Chapter 1

It was in early July, 1960, only a few days after the Fourth of July had passed. I was busier than I'd ever been. Ellen and I were getting ready to be married in the middle of August. I was pushing myself pretty hard, trying to get my firewood delivery business built up while still handling a lot of the delivery driving myself.

From the very outset of our working together, Cousin Billy and I had been involved in trying to establish a new series of guidelines to govern the changes we were making in how we treated each other. We both were aware that things needed to change now that we'd added a business relationship to our personal and family one.

Now that we were really starting to do well, Billy and Theresa were beginning to have some doubts about whether or not I was exploiting them. I didn't think I was exploiting them. I really believed what I was doing was helping them as much or more than it was helping me.

Back when we'd all been children, it had been Billy that dominated me. He held this superior position relative to me primarily due to the differences in our ages. He'd had much greater physical strength, and he'd always been able to get whatever he wanted from me, sometimes by force, sometimes by intimidation. Now that I was fully grown, I no longer felt it necessary to bow to his will. Because I acted that way with him now, he was becoming concerned about how people would view the two of us in our emerging working relationship.

In addition to this, he was disturbed by what appeared to be taking place with our separate financial positions. I was expanding my sales, and Billy knew exactly how much money I was making with each delivered cord of firewood. My business was very simple, requiring very little capital outlay from me. My money was tied up in his firewood for only as long as it took me to make my deliveries and be paid.

Before I started buying in quantity from Billy, his firewood had been sitting around doing nothing for his bottom line, for months, if not years, at a time. Billy had a constant overhead in his logging operation, and this had gotten him into trouble in the recent past. Billy didn't like being dependent on me for his continued livelihood. At the same time, we were family, and my new business was bringing him in some much needed revenues.

I knew, almost as soon as we started doing business together, that it wasn't going to work out for either of us if I continued to let Billy remain the dominant figure in our business interactions. We were already having conflicts over the fact that I was making a lot of money off of what Billy considered his hard work.

As far as Billy was concerned, all I did was take his wood out and sell it to buyers already eager to purchase the product. Forgotten now was the fact that selling wood had always been the main weakness in Billy's business model. He didn't like selling, and he hadn't ever thought to hire anyone to sell the wood for him.

Now that I'd gone out and opened some accounts, he didn't think I should end up making more on each sale than he was. His position was that it was him that was doing all the hard work involved in acquiring and readying that firewood for sale in the first place.

Billy and I could both easily see that his logging operations had been greatly enhanced by having me out there creating a steadily growing demand for the hardwoods he harvested. Having a ready and dependable outlet to dispose of the wood quickly and profitably really helped him in bidding on new jobs for his logging and lot clearing operations. I was already buying all the trees he was able to harvest and cut into firewood cords.

Having turned all his previous backlog of firewood into cash had given Billy the capital to compete with some of the other small logging crews. He could bid more aggressively for jobs, knowing that he could quickly recoup his out of pocket expenses by selling off the new wood he was logging.

Even though I was bigger than Billy now, and outweighed him easily by at least forty pounds, Billy still thought of me as his younger cousin, someone he'd physically dominated for all of our previous mutual lives. He wasn't going to willingly relinquish what he felt was his proper role. He wanted to control things, to have the right of approval of everything I did in my new business.

To complicate matters even more, Theresa, his wife, believed that I was taking advantage of Billy somehow when it came to me buying wood from him. He worked a lot harder than I did, according to her, and therefore deserved most, if not all, of the profits being generated. Neither of them believed that my having the idea on how to capitalize on all that wood should be worth the kind of money I was now beginning to make.

If I'd been struggling, barely making enough to keep my trucks running or to pay my cousin, Lenny, they wouldn't have tried to pull what they were now in the process of pulling.

I was already paying him more for his wood than his current asking price for the product. He'd sell the same wood, more cheaply, to a total stranger, anyone who might happen to drive by his farm and see the sign that he had posted that announced he had cut firewood for sale.

Even paying him more than he was asking for the wood, I was doing very well for myself. I certainly wasn't taking advantage of Billy though. I'd had already had several other logging operators offer me the same kind of wood I was buying from Billy, and for a lot less money than I was paying for it now. Out of a sense of family loyalty though, I continued to only buy my wood from Billy.

For the past month or more, most mornings when I'd come out to Billy's farm to pick up the wood for that day's delivery, Billy would either do or say something to try to let me know that he was still the one who was in charge.

I didn't like having to deal with anyone's belligerent attitude, although I admit this was especially true if it was Billy. To my way of thinking, my business idea had probably saved Billy from having his logging operation go under. He should be happy that we'd found a way for him to stay in business and keep his farm.

I'd borrowed money from my parents to prepay him for the first loads of wood I was buying. Without that advance from me, he'd told me he hadn't known how he was going to get his family through the winter season. He was worried about losing his farm. In the very beginning, before he knew that my idea would be so successful, he and Theresa were both expressing their gratitude for my assistance. In a matter of a few short months, I'd gone from being their rescuer to being an exploiter. Maybe it was human nature to want to maintain relationships where you're the person on top.

