Smoke Inn Blog Smoke Inn Cigar Talk
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the weirdest customer I ever met—Moondog, a tall weird looking Viking that used to light his cigars with the cellophane still on. So, I thought this week I’d switch to the smartest guy I ever met… and I’ve met an incredible number of famous, wealthy, or talented people because they all had one thing in common, well, actually two things, they loved cigars and they bought them from me.
Out here on the porch of the Home for Retired Cigar Czars we all realize that the harsh reality is that our days on the porch are nearly over, or if it was a baseball game I guess we’re all in the 9th inning and hoping for extra innings. So I guess the guy I’m about to tell you about will remain the smartest guy I’ll ever meet before I pass to the great beyond.
It was 1978, our two daughters were 3 and 5 and we were living in an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan just a couple of blocks from Gracie Mansion. It was a really spacious two-story apartment in an old brownstone that had fireplaces in the living room and each of the four bedrooms… and its own garden! That’s an absolute must for my wife LaVonda who is a maniacal gardener due to her upbringing on a farm in rural Kansas. The rent, as I recall, was $1200.00 a month in 1978 dollars, what that would be today I can’t even hazard a guess. I’ve never really been much for details, so I rented the place on the fly because it seemed perfect for our kids. Instead of walking them on the streets of Manhattan with all the weirdos, residential and commercial garbage, and dog shit (remember this was way before the pooper scooping laws), they could play in their own private garden! And, these living arrangements were great for me and LaVonda as our store and office were on 45th St. so just a 10-minute cab ride got us there or back home. Once we moved in there we discovered that there were “seedy” buildings on both sides of the garden where the residents would think nothing of tossing stuff out the window which would land in our garden. So, we made a practice of cleaning up any trash before letting the kids out there… until we discovered that among the trash were used hypodermic needles. That’s when we decided to move out of the city.
We found an idyllic old home from around the time of the Revolutionary War in Sparkill New York, Exit 4 on the Palisades Parkway. If we timed our comings and goings just right, we could get to work in a half hour or less! So, we bought this beautiful 22 room home on 15 acres that had a greenhouse and the remnants of a swimming pool and tennis courts, 2 big barns, and an apple orchard. Wow! Could you ever wish for a better place for kids to grow up? We hired a customer of ours who was a painter, and he moved into the house with his family and painted and plastered the entire place over the course of the next six months. Then we moved in! Less than a month later the house caught fire and burned!
So, with the house pretty much destroyed, where do we take our kids? I remembered there was a Holiday Inn about a half mile from there on Route 303 in Blauvelt, and so we went there and rented 4 or 5 rooms. Why 4 or 5 rooms? Well, I guess I forgot to mention that LaVonda’s mother and sister came to visit us the very day the house burned, and we discovered the fire as we pulled into the driveway coming from the airport!
Our very first night at the Holiday Inn (you just can’t make this shit up) the fire alarms went off, and these big hallway fire doors closed off our part of the motel and scared the hell out of all of us! Obviously, this was not a place we could stay in for more than a couple of days. Luckily, in the newspaper I found a couple named Ochell who were going away for a month and looking to rent their house in nearby Old Tappan. So I rented it and we lived there for about 3 weeks while I searched for something more permanent. By a stroke of sheer luck, I found a large 4-bedroom condo at The River House in Upper Nyack where two women were about to embark on a sailing trip to Brazil and would be gone for 6 months. I immediately agreed to the $1500.00 a month terms (remember, this is almost 50 years ago), but when I called the insurance company, they said the rent was too excessive. I said that I looked over the policy and they were responsible for reimbursing me for living accommodations that were similar to those that had been damaged. I told them that this was an 8-room attached condo on zero acres. What I lost was a 22-room home on 15 acres with two barns, a green house, an apple orchard, and blah, blah, blah. Should I be looking to rent something like that, or do you think we can just settle on this $1500.00 a month rental? They saw some wisdom in what I said and agreed to the rental.
