The Oppenheimer Report 8/30/10

Today’s rant begins with my consternation about the seemingly random pricing of cross border postage and shipping. The other day, we ordered some exhibit pedestals from Florida for an upcoming glass show. It was going to cost $250 to send them up here to Katrine, Ontario, but if I had them sent to Buffalo, it was only $60. It’s another $190 simply for the privilege of crossing the border … what exactly are we supposed to be gaining from the NAFTA agreement? My other pet peeve is Canada Post. The mail system in Canada has become, in my opinion, a giant cluster f-ck of disorganization, as well as ridiculously expensive. How is it that it can cost just about one dollar to send a post card to the States, but only 25 cents to instantly fax a four page document there? I’m also finding that Canada Post seems to lose a lot of things I send to the U.S. Twice in the last year I have paid their exorbitant rates to send small packages to the States only to have them lost with no apparent accountability. One item I sent out was returned to me several months later, postmarked halfway around the world, with no explanation why it never got where it was supposed to go. While these were not valuable items, I expected them to get where they were going without having to re-send them. Forget about disgruntled postal workers, what about the disgruntled customers?




Reading the CNN business section online the other day, I came across an article about the five most affordable housing markets in the U.S. As soon as I saw the story, I thought to myself, “Gee, Buffalo housing is cheap, I wonder if Buffalo made the grade.” Sure enough, Buffalo, N.Y. is rated number five for most affordable housing. Of course, the example they gave was a ranch style house in Amherst, N.Y., one of the more desirable suburbs. If one is willing to move into the ever-shrinking inner city, the houses become even more affordable. When I lived in Buffalo, in rem ( i.e for back taxes) , one could purchase a habitable, inner city house for ten thousand dollars or less. Add to that the cost of a few locks and a shotgun, and it’s still a great deal. Periodically, I receive a market report from one of the local real estate companies in Buffalo, and I am constantly amazed by how inexpensive good houses are in the vicinity of my Mom and Dad’s house. A large brick home with a half acre lot and a detached garage, located in one of Buffalo’s more prestigious neighborhoods, recently sold in the city for about $400,000. In Toronto, that same home would cost seven times as much. A long time ago, when I was still working for my father selling industrial real estate, he and I sold the largest of the three Trico wiper blade plants to a Toronto developer. They couldn’t believe how inexpensive it was, and while nobody locally could see a future for this obsolete, eight storey, 700,000 square foot industrial facility, these developers jumped at the opportunity. At some considerable expense, they have since been transformed it into the Tri-Main Center. It is now a viable, profit-making multi-use industrial facility, home to many small businesses in Buffalo. Now that there is some talk about re-developing the downtown core into a high tech medical research campus, perhaps Buffalo will become a less well kept secret.



A propos to nothing, the above photograph was taken in Rose’s apartment, and I love the hat. I’m thinking of wearing it to a Shriner’s convention. Perhaps I could wear it to my next Jewish wedding as a sort of frontier yarmulke. As for the mink stoles, who decided that having a dead animal draped around one’s neck was a desirable fashion statement? Do you like my stole … I skinned it myself? Whenever I see a “coonskin” cap, I am reminded of a radio “blooper” I once heard. Advertising a mattress for a children’s bed, which included an illustration of Daniel Boone, the ad read: “Hey kids, come and see Daniel Boone in action on the bed” Yowza! I don’t want to think of Daniel Boone that way.



Happy week before Labor Day. Where did the summer go?





Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/23/10

Today, the topic of discussion is the stuff we leave behind. Last Thursday, I had the dubious honor of taking my Aunt Rose’s last remaining possessions out of her apartment. It took more than a month to go through all her belongings, papers, etc., and to clean out the apartment. Rose had a habit of squirreling away money in strange places, so we didn’t want to simply throw things away without going through them first. It was a little like a treasure hunt. I found one earring which may or may not have a diamond in it. Finder’s keepers. The process left my mother-in-law and Shauna emotionally exhausted, and when it came time to take out that final load, I volunteered to do it alone. I’ve done this before, that is, I’ve helped clean out the dwelling of a deceased person, and it is a strange experience. We all hold on to possessions, because they are mementos, or we think it’s valuable, or we simply forget we have it. Over time those things adds up. You never think about the person who will be charged with disposing of your belongings. That inflatable party doll way in the back of the top shelf of your closet may come back to tarnish your reputation long after you are no longer around to explain that it was just a souvenir from a college prank. Rose was not a hoarder, but she had a lot of stuff in an apartment that was less than 1500 square feet in size. We took somewhere around fifteen garbage bags full of clothes to the charity; there was china, and silverware, and old vacuum cleaners, liniment bottles, from the 1940’s. I found an old bottle of iodine that still had the price sticker on it: 29 cents. The furniture was by far the hardest to dispose of. One of her couches was so big we were going to have to cut it in half to get it in the elevator. I imagine that Rose either inherited it with the apartment, or some poor schmucks schlepped it up eight flights of stairs when she bought it. We were lucky enough to find someone moving into the building who needed a couch, and conveniently, he moved in one floor below Rose’s place. We helped him move this monstrosity down to his place, and it must have weighed a ton. There were three of us, and we were each of us somehow injured in the process of moving it down the stairs. At one point, I was pinned against the wall of the landing. The guy who was taking the couch cut his finger and dripped blood all over his clothes, and our other mover slipped on the stairs and injured his leg. We also knocked out a fluorescent light fixture, scratched the paint in the stairwell, and tore some wallpaper in the hallway. Other than that the move went quite smoothly. Rose had a lot of strange “tshaktshkes” or knick knacks she’d acquired in her almost 95 years. There was some hideous ceramic wear, some Pre-WWII Japanese souvenirs, and the piece de resistance: a 2’x5’ enamel-mosaic-mounted-on-wood depiction of a chariot race, that NOBODY in the family wanted. Mysteriously, on one of our last trips down to the car, when we forgot to lock the apartment, it was taken. Who knew that thievery could be good karma?


This move was a wake up call to all of us who let our possessions build up. I have been through this exercise many times, moving to and from boarding school, college, my parent’s house and my own house in Buffalo, and finally, into two apartments in Toronto. A lot of possessions didn’t make the cut along the way, and at the time it was hard to part with them. I still wish I had kept my bright yellow Rock ‘n Roll Babylon tee shirt, with the tongue-wagging demon on the front. I think Shauna must have made that disappear. It was my mother-in-law who learned the most from this exercise. She has for a long time denied the need to cull her basement collection of “acquisitions”, and she is now determined to spare her children the aggravation of sorting through it all after her demise. In the final analysis, what do all these things mean anyway? Of course, only we can decide what is valuable to us. The trick is to find one or two things that have meaning to you, and get rid of all the rest. Easier said than done. My mother has a big house full of lovely antiques, acquired over fifty years of marriage. Some of them were probably good investments. But I don’t really care that much about their monetary worth, and most of it will likely be disposed of in an estate sale. All I really care about, the things I’d really miss if they were destroyed, are the things that remind me of my life with my family. There is a very noisy steeple clock in our den that dates back to my earliest memories from our first house in Kenmore, N.Y., and a kitchen table that was our first dining room table. A few weeks ago, in a moment of bittersweet lucidity, Mom grumbled about the uselessness of all these possessions. It was as if she suddenly realized that “you can’t take it with you” so what’s the point. I had to remind her that the point is that, for my father, my sister, and I, these things we collected over time adorned a home, which was and still is, a lovely place to live. Alone they are just possessions, but in that house, they were each of them a valuable piece of a memory. You can’t buy or sell memories, and who is to say whether your favorite memento is a valuable Edwardian dining room buffet or a not-so-valuable,circa 1950 alligator ash tray from Florida. Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/16/10

