New York Connections

Five Tales for a Quiet Sunday

Smith Brothers logo, 1914. In public domain at Wikimedia Commons.

I’m at work on a number of serious pieces on sundry topics, and I expect to start rolling them out this week. Topics will include: (1) Abraham Flexner’s controversial legacy in medical education, (2) troubling aspects of the quest for health equity, (3) pros and cons of effective altruism, (4) damage done by the nicest eugenicist, (5) unconventional minds and medical innovation, (6) rigidity of occupational licensure in healthcare. But for this quiet Sunday, I’ll share a few more offerings from my endless collection of odd anecdotes, as I did in Sunday Name-Dropping and Three Songs, Six Tales.

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Humanity in Manhattan

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I attended a Halloween party in New York City, where both of us lived, in the early 1980s. On that occasion, we dressed as the Smith Brothers—the 19th century confectioners who created America’s first commercially available cough drops. Alanna and I both sported dark suits, bow ties, and glue-on beards (one with a mustache and the other without). The brand’s popularity was somewhat in decline at that point, and we wondered whether anyone would recognize what our costumes were supposed to signify. We each carried a box of the cough drops to flash at anyone who asked. After dark, we walked up Broadway toward the 116th Street subway station, where a graffiti-splattered carriage awaited to take us to the party.

Just outside the gates of Columbia University, a homeless man sat on the sidewalk with his possessions. In those relatively lawless days in New York, there was a certain tension involved in encountering such a man, particularly at night. The general strategy was to avoid eye contact and to walk by as swiftly and distantly as one could without being obvious. We began to veer away from him and accelerate slightly.

Before we had a chance to pass him, however, he shouted out, “AAAAAAAAAAAY! SMITH Brothers! You’re the Smith Brothers!” We stopped, cracked up laughing, and flashed our boxes of cough drops. He roared laughing along with us. After a bit, we waved, wished him a good evening, and went on our way. It was a very humanizing moment in a city where one strived mightily to avoid emotional contact with strangers—and particularly from those in his circumstances.

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Local Market Failure

A close friend and fellow Chase Manhattan banker served in the Peace Corps before I knew him. He lived in a small village in East Africa, where his light skin and reddish hair made him a quite distinctive figure. In the local market, where all prices were negotiated, merchants charged him roughly twice what they charged the locals for everything.

As a future economist, he instinctively understood arbitrage. So, he arranged for a neighbor’s son to do his shopping for him surreptitiously. He told the kid what he wanted and gave him money—promising to pay him part of the difference between the foreigner’s price and the local’s price. After a while, the boy returned with all that my friend ordered, plus change.

My friend looked at the change and said: “Hey, wait a minute. There’s not enough change here. It looks like you paid them the foreigner’s price instead of the local’s price. Why did you do that?” The kid said, “Because the merchants said I was buying everything for you and not for me.” So much for arbitrage in small places.

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Stairway to Heaven, Almost

A colleague at Chase had an enviable job for a while. He was a credit analyst who was periodically sent from our office in the canyons of New York to the Bahamas to audit the bank’s operations and clients there. While there, he would live on a boat and fly on small island-hopper planes to visit clients on various islands.

A friend of his told him of a curious occurrence. The island-hopper on which he was riding took off and immediately starting buffeting violently. The pilots radioed the tower to report their emergency. Oddly, they said, none of the plane’s instruments reported any mechanical problems. The tower asked the pilots to circle around as best they could and to fly near the tower, in hopes that the ground personnel might be able to see the problem. When they did, the pilots heard laughter coming from the radio. “We have you on visual. It seems that the ground crew forgot to remove the stairway before you took off. Just land carefully.” As they did, the stairway disengaged and broke apart on the runway. All was well.

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A Matter of Timing

Also at Chase, I worked for a guy who had been an energy analyst for the CIA and lived for time in Colombia, where commercial airline flights were notoriously and chronically late. One day, he and his wife were preparing to fly back to the U.S. They were in good shape timewise, but he started rushing her. She asked what he was worried about—the planes were never on time, she reminded him. He said he just had a premonition that on this particular day, they they should be on time. They scurried to the airport.

