Marty Kolins

Marty Kolins was born 100 years ago tomorrow, May 25, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York.  Actually, he was born Martin Yeager, the first and only child of his two parents.  Unfortunately, his father died when Martin was a little boy.  What a tragedy when this happens.  No man would ever love him as much as his natural father.  Apparently, his mother had some financial difficulties as a result of her husband’s death and Martin went to live with his grandparents who raised him for several years. 

Eventually, his mother remarried and Martin went to live with the newlyweds.  She had a hard job convincing her new husband to accept Martin as his son.  He legally adopted Martin who then became Martin Kolins.  The couple later had a daughter and a son, Martin’s half-sister and half-brother.  Martin’s step-father showed favortism towards his biological children in contrast to being much less supportive of Martin.  I believe that Martin tried, for the rest of his step-father’s life, to show him that he was worthy of his love.  It was a difficult task.  This striving shaped Martin’s character.

Martin graduated from Erasmus Hall which then was a prestigious public high school in Brooklyn.  He applied to Columbia University, but was turned down, in spite of his excellent grades, because, as he was told by an admissions officer, “We have a quota on Jewish students.”  Anti-Semitism was also a constant theme in Martin’s life.  So instead of Columbia, Martin went to New York University.

As with America as a whole, the Great Depression hit Martin’s family very hard in the early 1930s.  His step-father had been a successful businessman, the owner of a company that manufactured ladies’s garments.  He not only lost his business, but the family lost their home as well.  They were literally thrown onto the streets.  This shocking turnaround psychologically devastated his step-father.  Martin became the family breadwinner.  He initially got a job as an usher in a movie theater in the Bronx, a long way from Brooklyn.

Then Martin caught a break.  Through a family friend, he got a job as an accountant, for which he had no training, at the newly created company, Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc.  This was 1934.  Prohibition had recently ended its foolish experiment in the United States and The Seagram Company, Ltd., the Canadian liquor enterprise, had established its American subsidiary at the Chrysler Building in New York City.  With the exception of his service in World War II, Martin spent the next 50 years working for Seagram’s.  Martin changed his major at NYU from liberal arts to accounting.  He also changed the mind of his step-father as to his worth.  I believe that Martin was relieved that he was working for a Jewish owned business where he would be protected from Anti-Semitism.

Some time after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, Martin, who was responsible for his parents, two siblings, plus a new wife, was drafted into the US Army.  After basic training in Texas, he was sent to a military base in Hawaii, then an American territory.  Shortly before his infantry unit was to be shipped out to somewhere in the Pacific where there was some serious fighting going on, Martin caught another lucky break.  While loading crates onto a ship, he broke his right arm.  He was sent to an Army medic, who did not do a very good job placing his arm in a cast.  Martin was sure it was a case of Anti-Semitism.  He never had full use of his right arm for the rest of his life.  And he spent the rest of the war in Hawaii.  After which, he returned to New York and Seagram’s.

In May of 1969, Martin, who was then the Federal Tax Manager in the Tax Department, convinced his boss that he needed an assistant.  He found one in me.  I had started working for Seagram’s in March of the previous year in the Accounting Department.  I began my new job in the Tax Department after lunch on the 15th of the month.  Martin, or Marty as I called him, was a great boss and a truly nice man.  He treated me, as he did everyone else, with the utmost of respect.  We were a team until he retired from Seagram’s in 1984 after 50 years when his wife, also a Seagram employee, was eligble to retire as well after 25 years with the company.  I succeeded Marty as Federal Tax Manager.

One thing I must mention about Marty was that he was a heavy smoker (when smoking was permitted in the office).  He would smoke one cigarette after another.  He constantly had a cigarette in his mouth and he would literally smoke his cigarettes all the way to the filter.  On his desk he had a large round ash tray that was black on the inside.  By the end of the day the ash tray was so filled with cigarette butts that you could not tell what color the ash tray was. 

One day, I was in Marty’s office discussing some work-related matters.  After some minutes, I realized he wasn’t paying any attention to me.  He kind of leaned forward in his chair, looking down, without saying anything.  Finally, he got up and walked out of his office and out of the department.  I returned to my desk, not knowing what to make of his untypical behavior.  Luckily for Marty, in those halcyon days, Seagram had a Medical Department with a doctor on duty, for Marty was having a heart attack.  I didn’t see him again until several days later as a patient in Lenox Hill Hospital.  Once he recovered, he quit smoking cold turkey,    

Marty died of another heart attack in April of 1997 at the age of 81.  I, along with many others, wanted very much to pay homage to him by going to his funeral.  Unfortunately and foolishly, there was no service (after his cremation).  He deserved better. 

Marty and I worked together for 15 years and during that time he told me much about his life.  Much of it was funny, the way he could tell stories.  A favorite expression (in Yiddish) of his was “If it’s free, spread it all over me.”  However, some was tragic.  I knew that his siblings pre-deceased him.  He cut himself off from his nieces and nephews because he didn’t think they would want to maintain any contact with him once his brother and sister had died.  Foolish!   He went through a very messy divorce from his first wife.  She had a lawyer and he didn’t .  Foolish!  He literally left their relationship with only the shirt on his back.  His wife maintained sole custody of their teenage daughter.  Occasionally, she would run away from her mother and go to stay at Marty’s home.  Once, the mother kicked in his front door to retrieve their daughter.  Marty was very disappointed with his adult son when he tried to stay neutral during his parents’s divorce.  Marty became estranged from him for a time as a result.  Foolish!

As Marty lived in my neighborhood, I ran into him occasionally after his retirement.  I was always happy to see him.  Let us leave Marty with one anecdote that typified the kind of person Marty was.  A colleague of ours in the Tax Department who smoked once made an off-hand comment that he had run out of matches.  This was not a request, simply a comment.  Marty left the building and went to a nearby store to buy a box of matches.  He returned and gave it to our colleague.  Marty was still trying to prove to his step-father that he was worth it.