In this latest of the sketches of New York life which Donald Paneth has contributed to COMMENTARY, he draws a portrait of one of those necessary, useful, and often misunderstood functionaries in the financial life of the great city: a pawnbroker.
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Irving Berg, who lives in Great Neck, Long Island, drives his son and daughter to school each weekday morning, and then continues on to the railroad plaza, where he parks his car, buys the Times, and takes the 8:47 to New York. He usually finds an empty seat, and for the next thirty-five minutes, as the suburban train starts and stops on its way to the city, scans his newspaper or chats with an acquaintance. At Pennsylvania Station he hurries up the steps and through the crowds to the street.
Then he takes a bus to Eighth Avenue and 55th Street, a shabby neighborhood of small bars, narrow tenements, crowded garages, and littered streets, where his pawnshop is located. He crosses the street, enters the store which one of his two employees has already opened, and goes to his old roll-top desk in the rear of the shop. At his desk, he talks briefly with Murray, his manager, finishes his newspaper, checks his cash-on-hand, and reads his mail: letters and interest payments, advertising circulars and police notices. A short while later, after the first troubled, distracted patrons have appeared and departed, he goes next door to a luncheonette for a breakfast of cereal, toast, and tea.
Berg, a short, nattily dressed, middle-aged man, has worked behind the counter of a pawnshop since he was a youth. “It’s a very good business,” he says. “It’s not seasonal, and you can’t suddenly lose everything. It’s not a business where you can get hurt; people loan and redeem all the time.” Berg’s shop is open six days a week from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., and patronized by a wide variety of city dwellers. Throughout the day he makes loans, records interest payments, redeems pawned articles, and sells a potpourri of merchandise with solicitous care. He is an expert on the loan value, that is, the resale value, of watches, diamonds, gold rings, cameras, violins, luggage, suits, overcoats, furs, antiques-and tears or frenzy don’t move him. “In this business,” he says, “you can’t be a softie. You wouldn’t last.”
Berg is shrewd, direct, poker-faced, and suspicious. Though he is courteous, and on occasion sentimental, he doesn’t cash checks, tests all precious stones and metals for genuineness, and is watchful for stolen goods and the artifices of patrons. He automatically compares each patron with the article being pawned, and if they don’t seem to correspond asks for identification. (He also carries a $200,000 Lloyd’s of London insurance policy against fire, theft, and holdup.) “There are people who sit up nights figuring ways to put it over on the pawnbroker,” he says with some dismay. “They try to pawn diamonds that aren’t diamonds, or they go into a Credit Jeweler’s, put $1 down on a $75 value, and then hock it for $10, or they try to disguise a hole in a suit jacket with a black arm band. Some people are really thieves. They come in when we’re busy, pull the tag off a suit on the rack, and try to hock it. Or they say, ‘I just want to see what color it is outside,’ and fly around the corner with it. Anyway, I’m very careful.”
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A Neon sign, IRVING BERG, LOAN BROKERS, and three gold balls, the traditional symbol of the pawnbroker, are above the entrance of his store. Orange and black signs on each side say: SALE, $3.95 UP, Famous Name Brand Suits, Sport Jackets, Top Coats, O’coats. The shop’s double windows have iron bars directly behind them. Shoes, boxing gloves, trombones, cutlery, shotguns, microscopes, fishing rods are in one window, and violins, bric-a-brac, jewelry, and oil paintings in the other. Next to each article is a small descriptive card, which may characterize it as, “Very Fine Value,” or “Collector’s Item,” or “Excellent Tone,” or “Made by Tiffany.” The shop within is long, narrow, and cluttered. It is brightly lit, but on all sides are counters and wooden bins and clothing racks and shelves, filled with more merchandise and casting big gloomy shadows. The back of the shop, where Berg’s desk, jewelry vault, and storeroom are located, is partitioned off by iron grillwork.
