Driven by Depression’s Lessons

Len Reiter is president of the SAGE Society at Cal State Northridge, where he is in a group that is studying philosophers. He also plays golf on Wednesdays and watches his investments on Thursdays. Retirement is busy, but his life is not as hectic as it was during his two careers. Reiter and his wife, Helen, live in Northridge.

When I grew up, I was a typical Depression kid, and we were poor, plain poor. I can remember when my dad didn’t work for some periods at a time. I grew up with all hand-me-downs. The only thing that would ever be new was shoes.

More than anything that was the driving force. I was going to work hard and I was going to get somewhere. I think I knew no one would ever give it to me. I didn’t have a family I was going to inherit it from.

I had been in the Marines, and then I graduated from college in ’47 with a B.S. in economics.

When my wife and I first came out here, we borrowed $200 and we headed cross-country. It was pretty gutsy. We arrived in ‘49, and you couldn’t come with much less but strange as it may seem I had no real doubts that we would somehow get placed and do it.

For 20 years after college, I was involved in retailing. I was a department store buyer, a store manager and then I opened my own store in Reseda. I had one of the largest independent stores there. For four years, almost every day when I came home my wife said, “Are we going bankrupt?” When you open a store, you don’t have any capital to talk about. We lived quite frugally through the first four years.

A survey taken in 1965 said that due to the lack of parking in Reseda and things like that the people would gravitate to indoor malls. It’s a shame, you know, because you worked so hard to make something, but I felt it was just a matter of time until we would be squeezed.

Although I was in my mid-40s and I had children, I thought before I opened another store that I would like to try being on the other side of the world, maybe as a salesman or be in the factory business. It sounded like the grass was greener over there.

I went to work for a company as an assistant to the general manager, and before you know it I was running operations. I began to take care of some of the biggest accounts, and I found that I really liked the selling thing, so I moved to another company as sales manager.

This worked out very well. I not only did a good job and I made money, but they didn’t want to lose me. It was the kind of company that was small, wholly owned, and I was given an opportunity to become one of the owners. I enjoyed helping us grow from a small company to a big company.

I was very competitive, and I worked about two weeks every week, and I had terrible hours I inflicted upon myself. I was a goal person, and I went from level to level, and I was really driven. I had an office in New York as well as my office here, so I lived on planes. If I wasn’t in New York, I was in Chicago, Detroit.

It was a pretty hectic life, so I took early retirement, at 62, and I’m glad, because I figured this thing is going to kill me. To have started out in one career and shifted at 45 into a whole new career and end up with the two satisfying careers was pretty nice.

Coming from the Depression era, it wasn’t so important what we had now as long as 10 years from now we’re going to be on our way to something. I think the biggest problem of the children of the last 20, 30 years is that they grew up in the affluent society and they want to start out married at the same level that it may have taken their parents 30 years or more to reach.

Young folks are evidently very comfortable operating in a debt society, owing for every toy in the house and every toy in the car. Hopefully they are going to have the strength somewhere in their makeup to straddle a bad recession if, God forbid, we get one.