I think one of the most amusing stories involved in my coming back to work for my father is the saga of my company car. Because of his antipathy to “nepotism” but knowing the spread-out territory I would be required to cover, he reluctantly came to the realization that I would need a company car. But he didn’t want it to appear ostentatious, and he worried about what his other executives would think. None of them had company cars since their travel was all by air.
As I have said all along, I had no problem with keeping a low profile but the extent to which my father went was a monument to obscurity. In order to achieve the desired effect, he called on his friend Bill Zikakis, one of the largest car dealers in Ithaca at the time. As Bill tells it, his first prerequisite was that the car be midsized, low-priced and of a subdued coloration, in this case black.
Pops’s second requirement to eliminate ostentatious show was that the tires not look expensive. Therefore he requested black walls. Keep in mind my father went through the generation where white walls cost a handsome premium, and he was apparently unaware that they were now standard equipment, and that black wall tires not only had to be special-ordered, but cost more. Bill says he tried to explain this to him, but to no avail. So, in order to diminish the appearance of my company automobile, my father paid a handsome premium for four black wall tires.
Then he asked Bill to equip the car with an AM radio only, preferably one that broadcast nothing but news. Zikakis again explained that all cars then came equipped with AM/FM radios and that it would be an extra cost, and almost impossible, to locate and install an AM-only radio. It was obvious my father didn’t want me tooling around New York State and Pennsylvania listening to music, and aside from listening solely to news on the hour, he apparently didn’t want me to have the radio on at all. It was his preference I be occupied on my Dictaphone or driving in silent contemplation of ways to increase the outdoor bottom line.
His fourth requirement was that the car have a manual transmission. I would have had no problem with that, having driven a stick shift car all through my college days, but the model he ordered only came with an automatic transmission. Manual shifts mostly came in high-priced sports cars, and it took some time for Bill to point out that all American cars at that time came off the assembly line with automatic transmissions.
At any rate, when the special order car finally arrived, I had trouble finding it in the parking lot since it was so cloaked with invisibility. The good news, surprising as it was, was that my father did provide me with a parking place for the car adjacent to our offices. At one point I was pretty sure that he would want me to park the car on the outskirts of the city so no one could see that I had a company car, and walk back and forth to work from some remote location.