Scrapland Tales

By Si Wakesberg

Si Wakesberg is New York Bureau Chief for Scrap.

Here are a few vignettes from my decades of travel and experiences in the scrap
industry.

Sinatra Close-Up. While Frank Sinatra’s image was there for me to see practically all my life—in magazines, on TV, in movies—I actually saw him close-up three times, all associated somehow with the scrap industry. They were images one doesn’t easily forget.

At a fall meeting of the National Association of Secondary Material Industries (NASMI) in Miami Beach—in those days NASMI’s fall meetings were like miniconventions—we were housed at the then-fabulous Fountainebleu Hotel, at which Sinatra happened to be the headlining cabaret star. It was prime Sinatra in those days, and everyone fought for admission to hear him perform.

NASMI President Charles Rubenstein of Central Metal Co. Inc. (Plainville, Conn.) took a group of us for dinner to the cabaret and was given the ringside table. It was a picture-perfect view of Sinatra, who was being very casual, smoking a cigarette, drinking, and managing to put across a song at the same time.

Leaning over our table at one point during his performance, Sinatra said to Rubenstein’s wife, “How about sharing your drink, honey?” She speedily gave him her glass. He tossed it down and handed it back to her, then continued singing. His alcohol-hazed voice had a special poignancy. In that moment when he leaned over, I got a closer look at Frank Sinatra than I every imagined I would.

I met Sinatra a second time while on vacation in western France. I was in Biarritz, once a city to which kings and queens traveled, staying at one of the most fabled hotels in the world, Le Palais, built by Napoleon III and later converted by the French government into a hotel. Why was I staying in this ritzy place? It was recommended by Fred Strauss, a remarkable scrap merchant from New Jersey.

“Do you want to stay at a hotel that you’ll remember forever?” he asked. “How long are you going to be there—three or four days? It’s expensive, but you’ll thank me afterward.”

It was most impressive. The second day, a quiet Monday, I decided to explore the pool. I was alone at first, then another figure appeared across the pool. It wasn’t difficult to identify the person as Frank Sinatra. He sat and opened a book. He nodded to me across the pool, but we never talked. The next day I learned that he had left.

The third time our paths crossed was in California. I was there for a regional industry meeting in Los Angeles and had arrived a day early. Checking in at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, I found myself standing in the same line with Sammy Davis Jr. Then, who should appear but Frank Sinatra, coat in hand, to talk with Sammy.

I learned from an enthusiastic bell captain that Davis was getting married the next day to Swedish actress Mae Britt, and the ceremony would be at the hotel. Curious onlookers were already gathering and whispering, “There’s Frank Sinatra.” The wedding took place as arranged—but the marriage, alas, didn’t last long.

There’s an old saying that if your paths cross three times, you or the other party must spring for drinks. I’d have been happy to buy Frank Sinatra a drink, but he undoubtedly had enough patrons.

Scrapyard Masterpieces. Long ago—so long ago that names, dates, and places are now only a blur—I visited a large scrapyard somewhere in the Pittsburgh district and had a strange and memorable experience. Taken, like a tourist, on a journey through the yard, which had some of the latest equipment, I was suitably impressed and made notes in my reporter’s notebook.

It had rained the previous day. As we tramped through the yard, I wondered why I was wearing my good shoes, which by this time were encrusted with mud.

We ended the tour at a small brick building that stood in the center of the scrapyard and evidently housed the office. My guide asked me in a low voice to please wipe my feet on a mat that lay at the foot of the door. I thought it was ironic excess but did as I was asked.

I wasn’t prepared for what followed. As I stepped into the room, it was as if I had been transported into another world—into a museum, in fact. For on the walls of this office hung some of the most wonderful and most expensive treasures of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Real originals. I was goggle-eyed.

Memory is a deep well down which we send one bucket after another in the hope that they will come up with glistening water. In William Zinsser’s fascinating book “Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of the Memoir,” he says, “Memory, one of the most powerful of a writer’s tools, is also one of the most unreliable: A boy’s remembered truth is often different from his parents’ remembered truth.”