Thirty or forty people a day pawn articles with Berg, and on an average day he loans them about $800, in small amounts between $10 and $25. “I don’t like to make big loans,” he says. “I’d rather loan $100 to ten people than to one person-the higher the number of pledges, the greater the turnover and the interest.” Trade is particularly brisk each day between 9 and 10 A.M., noon and 1 P.M., and 5 and 6 P.M. “There are always a few people,” Berg explains, “waiting for you to open. Usually, they need money to get to work. Then, at twelve o’clock, we get business from the people who go out to lunch; they want money to bet on a horse, and they pawn personal items such as tie clasps or fountain pens. At five o’clock, the people who have a dinner appointment or lost their bets come in.” Of the days in the week, Friday is consistently the busiest in the shop. “It used to be Saturday,” Berg says, “but most people get paid on Friday now, and redeem their clothing so they can wear it over the weekend. They bring it back and pawn it again on Monday morning. They bring in a new suit, maybe, and I loan them $11 or $12; then, in a month, I cut it down to $10 or $11, and so forth. If they put up a fuss, I explain to them, ‘Well, you’re wearing the suit out.’”
His diverse patrons comprise the poor and the well-to-do, the obscure and the notable, the transient and the regular. They include longshoremen from Tenth Avenue, young boxers from Stillman’s Gymnasium, music students from Carnegie Hall, lodgers from nearby rooming houses, rodeo contestants from Madison Square Garden, and entertainers from Broadway night clubs. “There are always new faces,” he says. “We get a lot of transient trade from the hotels and furnished rooms; six months later, I receive a money order from a Fleet address or California or out of the country. We’re a block from Stillman’s Gym, and I find managers bringing in youngsters from all over the United States. They don’t have too much money, and they come in and start pawning the watches they won as amateurs so they can get a room. Then, they have one or two fights and they’re not doing too well and they pawn their outfits-skipping rope, gloves, and headgear. They usually don’t redeem them. Now the Puerto Ricans are coming in and living on Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh Avenue. They have very little, and they become porters or bus boys or go on relief. A St. Christopher medal is the first thing they’ll buy and the first thing they’ll pawn. I also do a lot of business with theatrical people. They love to live high, and they don’t work too steadily unless they’re top. I’ve had some very well-known entertainers pawn with me; I can’t disclose their names, but the public would be surprised. I get a better class of trade too—from the hotels in the vicinity, the Pierre, St. Moritz, Hampshire House, Park Sheraton, and from the apartment houses on Central Park West. It happens in the best of families. Maybe they have to raise a bail bond, or maybe they’re living on an income, have been entertaining a little too freely, and need some money until their monthly check arrives. They pawn some very lovely jewelry.”
Berg has many steady patrons who won’t trade elsewhere. “They get used to the same shop,” he explains, “and feel comfortable in it. I have a press agent, for instance, who pawns his pants twice a week, and a TV actor who leaves his tuxedo with me except when he needs it for a scene; the actor pays $25 a week alimony. I’ve known one woman twenty years. She was formerly a silent movie actress, and she still gets letters from Cecil B. De Mille, which I have seen myself. She’s in her early fifties now, and occasionally gets bit parts in Broadway shows. When things get tough for her, she pawns a little diamond ring and pin. I’ve got one guy who works for an express company, and drinks; once a week, at the end of the week, he pawns a nail clipper and a scissors for $1. Another guy I’ve known twelve years. He runs around with women, and never has enough money; he pawns his golf clubs, a very expensive set, and his wife’s jewelry. I’ve been seeing a lot of him lately.”