Now that things were going well for me, and both of us were managing to earn much more than our expenses, Billy was trying to change "my" firewood delivery business into "our" firewood delivery business. He had also made it very clear that he was definitely expecting to be the senior partner in any restructured business agreement we might, eventually, strike.

"Jackie, I've been talking about things, with Theresa, and we both think we might need to hire ourselves another firewood delivery guy. Not to squeeze you, or cut you out of anything, just to keep us from having all our eggs in one basket, like what we're doing now with having just you."

I could tell that Billy had rehearsed this opening salvo of his. This was a much more confrontational approach than any he'd attempted before. I already knew he was trying to force me to give him half of the firewood sales profits I was earning.

"How's that supposed to work for me, Billy? I'm already buying everything you can cut. Does this mean you don't care if I go out and make my own deals with other logging outfits? I think Mr. Gracia still has more wood than he can dispose of over at his place. I know he was asking my old man why I never came to see him after I started selling wood around this area."

"I guess you could do that, Jackie. That would be up to you. You know he cheated me, right? How would it look if you started doing business with a guy who went out and screwed over someone in your own family? You think Uncle John would think it was alright for you to go and do something like that?"

Billy was right about that. When my father had told me that Mr. Gracia had approached him, he'd also told me what he'd told Mr. Gracia in reply: "You've got some fucking nerve even talking to me after what you did to Billy Blackwell. Get away from me, you creep, before I forget that you used to be someone I liked and respected."

My dad was like that. Family loyalty meant everything to him. If someone hurt anyone in the family, he was now an enemy. It was very clear cut and simple with him. I wouldn't want to try to explain to him why I was doing business with anyone who'd hurt Billy. Billy knew this and wasn't above using that against me either.

"Maybe not him then. I know lots of other small logging crews though. I don't think I'd have any problem buying as much firewood as I needed, not if I drove around and really went looking for it. I would probably get it for a lot less than what I'm paying you. Don't you go and push this idea of yours so far that you won't leave me any other choice but to start doing business with your competition."

"I guess that's it then, Jackie. I'll keep on supplying you until the end of the month. After that, you can go try to make your own deal somewhere else. Don't try coming back to me later, after you find out you've gotten yourself in a bind."

"You mean me coming around like you did over at my house before, when you managed to get my father to go to bat for you and your crew about getting some work out at the sub base? You can't have it both ways, Billy. If you want us to stop helping each other, I'm all right with that, but don't try to put me out of business just because you're jealous of what I've been building on my own."

When I left Billy's farm that day my thoughts were not very optimistic. I was sure that most of the family would side with Billy and Theresa. Most of them had no idea how much my creating a market for Billy's wood was helping Billy and Theresa to succeed with their own business. To them, I was just a young kid, fresh out of school, who'd somehow lucked into a creating his own job, and, in the process, had been using Billy's established business as my springboard for doing so.

As a general rule, all our family members worked for wages. Billy, having a business of his own, was a source of family pride. To them, it was like I'd somehow attached myself to Billy's business. If I went out now and started buying my wood from anywhere else, to them it would seem like I was turning around and taking advantage of Billy after he'd been the one who'd given me my start in the first place.

It was funny in a way, that the only relatives who understood how much what I was doing was helping Billy's business, were the three of us. I knew that Billy and Theresa weren't 'book smart', but they were shrewd in lots of other ways, especially Theresa. I was sure the reason they were doing this was as much about them seeking to retain some semblance of control over their own business as it was about them trying to co-opt mine. They could both see how dependent on my future success they were starting to become.

Billy's ego had taken a pretty big hit when it first became apparent that my sales were quickly pulling his bacon out of the fire. Rather than enjoying the fact that he now had a lot more money coming in than he'd ever had before, Billy was worried that he'd somehow be seen, in the family, as being inferior, business wise, to me. He'd had all of that he wanted with his brother, Dale, back when he was still a kid. He didn't want to be on the unfavorable end of any future comparisons with me.

It didn't matter to them that I'd never tried to promote myself as being superior to Billy in any way. That didn't mean I was going to allow either of them to deal with me as anything less than an equal though. I'd been very lucky to stumble across an idea that looked like it would turn into a permanent business. I was already making more money than I'd ever anticipated making. In addition, the future prospects for my business were looking even more positive. At least they had been, before Billy's little bomb shell landed on me that morning.

I spent the entire day trying to think of some way out of this dilemma I was now facing. Everything I managed to think of had, as a side consequence, the very real prospect of injuring Billy's business. I knew I had to avoid even the appearance of having done that to Billy.

When I finished my deliveries, I headed back to Groton. On most days I would have driven back to Billy's farm and waited to make sure that Lenny hadn't experienced any problems. Billy had already been given schedules for the deliveries we'd each be making for the remainder of that week.

