentatious

Fluking into Harvard

The Crimson and Football

The Cemetery

You’re in the Army Now

Didn’t He Ramble

I Hate Merry-Go-Rounds

Raced by a Coward

My Customer—Abe Zazlofsky

Fairyland

Flying

Who’s the Guy with Paul Azinger?

I’ll Meet You at the Acropolis

Please, Don’t Drop Me

You’re Going to Die!

Robbie Falls in Love

Walter Cronkite Was Pissed Off

I Can Fly a 747

Life’s Defining Moments

Who’s Who

The End—From Hedonist to Healer to Mourner

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

I AM WRITING this biography at the request of several people who feel that when I tell stories about my life, they are pretty amusing. So, this will be a collection of stories from my past.

It will not be a typical biography in the sense of I was born so and so, and I lived so and so, and I did so and so. Instead, it is going to be anecdotal, a collection of various stories and adventures that have taken place over what I think was quite a full and, I hope, interesting life.

For example, as we go forward, you’ll read that I ran a defense plant at age 10. I owned an airline. I owned a Caribbean resort. I learned to fly. I climbed mountains. I raced sports cars. I traveled the globe.

More important, I have been blessed with a companion, my dear wife, Robbie, with whom I have lived the last 59 years, and who has accompanied me on almost all my adventures. She certainly shared in owning the airline and in running the resort.

Sadly, she has endured seven spinal operations and the resulting therapy during the last five years: an episode she has suffered with incredible resilience and spirit. This experience has only made me love and respect her more.

So, without further ado, as they say, I dedicate this book to my hero, my true love, Robbie.

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My Hero

I hope my children, grandchildren, and anyone else who is interested reads this book and enjoys these stories as much as I have enjoyed living them.

Timeline

My Grandparents

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M Y GRANDPARENTS, like most American-Jewish people in the early twentieth century, were born in Russia. During the late-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of young Russian-Jewish men fled their homeland to avoid conscription into the czar’s Army. The service term could be for life!

On the Whitman side, that is my mother’s side, we have no particular record of where or when they were born. In fact, I believe that their name was certainly changed when they entered the United States. Remember, this was long before Ellis Island and immigrants could come from foreign countries and just show up and become citizens. Generally, the location resulted from the herd instinct; other people from their villages during the Great Diaspora had settled there.

Both grandparents, the Bregmans and the Whitmans, settled in Cleveland for reasons unknown. On my father’s side, we know my grandfather, Louis, arrived in Cleveland on the twenty-fifth of September, 1895.

He received his naturalization papers there and was required to foreswear allegiance to Czar Nicholas II. His wife-to-be, Nellie Jacobson, was also from Cleveland, but we have no record when she was born or when they as a family moved to Cleveland.

On the Whitman side, Lawrence married Betty Goldman and, at the same time, Betty’s brother, Al, married Lawrence’s sister, Esther. While, this was not totally uncommon in those days, it was an oddity for our family.

The two families, Whitmans and Bregmans, were polar opposites.

Nellie, who lived in Chicago when I was young, had a dystopian view of the world. Her family was totally dysfunctional. My grandfather, Louis, died before I was born, so I never knew him, but we do have anecdotal information about him, which I will discuss later.

On the other hand, the Whitmans were sort of a Jewish Walton family; very close, very upbeat, and very loving. They lived at 12685 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in a white clapboard New England-style house with a large front porch, a swing, and a large backyard. You expected someone to be saying, good-night, John Boy, from one of the windows.

During the summers I spent in Cleveland during my childhood, the house was inhabited by my mother’s younger sister, Shirley; her younger brother, Howard; and her older brother, Irving. Every evening the family would gather for dinner and afterward play games in the backyard and genuinely enjoy one another. It was idyllic.

When the war came, Howard went overseas as a war correspondent for the New York Daily News and Irv joined the Coast Guard. Shirley got married and her husband, Nelson, worked in the defense industry at Thompson Products in Cleveland. During the evenings we frequently would gather around the radio and listen to Gabriel Heatter or FDR’s Fireside Chats. If she was visiting us, Sue, Howard’s wife, would read to us his Daily News articles and V-mail that he sent from England.