He works snappily behind the counter. “The person needs money,” he says. “And he wants that money, he doesn’t want to chat with you. We try to get him in and out fast.” He shrewdly adapts his manner to each person with whom he deals: he is friendly with the regular, good-natured with the alcoholic, ingratiating with the well-to-do, benevolent with the Negro or Puerto Rican. “I treat everybody like a lady or gentleman,” he says, “if they’re sincere and don’t try to put anything over on me. I make them feel right at home, and explain to them that it’s strictly business. I explain that they can redeem their article today, tomorrow, or a year from today. Of course, we have the cocky type: whatever he asks I should give him. There’s always a little argument with this type, but I take him off his perch immediately. ‘If you can’t act like a gentleman, we won’t do business with you.’ Then we have the meek type. They come in very slowly, very quietly, and stand at the counter. They’re ashamed, and afraid you’ll get angry with them. ‘Is this a pawnshop?’ they’ll say.” Through a name for courtesy, Berg has tried to attract the well-to-do and well-known to his shop. “The better class of trade,” he says; adding, “Well, it’s nice to do business with nice people. They’re more understanding. Not that I don’t want to do business with the other type, they’re my livelihood.”
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Berg is a short, stocky man, fifty years old. His face is clean-shaven and bland, with thin lips, a fleshy nose, and alert eyes; he has wavy gray hair, and from his cheekbones two deep creases extend gravely past his mouth to his jaw-line. He wears well-tailored double-breasted blue or brown suits with matching silk ties, monogrammed white shirts, and a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. He is energetic, self-confident, and assertive—but nonetheless somewhat sensitive about his dignity, about being a pawnbroker. He feels that many people don’t regard pawnbroking as a respectable business. “They think every broker is a Shylock,” he says. “Hunched over, with a little beard and a skullcap. The Jew Moneylender. But that’s out of the Middle Ages, when pawnbrokinig was almost the only business a Jew could be in.”
Customers are constantly in the shop. A gaunt, shabbily dressed man pawns his overcoat. A couple enters, and inquires about a trunk. “You can have this one for $25,” Berg says. “A steamer trunk. It’s in very good condition; it’ll never wear out.” A theatrical prop man appears, looking for an old top hat and monocle. A young man in a leather jacket pawns a watch. “How much you want?” Berg says. “Seven,” the young man says, as Berg looks at the watch. “Five,” Berg says. “You gave me $7 a month ago.” “I know, we’re cutting down on all loans.” “O.K. Give it to me.” A tall Negro redeems a bicycle, rides it around the block, and then repawns it. A drunk, frowzy woman tries to induce Berg to take in pawn her canary and bird cage. “Just for a week,” she says. Another patron tries on a suit. “If you had it made to order,” Berg says, “it wouldn’t fit you any better. A beautiful fitting suit. I’m not kidding you.” “If you can let this go for $15, buddy, it’s a sale.” “Tell you what I’ll do,” Berg says. “I’ll give it to you for $18.”
Berg and Murray, his manager, a short, reserved, pipe-smoking man who has worked for him twelve years, wait on trade; another employee, Ray, is stock clerk. “Berg likes to handle the pledging himself,” Murray says. “And he likes the place to be efficient and clean. Sometimes he flares up and says something. What ‘dya let the customer out for?’ He feels he might have made the sale if we’d turned him over.” Most of Berg’s patrons need money quickly, often desperately, to pay rent, or buy food, or pay a bill. And his interest rates, though fixed by New York State, are correspondingly high: 3 per cent (per month) on $1 to $100 for the first six months, and 2 per cent for the following six; over $100, the rate is 2 and 1 per cent respectively. “It may sound a little exorbitant,” Berg says, “but it’s not. There’s the upkeep of the business, and it’s the same rate as seventy years ago.” The amount of the loan he makes, however, is fixed by habit and tradition, not law. For example, he usually lends 50 cents to $3 on an alarm clock, $2 to $8 on a drafting set, $5 to $15 on an overcoat, $10 to $35 on a violin, $20 to $50 on a rifle, $50 to $200 on a fur coat. Occasionally, his loans are larger: $150 on a Leica camera or $300 on an old, rare violin or $800 on a diamond clip. “We keep it down,” he acknowledges. “There are so many different opinions as to value—and we want to get our money back if it’s not redeemed. Sometimes, if a person really seems to need the money I loan a little more. I once had a fella come in with his wife’s fur coat. I offered him a loan of $90, and he told me he needed $125 for a hospital bill. I said no. But he started pleading, and I noticed tears come to his eyes. Then I began to weaken, and ask him questions, and he takes out the bill. Well, I loaned him $125. That was three years ago, and he’s still paying interest on the coat; he hasn’t been able to take it out yet. So I helped a fella out, and I’m getting a return on my money.”
