The Infants and Children's Novelty Association.

The Infants & Children’s Novelties Association.

My father headed a trade association of small manufacturers, “contractors”, in the garment business, mostly Jewish, Italian and Chinese. 

It was called the Infants & Children’s Novelties Association. Later, probably because few people knew what a “novelty” was anymore, it changed its name to the Infants & Children’s Sportwear Association.

I didn’t know what a novelty was until someone said it was “snow suits and things like that”. Snowsuits were one piece Eskimo-like winter protection for toddlers, with mittens attached to the cuffs by strings. The kids disappeared in the snow suits and the mittens disappeared in their thousands, despite the strings. Not losing them, that would have been a novelty.

I never discovered what “things like that” referred to. “Sportswear” covered all sins, and novelties.

The men who made up the association were owners of small garment factories or “shops”, 25 to 100+ machines. They were called “contractors” because they contracted to work for the big manufacturers who actually designed and branded the clothes and sold them to the Macys, Gimbels, Lord & Taylors and Saks Fifth Avenues. 

While big manufacturers like Carl Rosen of Puritan could be elegant, imposing men in finely tailored suits with race horses in the country and famous models on their arms, the contractors were usually short, pugnacious men who smoked cigars a few sizes too large, talked a few decibels to loud, argued as a way of life, eventually agreed and made deals.

Almost none had been to college but all had degrees in hard knocks, some advanced.

As businessmen eeking out their percentages in a seasonal business, and as the low men on the food chain, they knew failure as well as success. This was the norm.  In the garment business disasters were dire and numerous but almost never fatal. One good season could push you through several bad ones. Contractors were optimists. Like the Brooklyn Dodgers they had an unshakeable faith in next year. No matter how many times you struck out this season, there was always the next one. And like Brazilian soccer players, they were known by a single name: Karasic, Russo, Liu, Saporta, Famiglia.  

First names were for wives or girlfriends---or both.

They were moguls in miniature, but more human. They were all from somewhere else, somewhere worse. All spoke English with foreign accents, but rarely the same ones.

But now, in the 50s and 60’s, they were Americans. New York was America and the greatest place they could imagine. They took nothing for granted and worked 26 hours a day. They couldn’t believe their luck.

And although they worked in an industry they themselves would call “dog-eat-dog”, they saw no reason to consume each other. They were first to put their hands in their pockets for a person (a suddenly paralysed basketball player), a family (of a policeman shot in the line of duty), even a country (Israel Bonds!). They were generous in the way only people who have really seen how bad the world can be are generous.  For them, the Second World War was yesterday, the Great Depression last week. They never forgot either.

So while they were tough cookies, nobody's fools, and fit enough to survive and prosper in the rough and tumble New York garment business, they didn't subscribe to the 'survival of the fittest'. They were not social Darwinists.

Sure, it was a tough world all right, but that was why you shouldn’t be a shit, especially a complete shit. And there was no notion that for someone to win someone else had to lose.

They were all less than a generation away from the Old World---in southern Italy or eastern Poland or western China--- where the opportunity for a person to advance, no matter what their energy, intelligence or talent, was zero. So this world wasn't that tough.

In mid-20th Century America, they were unexpectedly successful. They grew their businesses from a few sewing machines to 75 or a 100 or more. Their “shops” helped thousands of women support families.  Some contractors were only a few years off the boat, but already they had bought their own houses and drove their own cars and made good lives for their families in Long Branch, Asbury Park, Syosset and Yonkers.

They were capitalists, also citizens, part of the post-war rising tide that lifted all, or most, boats. Immigrants, they had earned the right to push their chests out as Americans.

They weren’t rich.  Who dreamed of rich? What did rich have to do with it? Rich was for people in the glossy magazines and air-conditioned movies in CinemaScope, an MGM fantasy with Tab Hunter or Rock Hudson and Doris Day, good for two hours on a Saturday night. Going to restaurants, going to Florida for two weeks, raising a family, have a son or daughter go to college: that was truly rich.

They were grateful for all that, and gratitude made them dangerous. When Henry Caruso invited our family to dinner at his house in the Jersey Highlands, course after course were carried from the kitchen by regimes of Caruso women. Platters of pasta were followed by eggplant parmesan. Then roasted chickens. Then veal scalappini. And when it was impossible to consider eating another thing, out came an enormous platter of pot roast and vegetables. 

It was a feast designed to not so much to feed your hunger, but rather batter it into submission. 

Desserts finally made their appearance. Cakes, canollies stuffed to bursting, biscotti in several flavors. You had to eat something of everything and say yes to more, even as your insides pleaded no.  It was ungracious, it would be bad manners, it would be remembered not to.

Finally out of the kitchen, like a curtain call, slipped the maestro of the meal, Mrs Caruso. Up to that point she had only been a head darting in and out of the dining room, a nervous mother hen checking on the appetite of her chicks.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese contractors held their gastronomic assaults in Chinatown.

Tony Liu’s dinners were in a small and undoubtedly family-owned restaurant off Mott Street. They consisted of uncounted plates of beef, pork, duck, sweet and sour fish and several impossible to define and you probably wouldn’t want to know anyway dishes.  Dinner always ended with winter melon soup. Winter melon, it turns out, is not a melon but a rather large gourd, rude in shape to boot: long, fat, curved and hairy. But the soup was spectacular and in spite of being gorged, we all waited for it. Leather pouches filled with marbles—or pearls for all I knew---were going away gifts for the ladies.

The contractors' hospitality was not limited to the table. When my mother was in the hospital dealing with an unpleasant but not life-threatening "procedure", her room could have been that of the chairman of the Florist’s Association. Then Hymie Saporta, a Sephardic Jew of unbridled enthusiasm, unmatched generosity and zero inhibitions marched in dressed in his "new $400 suit", a fact he pointed out with great pride to my mother, whose interest in sartorial detail was at that point at a low ebb. He carried into that arboretum what in a forest might have been a small tree but in a hospital room was more Redwood.

  

There were always tickets to be had for courtside seats to the Knicks at the old Madison Square Garden on 48^th Street and 8^th Avenue. It must be said, given the hapless Knicks of that era---Kenny Sears, Ray Felix, Willie Naulls and Richie Guerin—even those tickets weren’t always in such great demand by other than me and my pals. There were also World Series tickets to Yankee Stadium, signed baseballs and tickets to the latest and impossible-to-get Broadway shows.

Today this may look like bribery, but it was really gratitude.

It’s easy to see why. My father helped negotiate contracts between his contractors, the big manufacturers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He knew and was respected by all the key players, Union and manufacturers. He was a confident of many senior Union officials. They asked for and valued his judgment. But he always had his members’ interests at heart. The contractors knew it. They also knew he was smart and honest as well as being well-connected.  And that he was more interested in having influence than having money. The ultimate net-worker, he made the matches and smoothed the way to keep the shops working and profitable, the machines humming, the workers employed. He knew the individual strengths of each of the shops and matched them with the appropriate jobs. Most of all, in a competitive industry with no small egos, he knew how to find the common ground that made the industry work. One does well, all do well was his MO. It used to be this country’s.

Now, of course, that idea would be a novelty.