When I got back home, my father was pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. He had a drink in his hand, whiskey and water, and was busy making all his opinions known to my mother. The gist of which was that I better take immediate care of this problem with Billy, or else he'd know the god damn reason why I hadn't. I hadn't even gotten the door closed, coming into the house, before he started to let me have it.

"Yutch, god damn it, why can't you ever be content to just feed at the trough with all the rest of us? Why is it that you have to stir up things instead of trying to make them work?"

"Does this have something to do with Billy attempting to horn in on my firewood business?"

"Your business? What the hell do you know about running a small logging operation? Nothing, that's what. All you've done is get Billy to let you go out and sell his wood for him. You can't walk into another man's business and start telling him how much of his money you're going to be keeping. If it wasn't for Billy, you wouldn't even have any firewood to run all around New England selling. Where's your loyalty, Yutch?"

One thing my father had always been famous for was his ability to go off half cocked. Usually, with little or no factual information to go by. In spite of not having any grasp of what the problem really was, he'd always felt more than qualified to make a ruling as to what was right and proper for the rest of us to do. I knew he had no real understanding about what it was I had actually been doing for Billy. In spite of this ignorance on his part, he'd already decided that I was the one who was guilty of ruining what he had thought of as a good thing.

Billy was doing well now, and so was I. If anything was beginning to put that in danger, the way my father looked at things, it must be my fault, because I was the newest person to be involved in Billy's business. It didn't seem to matter to my father that it had been Billy, hat in hand, who had come to him, a short while ago, asking for his help in keeping his logging crew together because he'd run out of money to bid on any new logging work.

Other than his vehicles and his logging equipment, Billy's only business assets were the five or six hundred cords of wood that were sitting stacked up all around his farm, passively waiting for someone to come by and take them off Billy's hands. I had been the one to discover a way to turn a huge portion of that wood into money. Money that Billy had desperately needed to see his family through another winter.

In the beginning, all Billy and Theresa were concerned about was seeing their short term financial prospects brightening. Now that the firewood business was growing into something really substantial, they were beginning to worry about how much money I was making for what they saw as the minimal effort I was putting in.

Now that my parents were becoming involved, I knew Billy wasn't just trying to cut himself in for a little bigger profit margin on the wood he was selling me. He intended to either become my partner, or else drive me away from the firewood business altogether.

I knew he might succeed in doing the latter too, because I'd need to go against my family's wishes if I tried to strike out on my own and secure a non family source of firewood to sell. I didn't think I'd be able to make myself do that. My business was important to me, but my family, and my place in the family, were far more important. I thought of my father as the head of our family, and I wouldn't go up against him over this.

"Billy didn't have the first idea about how to go about turning all that wood he'd collected back into money. He was selling about six cords a month from his signs out on the road. It was my idea to take the wood out to places that didn't have so many free standing clusters of hard woods. I don't need Billy's wood to keep on selling firewood in the big towns and some of the cities. Billy isn't in the business of selling firewood, not really. I sell five or six times as much wood in one day as he's been selling on his own in a month. I don't need Billy or his wood to stay in business. If anything, Billy needs me a lot more than I need him."

"You're starting to get too damn big for your britches, Yutch. You think you know it all. Well, you don't know as much as you think you do. I'm not going to have you doing anything to hurt your cousin. You hear me? Nothing. You don't want to sell his wood? Fine, but you aren't going to go out and compete with him in his own business. I just won't have it."

"What about Lenny then? Are you going to find him another job that he can handle? I can sell my trucks pretty easily. I can go enroll in school in the Fall too. Ellen and I will have to postpone getting married too, because I'm not getting married when I don't have an income. I'm telling you right now though, if I do this, not only am I losing out on a good income, but Billy and Theresa are going to have a real tough time making a go of things by themselves. Billy only knows one part of his business. That was how he got in so much trouble before."

"Billy's been doing this for a good long while without any help from you. What makes you think he can't make it on his own without you?"

"It costs money to harvest trees, dad. You make your money back by selling the wood. These stands around here are too small. Most of them aren't worthwhile for a big outfit to come in and harvest. These little crews, like Billy's, they can get in for a cheap bid, but these small stands of trees don't usually have enough product to make a big enough harvest to interest the people who buy large amounts of timber. Firewood is usually the best use they can put their product to around here. The problem is, in this part of the state, too many people have access to their own small stands of wood. They don't buy their firewood, they chop it down and make their own, just like Billy does, only in much smaller amounts. Firewood prices in this part of Connecticut are lower than almost anywhere else. Supply and demand. That's why I take the wood and move it over to where most people don't have the time to do it, or access to trees for cutting their own firewood. People from the city, they don't mind paying money for the extra convenience. Even then, I don't sell to the people who burn the wood, I sell to the people who sell it to those people."