My Father’s Son 
Bum Steers: Video 
The Man Who Wasn’t There
I never really knew my father, who died when I was four, but I’d always heard he was a prominent businessman and a loyal and loving husband—the kind of person, my cousin often told me, who could have been president. When I finally found out the truth about him, I came to love him for who he really was.
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Burka Bag had reorganized after Zeke paid off the debts. Originally formed as a Louisiana company, it became a Texas company. Zeke was president, but his share of the company was only one fourth. The rest belonged to M.M. “Mose” Feld, of Houston, whose Lone Star Bagging Company was a much bigger operation than the one in Galveston. He provided the capital to keep Burka Bag going. Zeke and Mose had been friends for some time. They had bought Houston-area real estate together as early as 1937, although the Feld acreage was much larger than Zeke’s. They had some good years; from 1941 to 1943, everything went well. Burka Bag made money. In December 1943, Mose wrote Zeke a glowing letter: “Looking back on the progress made by the Burka Bag Company since its reorganization, and bearing in mind fully the events leading up to our affiliation, I want to tell you it has been a real source of gratification to our associates here in Houston, and myself, to have been able to work in such close harmony as we have during these trying times. I only hope that as time goes on this spirit of cooperation and understanding between us will come as close as possible to perfection… . I hope that our business relationship will continue for many years to come, and you can depend on me to support you to the fullest extent, realizing that I, likewise, can depend on your support. We want to congratulate you on the fine showing you have made.”
In fact, Mose Feld was thinking about closing Burka Bag. By May 1944, he was showing his cards: “To express myself best, I will use the words of your brother, Morris. He used them on me many times, and I have never forgotten them. ‘The bagging business is subject to dangers of practically anything you can think of, such as, curtailed or short crops, freight differentials, price cutting, a war between sugar and jute …’” He wanted out, and especially out of Galveston. “My idea is this—why buck a proposition that doesn’t deserve to be bucked? Why not try to make money in an industry where money can be made without all these hazards. There is no use in our being ‘shnooks’ about this. I am sure there are several things we can do.”
By November, it was over. Mose gave Zeke two options: Liquidate and buy the plant himself on favorable terms or come to work for Lone Star in Houston. The choice was excruciating. Neither Zeke nor Natalie wanted to leave Galveston. They had married in 1940, both at rather advanced ages for the day, and they had built a life together that included a home and a child and many friends. Zeke had never been so rooted. Natalie’s mother, aunt, and uncle, all of them aging, lived in an old Victorian on Broadway. Her mother especially was in declining health; Natalie felt that she needed to be nearby. She told me once that she thought Zeke would never be happy at Lone Star. He had always been the boss, but at Lone Star he would be number two, at most, and Mose would own him. Mose had made that clear: “If you come to work for Lone Star it will be on the basis of you being 100% Lone Star, forgetting everything else as far as the bag business is concerned.” That meant no reading the Wall Street Journal, no calling his broker about the market. Buying the company was not within reach. Zeke received $19,000 for his stake in Burka Bag from Lone Star—a handsome sum in those days, but not enough to restart Burka Bag, even on a smaller scale. In any case, he must have known that Mose and Morris Senior were right: Bagging was a lousy business.
What am I to make of my father—and my relationship to him—all these years later? I have come to realize that a child who loses a parent at an early age looks at the world in a different way than a child with two living parents does. Silently, I noted on my forty-seventh birthday that I had lived longer than he had. Silently, I noticed on my seventh wedding anniversary that I had been married longer than he had. I could understand what he had lost, and in his loss I found a gain. The absence of a father made me a better father to my own children, I think—more aware of their needs and of my own mistakes.
Some of the wisdom Zeke conveyed I have incorporated in my life. Dianne Sattinger wrote that Marian was judgmental. So was Natalie—so much so that Zeke told her, “Judge people on averages.” I like that. I also took to heart his advice to Morris about how to treat his future wife. I have been married for thirty years, and I have never raised my voice to my wife in anger.
It is hard to say how growing up without a father affected me. My mother was a strong woman and was able to raise my sister and me alone—she was never interested in another man—but I think that the biggest loss for me was in not being able to observe a marriage. Let’s just say that it took me a longer time to grow up than most of my contemporaries. I think the myth had something to do with that. But there are no shrinks in this story.
