Forty Five Years of Heat

Forty Five Years of Heat

At twenty years of age, right after graduating from college, I entered our family home heating oil and service business in Brooklyn, N.Y. We had a customer base of about 1200 homes, small businesses, and multiple family residences. We were a service business where it was “hands on” by the owners. We knew our clients and they knew us.

My father was, “the Mr. Cohn” who the customers wanted to speak with when they had a heating problem and many years later it was me who stepped into those hard to fill shoes of his. Eventually I became the “Mr. Cohn” at Boro Fuel.
Dad retired in 1972.

When I was in college I had seen a quotation from Goethe which said,
“What you inherit from your fathers, you must earn to possess.” It is true and I never forgot it. I had seen many businesses similar to mine fall by the side because of inept management by the next generation.

I learned enough to find my place in the industry, become a respected owner, and enable the business to thrive despite fierce competition from within the industry. The deregulation of natural gas opened the home heating market for new gas heating sales by the utilities. This was the largest single negative factor impacting our business. Regional and national oil heating associations still spend vast amounts of money on advertising to slow the progression of the gas inroads.

Our customer base was so concentrated that we had to run one oil trunk every four blocks in our part of Brooklyn. This consisted of Boro Park and nearby Flatbush and Bensonhurst. At our peak we ran seven oil trucks and had five service technicians. Each truck had between 3500 to 5000 gallons and was refilled two or three times a day. Our clientele was mostly Jewish and Italian. They were for the most part loyal customers who came to you if they had a complaint and you rectified it. It kept the customer and us happy. We always met the customers demand at least halfway. If we did not give them something for their efforts we “won the battle but lost the war” and usually the customer as well.

Most of these people were tough, hard nosed, and obstinate. They bickered for the best price and the best service with a very demanding attitude but they were loyal customers. They had came to America and were determined to make a better life for their children. They were hard working honest people. We kept no inventory, there was no spoilage and the product disappeared into thin air and had to be replenished constantly. It was a beautiful business until the mid 1990's when marketing conditions changed.

Early on I decided to get to know the customers and spent several days on the truck with an oil delivery man. I am glad I did not deliver on my own as my mind wandered. I never would have paid attention to the “whistle”, or vent alarm, which signaled the driver to stop pumping when the tank was almost full. At my fathers suggestion I went door to door to try and get new accounts. This gave me an appreciation of how difficult it is to get a satisfied customer to change companies. Later on I went with a mechanic repairing and cleaning oil burners. I also helped install several boilers and learned more in the basement than I could have learned from books or in the office. It was an integral part of my learning how to be a heating man. It gave me the understanding and knowledge that only “hands on” can do. I never drove one of those massive oil trucks more than a few feet. It is like driving a railroad car. The driver actually counts the people approaching to cross in front of the truck and makes sure the same number of people comes out on the other side of the truck cab. When sitting up that high all you see are tops of heads. A lot of judgment is needed especially going in reverse gear to park such a large vehicle. Thank goodness, we never had a pedestrian accident.

I started from the ground level which I really felt gave me an appreciation and understanding of all aspects of the business. I obtained my own installer license and was certified to file plans and do work in New York City. It is a difficult license to obtain involving a written and practical (hands on) test.

I was ready for the office where I was to spend most of my time.
My desk was right up front close to the cashier’s window. Many customers came into pay because they either lived nearby or just liked to have a place to go to. Some just preferred to pay by cash. Sometimes they came in to try and bargain for a better price (every time).

A new customer, Mr. Assouline, came in to ask for a brick. I said to follow me and brought him to the garage where we had our installation supplies. I showed him common red brick, combustion chamber soft high temp brick, split bricks, refractory bricks, perhaps ten types in all. I asked him,
“Which do you need?” He replied,
“No, no, I need a ‘brick’ in the price of what you are charging me for the oil.”.
That was one of the funnier events.

I had many tradesmen for customers, but house painters and butchers were especially tough people to please. In particular I had three house painters who were known to be top quality painters who worked alone. Each owned three or four multiple dwellings that we serviced. They were hard workers and perfectionists. Today they would be called anal retentive.

Mr. Brisman would walk into the office and say in a heavy accent,
“First I want from you a smile and then a hello” each and every time he came in. Then he would pay his bills. After the smile and hello his gruff, brusque manner took over. Our office staff consisted of three bookkeepers, two senior bosses and the two junior bosses.

Mr. Taubin, another one of these house painters, always came in wearing a beret of one type or another. He sported a big moustache, wore eyeglasses halfway down his nose and used to say to Bill our male bookkeeper,
“Hallo Beel, how do you fill?” I loved his accent. He would crook a beckoning finger at you and say what he wanted. He took up considerable time because he made the bookkeeper recalculate each and every delivery slip by hand. He did not trust adding machines or later on computers. When the computation was finished, he would then take his figures out of his pocket and see if the tally was exactly the same was as his. If it was off by a penny he wanted to know why. When he called up on the telephone he refused to listen to music or our infomercial and would not be placed on hold. The office staff was instructed to lay the phone receiver down on the desk with the phone line “open.” He threatened that if he was placed on hold he would cancel his accounts. I didn’t doubt him for a minute. He was one of a kind, an original back breaker.

