Tama knew she and Jonathan could probably run the company if called on. Setting their own course gave them the thick skin they knew they would need should they return one day to work with Mel at Artkraft. Tama recalls that relationship wistfully. "All the time I worked here, did he ever say I did a good job -- anything?" she muses. She shakes her head and says softly, "No, not once in seven years." Mel steadfastly refused to give her a raise -- until she finally went out and got another job offer. "Then he raised me $50 a week, up to $250, and that was after five years. He always spoke as if he were doing me a favor. 'I've got to keep her down. She'll get a swelled head.' That's what he would tell other people."
* * *
Families are resilient. They defy the internal forces that often work to tear them apart. They are by nature cohesive. The Starr family, with all its combustible personalities, was also tight. Jake had commanded the family to assemble at his house for dinner every Friday night. No excuse would do. "My grandfather was a very hard man to say no to," recalls Jonathan.
"Leaving a family business is tantamount to leaving the family," says family-business consultant Hubler. "There's a tremendous need in all of us to belong. There's a tremendous allure to wanting to get back in the ball game." Jonathan came back to Artkraft in 1977, the year after his grandfather's death. He cannot explain what drew him back, other than to ascribe it to destiny.
Destiny presented Jonathan with an imposing situation. Mel, with his own father gone, finally had some power. The heart attack in 1980 was a grim reminder of his mortality. On top of that, his son, with his quick mind and willing hands, loomed in Mel's mind as a haunting memory of his just-departed father. When Mel got sick, Jonathan got his chance. After Mel came back from his heart attack, a year later, the two clashed.
Jonathan, like Jake, was decisive. Mel was not. Jonathan cared about craft. Mel cared about sales and closing the next deal. "From the time my grandfather died, he never bought machinery or tools. It was frustrating for me," says Jonathan. "I used to take part of my salary and on the sly go out and buy tools for the workers. One time he caught me and got very angry." So angry, "he cut Jonathan's salary," says Tama.
Most galling of all to Jonathan were the visible signs of neglect -- especially Artkraft's decrepit trucks. "Half the time they never got there. They often broke down, stranding a team of $60-an-hour union workers in midtown traffic." Mel refused to institute anything as basic as a maintenance schedule for the fleet, let alone buy a new truck or two.
Meanwhile, the aging sales force resisted exploring emerging markets for the company. With Times Square on the decline and sign technology changing, the work space on 57th Street fell increasingly idle. "For three or four months at a time no new big jobs would come in," recalls Jonathan.
* * *
Jonathan's despair during the late 1970s drove him underground, turning him into a subversive. Periodically, he called Tama in Hawaii. "We had these long conversations, and we'd share our frustrations," she recalls. "We got very close."
Tama might have been far away, but she, too, had maintained enough of a tie to the company -- returning from time to time for a few months to work with her father -- to care about it. "It was our baby," she says. "There's a tradition here. It's crazy, and it's beautiful. I was very concerned that it might die."
Muddying the issue for Tama was her father's Jekyll-and-Hyde demeanor on his visits to see her in Hawaii. Suddenly the harsh taskmaster became the convivial philosopher. "We'd stay up all night talking," she says. "It was the romantic thing to do -- just me and him chatting all night and waiting for the sun to rise."
Tama finally returned to Artkraft full-time in 1982 and replaced Jonathan, who eventually took off for Hawaii. "He needed a breather," she explains. Now it was Tama's turn to call and confide in her sibling when the yelling started up again at Artkraft. The business was stagnating, and their father's health was declining. "Jonathan and I had a secret emergency plan that no one knew about, not even my mother." According to the plan, Jonathan agreed to return to Artkraft full-time if anything happened to Mel. They agreed on how to share power.
When Tama heard the news that Mel had died, one morning in June 1988, she didn't really believe it. "I had to go see for myself." After heading over to her parent's house, she called Jonathan in Hawaii. He caught the next plane east.
The funeral for Mel, on a Friday, was enormous -- an overflow crowd of mourners. The scene looked like one from The Godfather: Tama sitting next to her mother in black, introducing her to a succession of dark-suited developers and construction magnates as they respectfully approached to offer their sympathies. But even in death, Mel was still in control. Tama realized that she lacked the power to sign checks, and the payroll was due on Monday. To gain that authority, she would have to obtain 20 copies of her father's death certificate to present to Artkraft's banks and vendors. It normally takes three weeks to get a death certificate from the New York City Department of Health.
"I said to the director of the funeral home, 'I need 20 death certificates in one hour, or all these people who work for me are going to be out of work on Monday, and I'm going to cancel this funeral.' " She got the death certificates.
The next day, Saturday, Tama went down to Artkraft and spent all day rearranging the furniture, altering the perspective the employees would have when they came in on Monday. She stripped her office walls bare and tore down partitions. She put up a portrait of Jake. By midweek the place would be painted yellow instead of a muddy brown.
Mourning her father, Tama says, "was superseded by a lot of other feelings. We had about 100 people working for the company. I wanted them to feel secure. They are working people. This is the only kind of work they know. I wanted them to feel reassured. I wanted them to walk in and realize this was a new day, a new deal. I did this so everyone would not come in on Monday and start looking for a ghost."
* * *
With Mel gone and the furniture rearranged, his heirs could also look at the world and the company with a fresh eye. The business was weak, its base too narrow, its bottom line propped up by the past. In truth, Times Square and Broadway had been in decline for two decades. There was less demand for large display signs. Artkraft needed to be in other markets, using new technologies. There were things that Artkraft, so indomitable for so long, couldn't do and needed to in order to thrive.
