Separation : Part 2

The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy
by Sandy Weill, Judah S. Kraushaar

(Page 2 of 9)

My grandmother played the role of supportive wife-she was a tiny lady and very old-world in her ways. However, she knew how to juggle the household and raise her kids with a strong hand. I never had the chance to understand what lay behind my grandfather's business success since he was in failing health by the time I knew him. All I recall is an old man suffering from consumption and spitting constantly into an oatmeal box.

My grandparents' children followed fairly predictable routes. My uncles joined the family business while my mother and aunts stayed close to home. My mother, Etta, was an old-fashioned Jewish mother-she cooked and cleaned and was always loving. Her family meant everything. Like her mother, she physically was short of stature and unsophisticated in her ways. Shy to the point of being socially awkward, she never liked going out and was given to housedresses and hairnets. She never learned to drive and was a penny-pincher by nature, often walking ten blocks if she could buy something for a few cents cheaper. Until the day she died in 1994, she never used a credit card.

My mother was no great intellect, yet she had a terrific head for numbers and always was concerned that Helen and I should have a good education. Maybe it was because of her basic frugality, but my mother had an unbelievable knack for memorizing and calculating figures, and she taught me at a very early age about arithmetic before it was called modern math. To this day, I can manipulate numbers in my head with ease.

As a child, I certainly didn't appreciate the mismatch, but my father and mother were worlds apart. I see now that theirs had to have been an arranged marriage of some sort. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if my father was attracted to my mother because of her family's money. After their wedding in 1932, Max "Mac" Weill went to work with my maternal grandfather in the dressmaking business-accommodating his new son-in- law, my grandfather changed the company name to Kalika & Weill.

Over the years, my relationship with my father would change dramatically, and I'd come to resent him in many ways. As a child, though, I adored him. He was tall and athletic and enjoyed the gift of an ebullient personality. I marveled at his gregarious nature, his terrific sense of humor, and his ease with people. Like my mother, he had been born in Poland and came to America as a child-insisting he hailed from more aristocratic stock, he used to contend (I assume tongue in cheek) that his family had migrated to Poland from Alsace.

Unlike my mother's family, my paternal grandparents remain largely a mystery. My grandmother died at a young age, and we didn't have much to do with my grandfather since my mother didn't enjoy his company. I know that my grandfather was a religious man with little money. After the death of his second wife, he apparently married again, this time to a disabled cousin as a mitzvah. I don't know much beyond those few facts.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, my father had split off from my grandfather and had established his own dressmaking business. For a while, his business thrived. I admired his work ethic and took note that he seemed more prosperous than anyone else in the family. Sadly, though, disaster suddenly struck. To the eyes of a tenyear- old, little made sense. By my early twenties, though, I pieced together what happened in this period. In the early 1940s, my father had taken advantage of wartime price controls for personal profit. He was caught by the Office of Price Administration for buying raw materials at controlled prices and then selling the goods on the black market at an inflated price rather than producing dresses for a fixed price as the rules dictated. He was convicted and given a probationary sentence.

My parents did their best to protect Helen and me from those dif- ficult events. In 1943, for instance, we learned abruptly that the family was moving to Miami Beach. Our parents told us only that we had to move there for business reasons. In truth, my father sought to gain physical distance from his legal troubles and probably felt it was too risky to stay in business for himself. I learned much later that he secretly maintained a stake in the garment business in New York by having others front for him.

I had mixed feelings about our move to Miami. Emotionally, I was uprooted from my comfortable surroundings and experienced a sense of loss at being told I would no longer have Miss Heally taking care of me. I was devastated as though I had lost a parent. Joanie contends this forced separation from my surrogate mother had a deep psychological impact on me for the rest of my life. She often reminds me how I consistently attached great importance to personal loyalty, both in business and in my personal life. While I don't know if in fact there was a lasting impact, my world certainly was turned upside down.

Arriving in Florida, we settled into a house on Royal Palm Avenue five blocks from the ocean. My parents insisted that I drop back a year in school but that did little to improve my academic performance. Over the three years we spent in Florida, I was a terrible student. On the other hand, I enjoyed the sunshine and was constantly outside riding my bike or playing basketball with my nextdoor neighbor, Frankie. All of the physical activity helped me realize that I had natural athletic abilities. Within a year, I took on my first job, delivering newspapers, and used to pay Helen a penny a paper to act as my assistant and roll each paper. I proved good at sales and making on-time deliveries and soon began winning contests for new subscriptions.

As I reached my teens, I became conscious of my father's boisterous personality. He dominated our household, always forcing my mother to take a back seat. He'd often embarrass me in front of my friends by telling lewd jokes or pointing out my inadequacies. In restaurants, he'd flirt with pretty waitresses and extravagantly grab the check when we ate with friends. These were little things that were harbingers of a gradually diminishing reverence I'd have for him over the next several years. The louder he became, the more I shrank back in shyness and passivity.

In 1947, my father surprised us again by announcing that we were heading back to New York. He had decided to start a new business with a partner importing steel. In the years following the war, New York suffered one of its periodic housing shortages, and we struggled to find a place to live. Reluctantly, my father moved the family into his father's house in Brooklyn for a year. One of my great-aunts already shared the house with my grandfather and his second wife, and quarters would be tight. At the same time, I was still doing poorly in school-in fact, my freshman high school grades in Florida were horrible. To ease the housing crunch and also acknowledge my scholastic difficulties, my parents decided I should go to boarding school upon our return.

Copyright © 2006 by Sanford I. Weill

About the Author

Sanford I. Weill is Chairman Emeritus of Citigroup Inc., the diversified global financial services company formed in 1998 through the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group. Mr. Weill retired as CEO of Citigroup on October 1, 2003, and served as Chairman until April 18, 2006.

Judah S. Kraushaar, the former director of the Global Financial Services Equity Research team at Merrill Lynch, has been consistently ranked as the banking industry's top securities analyst by investor surveys from The Wall Street Journal, Institutional Investor, and Fortune. He and his wife, Michele, and their three children live in Westchester County, New York.