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“I always owned a boat,” Richie says about growing up in Sea Cliff, Glen Head and Glenwood. From those boats he hauled in a lot of flounders, snappers, bass, and those spiny, bony little fish we called begals. To get the information for this biography we had to wait a few days for Richie to end a two week stint as chief engineer on a tugboat operating between New Jersey and New York. He doesn’t fish much anymore but when he does, it’s from a tugboat.
His childhood in Glenwood, he says, “was the greatest time in my life. You played a lot of baseball. I was into sports then. I was in walking distance of school [Glenwood] and we went to school early to play.” One of his closest friends was Danish immigrant Soren Hansen, and when Soren’s parents moved to Glen Cove for a few years, Richie would visit and explore the Morgan Estate recently vacated by the Russians. Although he attended the Lutheran Church, he also went to the church run by Tim Klenk’s father and the affiliated Young People’s group run by the Howell’s in Sea Cliff. Among their many activities for kids, he remembers, “They had free cake, and you didn’t have a lot of money in those days.”
In high school Soren says, “He [Richie] and I were both good at math and tried to outdo each other.” Richie says, “It was unusual for me not to like a teacher,” but he didn’t get along with was Mr. Matthews, perhaps because of his air of military authority, Richie speculates.
In his freshman year he and Nancy Samuelson, also from Glenwood, “were sweethearts for a little bit.” In our junior year he left school with another classmate, Colette Relation, and began married family life. John Broderick became godfather to their son Richard born in 1956.
To support the family Richie began working in the soda distributorship run by Jane Sessler’s father, then drove for Keyco Trucking in Locust Valley, before settling down with Borden’s Milk in the early 1960s. Because his mother took care of the children of the man who ran the Dale Carnegie schools, Richie took their night courses to improve his confidence when he had to knock on doors and try to sign up milk customers. Those early self-improvement and motivational courses, he remembers, were full of car and real estate salesmen. Despite his new self-confidence, after ten years with Borden’s, “I could see the milk business was going to crap.” He and Colette had had three children and divorced in 1963 but remained close. Richie married a second time and had two more children, and then married again briefly. Sociologists tell us the typical entrepreneur starts a business in his or her late 20s or early 30s, and that’s when Richie went into business for himself.
He had regularly stopped in at Pace’s Place bar and grill in Westbury, and when it came up for sale, he bought it. That was in the early 1970s. A few years later he bought a second bar and grill. Like most new entrepreneurs, he also found running his own business required long hours. He found himself going to work to open up at 8 in the morning, taking a nap after lunch, and going back to stay through the long, smoky, boozy hours until three or four in the morning. His oldest son Richard had turned 18 and begun working with him. When federal pressure forced New York to up its drinking age to 21 and increasingly successful trial lawyers forced insurance rates to quadruple in a year, time for change had come again.
His father was a foreman with Colonial Sand and Gravel’s tugboat operation, Bronx Towing, and Richie found a job. “I learned all about tugboats real quick. I took my coastguard test and I got my chief engineer’s license.” He would go on to an unlimited license. Along the line Richie realized he could earn extra job security by being a cook since boats no longer carried cooks. John Broderick who visits Richie at least once a year, says, “He flat knows how to get around in a kitchen.” Richie’s wife, whom he met 26 years ago while bowling, agrees. He has worked from Canada to Mexico, and still works two weeks on and two weeks off. When he’s not delivering sand, his boat may be bunkering (refueling) the giant ocean liners.
Richie, who rebelled under Mr. Matthews authoritarian regime, and who once quit a boat because the new captain, a former Navy Seal, wanted to rule like an admiral, says he likes tug-boating because, “Basically you’re your own boss. You have to answer to the captain but he doesn’t fool with you either.” All good things, come to an end of course, and he says, “My license expires Feb 2011, that’s when I’m going to retire.” He has a large collection of action movies on CD, but “Not the kind where they catch bullets and throw ‘em back.” He prefers the traditional Clint Eastwood type of action. He will also indulge his passion for golf, and he has sent in his registration for the 55th reunion.