Stepping out of the role of being his son and trying to look at Zeke’s life objectively, I think that he should have gotten out of Galveston when the Sealys pulled the plug on Burka Bag. He could have returned to New Orleans. He had friends and family and connections there, and his financial abilities and personality were such that he would have been in demand. Had he been born a generation later—say, when I was—he would have had opportunities that did not exist in his time. He would have graduated from college and gone to business school at Harvard (which he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Morris Junior to do) and probably to Wall Street. His real calling, and true love, was investment. He paid off the two-story brick house he and Natalie bought in Galveston in six months with a plunge in Cuban sugar.
Instead, he stayed in Galveston. He went to work as a broker for Merrill Lynch almost immediately after the bagging plant shut down, putting his genius at the market to work to make other people rich. In the Burka Bag files was a letter dated April 29, 1945, to Lone Star Bag in which Zeke acknowledges that he and Mose had parted “in an amicable and friendly manner.” And then, remarkably, he offers some advice for Mose on how to handle a financing problem. It was a detailed plan involving the issue of some nonvoting preferred stock and had many other steps, and I didn’t understand a word of it. “The above is given to you for what it is worth,” Zeke concludes, “and if the firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Beane can be of any assistance in helping underwrite this issue, please let us know, and we will go into it with New York via Houston.”
Zeke’s New Orleans relatives tended to blame Mose Feld for Zeke’s heart attack. Morris Junior told me that when Zeke and Natalie came to his wedding, in the fall of 1944, as things were coming apart at Burka Bag, Zeke, normally a robust man, looked drawn and gaunt, and there was visible space between his shirt collar and his neck. The files reveal that as part of the settlement with the Feld interests, he paid Lone Star for the life insurance policy Burka Bag had provided him and made it his own. His estate included around $90,000 in life insurance. He must have had intimations of his own mortality; there was not only the family history of early death but also the tuberculosis he had had in his youth—another detail I was never told but found in the files. Whenever he got a good report from the doctors, he would rush out and buy another policy. Indeed, his last such purchase was in February 1947, just a couple of weeks before his heart attack. After the funeral, Morris Junior saw some of the letters Zeke had sent his attorney and wrote Natalie: “I want to show you one of them to get your reaction on same… . I’ve read and reread it and just wondered if he could possibly have known he was ill . . . . It seems to me that there is a great deal of evidence that he did.” Mose came to the hospital, but Gussie, fiercely loyal, would not let him see Zeke. She had some harsh words for him. Mose was to write, years later, to Natalie, “I felt like a knife had been stuck into my heart.”
At this point the story might end, but there was to be one more transaction between the Burkas and the Felds. When my mother died, most of the real estate Zeke had owned with Mose had long ago been partitioned and sold. There was one exception, however: A 2.3875-acre lot in a subdivision called Bluebonnet Acres was still in her estate. It was in a sparsely populated area of southwest Houston, off Almeda Road and a lane whose street sign reads “Feld,” near Beltway 8 and the Brazoria County line. I had no idea what to do with it, and so I looked up the address of Mose’s son, with whom my mother had occasionally corresponded, and wrote him a letter offering to sell it to him at the value on the tax rolls: $26,000. He responded with a nice letter, but no, he didn’t want to own any more property in that area, and by the way, I should have the appraisal lowered. (He was right.) He also paid the estate for a number of years of grazing rights. I hired an appraiser to get the value for estate tax purposes, and it came to $17,000. I tried to give the land to Rice. The university didn’t want it. In fact, nobody wanted it, and if you had seen it, you wouldn’t have either. Potential donees were worried about oil pipelines in the area that might have contaminated the groundwater and could expose them to liability.
A few years ago, I received a call from the Feld interests. They were packaging their land for, as I recall, a chemical plant. They offered to buy the lot—for an absurdly low $3,000. I was noncommittal, but I called Jane immediately. “I’m not going to sell it to them,” I said. “The Felds are not going to screw this generation of Burkas.”
Last December I sold the land—not to the Felds. A couple of buyers had expressed interest in the property, one of them being a landfill operator who eventually bought it. When Jane came to Austin to visit over the Christmas holidays, I asked her if she wanted to see the land, which she had never done. We drove from Austin to Houston, and what greeted our eyes was the worst piece of land in Harris County. A gun range (very loud) adjoined it on one side, earthmoving machines were digging the landfill on the back side, and there were a few uninhabitable shacks across the street. The other buildings on the street were small industrial operations. A chemical plant was indeed about 150 yards away. The lot was overgrown with brush. We had gotten a very good price for the land, more than ten times what the Felds had offered. I could not resist the myth. “Thanks, Zeke,” I said. “You can rest easy now.”
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