YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Hochberg

lines on the record: 80
first: 2017-11-09
most recent: 2017-11-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, exactly. That was a lot of money those days. And so it was, I remember listening to the speech Bill Clinton was genius at this. We're listening. And as we're listening, we say, I think he's going in our direction. You know, he was so smart at honoring both sides.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was enormous disappointment. I mean, we all, you know, we raised something like $10 million, which was a lot of money in the 90s to try and raise for.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he got passed over for Secretary of Defense, so whether he had his own personal peak with the president about it, but he certainly made it difficult.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually was the finance chair of something called the Campaign for Military Service, which was a sort of a coalition of different civil rights organizations that was working to build support for what we thought President Clinton wanted to do in terms of integrating the military. So I left Lily and Vernon and literally within 10 days I moved myself to Washington and I worked here in Washington for six months as the finance chair working on finance and strategy with Tom Stoddard and a number of other people on that and we thought”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And probably Barney did come up with the concept of don't ask, don't tell because that was Barney's life. In other words, that a lot of that policy that happens in Clint, because Brawnie was influential, this is also partly, you know, that's how Barney navigated the world.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah much more acceptance, much more it's much more every day I've met a number of students here who are fellows who talked about it and I remember when I was at the small business administration jumping ahead you know I'd have parents come and talk to me because it's all right my boss is gay maybe you can help me how do I talk to my son and daught So, yeah, I mean, we as a country have made enormous strides.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always totally first of all. My generation, everybody of my generation has a coming out story. There's some passage that you've come out to your family, to your friends. Today a lot of kids don't come out. They're out. It's not something they have to, it's not a migration. And it's younger.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty intense, and we were working together So it had a lot of drama in it in that regard, you know, and you can't tell suppliers or what people in the company say or people do business with. So it took a lot of, I'm very fortunate I found a good therapist and worked through a lot of that stuff.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little easier for her to accommodate to it. But she had a really rough time. She had a rough time. I mean, she talked about she was going to exile herself to Europe and move back to Europe.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't say anything, he picks up, hangs up. One minute later, my phone rings. Hi, sweetheart you're home, you're home alone? Anybody? So I ultimately came out to her because I said, I'm living with a guy and this is, so in those days I started the conversation saying that I was bisexual. I figured that was a way of easing into the subject. Which I wasn't, but I mean, I had sex with him, but I figured”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not for, no, I didn't talk to my, so I came out to my mother. I met somebody and we were living together and in those days was pre cell phone. He had his own phone and I had two phones in the apartment. Just a couple of kids.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I remember first I got to the therapist, I never will forget I get there after the first session, he says, maybe you want to lie down on the couch. I was that anxious And it took me within six months. I'm talking about being homosexual, not gay. I really said. So should we like du shock treatment? I mean, what do we do? You know, I.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very tricky then. I sort of I came out I called it sort of the PSPA post stomal pre aids. In the 70s. And Barney Frank is sort of come out retail. First, you start coming out to yourself and figuring out what's going on here. And I actually... As it became more clear to me, I actually decided to go to therapy and I was on the couch for 20 plus years to try and just come to terms with it, which would be very different today. It was a much more hostile thing. When you say come to”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has its own complications. And, you know, to be honest with you, being openly gay, I'm sure added another whole dimension to that.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a challenge to go on. Family businesses are a challenge. I've talked to other people about it. I mean, because one day in the same 20 minutes, you're a business partner, you're in a subordinate, and it's your mother or father. And that's a lot of different roles to try and keep meshing together. You know, maybe we could have found somebody who would have been, there are a number of consultants now who do this kind of work, work with family businesses. Somehow we didn't deploy that, but”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jim I leave the business. What happened was I turned it was partly the tyranny of the calendar. I turned 40 the year she turned sixty five. And I had a lot of people saying, okay, you're present. When are you going to really run this place? You're going to be the CEO and take over. So I'm like revving and people are saying to her, you're going to retire, you're 65 now. And she's revving in the other direction. I almost think there are times I wonder if our birthdays did not coincide in the same year. Maybe that we would have been a little more relaxed about it.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading businesswoman, she goes, No, I can be a business person. I'm not going to be the woman business person. Acknowledge me.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was very heady. She really wanted, I think she wanted that acknowledgement. I remember once UJA wanted to honor her as like, you know, leading United States.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I applied some marketing, polling, market research Some financial models, stuff I learned in business school, and we're able to figure out what we actually did in a minute is we would calculate sales per square inch in the catalog. The way a store calculates sales per square foot. And we started products that sold a lot. We put more of those in, solds that didn't per square inch. We put less in, and we started really managing the enterprise. I got there in seventy five by eighty six we were well over one hundred million dollars.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She had the creative spark, she had it, you know, her book is called The Knife a Winner. She had a great eye for spotting products and trends early on. One of the keys in the business was we did all the things monogram. We put your name on anything and everything you can imagine. So I think when I came, I came out of business school and I was the only person with a college degree at the company. And we felt it was like a high school student who had never exercised this. The raw material was there, but we hadn't really analyzed the data. We didn't really expand it out. And I think when I got there, took her from 51 to 75 to get to $5 million. I think we thought, well, God, if we double the business to $10 million, that'll be a lot. And I applied, a lot of things.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just as an early day, in those days, color printing was really expensive. So we would take one page in the catalog would be all the copy, and the color would be only photographs on the following page, because that way you had waste color by having copy on it. But that was a different era of printing and production and everything else.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a wonderful life. So it had very simple beginnings, you know, and I don't think had the great ambition that developed over time. And my mom and dad got divorced in seventy? 69. So I think she then sort of more fully devoted herself to the business. And then I”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in those days they mailed in cash, and my job was to take the singles and put them in packs of fifty, take the quarters, nickels, and dimes and roll them in, you know, roll them, and I would go to the bank with my mom, and we didn't have an adding machine, and I would sit on the bank manager's desk, and I would actually add up the checks. So we had a deposit slip and how many people sent checks.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it started with just ads and ladies' home journal, red book, teen magazines, like things like that. And then in the very late 50s came out”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it actually started as it was called Vernon Specialties. And then it turns out, not surprisingly, David, there was a plumbing supply company with the same name in Mount Vernon, so it became Lily and Vernon's specialties, and that was like a mouthful. So they just dropped the specialties and became Lily and Vern”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they tastefully reinterpreted that. So I should go to Lord and Taylor and places like that, you know, and so he made these leather goods and she was sort of the designer. And then she got the idea of selling them in seventeen magazine, and she put an ad in the magazine, put it. Took two thousand dollars of their wedding money, which was a lot of money in 1951. Yeah. And bed at all, and that ad was probably the best ad the company ever ran in sixty years.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So she got here in 37, went to Hunter High School, went to NYU, and she got married at the age of twenty-two. So in those days she got quote unquote her MRS. She got married. She never finished college. And she always said, well, I wanted to have a little extra money. My dad had a dry goods store. And she wanted a little extra cash. So her father manufactured pocketbooks, belts, wallets, small leather goods. And my mom would actually go to the better stores in New York and she had a good eye and she would buy them and they would The crossword is knock them off, the polite word, as I said, they tastefully reinterpreted them for their moment.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was 1937. Yeah. So actually, my grandfather was already in America, and my grandmother went to get her visa. Extended, and the council officer were not extending visas, but you still have a week, you should get on a boat because if you get on the boat, they'll let you get off the boat. And they got on a boat. They packed up within a few days or a week. My mother, her brother and my grandmother, and some furniture and sailed to America.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They probably wouldn't have survived. What's remarkable is one third of the German Jews left Germany. So, if you think about it, if you're living in the community, and one out of three friends is leaving, this is not like a, you should be asking the question, what do they know that I don't know? So it was a sizable portion got out in advance. They went to Holland, they went to Amsterdam. And they figure that bought them time and they looked at, they went to a trip to Palestine. My grandfather came to Havana. And actually, it was when President Obama opened up in Cuba that reminded my mother, she says, you know, your grandfather went to Havana, I remember that now, and she had forgotten. And then New York and then side on New York. I could have been a Cuban American for all I know, almost.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well my mom was born in Leipzig in Germany in nineteen twenty seven and she had an older brother named Siegfried whom I named. I thank my parents every day they did not name me Siegfried but just Fred. Which throws people, it's not Frederick, it's not Alvarez, it's just Fred. And in 1933, My mother's brother was a few years older, she was like nine, kind of got roughed up by some Nazi Hitler youth and pushed down a flight of stairs, and I think that was the last straw for my grandfather. And he said we have to get out. So they went and they moved to Holland.”
2017-11-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 189 - Fred Hochberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source