Immediately upon my graduation from college in June 1949, Opa had arranged an interview for me with a business associate, a company by the name of Herman Hollander Inc. They were brokers in hides and skins and many other commodities. The interview with the treasurer, Mr. Blumenthal, went very well, and I was told that they were interested in me and that I would hear from them the next day.
I did get an acceptance from them the next day, but by then I already had been hired by another company.
The day after the interview with Herman Hollander Inc., I had an interview at Philipp Brothers Inc., which had been arranged by Oma. Oma had a school friend from Hamburg working there with good connections to the chairman of the board, Mr. Siegfried Ullmann.
I was interviewed by Mr. Ullmann, together with Mr. Salomon Fischmann, who was the manager of the traffic department. The entire interview had taken about 15 minutes, when Mr. Ullmann turned to Mr. Fischmann and said that he thought that I could be of use in his traffic department.
Mr. Fischmann only nodded and I was considered hired.
(Compare that hiring process with one current in any industry, with multiple interviews, documents etc. Criminal reports and investigations etc. are required. Before a new employee now starts, his/her file is already an inch thick.)
These two interviews would be the only interviews for a permanent job that I would ever have in my life.
I spent 36 years working for Philipp Brothers, and never looked back until I took early retirement at the end of 1985.
I had graduated from college in June 1949, and I started at Philipp Brothers on July 5.
My first “office” consisted of a semi-automatic calculator on a small two foot by one foot adding machine stand, located in the office of the traffic manager, Mr. Fischmann. Consequently, I was always under observation and Mr. Fischmann had a habit, once in a while, when he was passing me, of throwing a question at me about the particular transaction that I was working on. He wanted to find out whether I knew and understood what I was doing or whether I was just doing it mechanically. It was a good way of keeping me on my toes, but I was exhausted by the end of the day from the strain. This lasted for some months, until, I guess, he was convinced that I would make it. My work during these months consisted strictly of calculations (preparing invoices and accountings), adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, percentages, decimal places etc. No higher math, but pages and pages and hours of work, just to calculate the value of all the parts of just one shipment.
PB, in those early years, was primarily a merchant dealing mostly in ores and concentrates, as well as metals and scrap. The company had its origin in Europe, mostly Germany, and had been founded by several German Jews who had come to the US with experience in metals and ores.
Philipp Brothers would, in its prime, be the world’s largest metal merchant dealing not only in metals but also many other raw materials such as sugar and oil. No, we never handled flour, otherwise we could have baked a cake.
The history of the firm, in fact, the history of metal trading, and how it came to be controlled mostly by Jews of German origin, is an interesting subject in itself. It is fully described in a book, “Philipp Brothers, the History of a Trading Giant 1901-1985” by Helmut Waszkis, published in 1987, and a second edition in 1992 titled, “Philipp Brothers, the Rise and Fall of a Trading Giant 1901-1990.”
The firm imported, exported and had international and domestic business to and from any country that produced raw or consumed raw materials. The traffic department took care of all the paper work, including moving and insuring the merchandise, having it weighed, sampled, analyzed, invoiced and documented for payment. A “shipment” could consist of a cargo as large as 20,000 tons of chrome concentrates from Turkey to Baltimore, or as little as a few drums of high-value tungsten scrap being shipped from Chicago to Newark, or even, in later years, a super-tanker of oil or other liquid fuels. What traffic did at PB was difficult to describe to anyone who had never been there. When asked about it I would usually reply that the traffic department did everything but buy and sell and keep the books. Mostly everything else was traffic’s responsibility.
When my initial testing period was over, I was given a regular desk in a large room occupied by five or six other clerks doing similar work. Slowly, step by step, I was given more responsible work to do, until the day came when I was allowed to handle a shipment by myself.
I remember, the first transaction that I was permitted to handle by myself was a lot of 250 tons of Yugoslavian Trepca Brand lead that had been unloaded from the S/S Hrvatska of the Jugoslav Line at Pier Foot of 17th Street, Brooklyn, under contract number 18196-P, and was being shipped by Municipal Haulage, Inc. to Flemm Lead Corporation in Brooklyn under contract number 18196-S. (Sorry, I do not remember the name of the truck driver.) In subsequent years, my memory of these details remained a standing joke in the family.
When I started in traffic it consisted of about seven or eight employees. At its peak in the early 1980s the department would have a staff of about 160.
(To be continued next week)
By Norbert Strauss
Norbert Strauss is a Teaneck resident and has volunteered at Englewood Hospital for over 30,000 hours. He was general traffic manager and group VP at Philipp Brothers Inc., retiring in 1985. Prior to Englewood Hospital he was also a volunteer at the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Hospital for over 30 years, serving as treasurer and director. He frequently speaks to groups to relay his family’s escape from Nazi Germany in 1941.
