Quitters Never Win

By David Zackey

Dave became a star witness in an FBI probe of a con man after having a business affiliation with the man. The business association cost him his life savings and retirement income plans. Resorting to becoming a home improvement contractor (after a career in the corporate world), he was working away from home, a week at a time, and staying in an empty house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. One day, after repeated phone calls from collection agencies and lawyers, he gripped the stepladder he was using and thought, Why am I trying so hard? I'll never make this up. I'm washed up financially. I might as well just quit. At that moment, the Holy Spirit reminded him of a sign that was posted at the top of the steps exiting his high school's wrestling room: "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." Dave's story is also interconnected with two others that have been recorded. One is the movie, Donnie Brasco. A movie based on the true story of an FBI sting of the Mob in New York City. This sting led to the incarceration of Dave's business partner, Joe, for money laundering. And the second, a book titled Trafficking: The Boom and Bust of the Air America Cocaine Ring by Berkeley Rice. The story of the man who has the acclaim of being the person who has brought the largest amount of cocaine into the United States by one person. Joe and his picture are actually in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640794795

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Quitters

Never

Win

David W. Zackey

An Autobiography

ISBN 978-1-64079-478-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64079-479-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by David Zackey

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

I’m not writing this because I’m some kind of great Christian or have done anything that has changed history. I do believe that I have had a positive influence on some people and families.

I am writing this book because when I tell part of my story, especially a partial account of my financial demise through a bad business deal and ID theft, many people say that I should write a book.

My hope in writing it is that I can share my life with you and some of the wisdom that God has given me. Also so that you could apply some of the wisdom that I ignored to my demise in certain areas. In Proverbs, we are told to learn to be wise!

While I was going through a time of despair, caused by that bad business and ID theft time, I was working alone in a house and town where I didn’t know anyone and allowed myself too much time to think about negative thoughts. These times would lead me to think how I would probably not recover financially and that I was fighting a losing battle. In the midst of these mental and spiritual battles, the Holy Spirit reminded me of a poster that was at the top of the stairs coming from the Wilson High School wrestling room: Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win.

You know, I have found out that it isn’t the learning of the lesson or the promise of God; it is the practicing or believing it that makes you. You might have heard of the saying, Walking the walk and talking the talk.

It is my hope that in living my life with me through this book, you can avoid some of the pitfalls that I did not, live in the blessings that I have when I obeyed the Word of God, and walk in the wisdom that He has offered every one of us.

Not too long after my day of salvation (probably within a year), my study of the scriptures led me to make up a set of standards (priorities) for leading my life. And I based them on the beginning of time as we know it. In the beginning of the Bible (Genesis), we see how God’s creation developed over time here on earth. We see that the most important issue of life mentioned was a relationship with the Maker. God made people to be like ourselves (in our own image). He made man to be in fellowship with Himself (Genesis 1:26).

Secondly, he made us man and woman. Woman is to be man’s helpmate. Just after our commitment to love and serve our God, we are to love and serve our family (Genesis 2:22).

The Lord then told man to tend the garden. So I have determined that my third priority in life should be my job/employer/career/business (Genesis 3:17).

Later on, in time, families grew into communities, and a time of worship and teaching was established. Therefore, I believe that we need to be able to separate the idea of having a relationship with the Lord from our time of corporate worship, praise, and learning. Not diminishing the importance of the church, just putting it in its proper place in our life decision priorities.

I have found that every time that I make decisions that do not follow these priorities, I have much trouble and usually fail at the endeavor.

It should be God first, family second, work third, and church fourth.

Just as a side note—a chapter in this book is also sort of a sequel to a chapter or two in another book or story (not mine or written by me). The chapter Joe and Me and Real Estate is a continuation of some of the business dealings of Joe that were exposed in a book named Trafficking, Air America in which Joe’s involvement with a drug transporter and laundering of his money was divulged.

Throughout the account of my life covered in this book are universal laws or nuggets of truth. These nuggets are the real facts. They are the Word of God that, if learned and followed, will take your life down a path of blessing. These laws are real, even for the nonbeliever, because they have come from the Creator of all things. I just wish I would fear and hear Him more than all the other people and influences that have been in my life. Of course, if I had not made the mistakes recorded in this book, I might not have had a story to tell or at least a story that you would want to hear.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Life began for me in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, back in1949. I was born to parents who had been high school sweethearts (I’m told).

Dad was an athlete in high school and college; wrestling was his main sport (captain of his teams). He also played quarterback on the football team until he was knocked unconscious. Track was his spring sport (I don’t know which competition, except shot put sticks in my mind for some reason. Ah, who cares anymore?)

Mom was very athletic also, playing field hockey, basketball, and tennis. She was captain of both high school and college tennis teams. Both were college graduates (Mom from Beaver and Dad from Lehigh). Both served in the armed forces during WWII. I was told that my mom was the president of her high school class until her senior year. The class didn’t want to graduate with a female president, so Dad got the job. (I wonder what happened to me.)

