I am Neil Gillespie in the photo above, in 1985 at age 29. I owe my success in the car business to hard work, perseverance, and my association with the Philadelphia area Jewish community. Bert Rosner and Mel Levine, pictured above, were two of the Jewish men referenced in my letter December 31, 2005 to Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania.
My letter to President Gutmann continued: "As a fifteen year-old high school student, I spent three days at Penn participating in a junior science and humanities program. Upon graduating high school I did not attend college due to socioeconomic factors and a craniofacial disorder that inhibited speaking. Instead I labored at the US Steel Fairless Works for a year. Eventually I landed a job managing a car dealership owned by a Jewish man."
Sol Sherman was the Jewish man who hired me. I was age 21 then in 1977. Sol was a highly decorated World War II veteran. Sol Sherman was the first of many Jewish men in my life. Sol returned home after the war and initially opened a restaurant, and then founded Lonshore Auto Sales in Mayfair, a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia. Sol later moved his car business to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, a northern suburb of Philadelphia known for auto sales.
Langhorne PA was home to Reedman Auto World, a sprawling auto dealership operated by the Reedman brothers. Formed in 1945, the Reedmans initially sold cars on the family farm in Bristol, before moving in 1953 to U.S. Route 1 across from the Langhorne Speedway. In May 2004 Reedman Auto World was sold to Toll Brothers co-founder and former president Bruce Toll, and is now known as Reedman-Toll Auto World.
Sol introduced me to the Philadelphia area Jewish Community. Through Sol I worked with Bert Rosner and Mel Levine in sales, and met accountant Terry Silver. These men were later instrumental in the success of my business, Kar Kingdom, established in 1980 in Langhorne.
Sol took a chance hiring me to work as a salesman because I had a speech impairment, a congenital disorder called velopharyngeal insufficiency, resulting from a cleft lip and palate. Reedman Auto World's aggressive advertising brought customers from the New York City metro area, including many immigrants, non-native English speakers, which was a mitigating factor with my speech disability. This diverse customer base was the core of Langhorne's used car business. Previously I worked for Friendly Ice Cream and U.S. Steel, Fairless Works.
In April 1980 I set out on my own and established Kar Kingdom on a rented lot with a small inventory. Bert Rosner came to help me. Sol was downsizing prior to retirement. Bert was already retired. Bert had owned and operated the Coia-Rosner Dental Laboratory in Philadelphia. Bert told me about a speech prostheses, a dental device called an obturator, that might help me. Bert made obturators in his dental lab. My medical treatment at the Temple University cleft clinic ended in 1974 at age 18 after my health insurance company denied coverage for surgery under a preexisting condition clause. My medical treatment was delayed until 1985.
Bert Rosner was a mentor to me and a great help with new business. Bert studied Spanish so he could converse with our Spanish-speaking customers. Bert also spoke Yiddish, a language of Ashkenazi Jews, our clients from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Some of those clients were Holocaust survivors bearing concentration camp number tattoos. Bert himself was a descendant of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. His family's story is told in a book Bert gave me, Still Philadelphia, A Photographic History, 1890-1940. The image below, from page 159, shows Bert's parents, Charles and Maryann Rosner, and their restaurant and boarding house.
Below is a photo of Bert as a child with his parents in front of Rosner's Meat Market, page 240, Still Philadelphia.
"The picture above is of Charles Rosner's Meat Market at 6721 Elmwood Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, some time in the late 1920s. This is the same Rosner family pictured on page 159. The Rosners moved to Elmwood just after the neighborhood had been developed, and opened their business on the block between the brand new Tilden Junior High School to the east and the General Electric plant to the west. As Hungarian Jews, the Rosners were in a small minority in this predominantly nonimmigrant area. However, even in a community like this, it would not have been unusual for butchers and meat dealers to be Jewish immigrants." (Still Philadelphia, page 240)
Mel was a salesman and my right-hand man on the road as we traveled to auto auctions and wholesale accounts to buy inventory. Herb worked sales on Saturday, the main sales day of the week, when customers traveled from New York and New Jersey to shop at Reedman Auto World, but bought a car from my dealership.
Charles M. Fink, Esq., was a lawyer who help me and my business in the early 1980's. Mr. Fink helped me with harassment from a competitor, which was resolved when I moved my business from a rented lot to a property down the street that I purchased with Daniel Day, a local Realtor. Don DeJoseph, another salesman I employed, negotiated the sale of my lot lease for $10,000 to the competitor. Mr. Fink finalized the deal. A few years later Mr. Fink completed the buyout for me of my partner's interest in the Kar Kingdom property.
Charles Fink graduated from the Wharton School in 1930, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School class of 1933. His photo is from the yearbook. He was a member of the crew squad and the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. For many years Mr. Fink practiced business and criminal law with his son, Richard R. Fink, from their law office on U.S. Route 13 in Bristol, PA. In 1984 Charles and Richard Fink were sworn in together before the U.S. Supreme Court.
One day I will never forget, Linda became overwhelmed with dread of Antisemitism. We were walking on Seventeenth Street after leaving the Latham Hotel's restaurant. Linda was almost in tears when she said Jews needed Israel so they have a "place to run to" for safety. I embraced Linda to comfort her. You are safe in America, I said. But she was not convinced. Over the years I have thought about this day whenever I hear someone say Jews need Israel so they have a place to run to. After graduation, Linda left Philadelphia for law school.
In the summer of 1985 I began classes at the Wharton School, Evening Division. There I met Jordan L. Peiper, Esq., who taught business law. For the next several years I operated my business during the day and took evening classes at Penn. I graduated in December 1988 with an Associate of Business Administration (ABA) degree. While at Penn I rented an apartment at 2020 Walnut Street.
My letter to President Gutmann described how I came to question my education at Penn, after Wharton icon Michael Milken was convicted, and his portrait removed from Steinberg-Dietrich Hall. Also, my friend and legal counsel, Jordan Peiper, was jailed and disbarred over money missing from a client's trust fund. Author David W. Marston, a former U.S. Attorney, wrote about Peiper on page 80 of his book, "Malice Aforethought, How Lawyers Use Our Secret Rules To Get Rich, Get Sex, Get Even...And Get Away With It".
The stock market crash October 19, 1987 devastated my business as it impacted New York City and the car-buying clientele on which Langhorne depended. I had recently expanded Kar Kingdom and taken on new debt. Sales declined with no recovery in sight. I sold when a good offer came.
Realtor Martin Levine, as my agent, facilitated the sale of my Langhorne property in June 1988 to Gary Buch of McCafferty Ford in Langhorne. Bruce M. Sattin, Esq. represented me at closing. On August 20, 1988 I got mugged during a street robbery while walking in the city, resulting in a traumatic brain injury. I was not properly diagnosed for years. In 1990 I established another car business on West Erie Avenue in Philly, Joe's Erie Ave. Auto Sales. Martin Levine managed the property. The Gulf War was on, the economic timing off; the business closed 1991.
Martin Levine was a WWII veteran, age 63 when we first met. I was age 32 at the time. Martin was a religious Jew, an observant Jew, who kept the Sabbath, wore a kippah, and kept kosher. After returning home from the war, Martin formed a real estate business.
Martin's letter of December 15, 1991 shows the script B' H' in the upper right corner. This is an old Jewish custom for the abbreviation of Biezrat Hashem/With the help of G-d. Martin was a graduate of Stanford University, class of 1949 with a BA in Political Science. The 1948 Stanford Quad shows a group photo of Martin as a member of the Men's Glee Club.
Martin said it was important for people to have a faith, regardless of the particular religion. Once during our discussion of religion, Martin suggested I read Moses and Monotheism. That book, and my later study of Freud at Evergreen, led me to a new understanding of life and faith.
The Evergreen State College (TESC) was not exactly the "antidote" to Penn I imagined in my letter to President Gutmann. Evergreen was an introduction to liberal academia. Prior to moving west, I was accepted as a patient of Dr. Robert W. Blakeley, Ph.D., Professor of Speech Pathology, and Director of the Craniofacial Disorders Program at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, Oregon. There I met Dr. Ningyi Li, a visiting scholar from China.
Me with Dr. Blakely (lower left), speech obturator (upper left), me with Dr. Li (upper right), Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University Medical College, PRC (lower right)
Dr. Blakeley's team made me a speech prosthesis, the obturator device Bert Rosner told me about years earlier, to correct velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI). This was a difficult process to for me to undergo as a 40 year-old patient because of the gag reflex and established speech patterns. But it worked so well my mother did not recognize my voice on the phone. The obturator worked for ten years or so, but needed maintenance I was not able to obtain in Florida.
At Evergreen I studied psychology, sociology and craniofacial anomalies. This was the basis for my "FaceMatters" webpage, https://www.nosue.org/facematters-org/
On May 18, 2014, I wrote the United Nations regarding Ms. Zinnah Begum of Bangladesh (left). Zinnah was born with a craniofacial disorder. At age 58, Zinnah finally got life-changing reconstructive surgery through Touching Souls International. The United Nations did not respond.
Public discussion at Evergreen about disability was not always well-received. Once after I presented a paper on congenital craniofacial anomalies, a student approached me after class and apologized for some of the comments from the class. Her parents were disabled, she said.
Another example played out in the school paper, the Cooper Point Journal (CPJ), in response to student Nomy Lamm's writing about living as an amputee. Nomy's left foot was amputated at age three, and she wrote about the difficulty with her leg prosthesis. Nomy is a singer-songwriter and political activist, a self-described "bad ass, fat ass, Jew, dyke amputee". I still have a letter Nomy wrote me, framed on a wall in my office, along side her CD Anthem. Nomy wrote in part,
"…the main reason that i'm writing you is that i really wanna thank you for all the writing you did in the cpj this year, it was really great to have an ally in that fucking place. i kept meaning to write you every time i read something you wrote or some response to your writing ("what is your problem nomy and neil?" heh heh) i thought everything you said was really right-on and i'm really glad that you were so persistent about it…it was especially good for me to get yr support on the issue of disability, since that ' s something i've only recently "come out" about, so to speak, and as i said in my column, it's really hard for me to talk about. i really can't tell you how important it was to me to have your support, and i'm sorry it took me so long to try to contact you cuz honestly, knowing that you were on campus and doing shit was totally vital to my survival there…"
When I met Ronny Cooper in the Marion County Jail, a man whose leg had been amputated, I recalled Nomy's song Fly - I walked a whole block for you - about her pain and disability with a prosthetic leg. Ronny also had a prosthetic leg. Ronny was awaiting trial for taking a vehicle from a woman at a gas station. He was released too soon from a psychiatric hospital, he said. The American Civil Liberties Union would not represent Ronny. Convicted at trial without legal counsel, Ronny was sentenced to life in prison. A lawyer friend of the judge was on the jury.
Nomy Lamm, a pretty pretty princess. Liner notes to Fly (Anthem). I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Evergreen and graduated December 16, 1995.