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Lawrence Whitman - Cleveland Circa 1937

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Betty Whitman - Cleveland, circa 1937

My grandfather worked out of the house and was home a great deal. He was a landlord and would go on rent-collecting or repair trips with his assistant, Gilbert. Sometimes he took me along to the tenements he owned. Gilbert was a black man, who had lost an eye in World War I and worshipped my grandfather, even though he persisted in calling him the schwartza. Actually, my grandparents communicated in Yiddish quite frequently and my mother and aunt learned the language. I always felt that the only reason they used it was so that I would not know what they were talking about. Eventually, I did. Not to discuss philosophy, which they didn’t, but if they said, He’s not getting a pony, I figured it out.

Looking back, I believe that the Whitman family was perhaps too close in that they never really accepted Howard’s wife, Sue, or Irv’s wife, Florence. My mother, her mother, and Shirley sort of formed a girls’ club that excluded all others. Until the day my grandmother died, my mother talked to her on the phone every week from wherever she was, and she also talked to her sister. It was a wonderful relationship for them, but not so great for the other women in the family.

While medically there probably is not such a thing as dying of a broken heart, I always will believe that after my grandfather died, my grandmother, who had never been apart from him for more than a day, lost all interest in life and died shortly thereafter.

On the Bregman side, it was quite the opposite. Louie was in the scrap-iron brokerage business in Chicago and did extremely well. Around Chicago he was known as a sport. He dressed the part, belonged to the Chicago Athletic Club, played high-stakes bridge, and probably was not home very much.

The family lived in the Drexel Park neighborhood, which was where the higher-class Jewish people lived at the time. It later became famous for the area from which the Loeb and Leopold boys came during the famous Bobby Franks murder case.

It might have been because Louie was never at home or other family problems that my grandmother, Nellie, became so cold and unemotional. She had four children: my father, Walter; his sister, Sylvia; his brother, Robert; and another sister, Myra. Sylvia was born with a withered arm and for all the years I knew her wore a wooden prosthesis covered with a glove—scared the hell out of me.

Myra was apparently born mentally retarded and subsequently was put into a home. The family lore when I was young was that Myra had died at birth, but later census records indicated that she had lived with the family for a few years and then was sent away. With this background, it is easy to understand Nellie’s sour disposition. As I grew up, I never saw her wear anything but black: shoes, dress, hat, gloves, et cetera.

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Nellie Bregman, circa 1940

We lived in an area called Madison Park on the South Side of Chicago and she lived nearby in the Madison Park Hotel We visited back and forth about once a week.

Every time we met, she would tell me how wonderful her other grandchildren were: Robert’s sons, Buddy and Bobby, and Sylvia’s children Buster and Shirley. Naturally, I developed a healthy hatred for all four of them, as, in fact, they did for me.

It seemed my grandmother delighted in sowing suspicion and anger among her children and grandchildren. My mother was equally disrespected, as she was told how wonderful Claire, Bob’s wife, and Sylvia, her daughter, were to Nellie.

All of the above became clear when my grandmother died in the early 1960s. Robbie and our children were on Cape Cod visiting her family. I went to the funeral alone and for the first time in many, many years met with my cousins Buddy, Bobby, Buster, and Shirley. It sounds odd, but after the ceremony I invited them all to join me at the Playboy Club in downtown Chicago. Remember, we had not seen each other in years but still harbored a healthy dislike.

As we started to talk, it became clear that all the stories we heard about each other were total fabrications on the part of our grandmother. In actual fact, we were really nice people. Since that time Buddy, Bobby, Shirley, and I have communicated and have become good friends. Buster, unfortunately, died at an early age.

So these were my grandparents. On one side sunny, warm, familial, loving, and tightly bound together. On the other side dark, dysfunctional, with very little family cohesion.

How this affected me, I am not entirely sure.