Well, by now you’re probably starting to wonder “what the hell does this have to do with “the most interesting person I ever met?” Well, just bear with me for a little while longer and you’ll see.
We are happier than a pig in shit with the place we rented in Upper Nyack. It’s attached to this incredible old mansion right on the Hudson River. Helen Hayes even lives a couple of doors from us, and the kids absolutely love the place. But we know that before 6 months are up we need to find a permanent home. Then, strolling down the streets of Nyack we pass by a real estate agency: Lydecker Realty, and we go in. Toby Lydecker meets us at the front door and while looking at pictures of available houses we are enthralled with his story. He was The Original Marlboro Man in all the TV ads. Well, he shows us a picture of a house in Tuxedo Park that’s for sale for $245,000 and we agree to go see it. Yes, it will be a tough commute for us, but we agree to take a look.
I’m going to stick a picture of the house in here just so the rest of this story in more understandable.
Having been apartment dwellers in the city, and now condo dwellers at the River House, when we get to the place in Tuxedo, we believe we are looking at 3 attached townhomes and the price for each is $245,000. So, we go in the front door, and we are in this beautiful large entry parlor. It’s maybe 800 or a thousand square feet and has a phenomenal winding staircase to the floors above with a gigantic chandelier hanging from way up high. Through double French doors to my left is a massive room, maybe 25 by 50… and looking through the French doors to my right, I can see a huge kitchen with doors that open to the most ornate dining room I have ever seen in my life from that day to this. I can also see another huge room that dwarfs even the room I had first seen to my left. This room is possibly 80 feet long and 25 feet wide with a panoramic window overlooking Tuxedo Lake. I am mesmerized and I pull LaVonda to the side and say to her: “Hey, this isn’t three attached townhouses, this is all one fucking house!!! LET’S BUY IT!… AND SHE SAY YES!
So, we tell Toby we want to buy the house, and we’ll pay the full asking price. In short order, we are the owners of a home in Tuxedo Park, but it’s really going to be impossible for LaVonda to get to Manhattan every day to run our mail order operation, especially with two little kids.
Well, the only commercial building in Tuxedo is the local drugstore/lunch counter/everything else. And it’s located in this big old building right off Route 17. I find that there’s a 2500 square foot office on the second floor that’s for rent, and I make an appointment to meet the landlord who just happens to be…THE SMARTEST GUY I EVER MET IN MY LIFE!
His name is Hazard “Buzz” Reeves. He was asking $600.00 a month for the office and being in an absolute panic to get LaVonda a place to work, I tell him I need occupancy right away and I’ll just write him a check for $21,600.00 for the whole three-year rental. Within a day or two I have some office furniture and chairs moved in, phones installed, and hire the lady (Jane Todd) who made me coffee in the downstairs drug store as LaVonda’s first employee. Hey, beggars can’t be choosers, but she ended up working for us for over 20 years. She also knew a couple of other women in town that we hired, and they also worked for us for decades!
Now, bear in mind we are moving into a gigantic 16,000 square foot house after having a fire. We have almost no furniture, no appliances, no nothing. Even our clothes had been damaged by the fire, and after having them all dry cleaned we found that when we would try to wear some of them, the heat of the fire had melted the chemical based threads they were sewn with, and so our legs would go through the sides of the pants, or the sleeves would just fall off when we attempted to put on a shirt or blouse! In other words, we had almost nothing. In the weekend NY Times, I saw an auction for a Frankart Furniture store that was in bankruptcy and I went there and bought two entire 22 foot trucks of furniture so that we had something at least to sit on. Among the stuff I bought were 31 Herman Miller Grandfather Clocks that were such a good buy that I couldn’t resist —but that’s me, and that’s another story for another time.
So, we found a great house, we got LaVonda set up in an office, we hired people we knew almost nothing about that turned out to be great employees for decades… that ain’t bad!