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Gold and silver rings, diamonds, violins, and objects of art are the most difficult articles upon which to fix a loan value. And Berg is extremely cautious when accepting them in pawn. He carefully tests all rings and diamonds. “I can judge by the weight of a ring if it’s gold or gold-filled,” he says. “I get a feel in my finger tips. But I don’t allow my men to do this, I insist that they test it. Filing it a little in an inconspicuous place, and putting on an acid; if the acid turns green it proves the article is brass.” Determining the value and genuineness of diamonds is more complicated. Berg goes over each diamond with a Diamond Point Pencil (it will scratch glass or sapphire but not another diamond) and measures its circumference and depth with a precision gauge. He chiefly encounters diamonds of three grades: brown, the cheapest, yellow, mediocre, and blue-white, valuable. “Some people,” he says, “try to color a yellow diamond with an indelible pencil. Give it a ‘Silver Cape,’ a bright color. The only way to discover that is to wash a diamond with alcohol, which removes the indelible film. We wash practically every diamond with alcohol. Then we have a doublet-diamond—the top is diamond and the bottom is zircon, the nearest and hardest thing to a diamond. If you look into the center of that diamond, it’s dead, it has no life.” Unlike many other pawnbrokers, Berg is also familiar with the characteristics—and approximate value—of violins and objects of art. “A pawnshop takes in an awful lot of violins,” he says. “We get quite a few from students at Carnegie Hall who either run short or quit. Now I’m no expert, I don’t know the real value of a fiddle—a Strad or Guarnieri#mdash;but I know what to look for. How beautiful the stain is. Whether it’s a healthy fiddle, cracked or repaired. How fine the scroll’s been done.” Similarly, he accepts china, bric-a-brac, and antiques in pawn. “Venetian glassware,” he says, “Italian china, Royal Copenhagen china, Meissen and Dresden figures. As long as I can remember, I’ve loved anything old.”
He records each loan in a ledger, on descriptive cards, and on the pawn ticket, which is small, pink and white, and oblong. “This Ticket Good for One Year Only,” it says. “This Ticket may be renewed by paying the interest due.” Each evening the descriptive cards are mailed to the Police Department, which checks them for stolen goods; Berg in turn receives daily lists of stolen goods from the police. “Every pawnshop gets a few characters with stolen goods,” he says. “But I don’t try to compete with the Police Department. If I think an article’s stolen, I say, ‘Do you mind if I check this?’ I give the guy a chance to go, and he runs out of the store. This happens a dozen times a year, but as long as I’m behind the grill I don’t get nervous.” Many of the articles which are legitimately pawned are eventually redeemed, while the remainder are sold at auction or by Berg himself. “There are some people,” he says, “who wouldn’t think of shopping anywhere else. But we also get a lot of celebrities. I sold Joe Howard a diamond ring in ‘43 or ‘44. And Kid Gavilan. I sold him a guitar. I paid special attention to his hands. I have a small hand, but his hand was smaller than mine. It made you wonder where he gets all the power from.”