My Mother

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G ERALDINE MILDRED WHITMAN was born in 1911 and, as she came into adulthood, was essentially a product of the flapper era and the Roaring Twenties. She was, in all senses of the word, a Jewish American princess of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She was the first female child in the Whitman family, was considered a princess, and she was raised that way. Despite the fact that her sister, Shirley, came along six years later my mother was always the queen of the family. Unfortunately, Shirley was less attractive and rather plain. My mother, however, always cared for her and loved her, and their relationship continued until the day she died.

From the standpoint of characteristics, like everyone, my mother had her good points and her bad. She was beautiful, flamboyant, witty, gregarious, style conscious, creative, charitable, and hardworking. On the other hand, she was irascible, stubborn, selfish, possessive, domineering, vain, and self-centered. This is as close as I can come to an objective evaluation, but perhaps some of the stories I will tell you about her will be more helpful.

First of all, she married a man who was twelve years older than she was, when she was eighteen years old. She had no formal education, other than high school, but was the queen of the Cleveland Jewish community, written up in many papers, and photographed constantly. My father met her on a visit to Cleveland, wooed her, married her, and moved her to Chicago. She arrived knowing no one and without friends.

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Geraldine Whitman, circa 1923

My father, of course, left home and went to work every day. As a result, by her own admission, my mother went to the movies constantly. It was from these movies, I believe, she obtained her sense of style, her characteristics, and probably her adult personality. Of all the stars at the time, she worshiped Joan Crawford and in many ways imitated her, although she never beat me with a wire hanger.

In the beginning, my parents lived in a chic apartment on Delaware Place on the near North Side of Chicago. The only friends my mother eventually developed were the wives of my father’s ex-bachelor friends, who were also twelve to thirteen years older than she was. She matured quickly.

At one point, casting about for something to do, she somehow learned that the Japanese government was putting thousands of pairs of men’s jodhpurs on the market.

She convinced my father to buy the riding pants and proceeded to cold call Marshall Field’s, Carson Pirie Scott, Mandel Brothers, and other stores in Chicago. But she visited the women’s department. Of course, they were men’s jodhpurs, but in Japan, the men were the size of Chicago women. She sold every store but naturally was unable to handle reorders; this from a woman with no business or sales experience.

Years later while living in Glencoe, Illinois, my mother created a women’s store called Casual Clothes. Her concept, which at the time was totally unique, was to sell separates to customers who could then select any one of four charities to whom the profits would be distributed. She found some friends to volunteer and the American Heart Association, the United Jewish Appeal, the Catholic Archdiocese, and, I believe, Presbyterian–St. Luke’s Hospital all contributed staff to her store. She went to New York during fashion week and, again cold calling, was able to convince major sportswear manufacturers to sell to her tiny store in a Chicago suburb.

This was no small feat in view of the fact that, at that time, manufacturers tended to have exclusivity contracts with retail outlets such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, Marshall Field’s, et cetera.

My mother, I should have mentioned, was also tough, and was able to convince these equally tough venders to sell to her. She simply said, "You mean to tell me you want me to tell the Chicago Tribune that you’re refusing to allow these four charities in Chicago to profit from your sales?" Every single manufacturer she visited became her supplier.

The store prospered and contributed thousands of dollars to Chicago charities for many years. One of the perks my wife had was that my mother would give her what we at Playtex later would call the SLOBS (slow moving and obsolete inventory) from the store. This was regardless of size. Fortunately, Robbie was a good seamstress and was able to tailor them to fit her.

In another instance, my mother volunteered during World War II at the Downey General Hospital and, in short order, became head of all the volunteers at that hospital. She was also a member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and after several years became the president of the Chicago chapter and a member of the National Board.

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My mother with National Conference Board members

Did I mention that she was gregarious and aggressive? One winter, my parents were in Miami Beach checking into the Fontainebleau. As they were walking in, my mother observed a man who was also checking in. He was a rather short, stocky man surrounded by some very large, stocky men.

She walked right over to him and