Sure enough, at check-in, they were told to rush, as the plane was about to leave. They did a mad dash through the airport, arriving at the gate 10 minutes before the scheduled departure time. The plane was already pulling away from the gate. The gate agent called the plane and told them to wait and to reopen the door. They dashed again and made it onto the plane. They sat down, out of breath. When things calmed down a bit, he asked the flight attendant why the plane was pulling out before the scheduled time had arrived. She told him, “Oh—this is yesterday’s flight, sir.”

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A Tale of Two Cemeteries

My father-in-law died in the 1970s—before I had met my wife—and was buried in Queens, New York City. His stone was placed over two plots, inscribed with his name and years, and with my mother-in-law’s name and her years left blank. In 1992, living with us near Richmond, Virginia, she lay near death, and a friend who had just lost her own mother advised us to make funeral arrangements before the end arrived. Alanna thought that wise. I called the funeral home, and Alanna called the NYC cemetery. She called me back, as exasperated as she had ever been. The NYC cemetery receptionist told her that the cemetery president was vacationing in Europe and that she would have to call back in two weeks. “My mother will likely die by tomorrow,” she said. “I can’t wait two weeks.” I’ll need to bury her.

The receptionist gave my wife what could be the Official Motto of New York City: “Well, What Do You Want Me to Do About It?” She reiterated that nothing could be done for two weeks.

My wife was beside herself, and I used the opportunity to tell her what I had long thought to myself. I had always been sad that, one day, her mother would be buried far from us and had thought for years that maybe she should move her father southward, where he and his stone could be re-interred in my family’s plot. She thought it was a great idea. She called the NYC woman back and told her of her plans, and the woman said, “I’m not sure we can allow you to disinter him.” Alanna was explosively angry—which she never is. She told her dear friend Carolyn—a great Southern lady—and Carolyn said, “Honey, I got a pickup truck and a couple of real big shovels, and I’d be glad to take a ride with you to New York.”   

Alanna’s mother died the next day, and we buried her in my hometown, Petersburg, Virginia, having purchased side-by-side plots. In a few days, Alanna called the woman and threatened legal action if the cemetery interfered in the transfer. Her father and his stone were soon heading south on Amtrak. Arlie Andrews, the owner of our local monument company (and a former mayor of Petersburg) was in charge of retrieving the casket and stone at the train station and reburying him next to his beloved wife.

The day of the arrival, Arlie called me up and said there had been a “little problem” at the train station. I was a bit unnerved by that, and our conversation proceeded something like the following. (And I don’t remember the exact dollar figures, but these are close.)

• “Problem? What kind of problem?”

• “Fellow at the train station handed me a bill for $6,000 to cover the disinterment and shipping. I told him it doesn’t cost $6,000 to dig a casket up and ship it 360 miles.”

• “What did he say?”

• “He said that’s what the New York cemetery demanded and that he couldn’t turn the body and stone over to me unless I paid him $6,000.”

• “So, what did you do?”

• “I told him he could just keep your father-in-law and the stone – that I didn’t need them all that badly.”

• “WHAT? … What did he say?”

• “He asked me what he was supposed to do with them. I said, ‘I dunno. I’m sure you’ll find something to do with them.’ And I headed out the door.”

• “What happened then???!!!”

• “He started calling for me. He seemed just a little bit upset.”

• “And???”

• “He asked me how much I thought the bill should be, and I said, ‘Oh, about $2,000.’ Then, he said he couldn’t possibly release the body for that amount. So, I wished him luck on finding somewhere to put the body and the stone.”

• “And then??!!”

• “And then, well, he said he thought maybe $2,000 was a pretty fair amount after all. We’ll be burying your father-in-law this afternoon, and we’ll set the stone in place soon after. You just get me a check for $2,000 whenever you can.”

That last story, my friends, tells you all you need to know about why Alanna and I left New York City and headed southward to spend our days.

Lagniappe

In our New York years, Alanna and I often heard the great Stephane Grappelli, be it at small clubs in Greenwich Village or on the stage at Carnegie Hall. He’s best remembered as a co-founder, along with Django Reinhardt, of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, in 1934. A half-century later, Reinhardt was 30 years gone, but Grappelli was still a force of nature in jazz. Over the years, he played with everyone, including Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Quincy Jones, Earl Hines, McCoy Tyner, Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Dave Grisman, Julian Lloyd Webber, Toots Thielemans, Paul Simon, and Pink Floyd. Watching him on stage was a wonder; the moment he picked up his violin, absolute joy would beam from his face. Grappelli passed away in 1997 at age 89. Here he is, playing “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.