Introduction

I was born to negotiate. It is in the Felder blood.

Some people presume that I acquired the tough negotiation street smarts of the inner city, growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Popular inventive fiction likes to attach this quaint fable to people born and raised in the stickball-playing boroughs of New York.

The truth is more prosaic: I learned the skills of a good negotiator from my father, Morris, who was also an attorney. From the time I was six or seven years old, I used to listen on the other side of the door as my father talked to clients in our living room. What impressed me most was that people would arrive at our home displaying anger or anxiety, but after they talked with my father, most of their negative feelings would vanish. He could negotiate away their animosity and find the right path for an equitable settlement.

My father's law office was in our home, a common arrangement in the early 1940s. Like many other lawyers struggling to earn a living, he could not afford to rent outside space. I find it ironic that today rich and famous lawyers see clients at home, presumably some cachet exists by conducting business in the kitchen pantry, the library, or on the veranda.

I also learned the strength and power of negotiations from my late brother, Jerome. He was better known to the world as Doc Pomus, the songwriter of such famous hit tunes as "Save the Last Dance for Me," "A Teenager in Love," "This Magic Moment," and "Viva Las Vegas." He invented the professional handle of "Doc" to prevent neighbors and relatives from discovering that Mr. and Mrs. Felder's nice boy Jerome sang the blues in black nightclubs, where he was known as a "blues shouter."

Jerome had contracted polio in childhood and walked with cumbersome metal braces and crutches. Each day, he struggled to live as normal a life as possible. He used negotiation to acquire power over his handicap since every aspect of his existence required some form of give-and-take. Fifty years ago, there were no wheelchair ramps on city streets, no electrically powered wheelchairs, no lifts to access public buses, and no specialized van services for the handicapped. Life was a constant hell, and he had to depend on charm and verbal skills to accomplish the most basic tasks.

Finding a taxi was a daily challenge for Jerome. The cabs in our Brooklyn neighborhood cruised the pedestrian traffic beneath the Broadway elevated ("El") tracks several blocks away from our house. I leaned how to hail a taxi on Broadway and would bribe the cabdriver with extra cash to come to our house and pick up my brother. Cabbies did not want to stop for handicapped people because it took extra time and they lost revenue picking up and dropping off a slow-moving person.

Home delivery services for food, drugs, books, and dry cleaning also were hard to come by in my brother's time, arranging for a delivery usually required the promise of a substantial bonus payment.

A mom-and-pop candy store was located about a block away from our house. My brother often did not have enough money to buy a full pack of cigarettes and, instead, bought a few at a time (called "looseys") for a penny apiece. Or he would telephone Mrs. Zimmerman, the storeowner, and plead for her to deliver five cigarettes to our house. But she always protested until he began negotiations, which usually involved an offer to give her a record as well as the promise to pay double for a pack of cigarettes the next time he visited her store.