Well, our main place of business was at 108 West 45th St. in Manhattan. That’s where our main store and our mail order department shipped from and the orders were being Telexed from LaVonda’s new office in Tuxedo Park. The store and the basement below held millions upon millions of cigars, all kept under constant temperature and humidification. Hey, I know this all sounds too crazy to be true, BUT… the adjoining building was being demolished and in the process their fuel oil tank was punctured and diesel fuel began seeping into our basement! To save our business, we had to move everything out of the basement to…to… TO WHERE?
Well, right below LaVonda’s new office was the other half of the building that the Pharmacy did not occupy. It was about 4,000 square feet, and a basement of equal size, and fortunately it was connected to the office above by an interior stairway and elevator shaft. And so once more I met with Hazard Reeves and rented the space, moved the cigars from Manhattan, erected shelving, installed conveyor belts and established not only a new shipping point, but a budding friendship with Mr. Reeves… the smartest person I ever met.
Hazard was without a doubt the most accomplished and possibly the wealthiest resident of Tuxedo Park, and shortly after we moved there, he sponsored us for membership in the exclusive Tuxedo Club. Even with his endorsement our membership was “blackballed”—it was claimed that it was because we were merchants, but we knew it was because I was Jewish. But that’s another story, this is about Hazard Reeves.
Hazard never bragged how he came to own the building we were in or how he was the main owner of the Tuxedo Park Association and all the lands it controlled, or how he invented some sort of device that enabled the crystal radio to be clipped to any piece of grounded iron and receive radio transmissions, or how he was responsible for the Waring Blender, or Cinerama, or Stereophonic Sound, or magnetic recording tape, or how he was the ham radio champion of the entire world for 13 consecutive years, or how during World War II he ran laboratories manufacturing electronic gizmos for the military and won their Award for merit 4 different times, or how he won an Oscar for sound. The thing he liked to talk about was inventing glass records during WWII so that people could enjoy buying music even though shortages of rubber and petroleum prohibited the manufacture of regular records.
Rehashing all the marvelous things Hazard was responsible for would take a book, not an essay, so I would advise everyone to look up this guy on Wikipedia or some other kind of information thing on the internet.
One of the coolest things he created was called REALTRON. He sent around people using his magnetic recording devices to film upscale residences in all the major cities, and then if an executive was being transferred to another office, rather than physically going somewhere to find a place to live, he could just get a half dozen or more films from Realtron to select a new place to live.
For decades Reeves Teletape was the common way shows were recorded for television and if you have the occasion to watch Stephen Colbert on late night TV, that building, and that studio and the Ed Sullivan Theater within it was owned and operated by non-other than Hazard Reeves.
Just about any time I had the occasion to talk to Hazard, his sidekick Frank Howard would be there with him. I don’t know that Frank was actually ever was employed by Hazard, but they were fast friends. Frank was another interesting guy that maybe I’ll write about some day. He was a lifelong resident of Tuxedo Park and I recall stories he would tell me about how he would accompany his father to work in Manhattan taking a seaplane from Tuxedo Lake to the 79th St. boat basin on the West Side. His father must have been someone really important as I know that the Howard Pavillion at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital is named for him. Frank, to my knowledge had only one job in his entire life… protecting the trademark TETRA-ETHYL LEAD. That’s the ingredient that made high test gasoline truly hi-test. His job throughout his life was suing anyone transgressing on that mark.
Well, now that I’ve sucked you into reading all this stuff, it occurs to me that I ought to mention the smartest guy I ever met in the cigar business. His name was Simon Camacho. In About 1962 or 3, Simon bought a bale of1959 Havana filler that was in the hands of a factory making machine made, short filler cigars in Yoe, Pennsylvania. The filler was essentially unsuitable for even a machine made, short filler, domestic cigar.
Well, Simon started making private brands for the country’s largest cigar merchants (me being one of them) and each brand claimed to be made from that bale of Havana Filler. Simon was so smart, that he was able to keep making brands of all long 1959 Havana filler from that same ONE BALE of tobacco for the next THIRTY YEARS!
So maybe Simon was the smartest person I ever met… Hazard? Simon?… you be the judge.
