"Taking Risks" (about my father)

[I wrote this for a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in 1988.] Taking Risks The willingness to take risks is part of a particular mind-set and approach to the world, one which is expressive of optimism and a certain measure of cosmic security. The risk-taker sees life as a gamble, whose stakes are whatever life, at its best, has to offer. It is not a common attitude, and its acquisition by a child should never be taken for granted. It is learned, like so much else, primarily by exposure to favorable examples at an early age. It was just after the War, and my father was attempting to start up a business. He was laboring under several severe constraints, the most salient of which was a lack of capital. And on the positive side, he was armed with an eighth-grade education and experience as a purchasing agent for an aircraft company doing war work.

It was afternoon, and he was perusing the Wall Street Journal, when he noticed a small ad announcing the sale of a warehouse full of surplus tape in New Jersey. He got in his car and went directly over to look at it. Upon being told what was wanted for the tape, he made a ridiculously small counter-offer. The executive in charge of the plant said he had no authority to make any deal but would put my father through to the main branch office in California. Speaking to the Vice President of the company, my father repeated his extremely small offer. After a long pause, the voice at the other end of the line responded: "Mr. Hogan," you've just bought yourself some tape." Hearing his orders, the New Jersey executive was plainly stunned.

By now it was late afternoon, as my father fought the traffic back into the City. He went straight away to see a new acquaintance, Abraham Kraditor, the head of a law and accounting firm and a man of some importance in public affairs.

"Abe," my father said. "I've just bought a warehouse full of surplus tape, but I have a problem: I haven't any money to pay for it." Kraditor, who had substantial connections at the bank, promised to arrange a loan. "Abe," my father continued," I have another problem: where will I put the tape?" Early the next week, my father and Kraditor found an old Borden Milk Company depot in Edgemere, Long Island, and were able to lease it immediately.

For the next week a caravan of trailer trucks plied their way between New Jersey and Long Island, carrying hundreds of thousands of rolls of tape to the old stable that used to house the horses that delivered Borden's milk. When they were finished, mountains of tape in card board cartons filled the cavernous building. It was the beginning of Hogan Industrial Supply Company and of years of rewinding, slitting, and selling every conceivable type of tape one could imagine. The investment in the tape was the basis of many years of successful business, business whose history was punctuated by various other entrepreneurial coups.

I heard this story (and other similar ones) told over and over again as I was growing up, especially at dinner when my father was in an expansive mood and responded to our pleas to tell "business stories." These tales, no doubt somewhat exaggerated, became part of a mythology surrounding my father, which played an important role, I think, in my life. For when I try to sum up--especially in times of conflict or disappointment--what it was that my father gave me, the answer that always comes to the fore is: a willingness to take risks and to see life as opening its rewards to anyone with energy and chutzpah. This attitude was a kind of Horatio Alger equivalent of Erikson's notion of "basic trust." And it was a valuable legacy.