This originally ran here on September 1, 2013…
There's a great Yiddish word that, like many Yiddish words, is spelled all different ways in English: Ganef, Gonif, Goniff, Gonnif, etc. It denotes a person who is thief and a crook and you can spell it however you like. Me, I usually opt for gonif. This is the story of Harry the Gonif.
There is much that I can't tell you about Harry the Gonif. I can't tell you what his last name was because though I heard it many times, we always referred to him as Harry the Gonif. I can't tell you who first hung that term on him. I can't even tell you how my father knew him…but my father was friends with Harry the Gonif. Harry would come over for an evening now and then. Sometimes, my father would go to lunch with him or take us all out for dinner with Harry the Gonif.
Most often, we'd drop by his place of business where Harry sold TV picture tubes. Discount TV picture tubes. This, obviously, was back when TV sets had picture tubes…around the mid-sixties. If your TV set needed a new one, it could easily run you $80 or $100…and that was just for the part itself. Installation could drive the price far beyond that.
But there was an alternative. Buried in the sports section of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, there was a little ad that advertised brand-new TV picture tubes for $19.95…and then in the kind of microscopic typeface I like to call Flyspeck Bodoni, it said, "…and up."
That was Harry's ad. He had a deal with a manufacturer in Hong Kong or Korea or some country where workers could be paid cents per hour. They made picture tubes and shipped them over and he sold them in the Los Angeles area. There were, I gather, other gonifs in other cities selling them to folks in their jurisdictions.
They made picture tubes in all shapes and sizes, and they made them in two levels of quality. If you came in to get your $19.95 picture tube, Harry would usually sell you one…but acting like he was your sudden buddy, he'd let you in on a secret. The models he had for $34.95 were much, much better and because of their longer, warranty-covered lifespan, much more cost-effective.
Or sometimes, if you looked desperate to get your TV working again before the Dodgers game that evening, he'd just tell you he was out of the $19.95 tubes that would fit your set and it would be two weeks before he could get more in. Then when you were in sufficient panic, he'd tell you, "Gee…I think I might just have one tube in the right size but it would be our $34.95 model." About two-thirds of those who went to Harry for the $19.95 tube went home with the $34.95 one.
He wasn't lying about one thing, by the way. The $34.95 models were indeed better than the $19.95 models. The $19.95 ones were, I gather, picture tubes in the same sense that a Snickers bar is dinner. But all you need to know about either is this: When our living room TV died, my father called Harry and told him. Harry immediately sent over one of his men to install a brand-new picture tube — and it was not one of his. He had his guy stop off at some warehouse and pickup an RCA model, for which we paid his cost plus an installation fee.
Harry may have been a gonif but he wasn't the kind of gonif who'd stick a friend with his crummy product.
Of course, $34.95 only got you the picture tube. If you wanted one of Harry's men to come to your house and install it…well, that's where they made back some of the profit they weren't making by selling picture tubes so cheaply.
Or you could take it home yourself with a little printed sheet Harry provided — instructions on how to do-it-yourself. And then when you'd done-it-yourself and it didn't work, you could pay to have Harry's guy come over and make it work…and that could really run into money. (Also, if one of his crew came to your house, they'd gladly haul away your old picture tube and "dispose of it safely." Usually, that meant they'd recycle it and make even more bucks off you.)
Up above, I said there were many things I couldn't tell you about Harry the Gonif. The big one was why my father was friends with this person. I think it was just that my father was such a nice man, he couldn't bring himself to cut an acquaintance loose…and with his tendency to see the best in everyone, he did have some nuggets of respect for Harry, AKA "The Gonif."
Harry had built a successful business. He seemed to treat his employees well. And some people couldn't afford a $90 picture tube so a $19.95 one, inferior though it might have been — or even if they were baited-and-switched up to 35 bucks — was still a good thing. If your TV was busted and you called a repairman out of the Yellow Pages, you could get swindled a lot worse than anything Harry would do to you.
One day, Harry took my father to lunch and let him in on a secret. Harry was preparing to triple the size of his operation. The more picture tubes he ordered from Sweatshop City, wherever it was, the less each one cost him. If he could get his sales up 300%, he'd up his profit more than 500%. I am not remembering the numbers precisely but I'm in, as they say, the ball park.
All it would take was a bigger building, more employees and more advertising…which of course meant more working capital. He was going to buy billboards all over L.A. and get a full page amidst all the other gonifs in the phone book. He'd even paid good money to secure a new phone number that spelled out something like NEW-TUBE. I thought it was a shame that none of the many common spellings of "gonif" had seven letters.
To do all this, he was taking in investors. He had one share left of his new, expanded business and my father could buy in for $3000.
My father had $3000 in the bank but he didn't have much more than that. He heard Harry out, examined some papers Harry gave him about the investment and what he'd get for his money…and asked for a few days to think it over. Then he went home and involved my mother and me in his thought process.
He had little doubt that Harry would make his expanded company profitable. Whatever else you could say about the guy, he knew how to run that kind of business. He also believed Harry was offering him this opportunity out of naught but friendship. Given the firm's past track record, it wouldn't have been that difficult to find a stranger willing and perhaps eager to put in the three grand. Harry really liked my father and liked the idea of making him a bit wealthier.
