Chapter 22

My sister Nancy and her husband were moving back to California. John, her husband, had taken Nancy and their twin daughters up to Seattle two years before, to take a job as a heavy equipment crane operator for the Port Authority. He'd gone to some school back East before he'd gotten married to learn how to operate that type of machinery.

Because there had been some kind of accident with the crane, and someone had gotten hurt, John had lost his job. Even John admitted that the accident had been his fault. In any case, they were back home and living with my parents, until John could find another job.

My father did a lot of grumbling about John, calling him a damn freeloader, among other things. He was angry that John wasn't willing to take any other job, other than as a crane operator. He also didn't think his son in law was as diligent in looking for work as he ought to have been.

I got along with John just fine, and we'd had them over to our house several times, for supper, and just to give them a break away from my parents on the weekends. I could tell that Nancy was still very much in love with her husband. They'd been married for about five years by then, and I was happy for her.

By the time Nancy and her family had been back in California for three months, John had already applied just about everywhere in a sixty mile radius that used cranes. Most of these places were construction companies, in Los Angeles. According to John, having that accident on his record made it difficult for these companies to hire him, due to their insurance carrier's objections.

In talking to John, I'd found out that this school he'd gone to had also taught him how to operate plenty of different types of heavy equipment. He could run big earthmoving bulldozers, and just about anything else that operated on tires or steel treads. He told me that he really preferred operating the big cranes though.

I knew a few guys that did grading for big new housing developments. I knew the operators made a very decent living. When I asked John why he wasn't applying for those kinds of jobs, he just shrugged his shoulders and told me he was a crane operator.

I was starting to get some sense of what my Dad had been saying about John's work ethic. It sounded to me like he was using only being a crane operator as an excuse to not just go out and find himself any damn job that would allow him to support his family.

After another month had passed, my father had seen and heard enough of John's excuses. There was a big blow up over at the house, with my father telling John that he wasn't any kind of man if he couldn't, or wouldn't, support his own family. He threatened to evict the lot of them if John hadn't taken any job he could get in the next week.

I knew my father, and he meant what he said. Once he gets mad enough, even my mother has a very difficult time trying to get him to change it. By Monday morning, it was clear to everyone that his one week ultimatum still stood.

Curiously, even though she really loved John, I think Nancy agreed with Dad. Her husband was young enough, and healthy enough, to go out and get some work. She was getting pretty fed up with all his excuses, and with his insistence on not taking other kinds of work.

By Wednesday, John had gotten himself a job through his union hall. It wasn't exactly operating heavy equipment, it was running one of those big portable electrical generators in places where there were temporary power outages. Mostly, all he ever did, once everything had been hooked up or plugged in, was make sure that the generators didn't run out of the fuel that powered them.

He would just sit in the cab of the rig the generator was carried on all during his work shift. He'd have to get out every once in a while, to check the gauges, or to help with the refueling, when the truck came by to deliver the diesel fuel. The pay was pretty decent too, mostly because it was a union position.

After they had saved up a little money, John and Nancy found a two bedroom apartment and moved out of my parents house. Once John had started back to work, my father left him alone, for the most part.

He stayed angry for a long time though, because John never once offered to kick in any money to help pay for any of the extra food costs while his family lived with my parents. For years afterwards, whenever John's name came up in one of our conversations at work, he'd always refer to him as 'Freddie the Freeloader'.

By early 1970, my company was finishing up the build out of the final six homes at the old job site. The housing market was still very healthy, and I'd ended up making a very nice profit on each the first six homes I'd sold there. I'd raised my sales prices by three thousand dollars on each of the other six that we were just putting the finishing touches on, and already had four of them sold under a sales contract.

I'd paid down $100,000.00 on the principal balance of my loan from Daniel, out of the proceeds from the first six home sales. I would be paying another $100,000.00 off, once I got paid for the six I was selling now. I was very pleased with how things were going to end up for that project, but most of my thoughts and interest were now turning to the La Habra lots.

I had hired a team of sub-contractors to hook up the water, power and sewage to each lot. It cost me about twenty per cent more than it would have if I'd had my guys doing it, but it saved me more than two weeks on my building schedule, and these people specialized in exactly the job they were doing for me. This was really the first time I'd had a big enough subdivision to justify having a sub-contractor bid on the job.

It was almost the end of March before we finished up everything at the old project, and were moved over to the new one. We'd had quite a bit of rain the past winter, but had been lucky that all the houses had been up, framed and roofed by the time it came. We didn't really lose many building days due to the weather.

