Lessons from my Father on His 50th Yahrzeit  

On Tuesday evening and Wednesday of this week I will observe the 50^th anniversary of the passing of my father, Sidney Pomerantz, of blessed memory.

Memorial days often are times not only of remembrances about the loss per se, but also a time to reflect on the lessons learned from the life lived with the person whose memory is being recalled.

My dad was a manufacturers’ representative, the modern title for a salesman, in the commercial stationery industry. In those days that meant tags, labels, loose leaf indexes, ledger binders, files, clipboards and the like. Actually, many things that were later made obsolete by the emergence of the computer society in the mid-1960s.

But he did not have a computer. Rather, each night when he returned home from his rounds, he would sit at his desk until late in the evening meticulously recording the purchases of each customer, by hand, on 3 by 5 inch index cards which formed the backbone of his records system.  At the age of eleven I started assisting him in that tedious effort as well.

During the summer months when he travelled outside of New York City to New Jersey and Long Island, I often went with him, not only to relieve the boredom of those ten week summers with neither school nor camp to fill my time, but also to assist him in checking the stock at stationery stores who were his customers.

What he taught me very clearly was that, at least in those days, people did not buy from companies, they bought from other people, even if those other people were representing companies. So when a client ordered 20,000 price tags for example, it was not important to them that the tags were made by Associated Tag & Label Co located on Houston Street in Manhattan. Not at all. What was important was that they were doing business with Sidney Pomerantz whom they liked and trusted. The company that made the tags was secondary.

Fast forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow, June 30^th, the company I founded with three others 35 years ago here in Israel, will formally end its monthly retainer representation of the Pennsylvania Department of Commerce and Economic Development after a 29-year run. The relationship began on Jerusalem Day, 1997, with the visit of then Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge who came to Israel with a trade and educational delegation from the state.

29 years is a long time for any company to have a consulting relationship with a client, but my father’s relationship principles helped me make that happen. Of course, we had to produce to meet the professional expectations of the client.  Nevertheless, the relationship had to be personalized as well. So, every time I traveled to the US in those years, which was often 3-4 times annually, I made sure to go to Harrisburg, the state capitol, and visit with the client, tell them how proud we were to represent them here in the Middle East and how much we appreciated their business.

There were people inside our organization here who questioned whether this was worth the effort, given our business success on their behalf. However, when our new CEO took over and I introduced him to the people in Harrisburg, they made a point of acknowledging my regular visits and said it was not lost on them the importance we placed on that relationship.

My father imparted great values to me during his relatively short lifetime (he died at the age of 65) which proved useful all of my life. Sadly, they are values that some of our young people today, involved as they are in the digital world, either never learned or discarded as unnecessary. Yet, so many of the problems in today’s world, which seem so challenging, could well be addressed by building and maintaining those one-on-one relationships that cannot develop by relying on a smart phone alone.

The confluence of my father’s 50^th yahrzeit and the closing of a 29-year long chapter in the commercial life of our company may, indeed, be simply coincidental.   Nevertheless, the lessons learned and how they were applied in this case inextricably links them together.

May my father’s memory continue to be for a blessing and may his soul continue on its upward path.