The last member of this trio was Mr Steinberg who owned two six family houses in Bensonhurst. He demanded that I come to his house when he got his rents and he paid his bill after I had a “glass of tea” with him. He remarried an appropriate woman after his wife passed on. His new wife told me,
“I had my own house and I did business with the Cirillo Brothers. They always did right by me. I tried to get Benny to switch”.

I let her know that the Cirillo Brothers had a fine company but Mr. Steinberg had the installation of oil heat done by us and he loved our service. I assured her that she would be very happy with us as well. She was just letting us know that she had some power and wanted to be respected. We gave her the respect and included her on any business decision he had to make regarding his oil account. I knew he was beginning to “lose it” when one day he said,
“Your daddy and your uncle look so much alike, which one is your poppa, your daddy or your uncle?”

The butchers were another story. They were a humorless bunch. However, some fancied themselves to be Romeos and tried to “hit” on the housewives. Perhaps they thought WW2 was still on. Several butchers owned multiple houses that we delivered oil to. Mr. Taub, I was told years after he died, propositioned my mother, step-mother and both mothers -in law. I think he propositioned any female. I guess once in awhile he got lucky. You can be sure he wasn’t lucky with the aforementioned ladies. One of my mothers card playing friends, Doris, called him up after getting “loaded” one New Years eve and said,
“Hey Taub, your schmuck should be as hard as your chuck!” I think she knew. He was a miserable person and very nasty as well.

Another butcher who left a lasting impression on me was Jack Fogel. One day I said to Mr. Fogel, when I went to his house on an estimate,
“How are you my friend?” as I had seen my father do with him in prior years. Mr. Fogel had been a heroic guerilla in the Warsaw Ghetto and I had great respect for him. He asked me,
“Have I ever sat down and had a cup of coffee in your house?”
“No,” I replied.
“Have you ever had a cup of coffee in my house?”
I again said,”No.”
“Than I am not your friend, I am your customer; your father, ‘Willie’, he was my friend.”
He taught me a lesson in humility.

I have remembered that story and told it countless times, including most recently to a roofer who was cheating me on a roof tile repair job , courtesy of Hurricane Wilma..
When he called me,
“My friend”, my hackles went up and I told him why he is NOT my friend, among other reasons.

Some of our clientele did not use the post office or banks. We were the “bank of Boro Fuel.” When their social security check came they would call up and say,” I got it.”
We immediately knew by the voice if it was Mrs Zander , Mrs Buccafusco or one of the dozen or so who insisted that we bring them the exact change for their check and pick up their payment. We stopped personal collections years ago.


Mrs Buccafusco, a skinny old crone with wire frame glasses was a nervous woman. Her late husband had been had an opera star in Italy and she had pictures of him in costume on the walls of her home. She never failed to point them out to me every month that she had an oil bill. When she did not owe money she still tried to get us to come and cash her check.

One day when I had to bring her change and pick up her check (very early in my career, I might add, before I rebelled against such tasks) she said to me,
“You know my granddaughter; she’s going to get married. She’s going to marry one of your kind”.
“Oh” I quickly asked,
“Do you mean a man, a tall person, or perhaps an earthling? I really don’t know what you mean”. In reality I knew very well.
“Come on, you know what I mean. He’s a Jew, BUT NICE!”
‘”Oh”, I said “Well thank God for that.”
I don’t think I would answer differently today.
When Mrs. Bertha Zander would call up, she would say,
“Please, you’ve got to come right away, I gotta give you your money, it’s not mine. Hurry up.”
Rain or snow or whatever, we had to run on that collection. She too was another old skinny lady who wore her hair in a bun and a house dress with an apron over it, as you would expect. On the top of her newspaper covered soggy staircase was at least six or eight yellow glass gallons of what was known as Javelle water or what we call Chlorine bleach today. The house reeked of it. She washed the hallway and staircase of that six family house multiple times each day. I don’t think her linoleum covered stairs ever saw daylight. She would hand over the money, look up toward heaven while wringing her hands and exclaim,
“Denks Gott!, denks gott, now I don’t owe nobotty nottink., Oy I am sooo heppy I can sleep tonight”.