I believe that they tried to raise their family in the traditions of upper crust Philadelphians. My wife questions their success. Just the same, we had silver napkin rings with linen napkins and a fully dressed table with real silverware for dinner every night, and we always ate as a family.

I don’t know if this is of any significance as to what my parents were thinking when I was born, but I was born in the City of David, Bethlehem, that is. I was born second of five children, three boys and two girls.

Dad and Mom purchased a house out in the country near a town called Riegelsville, about a year and a half after my coming into this world. It was a fixer-upper as we have come to know such structures. Sounds kind of like the journey that JoAnn and I have had. Only they stayed in their first house. We didn’t.

It was an old house with a shed and a barn on ten acres of property almost at the end of a dead-end road that was dirt and one car passable (it still is to this day). Through the years of our being there, Dad transformed the house into our home, tearing out walls here and there and then, using the same wood and nails, putting one somewhere else to form quarters more suitable for the family that grew to five kids. Maybe that’s how it got into my blood. I’ve been watching and doing this same thing most of my life. Dad’s the one who taught me how to straighten a nail so that it could be used again. JoAnn, my wife, put an end to that when we started to renovate houses. She explained how much our time was worth. Basically, it was worth about fifty pounds of nails for one of our hours.

I don’t know about my siblings, but I really enjoyed the adventures of scouting and playing in the area. The neighbor across the road from us had two hundred acres, and the one at the end of the road had twenty, and the one behind us, well we always claimed that he owned half of Riegelsville. But we were definitely rural, and that fit my fancy just fine. I was able to be as loud as my father and not really bother anyone except those in my own household.

For me, Walden, Bougher Hill, Williams Township was a great place to grow up.

I, myself, consider growing up in an environment like that a blessing—the fun and adventures we had (mostly the neighbor and best friend), Big ED and I roaming around in the woods, investigating some of nature’s areas. There was the path down to the highway that had been a road probably at the turn of the century (nineteenth to twentieth that is). The one lane dirt road that went in front of our house that ended at the next neighbor’s house (the path to the highway started at that point) was the bike path between our homes. His father died as they were moving to the neighborhood, and that led to him to becoming like my father’s fourth son and my third brother.

At the end or—should I say—the beginning of the dead-end dirt road that we lived on was a small farm where Bill and Martha, brother and sister, and Tilly, their niece, lived. When I was five, I would follow the students Elaine, Ed, and Franny down to the bus stop by Bill and Martha’s place. (Mom didn’t send me to kindergarten. I’m not sure that it was offered back then.) I then spent a lot of the day following Bill around the farm, picking eggs, feeding the cows, and whatnot. I remember him cutting the heads off the chicken of choice for dinner and letting it run, headless, around the yard. I remember him telling me that the one cow was going to have a baby and the mail man was going to deliver it. This was all good educational experience, so who needed kindergarten anyway.

There were so many things to do and places to explore that it was hard to understand what my classmates in high school did for fun in the city. But then they had the public places like pools and parks, allys and streets, and a larger group of guys their own age to dream up what to do. When my dad’s dad died (I was ten or eleven), Dad got a couple of thousand dollars from the estate. So he got the driveway blacktopped and had a flat blacktop surface installed behind the barn. We turned that into a tennis court through a lot of additional work. We used Dad’s little Farmall tractor out the in the field, scraping up soil, bringing it back to the tennis court area, and leveling the ground out so that we could have a proper backcourt area. That tennis court supplied many hours of great fun for us. I loved the game so much that I would do chores around the house while Dad was at work so that he would play tennis with me rather than weeding his garden or mowing the lawn after dinner. My siblings thought that I was brownnosing him (that is what Barb told me anyway), but what I was doing, in my line of thinking, was taking away his excuses for not being able to play tennis after dinner.

Putting that tangent aside, when I was six, I was told that I had a cousin in Vermont who was a day older than I was. We were visiting my dad’s parents in Philadelphia. Grandpa asked if I could go with them to Vermont for a week and meet Chris. I was left in Drexel Hill with my grandparents, and two days later, a package arrived in the mail. It was filled with my clothes that I would need for the trip. We made that trip in Grandpa’s brand new 1955 Chrysler. Man, that car had air-conditioning and power windows and seats (nothing like I had ever experienced before). We stopped in Connecticut and had dinner at the Surrey restaurant, and I had something I had never thought of eating before (of course, I was only six at the time)—swordfish steak. In Vermont, outside of West Brattleboro, we entered the world of the Deer Ridge Farms.

By now it had a nonfunctioning dairy barn and chicken coup, a dilapidated sugarhouse (for boiling maple sap to make maple syrup), two nice apple orchards, a bunch of fields that were cut a couple times a year for the hay, a defunct sandpit, lots of woods, and some streams over the rest of the 250 acres. That really gave us a lot of room for playing and creative adventure.