So, did I really see those paintings? If, over time, some buckets have come up empty, or half-empty, it’s no wonder. Ask me to swear on a stack of Bibles, and I will demur for fear of perjury. But you can take it from me that what I saw that afternoon actually happened. This wasn’t virtual reality; it was reality as my astonished gaze fell on those works by Monet, Cézanne, and Degas hanging on the walls in that anonymous scrapyard.

Chicago Scrap Czar. I wish I could recall in more detail some evenings I spent with Harold Weinstein, who was a dynamo in the ferrous scrap industry and, for a while, president of the powerful Chicago Chapter of the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel.

A flamboyant and colorful character (there was gossip that he served as a model for a character in a play about the scrap industry), Weinstein was well-known throughout the scrap industry and nowhere so well as in Chicago. One night, after a meeting of the Chicago Chapter, a few of us were standing around schmoozing, when Harold bustled over and announced imperiously, “You guys are coming with me. We’re going out.” The “you guys” referred to about eight of us and surprisingly included me.

As we squeezed into a couple of cabs, we looked at each other and asked, “Where are we going?” No one knew, it seemed, but no one dared ask. At our destination, we found ourselves pushed and shoved into one of those celebrity nightclubs of the era. It was crowded. Tables jostled each other so that the waiters could hardly weave their way through with the drinks. A very tiny space was left open on the dance floor.

The maitre d’ rushed over to greet Weinstein with many a “Sir” and “Yes, Mr. Weinstein.” In no time, two tables appeared on the dance floor and our party was seated smack-dab in the center. When the show began—yes, of course there was a show—we had the prime seats. “Oh, Harold does that all the time,” said the fellow sitting next to me. Harold Weinstein was host on many such occasions in the night life of Chicago during his reign as a czar of the scrap industry.

Recalling ‘Uncle Lou.’ Weinstein wasn’t the only interesting and dynamic character I came across in my travels through scrapland, of course. One of my favorites was Louis Gordon—or “Uncle Lou,” as some of us called him—from up Boston way. Lou took care of nonferrous scrap for his firm while brother Frank handled ferrous.

We were at an industry convention in Chicago, returning to our hotel after dinner, when Gordon said with a straight face to one of the hotel’s elevator men, “Listen, I’d like to buy this elevator for the next two hours. How about $50?” The astonished elevator man studied him to see if he was joking, but Lou was holding a $50 bill.  “Yes sir,” he said quickly. “You understand that for the next two hours, no one except people in my party are to use this elevator,” Gordon said. 

“I understand sir,” the man replied, pocketing the money.

There were three or four elevators in the hotel. I noticed about an hour later that there was a sign on this one that simply said, “Out of order.”

“I hate to crowd into an elevator going down to the banquet,” Gordon remarked, as if to explain his action. On another occasion, we were in a restaurant finishing our appetizers when Gordon hailed the waiter. “If we can get a clean table within five minutes you get $20,” he said. Like a magician, the waiter pulled off the old table cloth, dishes and all, and inside of five minutes we had a new cloth, new knives and forks, and a smiling waiter clasping a $20 bill.

Faces in the Crowd. I was sitting on a stool in one of those mediocre airport cafeterias, sipping coffee and reading the New York Times, waiting for a plane to Pittsburgh, when a gentleman sat down on an adjacent stool. He looked vaguely familiar, but having met hundreds and hundreds of people in the scrap business, my recollections sometimes dim. At one point, however, the gentleman put down his newspaper and looked at me. 

“Aren’t you Si Wakesberg?” he asked, adding, “I’m Ralph Ablon.” I hadn’t seen or talked with him for more than 10 years. But keen executive that he was, he remembered my name.

I first met Ablon in Philadelphia when he was working his way up the corporate ladder at Luria Brothers. Over the years, I interviewed him several times, wrote about him, got him to talk at meetings, and watched his rise in the world of metals and finance.

You could tell early on that he was a corporate genius, one who would make a name for himself, which he certainly did. Having achieved success in the scrap industry, he moved out into the broader world of corporate finance. Ablon must have met hundreds, possibly thousands of people in the years since we’d last seen each other, yet he remembered my name from the old scrap days. In a way, that was the measure of the man.

How well does memory serve one? How much of what is remembered is true? I can only quote Russell Baker’s famous line to his wife as he prepared to write his memoirs

—“I am now going upstairs to invent the story of my life.” •