{"id":694,"date":"2009-08-19T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=694"},"modified":"2021-09-20T18:21:59","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T22:21:59","slug":"buckeye-battle-cry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/19\/buckeye-battle-cry\/","title":{"rendered":"MY DAD WAS A NUMBERS GUY"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post<\/strong><\/span> is for everybody who read my recent Wall Street Journal<\/em> article about my dad and wants more info on him. (The WSJ article is linked here<\/a>.) <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

My father,<\/em> Toby, got a letter from<\/span> a Piney Woods<\/span> <\/span>Arkansas man, extolling my dad’s homemade foot powder: “Mr. Lesbert: Do NOT stop making the powdor! Do NOT stop!!” Toby used to make the foot powder in the basement. The company was Lesbert Drug Co., named after my sister, Leslie, and me. My dad stopped making the powder. The Arkansas man was about his only customer.<\/p>\n

Then Toby<\/span> started selling cosmetics<\/span>.<\/strong><\/span> Then he starting buying buildings . . . on and on.\u00a0 He was the Jewish Willy Loman. (Kind of like how klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras was the Jewish Benny Goodman.)<\/p>\n

My dad schlepped me to banks. <\/span>I remember a banker who called my dad “Teddy.” That was weird. My father’s given name was Theodore and his Jewish nickname was Toby. This banker liked to talk Tribe (baseball) and his wife’s spaghetti recipes. The banker was a “people’s person,” he said. (Maybe he was a dogs’ person too.)<\/p>\n

My father<\/strong> <\/span>was not a people’s person.\u00a0 He was the Lone Ranger. He got the mortgage and we got out of there.<\/p>\n

My dad owned one LP record, of the Ohio State marching band. My dad had stock records. Toby bought his first stock, Seaboard Air Line, when he was at Ohio State. Air line<\/em> meant train line <\/em>back then. Air line<\/em> was the shortest distance between two points \u2014 the way the crow flies. My dad never made money on stocks. He was too busy buying and selling and not holding. Toby was even a stockbroker for about six months in the 1950s at Bache & Co.<\/p>\n

He liked numbers. He was a numbers guy. Totally.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is for everybody who read my recent Wall Street Journal article about my dad and wants more info on him. (The WSJ article is linked here.) My father, Toby, got a letter from a Piney Woods Arkansas man, extolling my dad’s homemade foot powder: “Mr. Lesbert: Do NOT stop making the powdor! Do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports-pages","category-toby-stratton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29106,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions\/29106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}