I had decided to start building the first six houses on the upper cul de sac at the western edge of the tract. Since I'd be selling homes as they were being built, I wanted the first ones to be the easiest to get to, from the access roads, and at the highest point on the property line. Being at the top of a subdivision was something people seemed to want, and I didn't want people deciding to wait for an upper ridge line view when I needed to sell some houses to get the funds to build out the rest of my project.

There seemed to be a lot of interest in the new project. The Orange County Register had sent out a reporter and photographer to interview me for a nice article in their Sunday Home section. I think they were hoping I'd advertise my new homes in their paper when I finally started selling them.

It took my six crews seventeen weeks to build the first six houses. I decided to hire a landscaping firm to put in a lawn, a few trees, and some flowers on the lot where the top most house sat. The lawn guy gave me a special price after I agreed to letting him put a small business sign up on the front lawn, and agreed to pass out his business cards to all my home buyers.

I waited until all six homes were finished before letting people view them. I had some artwork on each design made up, showing the interior lay outs and whichever elevations I planned on using. The market was still heating up, with prices rising by as much as two per cent in a month. There was a much wider price variance with higher priced offerings, because there weren't nearly as many people who could afford homes priced above forty thousand dollars.

I priced the six finished homes between $68,500.00 and $78,999.00. The three designs with the entry way or the porch were priced at $74,000.00, and the house with the landscaping was the highest priced home.

I sold two of the homes that first day. The landscaped one was the first to go, to a heart surgeon from Fullerton, and the one with the screened in view porch went next, to a lawyer from Anaheim. Neither buyer blinked at the prices I was asking. I took that as a very good sign. By the end of the week, all six houses were in escrow. I had sold them for an accumulated total of $438,000.00.

The sixty per cent of the sales price I was obligated to give Daniel's company to release those six lots, came to a little more than $262,000.00. I used some of my working capital to pay off the remaining loan balance of thirty eight thousand and some accumulated interest. I was once again out of debt, and I had enough working capital to build the next six houses, while still keeping over fifty thousand more dollars in reserve.

Mr. Kaplan was smiling wistfully when he went back to his safe and retrieved my coin collection for me. I had already figured out that he really liked having them. He told me himself that he took them out and looked at them from time to time. I reached into the loose coins and pulled out two of the pouches. I didn't know which two coins they contained, but I put them on the counter top in front of the man who'd been such a help to me.

"These are for you, Mr. Kaplan. To thank you for all your help, and for believing in me. I couldn't have gotten to this point without you." When he started to protest, I told him I wouldn't settle for him taking anything less. "Think of me sometimes when you look at them, and remember how much your helping has meant to me."

One of the coins I gave him turned out to be an 1870CC, the other was the more valuable 1871CC. To me though, the coins meant much more than just the dollar value to coin collectors. I was giving him a part of my life. I'm sure he realized that, and knew each coin in my collection held exactly the same value for me. He finally bowed to me and gratefully accepted the coins in the spirit they had been given.

As the buyers started moving into their new homes, I started getting interested buyer questions from their friends and associates, all of them expressing an interest in having me build them a home in the next phase. I told them all that I wouldn't know how to price the homes until after I had figured out what my building costs would be.

It was true that my building costs for materials was slowly rising, plus I was also giving all my employees an hourly increase in wages. I already paid well above scale, but my crews were all top of the line builders, and I wanted their pay to reflect that status.

In the end, I tacked on another five thousand dollars to each of the previous home prices. The second phase was in the lower westernmost cul de sac, and there were seven lots available. I didn't want to hire another crew, so I decided to only build the top six homes, and leave the bottom lot empty.

I thought the bottom lot was the nicest of the seven, and it had a terrific view of the mountains, all the way to Big Bear. I thought that, if I was going to build a new house for my family, this is where I'd want to build it.

It took almost three years to build and sell off all of the La Habra project. With each new phase, I'd raise all the prices, either three or five thousand dollars. Even when Nixon put in his wage and price freeze, I had no problem getting the prices I was asking.

Early in 1971, my father had asked me to give my brother Kevin a job. Kevin was having trouble with just about every part of his life. He was in his thirties, and had never held any job, with the exception of his Air Force enlistment, for more than six months.

He'd been a cab driver, a waiter, HVAC installer, truck driver, bartender, carpet salesman and a night clerk in a Seven Eleven. Most of the time he'd just get bored and quit.