Last Saturday I participated in my second annual Western New York Poker Run in Buffalo. The rain held off, the event drew around 58 boats this year, and a good time was had by all (of those whose boats ran) . There was some question as to whether or not the 3-4 foot waves would make the last leg of the run, down to Sunset Bay, a little too uncomfortable for the smaller boats, but the organizers decided to proceed as planned. Once we left the protection of the Buffalo Harbor it was a bit of a bumpy ride, but the trip was more than tolerable. The biggest problem was not the rough seas but the enormous cross chop generated by fifty-eight V-8-driven boats traveling in the same direction. Because it is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie can be challenging for small craft on a windy day. Waves tend to be steep and deep, and sometimes the “slop chop” conditions generated by other boaters make for a rough ride on plane. While traveling off plane is an option on a high freeboard fishing boat like mine, it is not a good way to travel in a deep-V offshore “Cigarette” style of boat. Those boats only perform well on plane. My friend Bob is an accomplished rough water operator and he piloted his twin-engine 27’ Magnum (see photo above) through the tricky chop with relative ease. Although his boat is, by offshore powerboat standards, an antique -- his boat is over 37 years old -- and while there were many larger, newer, more seaworthy boats in the run, we held our own and made it to the final destination before many of the faster boats. It’s not always about how fast your boat can run, but how fast you are capable of piloting it in rough seas. At one point, as we barreled through the chop at about 60MPH, I heard the roar of high performance V-8s coming up on our port side, and turned in time to watch three 35+foot catamaran speedboats pass us as if we were standing still. One of the larger “cats” in the run was capable of speeds approaching 150MPH. For me, this is the best part of the poker run: watching truly high performance offshore boats running fast on open water. I enjoy boat shows, but for me, there is no greater thrill than the spectacle of three or four dozen high performance speedboats barreling through the water at high speed. Add rough water to the equation and the fun doubles. The run (not a race) officially ended when we picked up the final card of our poker hand at the last checkpoint, 30 miles south of Buffalo at Sunset Bay. There we had a beer and a bite to eat, and then, as the clouds rolled in from the West, we headed back to Buffalo. The conditions for the ride back couldn‘t have been better. The southwesterly winds had died down and the combination of the smooth rolling waves and the following sea provided us with more than a few great jumps.


Celebrity fossil Zsa Zsa Gabor (93) is down for the count after complications from hip surgery. I’m guessing her cop-beating days are numbered. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell President Obama’s vacated Senate seat in 2008, is presently waiting to hear the verdict of what has so far been a hung jury. Apparently, his attorney, in his closing statement said something to the effect of “my client is not the sharpest knife in the drawer but he’s no crook”. As Steve Martin quipped in one of his old comedy routines, two simple words, “I forgot” , can extricate one from so many tight situations. Rape, murder, fraud … I simply forgot those things were illegal, sorry. Can’t blame me for being stupid. Radio talk show host Dr. Laura Slessinger used the “N” word 11 times the other day during her call in radio talk show, in response to the comments of a female African-American caller, sparking indignation from the African American community and ultimately prompting her to make a public apology. Her contrition might have saved her job; look what happened to shock jock Don Imus after his ill-considered racist remarks. His verbal diarrhea yanked him off the throne of success faster than you can say “would you like fries with that?” I’ve listened to her show more than a few times when I’m in the car, and in my opinion Dr. Laura is a first class “bee-otch” … but I don’t think she’s a racist. Insensitive perhaps, but apparently that’s her M.O. Controversy sells radio time, and it’s sometimes a fine line when you’re pushing the envelope, trying to be edgy. I think Slessinger was unsuccessfully trying to make the point that certain derogatory words or expressions must be taken in context. Black people use the “N” word with impunity, but people will inevitably get offended when a white person uses it. These days, I hear and see a lot of things that I think cross the line, and I suppose the lesson here is more tolerance, AND more sensitivity. Considering my propensity for foot-in-mouth disease, I hope all of your are snickering to yourselves right now.


