Monster CashPicture these two brothers who own...

Monster Cash

Picture these two brothers who own and operate a toy store in Philadelphia.

Toys sound like an easy sell, but merchandising has turned out to mean heavy competition, long hours and short or no vacations.

The Goldman brothers decided that they don’t want to work so hard and are sitting around thinking about a solution.

Darron Goldman, who is twentysomething, turns to his thirtysomething brother, Bruce, and smiles. “What we need,” says Darron, “is a seasonal store we only have to operate part time.”

Bruce smiles too.

They pick their favorite holiday and run with it, starting with their own store and then crossing state lines. The Halloween Adventure stores in Woodland Hills, Northridge and Sherman Oaks show how far the pair have come in seven years.

In 1984, after they first turned their Philadelphia toy shop into a Halloween wonderland, the results, and the money, told them to expand. By 1986, they put in a call to uncle Lenny Goldman in California because, as a retired corporate manager, he could help them structure their expanding business.

Uncle Lenny left his Northridge home for Philadelphia for a two-year stint that helped launch his nephews in what has become a nationwide chain.

This year, there are 36 stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Florida, and seven in Southern California and the business, even during the recession, shows no sign of slowing.

Each store, open from the beginning of September till Halloween, is a wonderland of spooky, funny, eccentric, wild and trendy kitsch, where large and small children enter as children and emerge knowing that they are now ballerinas, turtles, monsters, nurses, Terminators or worse.

According to Uncle Lenny, now back in the San Fernando Valley, the stores have become a multimillion-dollar business, a statement one of the company’s wholesalers confirms.

“They buy more than $1 million worth of Halloween gear from us annually, and we are just one of their suppliers,” says Richard Tinari, sales manager for Ruby’s Costumes in Manhattan. They are “definite major players in the novelty business,” he says.

Although the Goldmans may have refined a marketing concept in the two-month-a-year store, their success has effectively trashed the idea that originally got them going. They thought that they would work about three months of the year and enjoy the good life for the rest.

With the success of their business, according to Uncle Lenny, they now work at least 10 months of the year, attending conventions, looking at merchandise, keeping up with trends and looking over lease properties.

Air Force

Burbank’s Peter and Michelle Albiez are agro aviators.

They drive to their respective jobs Monday through Friday and fly north to work their Central California farm every weekend.

They belong to the International Flying Farmers organization, whose members consider their aircraft an essential farm tool.

“When we get together, we talk about farming and flying and then go to see a neighboring farm or ranch,” says Michelle, who is on the board of the California chapter that, among other things, is dedicated to promoting ways that aircraft can help the rancher.

In California, they see fruit and veggies growing and, in the Midwest, it’s likely to be wheat. It may not sound like a peak experience, “but there is a good feeling of fellowship and warmth,” she says of the group’s get-togethers.

The Albiezes have been airborne longer than they have been landed, having met when she was taking flying lessons at Burbank Airport in 1972, where he was keeping his private plane.

On their first sort-of date, he took her home in his Cessna Cardinal from an air race in Arizona, and they’ve been up in the clouds, more or less, ever since.

She is an insurance consultant and he creates special effects for the movies, such as the “Airport” series, “Blue Thunder” and “Spaceballs.”

“Peter and I bought the farm in Lindsay for our retirement in a few years,” Michelle says. “But until we are ready to move there permanently, we need to get up there every weekend.”

Although they do have reliable help, the Albiezes are the primary caretakers of the kiwi and orange farm near Visalia.

“We planned to take care of it ourselves, and we like doing it,” Michelle says, “even though it does take up almost every weekend.”

By flying, they save more than four driving hours every weekend, Albiez says, “hours of flying over beautiful country rather than being stuck in traffic.”

Although the Albiezes could fall into the classification of gentlemen farmers, she says most of the members of the Flying Farmers are into the agro business full time.

“Most of them have huge ranches or farms where the plane has pretty much taken the place of ground vehicles or animals,” she says.

Honored Shooter

If you are into serious film and filmmakers, the name Donald Livingston is one to tuck away for future reference.

The creatively driven Livingston, 18, is a director-in-progress, approaching his chosen artistic field with an idiosyncratic eye.

One of the 1991 Chatsworth High School graduate’s student film projects was titled “The Escalation of a Highly Influential Teen Psychotic’s Self-Destructive Desires,” and told, according to its auteur, the story of how a young man can be driven to suicide.

Although not all of his work at Chatsworth was that dark, it was all, according to his film instructor, Richard Doran, “visually exciting and strikingly abstract.”

“Everyone in the class had a filmatic niche and I was the avant-garde lunatic,” says Livingston, who is attending Valley College in Van Nuys, hoping to broaden his intellectual horizons before applying to the UCLA or USC schools of film.

The filmmaker was one of 400 young people chosen from around the state to attend the California State Summer School for the Arts last summer.

Livingston says he admires many creative eclectics, including writer William Burroughs and director Gus van Sant, but like most trail-breaking talents, his ideas, he says, are reactions to his own experiences, not variations on someone else’s theme.

There’s J. R.

You never know who you are going to find at the Warner Center Marriott because, like many area hotels, it is often used for location shoots by television and film companies.

While most of the visitors have been thrilled to ride the elevator with Larry Hagman of “Dallas,” or exchange smiles with Linda Evans when “Dynasty” was taping, there was the occasional guest who was not amused, General Manager Rene Boskoff says.

“We had a film starring Stacy Keach shooting around the hotel entrance recently,” Boskoff says. “And for a couple of minutes, people couldn’t get in or out the front door.”

While most of the guests watched the shoot with interest, one made his displeasure known.

“He said he had had a rough day and he wanted to get to his room,” Boskoff says. “And I agreed that he had been inconvenienced since we are, after all, first a hotel.”

By the next day, Boskoff’s staff had arranged for the grumbly hotel guest to have his picture taken with Keach and all, according to Boskoff, was forgiven.

Overheard

“The leading cause of stress in my life is my life.”

--Woman to companion at a Sherman Oaks mall