Fifty-six years ago, Milt Goldman wrote an ad in the Detroit Free Press in the “Situation Wanted” section, announcing that a “Young Veteran, 24, seeks position, is willing to learn and advance.” On a Sunday in February, 1956, a phone call came from Joe Falk, owner of Hardware Sales and Supply Company, a wholesale distributor of locksmith supplies. He asked my dad to come to his house that day for an interview. Desperate for help, Joe hired my dad immediately. My dad started in the back of the small Detroit warehouse, in shipping, and after a week, got a $5 weekly raise, which was a sign of respect and gratitude and the last raise he got for a very long time.

Hardware Sales and Supply was a small distributor in the 50s and 60s, selling builders’ hardware, key blanks, night latches, die cast rim cylinders, padlocks, door checks, key machines, and hardware specialties from Independent Lock Company, Lockwood Hardware, and others.

My dad told me that locksmiths, before Bill Zipf Sr. introduced .005 pins and pin charts, used pins in nine different lengths and filed them down. He remembers when locksmiths, covered in black graphite, were just repairmen who didn’t charge much for service calls and rarely suggested security upgrades.

My dad was an intense, dedicated, hard-working employee who really cared about Joe and his company. Joe, intelligent, creative (he was also a jazz saxophonist), classy and kind, became a second father to my dad. Joe felt the pressures of keeping the company afloat and once suffered a heart attack right at his desk. He, his wife Hortense, and daughter Nancy, escaped the stress of business by spending winters in Florida. My father was willing and able to run the business and Joe depended on my dad.

Hardware Sales came close to declaring bankruptcy in the 1960s, barely surviving from one customer payment to the next. My father learned the importance of opening the mail, hoping there were orders and checks to keep the bank away. Hardware Sales wasn’t my dad’s company then but he worked as if it were. Joe had saved my dad from unemployment and my dad worked as many hours as necessary to save Joe from bankruptcy.
The business was floundering but Joe found a run-down but larger building close to three expressways that he thought might help. It was on Grand River, one of the major avenues of Detroit, next to the Wonder Bread factory. The year was 1968, one year after the Detroit riots, the same year of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s deaths, during the same week as the Detroit-St. Louis World Series which Detroit won, four games to three.

I spent some time as a child at Hardware Sales, once when I was three years old, helping to publish its first catalog in 1960 which required stacking each copied page together. I was directed to walk around the room, holding each page in sequence, so it could be stitched together into one binder. A few years later, I worked part-time, putting stock away, picking orders, and shipping them out. I didn’t know where anything went but my dad directed me to find keys, padlocks, latches, or anything a customer needed. I remember organizing the key blank shelves, placing boxes of Ilco, Taylor, and Dominion keys in their right places on the shelves. Often, I’d go to a room filled with keyblanks and pull a case of Ford ignition keys or General Motors A and B.

Steve Dyson, Dominion Lock rep then and now president of IDN-Canada, remembers my dad in those days, roaming the warehouse with his 50 foot telephone cord, waiting on the counter while talking to a customer on the phone, the cigarette smoke drifting from his lips (he smoked 3 ½ packs a day then). These were Steve and my dad’s “mad men” memories.My father became even more important to Hardware Sales when Joe died of a heart attack in 1974 while our family was on vacation in Mackinac Island. My dad had to return back to work to face the future, directing its few employees, Ralph, Christine, John, Edie, and the outside salesman, Ramo Belletini. The ownership now fell unto Joe’s wife, Hortense, an eccentric lady who had a canny ability to collect. She pestered past-due locksmiths until they couldn’t take it anymore and finally succumbed to pay.

Hortense wanted to sell the company but she was leery of selling to my dad, who would have to pay her back over many years. Yet, she wasn’t reluctant to sell to my father if he had successful partners. So my father became one of the first partners of Al Hoffman of H. Hoffman Company in Chicago and Virl Mullins of Armstrong’s Lock and Supply in Atlanta. This was the first year of LSDA, the Locksmith Distributors of America, which eventually became IDN. Within a year, there were five distributors linked up in a network, focused on helping each other manage, market, become automated and efficient, eventually buying a computer system when computers were mammoth, slow, had little memory, when Microsoft was a dream in little Billy Gate’s eyes.

When I went to college, I worked part-time for Hardware Sales to bring in extra cash. When I graduated in 1979 with a liberal arts degree, majoring in English and Psychology, my dad asked if I would work full time until I was able to find another job. I wanted to move out of my parents’ house so I agreed but I interviewed at other companies, including Kmart, headquartered in Michigan and the largest retail company in the world. I didn’t want to work for massive companies and so I continued to help Hardware Sales move out of Detroit to the suburbs, to Madison Heights on the northeast side of Detroit.

At first, I was bored by the lock business, wanting to write instead but eventually, I was picking orders, putting away stock, answering phones, taking orders, writing advertisements, ordering stock from vendors and calling to get the orders shipped. I thought I worked hard but never worked as hard as my dad, who started at 6 a.m. and worked all day, a model of hard-charging, high-intensity sales and management. He had a volatile temper at times, scaring some employees and many of the manufacturer’s reps and sales managers. There were many legendary stories about his angry reactions after a manufacturer rep didn’t do what he promised or when a manufacturer’s sales manager was caught in a bare-faced lie.

I worked with my dad after 1979 as did his brother Sid, nephew Fred, and years later, his niece and my cousin, Maureen, a CPA who started in the early 1990s. My father was sometimes tough on employees, especially family, expecting us to be there every day, on time, work hard, be smart, and do the right things. My dad became disappointed if my Uncle Sid said something embarrassing or if Fred gave an extra discount or traveled too much. He got mad at me when I bought too much of a new product that didn’t sell, spent too much time with a rep, or discounted a slow-moving item when it should have been sold at “regular” price. He and I sometimes had arguments that employees could hear throughout the building. Often, when my father overreacted, he would return to apologize, knowing he shouldn’t have reacted so emotionally.

My father believed that locksmiths had great potential to be good businessmen. He preached to them that they needed to be more professional, to present themselves well, inside and out. They should focus, he said, on selling the highest quality products, not the cheapest. “Believe in what you sell,” he told them, “and sell the best locks and door hardware.” He watched the market change as home centers emerged and locksmiths began to sell lower priced, low quality locks and deadbolts, exactly like the big box mass merchants they feared.

Although my dad was only 63 when he retired in 1994, his leaving the intense stress of full-time leadership may have extended his life. He was able to enjoy spending time with his four grandchildren, Kyle, Ilana, Marlee, and Karenna and didn’t have to worry much about IDN-Hardware Sales. Still, he periodically visits and walks around the company, still aggravated by sloppiness and mistakes. Yet today, he is wiser and when he gets too angry or frustrated, he can go home to my mom, the real boss of his household.

My father and I have witnessed a lot in our years in the locksmith industry and have lived through many ups and downs. But I am grateful that he gave me a chance to work with him and succeed on my own. The economic environment was pretty lousy in 1978 when inflation was high and optimism low but that didn’t stop him from allowing his son to join him. We had many arguments, didn’t agree on much, and I caused him much aggravation. Yet, we deeply respected each other and made me eventually realize that love and respect is what is most important in a family business.

This was an excerpt from The Locksmith Ledger, written by Arnie Goldman. Read the full article, on The Locksmith Ledger’s website. Arnie Goldman is president of IDN-Hardware Sales, one of the IDN network of companies and a member of the Security Hardware Distributors Association (SHDA).