Thank goodness for fast boats!



Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/10/10

I like to keep up with what’s going on in my home town, and I read the Buffalo News online when I get the chance. As well, I sometimes listen to Buffalo radio stations when I can pull them in up in Toronto. Last week I was in my car and I was listening to one of those FM morning shows from Buffalo. I had to chuckle at the subject matter. It seems that the Mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, has a nineteen year-old son, Byron Jr., who keeps getting caught doing very (politically) embarrassing things. Not too long ago, he was caught on a video surveillance tape smashing his dad’s SUV into a couple of parked cars, which of course he was foolish enough to deny having done. A week ago last Saturday, Junior pulled another great stunt when he was caught shoplifting from a discount clothing store in N. Buffalo. On its own this is embarrassing enough, but the kid, who comes from a well off family, stole a $20 boom box and $40 worth of clothing. Of course shoplifting anything is unacceptable behavior, but he really looked silly shoplifting such cheap stuff. Go big or go home. Naturally this is a huge embarrassment for the Mayor. I don’t know how this will play out for him politically, but if I’m his public relations guy - that is, if the Mayor of Buffalo even has one - I’ve got my work cut out for me. I suppose one could go with the “hey-he’s-a-stupid-teenager” defense … lots of parents have boneheaded teenaged sons (and 19 IS the new 13), and in that sense this incident probably humanizes the mayor. Brown could use a little of that; the man is a walking sleeping pill. He has absolutely no personality and speaks in a monotone voice. On the other hand, the more judgmental among us (i.e. people like me) are likely to say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Anyhow, it’s nice to know that Buffalo has it’s very own version of Billy Carter. Perhaps Byron Jr. should come out with his own beer, like Billy Carter did. Byron Beer.



Over the years Buffalo has had some interesting mayors. Apart from the fact that most of Buffalo’s mayors did little to improve the city, Jimmy Griffin sticks out in my mind as one of the more colorful ones. An outspoken Irishman from Buffalo’s First Ward, Griffin said whatever came to his mind without much concern for the political consequences. Among other interest groups he managed to alienate, he seemed to take great pleasure in enraging Buffalo’s homosexual community. I remember once when he was on a radio talk show, a gay man called in and started to attack Griffin‘s notorious homophobic behavior. Griffin said something like “I thought ‘gay’ was a happy word … I don’t get it, what do you people DO with each other?” He was also famous for his advice to Buffalo residents after a blizzard shut the city down. He suggested everyone just buy a six pack of beer and stay at home. Clearly, the man was a genius.



In the news last week, there were devastating floods in Pakistan, wildfires in British Columbia, and a little welcome rain in Southern Ontario. Finally, and a propos to my many comments about my parents geriatric journey, I watched a “60 Minutes” story covering the very sensitive subject of end stage health care. The discussion was about the high cost of dying, and the gist of the story was that American taxpayers are paying an increasingly unrealistic amount of money to foot the government bill for end stage health care. Put another way, we are putting WAY too much of our limited health care resources towards keeping people alive long past when their life is effectively over. I know that shortly before my father passed on, my sister Jill and I did everything in our power to ensure that he was as comfortable as possible at the end of his life. He died at home, and that was what he wanted to do. He told us so. He had, and Mom has, wonderful nurses. One nurse actually took on the role of Dad’s death coach, making the process less mysterious and frightening for him. This, I have come to believe, is the best one can hope for in situations like this. Admittedly, my family had the financial resources and commitment to do this, but the sad fact remains that we as a society have lost touch with reality. We are sweeping the reality of death as a part of life under the rug, and that does neither the terminally ill or their families any good. Organizations like Hospice can help (and Hospice is not for everyone), but some of it is simply about common sense and love. At some point we must have the dialogue with the our loved one about his or her wishes. Excluding euthanasia from the discussion, give that person some control over the end of his or her life, and help make it as painless and peaceful as possible. As for me, I would rather “pull the plug” than die badly, alone in an ICU, hooked up to a respirator and IVs at $10,000 per day. It’s a tough, complicated subject, and I’ll wager the right-to-lifers want to shoot me (really, they do that). I say spend the money on education and therapy, so that more people are apprised of their options, and/or what is right for their loved ones. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing, but let's save the ones that can be saved. Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 8/2/10