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Irving Berg was born in London on March 1, 1904. His mother, Anna, and his father, Barnet, had come to England from Warsaw three years earlier. Berg was the second of three children; he had an older brother, William, and a younger sister, Molly. His father was a baker. “He was a short, dark-haired, hard-working, nervous man, who loved to play dominoes. My mother, vas religious, independent, and even-tempered; nothing interested her except her family. We lived on Coke Street in the East End, and I can remember some very hard times, when my father wasn’t working and we only had a fireplace to keep warm and cook at. Then my uncles helped us. I also can remember my mother giving me a halfpenny for fish and chips in a paper cone and my brother and I getting lost following a parade on London Bridge.”
When he was four years old he came to the United States with his family. His father got a job as a bread baker, and they lived on the East Side between Second and Third Avenue; another sister, Lillian, was born, but she died of scarlet fever at the age of two. After her death, his family moved uptown. “We lived in about seven apartments, on 100th, 103rd, 104th Street,” Berg recalls. “We weren’t Gypsies, but we’d get two or three months’ concession and then move. We started from the bottom like most immigrants, but we always had a bed in the house and a couch in the living room. We used to buy things on time from customers’ men who came around; for years and years we’d be paying them off, 25 cents or 50 cents a week.” Once a year he got a new pair of shoes and a new suit. “I was an average kid,” he says. “I liked athletics, and I didn’t like school. I wanted to get out and earn some money.”
Berg went to work selling newspapers after school when he was eight. “I borrowed 10 cents from a neighbor,” he says, “and bought two papers for one cent, and sold them for a penny a piece. Somebody would yell from a window, and I’d get two cents for bringing it up.” When he left school at the age of twelve he went to work for the New York Athletic Club as a pin boy. “I loved that job,” he says. “I made $15 or $20 a week, $2 or $3 in tips a night. Every night we had executives, politicians, judges—all big shots—bowling, and they’d roll quarters and fifty-cent pieces down the alleys. After eleven we’d take a swim in the pool and put lotion and cream on our hair—it was for nothing—and get a wonderful meal. That lasted eight months. I started playing cards, and got into a fist fight, and that was the end of it. I was canned.” Then he went to work for an importer of lamps and bric-a-brac as a delivery boy. “I didn’t like that job,” he says. “They wanted a horse. But while I was there, I decided I wanted to become a businessman. I felt that was the way I could be a success. I loved to earn money and spend it. And I loved the idea of trading.”
Subsequently he worked as a delivery boy for a tailor and then as a stock clerk in Ovington’s; two years later, when he was fired for lateness, he got his first job in a pawnshop. He was seventeen years old. “A friend of my father’s,” he recalls, “was in the wholesale jewelry business. He specialized in selling to pawnshops, and he got me a job in a small place, three blocks from where I am now.” Berg liked pawnbroking. “I was fascinated by it,” he says. “So many things you could have: musical instruments, shotguns, fishing rods. I could play with it all. And being behind the counter—how would you say it?—with people coming to you to borrow money, I felt it was important of me. This was the business I wanted to learn.”
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Berg went to work in a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue. The proprietor, Kalman Radin, had been a pawnbroker for the past fifteen years. “He was the oldtype broker,” Berg says. “His shop was dingy, and he was tough, no leeway on loans. He had a small business, and used to sleep most of the day in his chair.” As stock clerk, Berg swept the floor, camphored and wrapped clothing, answered the inquiries of customers, and learned the loan value of merchandise; later he made small loans on his own.
In 1924, after Berg had been working in the shop three years, Radin died, and two brothers, Sol and Alex Gordon, became the new proprietors. “Alex Gordon was my ideal of a perfect broker,” Berg says. “He knew the business, and was good-looking, intelligent, and suave. He was the front man. His brother, Sol, had come up the hard way, as a drummer, and belonged to the old school; he was the financial backer and quite shrewd. He knew diamonds—and you can make a fortune if you know diamonds, their value fluctuates so. During World War II, for instance, they went from $65 a carat to $300. Anyhow, Sol made the snowballs and Alex threw them. They built a fine shop. They got rid of the half-swinging doors at the entrance. They replaced the glass rings in the window with real diamonds and the belly-stove with a gas heater. And painted the shop.
