Vol. 87: Escape from the rat race

How my Dad discovered the Fountain of Youth

When I was a kid growing up in New York, my father, Herman Rottenberg, ran a ladies’ knitted wear manufacturing company whose substantial domain embraced two factories— one in Brooklyn, the other in Valley View, Pa.— as well as an office and showroom in the Garment District. Dad made a good living from his business, but he never liked it. The rag trade, as insiders called it, was a classic rat race, vulnerable to constant swings in public taste and to fickle customers who thought nothing of canceling orders whenever fashions changed, leaving Dad to scramble to pay his 500 employees.

During one such crisis in the early ‘50s, my mother had to take me somewhere on a Saturday, leaving my younger brother Bob in Dad’s care. Dad took Bob to his mid-Manhattan showroom, where Bob spent the day running around among the mannikins while Dad worked the phone in a frantic search for a buyer for a rejected order. When they came home that evening, Bob helpfully told our mother, “Dad didn’t do any work at all today. He just spent the whole time talking on the phone.”

Dad’s father and partner, my grandfather Marc Rottenberg, reveled in the sheer challenge of running such a business, but Dad had little use for it, or for the people he had to deal with. Their only interest, I once heard him say, was money and making more of it.

One stunning step

Sometime in the mid-’50s, when I entered adolescence, Dad found his passion: international folk dancing. Each weekday he’d come home from his office or his factory exhausted; then, after dinner, he’d put on his folk-dance outfit and take the subway to a folk-dance class in Times Square. When he returned home, about 11 p.m., we found him completely rejuvenated.

Eventually Dad learned every folk-dance on the planet. Then he took every folk-dance teaching class there was to take. And in 1962, when he was only 46, Dad stunned his family, friends, and business associates by selling his company altogether to devote his life to promoting international good will through folk dancing.

Exactly how he would achieve this goal was far from clear. At first, Dad taught folk-dance classes here and there. He created a foundation that supported various folk-dance schools and troupes. But this sort of dabbling failed to quench Dad’s combination of passion and management skills.

A unique dance troupe

Then in November 1963— on what Dad later called “the day that changed my life”— Dad started teaching a weekly folk-dance class at International House, New York’s residence hall for foreign graduate students. He soon discovered that many of his students there were major talents studying at Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, and other top-drawer musical institutes. So, Dad's entrepreneurial instincts quickly surfaced, and he assembled his best dance students into a traveling international folk-dance company.

         Over the next 35 years, this eclectic “Allnations Dance Company,” as it was called, traveled the globe, performing as many as 300 shows a year for schools, colleges, corporations, civic organizations, foreign governments, and the U.S. Armed Forces, all in the service of spreading its motto: “Joy in Every Land.”

         The Allnations Dance Company was a rare phenomenon: It combined all the polish of a professional troupe with the charm of an amateur troupe. Its primary goal was not to produce great art but to connect with its audience. The show followed a basic formula: A small but eclectic troupe of dancers from different countries— usually eight, and rarely more than a dozen— performed perhaps two dozen dances in succession, changing costumes for each new number. At first, they'd perform their own native dances; then they'd perform each other's dances. If a particular dance wasn't to your taste, not to worry: Within three minutes or so, the number would be replaced by something else.

By the end of the show, you'd be watching Filipinos, Africans, Koreans, and Russians doing the Charleston in flapper dresses and zoot suits. The cumulative effect, after 90 minutes, was to infuse the audience with a sense of the joyful possibilities of opening oneself up to other cultures. What Dad’s dancers shared was a perception of art— in this case, dance— as a vehicle for human betterment rather than an end in itself. In effect, Dad made brotherhood a work of art.

Lost in translation

In many respects, running an international touring dance company was every bit as challenging as manufacturing women’s clothing. Imagine keeping a troupe of top-drawer performers intact in the face of lucrative offers from other troupes. Imagine the priceless chemistry among them that might be shattered if any one dancer dropped out. Imagine making booking travel arrangements with people who didn’t speak English and applying for visas from third-world bureaucrats.

In these situations, Dad’s management skills proved a unique asset. Within the often flaky and financially precarious world of dance, the word got around: “If HR says something will happen, it will happen.”

On one occasion, Dad’s regular Mexican dancer had to drop out just a few days before the troupe was scheduled to depart for a two-week tour of Europe. Dad scrambled to replace her with another Mexican dancer who barely spoke English. At their first meeting, he explained the basic financial arrangements:

“Your air fare and ground travel will all be covered,” he told her, “as well as your hotels and some sightseeing. You’ll get a per diem for your meals. And your fee will be $1,500.”

The woman, I am told, swallowed hard, reflected in silence for a long minute, and finally said OK.

Only later did Dad discover that the woman had mistakenly thought she would have to pay him $1,500 for this experience— and she was willing to pay it.

Unexpected phone message

Meanwhile, at International House, Dad created a broad range of cultural programs and special events that greatly enriched the lives of the resident students: international fiestas and fashion parades, balls to celebrate the arrival of spring and fall, and summer “ice cream socials,” where Dad personally scooped cones for the residents into his early 90s.

Dad’s work with much younger dancers kept him physically and psychologically young himself. As he put it, “Each year I grow a year older but, the kids stay the same age.” So, he was still teaching dance— not only folk dancing, but ballroom dancing too— at I House until he finally hung up his dancing shoes at the age of 91.

At his apartment overlooking Central Park West, Dad hosted parties for I-House residents and alumni on his birthday, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, and any other excuse he could find. You can imagine what it must have been like for graduate students from, say, Kazakhstan or Indonesia to arrive in an overwhelming city like New York, settle into a barren single room, and find a message on their answering machine from “your friend HR,” inviting them to a ballroom dance class and welcoming them into his warm and eclectic circle.

Selfish motives

Many of the dancers and I House residents who crossed Dad’s path during his 45 years there subsequently returned to their native lands to became world-class bankers, corporate executives, government officials, entertainers, kings, queens— you name it. As a result, Dad was able to travel the globe and find a red carpet waiting for him wherever he ventured.

In his later years, Dad was always touched to hear from I House alumni who told him he had changed their lives. But he was also flabbergasted. From his perspective, his motives were purely selfish, not altruistic.

“You know,” he once told me, “I’m not supporting leper colonies. I’m surrounding myself with bright, beautiful, interesting people.”

‘You could have made millions!’

In his 90s, as dementia set in, Dad’s mind sometimes wandered back to his past as a garment manufacturer. “We gotta make the payroll!” I sometimes heard him say in his sleep. Yet before those last years, he never once looked back at his previous life. As he put it, “I’m grateful to the knitted wear business for giving me the means to move on to a more interesting life.”

Years after his mid-life career change, Dad ran into one of his old competitors from the rag trade. "Herman," the man reproved him, "you got out just when business got good. If you had stayed in, you would have made millions!"

To which Dad replied: "What would I have done with that money that I haven't done already?”

The ultimate lesson is….

         This past weekend, hundreds of International House alumni gathered to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of its founding (by John D. Rockefeller Jr.)— the first of dozens of residence halls that today house foreign students (and Americans too) in major cities across the U.S. Saturday night’s festivities included a video tribute to HR (as Dad was always known), and a brief parade of residents and alumni dressed, in the best HR tradition, in costumes from someone ese’s country. My own brief comments about Dad’s remarkable career were greeted by a standing ovation— a response that, I readily recognize, was more of a reflection on Dad’s effect on people’s lives than on any words I spoke.

So, ultimately, what’s the moral of Dad career? Frank Tyger, the late editorial cartoonist of the Trenton Times, put it best: “If you want happiness, provide it to others.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com