The last trip to Buffalo was bittersweet. My sister and brother-in-law drove in for a few days, and we had at least one good dinner with Mom. Sadly, the Lewy Body Disease is taking its toll on her, and we can do nothing but stand by helplessly as it wreaks havoc on her mind. We’ve tried a dozen drugs to help her with her struggle and all have had unacceptable side effects. The best we can do is to keep her as comfortable as possible, and that’s no mean feat. This is a degenerative disease; she’s in bad shape now and there are times when she is aware of what is happening. I wonder how many families out there are dealing with this privately, because they can’t believe anyone else has had a similar experience. It’s a complicated, frustrating, sometimes frightening emotional roller coaster. Why do I air some of these very personal details in public? First and foremost, because I am self-absorbed, but there’s another reason. I think a lot of my peers are facing similar dilemmas, and some of us aren’t talking about it. A lot of us were well cared for by our parents, and now, as the parent becomes the child, we feel honor bound to return the favor. I’ll wager there are more books out there on the subject of child care than of geriatric parent care. I can say with some certainty that Lewy Body Disease is the most confounding and difficult challenge I have yet faced, and I never saw this coming. I simply was not prepared emotionally for this.



While I was in Buffalo, I took a bike ride around the city because Garden Walk was on. Garden Walk is a Buffalo event wherein residents with notable gardens open up their yards to curious onlookers. Some of the gardens were exceptional, but I only had time to scratch the surface. Buffalo’s rustbelt industrial reputation, as well as its sometimes horrendous weather, are notorious, but sadly, it’s a well kept secret that much of the city is in fact very beautiful. Buffalo is a city of good neighbors, and strong, healthy neighborhoods.



I’m now back in Toronto for a few days to continue helping my in-laws clean out Rose’s apartment. We’re through the worst of it but must now dispose of all the furniture. I’m guessing they’ll give it all to some charitable institution, but the trick is to find someone who will pick it up for free. Most of it is good quality, but most charities typically charge to pick up furniture donations. Go figure. The other day, Shauna found Rose’s false teeth, which Rose had misplaced shortly before she passed on. I heard that Winston Churchill’s teeth fetched over $23,000 at auction. What in heaven’s name does one do with Winston Churchill’s false teeth … put them next to the Waterford crystal in the china cabinet? Anyhow, perhaps we can include them in a garage sale, or perhaps they would be better marketed in eBay. I’ll wager there are other folks out there as twisted as I who could figure out a way to incorporate false teeth into their “collectibles” stash.



In the news, 21 people were killed and over 500 injured when a crowd swelled in the underpass leading to and from a music festival in Duisburg, Germany, called “Love Parade”. And finally, it looks like the immigration debate in the U.S. is headed for the Federal Supreme Court. If I understand correctly, the core issue is the State’s right to enforce rather strict immigration laws imposed by but not enforced by the Federal government. For instance, Arizona is now trying to enable local police officers, at their discretion, to require immigration verification from “suspects” in the course of their routine investigations. On the one hand you have the civil liberties concerns, and the potential for abuses there. On the other hand, you have newly established and potentially overburdened national health care system. I’m sure nobody will abuse that right, any more than they abuse welfare, or social security. This promises to be a heated debate. Will Texas and Arizona threaten to cede from the union? Load up the rifles Chester, yeehaw, we’re fixin’ for a fight!





Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED