From Nazi Germany To The South Bronx

 

To most entrepreneurs, the ups and downs of business are the stuff that makes the adrenaline flow. Not Fred Neuberger, though. His stressful days are mostly behind him.

When he was 12, in 1942, his mother spent months arranging to send him to Palestine on a boat with other refugees. "Just before the ship left, I got pleurisy and couldn't go," recalls Neuberger. "Everybody thought what a tragedy this was. But the ship was torpedoed, and everybody on it was killed. If I had been on it, I would have been killed, too. After a few things like this, you develop a fatalistic attitude."

The following year, he set out on a five-week journey through Bulgaria to Palestine with a group of children traveling on foot and by train under Red Cross supervision. About 40 of the children were shot to death along the way by German soldiers.

At 15, he lied about his age, joined th British army and fought "on the coattails of the African campaign and part of the Italian campaign." When the war was over, he returned to Palestine and worked in the underground with the notorious Stern Gang during Israel's War of Independence. ("Say Stern Group," Neuberger suggests. "Gang isn't nice.") "I got into trouble with the British government," he recounts, "and it was suggested that the safest thing would be for me to leave."

Neuberger emigrated to the United States in 1947 and found work as a laborer in metalworking companies.After telling officials that his high school records had been lost, he passed the tests for admission to a small college in Chicago. "I had never even seen the inside of a high school," he says. Later he earned a graduate degree in mechanical engineering at New York University.

In 1955, he and a partner founded Fleetwood Metal Products, a precision sheet-metal company. For several years the business was modestly profitable, but his partner became ill in 1970, and Fleetwood fared poorly during a national recession. "The company could no longer support two people," says Neuberger.

Welbilt made dies for Fleetwood. So Mariotta got to know Neuberger, and asked him to take the place of his partner in Welbilt, who wanted to retire.

Using his old Buick as collateral, Neuberger borrowed $2,000 from a finance company to buy into the company. "Welbilt had no net worth to speak of," says Neuberger. With Welbilt approaching $12 million in annual sales, the Buick has been replaced by an $18,000 Continental.

Fleetwood has prospered, too. Having maintained half-interest in that company, Neuberger bought out the estate when his partner died in 1978 and became the sole owner. Fleetwood, which grosses about $1 million a year, occupies part of the downstairs of the Welbilt plant. Nowadays, Welbilt is a customer rather than a supplier

The prosperity of the last few years, says Neuberger, "has made me more relaxed, more patient, more public-spirited. You come to a stage where you have the time and the ability to give something back. You don't have too much on your mind to be forbearing and tolerant."

The drama of his early life more than prepared him for the vicissitudes of entrepreneurship. Says Neuberger, "Since I was 19, everything's been kind of anticlimactic. I'm going to worry about the IRS? What can they do to me?"