“The 20’s were lush years,” he says. “There was lots of easy money around. Racketeers kept gals and bought jewelry and spent money. We were surrounded by speakeasiesevery cellar was a speakeasy-and I saw the bootleggers, the strong-arm boys, the smart operators. I was a kid, and it fascinated me.” Berg worked six days a week, and was eager, conscientious, and energetic; on Saturdays he worked to midnight. “My parents were surprised I kept the job,” he says. “I had to give up Saturday night with the boys. But I didn’t mind. I belonged to the ‘Y’ and used to bowl twice a week and play poker once in a while. I wasn’t a lady-killer; I didn’t like to spend much money on them. After a while, I got to know merchandise pretty well, and became a counterman. I learned how to talk to people, and gradually built up a following: I’d like to see Irving.’”
He became manager of the shop in 1929, when he was twenty-five. About this time he decided he would ultimately like to go into business for himself-and simultaneously had a disturbing experience. “During the boom,” he says, “a friend of mine and I bought some copper shares. We made $400 or $500, and pyramided it, and then lost it all in the crash. Well, it was a cheap experience for me; some of my friends lost all of their savings. Today I only invest in my own business.” Now he began to make regular trips to Philadelphia, where his brother had opened an automobile agency. “There were plenty of pawnshops in Philly,” he says, “and I went from shop to shop, buying merchandise, reselling it in New York, and making a handsome profit.” Then, in 1933, when the United States went off the gold standard, he quit his job, and began traveling about, buying and selling gold. It was an abortive venture. “I made some money,” he says, “but not too much. It was interesting, and I might have stuck to it, but my expenses were too high. So when they offered me my position back, I went back.”
The pawnshop business did not fall off during the depression, although its character altered as sales dropped and loans increased. Berg is reluctant to discuss the events, dilemmas, and mishaps of this period. “Business is best in normal times,” he says, sensitive to inferences. “When everybody is working and there’s no inflation, no depression. Normal times. That’s what this country has been trying to get since 1776.” In 1934 Berg met his wife, Gertrude, at a summer resort, and a year later they were married. Gertrude was a short, blond girl of twenty-eight, a graduate of Hunter College and a school teacher. After their marriage, Berg began to plan and save in earnest, with the objective of opening his own shop as soon as possible. “It took me three years to get all the money together,” he says, “with both of us working. Thirty thousand dollars. It’s not a business you can go into with $3,000 or $4,000; you’ve got to have money to loan.”
He opened his shop in 1938. “I picked a location,” he says, “which I felt was the first they’d see coming downtown from uptown. It also was near the hotels and rooming houses, and I didn’t want to go too far away, because I knew I’d take a certain amount of business away from my old bosses. I knew that I was going to lose money at the beginning, and I did. I showed a loss the first year, and a small loss the second year. I tried to keep expenses down; I was the only one in help, and I didn’t draw much of a salary. I advertised for business in buses. And bought a lot of secondhand stuff in stores on Sixth and Third Avenue so it would look like a pawnshop.” His trade grew. “From then on,” he says, “we got out of the woods. When we got into the war I had a nice inventory—and you could sell anything. There wasn’t much pawning, but they were knocking down our doors for merchandise. Everything was rocketing, and the longer we held it the more we got for it. For instance, I had a couple of cases of 67-cent alarm clocks, and I sold them for $3.50 a piece. Then I got interested in antiques and began to buy and sell them, and there was quite a lucrative business in that. Well, that’s the breaks in business, I went into business at the right time.”