We had lots of characters for customers. The more memorable ones earned nicknames like,
“Deaf Greenberg” who spoke so loudly that whoever answered the phone had to hold it a foot away from their head. There was “Dots Levine” who preceded every phone order with “Dots Levine” calling. Mrs Wein used to say this is Mrs. Wein, Boro. The same (stupid) office person always thought she said, this is Mrs. Weinboro and answered, “Yes Mrs. Weinboro”. Another lady started every call with,” Well, this is Miss Indelicato”. There was a lawyer, “Say, this is Nathan Ginsberg” etc. He had a voice just like Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo). After awhile I knew all the regular callers by voice before they got the second syllable out. I had a great deal of patience for the ones my Dad referred to as naked Santa Clauses, or “Nude-niks”. I always told the customers who thought they were pestering me,
“Never apologize, you are paying my salary and I am here to help you.” I tried to mean it even if
my patience was wearing thin.

One poor soul, Mr. Lamstein, kept calling every two minutes that he is cold and has no heat. The dispatcher kept telling him to stop calling or he will not send anyone. This did not help at all. We finally called up his daughter to tell him to stop calling. She told us that her father doesn’t realize what he is dong and that she would go over and take care of the matter. That was when we realized he was senile or had Alzheimer’s disease. So we now had an, “in office” buzzword, not meant unkindly, for people having the,”Lamstein Syndrome.” These were but a few of the more colorful and memorable people I had as customers.

Memories, memories, there were so many characters that came in to our street level office. There were con men, schemers, dreamers, beggars, hustlers, streetwalkers, bull throwers and sales people galore. Eventually we put in a buzzer system and intercom to screen who we admitted. The neighborhood changed as well as our clientele. The area became seedy. Many of the old customers sold to builders and the new houses used gas heat. Our customer base changed from mostly Jewish and Italian to more than three fourths Asiatic, Latino, and African-American. The Italian -Americans went to Staten Island and the secular Jewish customers to Long Island. The Orthodox Jews moved heavily into Boro Park.
Today the office personnel reflect the ethnicity of the customers. They have the “United Nations”
working there, and rightfully so.

I don’t miss work at all. I worked in the oil business for many years and was beginning to feel burnt out. The fifty six mile round trip that I was making every day since 1972 became more arduous as more people fled the inner city. I occasionally have nightmares about some aspect of the business usually involving an environmental problem.

I put in over 45 years on the job doing everything from credit and collection, buying oil, buying boilers, plumbing fittings, controlling parts inventory and checking in serviceman and drivers. I answered many phone calls myself, handled all sales, advertising, customer retention and solicitation of new accounts and real estate leads. I also bought and equipped all of our oil delivery and service trucks and company cars, and priced the service charges. My partner and I wore many hats. He mostly took care of the bookkeeping, billing and payables as well as dispatching. The new owner has eight people in the office doing what we did. We worked from seven A.M. until we closed whether it was six, seven or eight o’clock at night, sometimes six or seven days a week as needed. That work ethic is not there today. Maybe we were not as smart, but we worked hard and saved our money.

I have never looked back and have been to Brooklyn perhaps three times since I retired. I am so very happy to wake up here in sunny Florida. I turn on the TV as I get ready to go fishing or for an early swim. I hear Al Roker or some other weather person say how cold it is in New York. I am delighted to have gotten out when I did. I doubt that I would still be alive if I stayed in that business. I earned my retirement.
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I am a past president of the New York Oil Heating Association. Each year we published a directory and it lists all the past presidents. Only a few who served before me are still alive and too many who served after me are gone as well. It became a very difficult business and I made the vow that I would not be carried out feet first. Dad retired only after he had a major heart attack at age 62. I retired at age 62 and didn’t want to tempt fate.

The nature of the business has changed. We used to buy and resell heating oil Today, you have to be a commodities buyer and hedge oil futures. Insurance rates have soared since 9-1-1. At one time it was fun to go to work, but not anymore. Severe price spikes became rampant in 1999 and the business was too volatile. The year ending before I retired we had our first negative balance sheet because of price guarantees. I felt the future of the industry was bleak. More and more companies were being swallowed up in the economic times of the business “roll up”.

Suddenly the largest buyer of oil companies ran into trouble and was considering going into Chapter 11. That company set the standard for a fuel company buy out price. I decided to get out while I can before the business became worth very little. I told my partner that I wanted to retire. He said he would not stay without me. I told him that since I was active in the dealers association that I would find a buyer. I found two companies who wanted to acquire us. We eventually sold to my partner’s son who had entered the business several years before. It was a logical move for him since he got his father to guarantee my buy out. He knew the business and is still being tested in the matter of business survival.

I sold my interest in my beloved building that we were housed in to my partner. That was a mixed blessing. I loved that piece of property but didn’t want to be tied to it. I had a five year payout which was completed in June2005 for which I am very grateful. The industry has shrunk further and is more precarious than ever.

I got out at a time of life when I could still enjoy whatever God given years I may have. I like to think like Mrs. Zander,
“Denks Gott, I don’t owe nobotty nottink”.