But even if an investment looks like a "sure thing" — and this wasn't quite that — it's not easy to part with most of the money you have in your bank account. My father, as I've mentioned here, was a great worrier. The second the money was invested, he'd be worried: What if Harry's expansion plan did crash and burn? And what if we, the Evaniers, had some sudden, impossible-to-predict emergency that needed those bucks?
There was also a wee bit of conscience involved. Harry broke no laws. His $19.95 picture tubes weren't first-rate but what do you expect for $19.95? You could certainly make the case that he was doing his poorer customers a favor. You could also make the case that there's something a bit sleazy about making money the way he did.
Against all that, my father (and we) had to weigh the fact that this seemed like a pretty good investment. My father, you may recall, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. There are some lines of work where you can get rich if, say, you work for a company that thrives and prospers and they promote you. It doesn't work that way at the I.R.S. My father's income was pretty much locked down for the rest of his life, pension and all. Even if they'd bumped him up to a better job in the department, he would only have made about 5% more. If he was ever going to make a lot more money, he was going to have to take a gamble in something like this. He asked us if we thought he should do it.
My mother voted, basically, "No but if you really want to gamble on this, I'll support you but I'd rather you didn't." She had no idea if it was a good investment or not. She just didn't want to put up with my father worrying night and day about his money…as she knew he would. When my father asked me how I voted, I voted, "I vote that I should not have a vote." I kinda liked the idea of the gamble but something felt wrong about it…something upon which I could not quite put my little finger. Also, I didn't want to feel responsible if he did it and it failed or didn't do it and regretted it…so I said, "It's your money and your decision."
I was sure he'd decide against it but the next day, he surprised us both by saying he was going to do it. He called Harry and said yes. "Great," Harry the G said. "Bring me a check for $3,000 as soon as you can." My father said he'd be right over with it and then he sat down with his checkbook. I thought I noticed a slight tremble in his hand as he made it out. Then he stuffed it into an envelope and asked me, "Want to take a ride?" I said sure.
On the way to Harry's, my father told me, "I'll feel a lot better about this if I know you approve of it. I know you said it's my money but it's really not. My money is our money. It's the money we all live on."
I was impressed that he'd put it that way and that he really wanted my opinion. A lot of fathers wouldn't care what their 14-year-old son said. I'm guessing that's what I was at the time. We were still some distance from Harry's so I said, "Give me two minutes to think about it."
He gave me the two minutes and I tried to figure out what it was about this whole matter that bothered me. Finally I said, "I don't know much about business…but isn't there a rule somewhere that says you never trust your money to anyone whose nickname is The Gonif?"
My father thought for a second. Then he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car. Then he brought out the envelope with the check in it and tore it up. Then he started the car up again and turned a corner so he could head home instead of to Harry's. When he got home, he called Harry and told him he'd thought it over and had changed his mind.
"You're making a big mistake, Bernie," Harry told him.
"Maybe so," he said. "And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity but I don't want to risk my family's security this way."
Harry said the same thing again a few more times — "You're making a big mistake, Bernie" — and then they said goodbye.
Now, this story could end one of two ways. I could tell you that Harry's expansion plans were a disaster; that the whole enterprise collapsed and all the investors lost everything and my father was always grateful that I'd brought him to his senses. Or I could tell you that Harry's new, super-sized TV tube business venture thrived and grew such that even a $3000 investment would have yielded a significant return. That version would end with my father wishing 'til his dying day that he'd gone through with it.
But the truth is that I don't know how Harry made out and my father never knew, either…because my father never spoke to Harry again. He never called Harry and Harry never called him. The only clue I have to the progress of Harry's business is that his ads in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner got larger, then they got smaller, then they stopped appearing. Some years later, so did the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I don't think Harry not advertising in it was the reason but with gonifs, you never know.
Once when I was visiting my father during one of his occasional hospitalizations, I was groping for something to talk about, just to make conversation. Outta the blue, I asked him, "Hey, whatever happened to Harry the Gonif?" He thought for a second and said, "I don't know…and I don't care."
Then he looked at me and said, "Right after I turned down investing in his company, I got to thinking, 'Why is this man my friend?' I didn't enjoy his company. I didn't learn anything from him. I didn't find him particularly interesting. When he called up and said, 'Let's have lunch,' I always thought, 'Oh, Christ! Him again.' It was like a chore. I had to have lunch with Harry." He paused and added, "You know, it's important to have friends in this world but you don't have to make room in your life for every person you meet."
That was one of the wisest, sharpest things I learned from my father. Right after he said that, I took a good, hard look through my address book and realized I had a couple of Harry the Gonifs in there. They were people upon whom I wished no ill will…but I just couldn't explain why I wasted any large chunks of my life on them. Not when there were so many people I liked in this world.
Being polite is fine. You can and should be polite to everyone. I just had to learn not to let these people drag me out to dinner or wrangle invitations to drop by when I literally had nothing in common with them and no interest in anything they had to say. The time I spent with them was time I didn't spend with real friends.
So that was one big thing I learned from him. I was going to add that another was "Never trust your money to anyone whose nickname is The Gonif" but I think he learned that one from me. Either way, it's good advice, too.