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Since he went to work behind the counter, Berg has observed a few local changes in pawnbroking. “Brokers have dressed up and cleaned up their shops,” he says. “And they’re more courteous, and don’t try to pull anything. Years ago, fellas would stand outside and try to sell you a bargain. All you had to do was look in the window, and you were in; that was their job, hustling you into the store. To sell suitcases, the broker used to buy gold-filled rings for 10 cents apiece and put one in each valise. The customer would see it—the broker would pretend not to—and he’d be tempted to buy. I don’t think people would fall for that today, they’re too sophisticated. Twenty years ago Park Row and the Bowery had most of the pawnshops. But today they’ve moved uptown—to Columbus Avenue, Harlem, the East Bronx. Now Harlem is the busiest neighborhood, the melting pot.”
Berg today is successful and prosperous. He drives a Cadillac, lives in a $35,000 home in the suburbs, and dines often in restaurants like Longchamps, Lindy’s, and the Chambord. “He’s advanced himself,” says one friend of his, “and made good money for the past twenty years. He has average tastes, and likes quite heavy food, and spoils his children a little. When he moved out to Great Neck a few years ago he didn’t particularly care for it—his tastes weren’t so expensive, more simple—but he’s beginning to get into it now.” His home in Great Neck is an eight-room, ranch-type dwelling, with an acre of land which he conscientiously gardens in the evening and on the weekend; his next-door neighbors are a doll manufacturer and an attorney. “This is a new development,” he says. “Kenilworth Terrace, fourteen homes. I like it on the whole. It’s a nice community, wonderful for the children, and we’ve met some lovely people. Recently we formed a Civic League so we can get better acquainted and do things to improve our property; a majority of the communities out here have their own swimming pool, and we may build one too.” His home is comfortably furnished, with wall-to-wall carpeting, modern and “traditional” furniture, and many antiques, including a Regency dining table, Meissen figures, Royal Doulton vases, Royal Worcester china, and a great antique bowl from the home (and with the crest) of a Duchess of Kent. A maid comes in to clean and wash three days a week.
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Berg and his wife have two children: Paula, fourteen, and Richard, ten. He is an excitable yet indulgent father. “My little guy loves to build things,” he says. “Just give him a hammer and nail. And he’s crazy about planes. Paula is an even-tempered child, and loves school. Of course, she’s getting into her teens now and beginning to enjoy parties and dancing. We took her to the Latin Quarter and she was fascinated.” In the evening Berg strolls his dog, Peppy, a toy fox terrier, and then reads the World-Telegram & Sun and perhaps the Reader’s Digest or Life. He also likes to watch television, and occasionally see a Broadway musical or adventure movie. He is a Mason, and a member of the New York Pawnbrokers’ Association, the Men’s Club of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, and B’nai B’rith—but he isn’t active. In the summer he likes to golf and fish in upstate New York, where he and his wife have a summer home. “Fishing is my hobby,” he says. “I love to fish. I relax and don’t think of anything; I’m in the fresh air. Eight years ago I used to own a thirty-two foot Wheeler cruiser, and go deep-sea fishing. It was a good-looking boat, with windows all around and two wells for fishing, but Gert didn’t like to go out in it and I sold it.” “He’s the venturesome type,” his wife says. “I’m a look-before-you-leap. He likes to keep going, doing something all the time. And he’s a little temperamental-moody, restless.”
He is not a reflective or religious man. “I believe in God,” he says. “But, I have my own belief. Trying to do the right thing. Helping my family. I’ve always been a great fatalist, and I don’t try to do things I can’t do, I’m not a four-flusher. And if I have anything to tell a person I tell him. I don’t like a liar; Ihate to lie, unless it’s absolutely necessary.” Berg is preoccupied with his business and his family, and has relatively few other interests. “I only vote in Presidential elections,” he says, for example. “And I never talk politics—or religion—with my customers. It must conflict with your business, and be detrimental. If he likes Ike I like Ike. I like to get the most out of life in a sensible way—and I have. I married a wonderful woman. I’ve got two lovely children. I’ve got a house and a car, and I had a cruiser; if I go tomorrow I haven’t missed anything. Like every young fellow, I wanted things I couldn’t afford and promised myself I’d get them when I was older,”
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