A number of years later (I think it was when I was about ten), I spent the summer with my cousin and aunt and uncle on the farm. It was a great time of exploration and work on the farm. We got to ride on the top of the bales of hay that were stacked on top of the large stake body truck. We rode through the fields and then down the roads at what felt like 50 mph. I’m sure that Uncle Al didn’t go more than 25, but it sure felt faster as we hung on to the ropes that held the bales on the truck at a height of twelve or fifteen feet above the road, getting slapped by the tree branches as we traveled down the road to the barn.

The barn was full of adventures and things to play with too. It wasn’t hard to find things to do. Sometimes, we acted out the stories that Chris wrote (starting to write at the age of six). We did this in an empty shed between the main house and the apartment/garage. We built a whole community in the dirt floor.

Then there was stuck in the mud, a tractor of sorts that Uncle Al had made out of an old cultivator/rototiller. He had taken the drive box with the large tractor type tires, welded to a flat plate about three feet long. The front of the plate was where the motor was mounted. He had taken a steering wheel out of an old Studebaker that was behind the barn. (I guess that the dream of making the Studebaker a doodlebug was dead). The seat was from another farm implement.

This little contraption kept us busy for many hours. We would hook a wagon to the back and ride it out in the distant woods, carrying wood and tools to build forts and other things boys do. The thing actually did create some friction between the two of us. Chris was all brain and not at all mechanically inclined. The engine was not always the easiest to start. And whoever started it got to drive it first. I got to be first every time. I even spent the time trying to train him on how to prime the cylinder by removing the spark plug and dropping a couple drops of gas into the cylinder. I don’t know what his difficulty with that was, but it was a bone of contention. At home, I was always doing that sort of thing since I mowed our lawn most of the time.

Not that it makes any difference, but I’ll mention it here—I took trumpet lessons from the age of eight till I was twelve. I can remember playing songs loudly out through my bedroom window so that our one neighbor, Arlene Young (who lived on the farm about half a mile away and practiced her accordion on her porch), could hear that I played an instrument too.

I don’t know if my brothers had the same type of relationship with my dad that I did or not. But Dad decided he would try and find what I liked as far as sports like hunting, fishing, camping, etc. He brought me a fishing pole, and we went fishing a couple of times. Never really caught anything to make it exciting enough.

When I was eight, our neighbor (Bud and Ruth Hoyt) had a foster son (their nephew) who they felt gave them more problems than they could handle. So they decided to send him to the children’s home in Easton. This meant that George now had to give up his .22 gauge rifle. It was a single-shot bolt action. Dad bought it for me and gave me a nickel for each red squirrel that I shot. The nickel was to buy replacement ammo. At the age of ten, I was buying .22 long rifle hollow point bullets by myself, and no one seemed to care. Things sure are different today!

The squirrels were getting in the house and making a mess in the attic. And at night, I could hear them rolling nuts around, and when they got to the end of the ceiling, I could hear them bouncing off the studs, inside the walls, as they descended to the first floor level.

That .22 rifle was also my companion as I tromped through the woods with a friend from Riegelsville, Bobby Mills. He was a hunter and trapper at heart and got me interested in trying the sport or discipline. He used the value of the pelts to get me interested. At the age of ten, being able to get ten dollars for a raccoon or fox pelt sounded quite appealing. So I bought a couple of traps, and we went around through the woods setting and checking them on a regular basis. Mine never netted me anything. I guess setting them and baiting them without the knowledge as to the proper way would be what kept me from success.

I remember that one day while checking the traps, we came across one of Bob’s that had a skunk and the skunk had backed down a ground hog hole. We only had Bob’s BB gun that day, and it took quite a while to actually retrieve the animal. Ah, well, so much for that line of work!

George ended up being my foster brother for a year. My parents felt sorry for him and tried to help him out. Problem was George was not used to the type of discipline that we, children, were to live by. And after a year, he did move to the children’s home.

One of the things that Dad did for George was to build him a go-cart at work. Dad was a supervisor of the maintenance department that served the lower part of Bethlehem Steel. He had his men build the cart during their non-busy times. George used to drive the cart to work all the way down to Durham, which was on the other side of Riegelsville. When George went to the home, he couldn’t take the cart with him, so I got to use it!

One day, Big Ed and I decided that it would be great to play racing with the cart. So we drove it down to Riegelsville and took it up to the graveyard of the Lutheran church. The graveyard had an oval as part of the road through the cemetery. We had a great time taking turns running around the track with the throttle to the floor.

I’d probably yell at my grandchildren for riding like we did. One of us would drive, and the other would stand back by the engine and hold on to the seat.

When our time at the track was over, we headed home. Now to get to the church and back, we had to go about a half mile on Route 611 through the middle of town. As fate would have it, an officer of the local law spied us and pulled us over. I’m not sure what he intended to do, but he was telling us how we couldn’t have an unlicensed vehicle on a public road. While he had us pulled over, Mary Ceader came driving by and stopped to see what was happening. Mary was a nice girl who still lived at home with her parents, and her dad was reported once as owning half of Riegelsville. Somehow, she talked the officer into letting her escort us out of town,