Library of Congress Control Number: 2008931490

Copyright © 2008 by Chris Prentiss. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-0-943015-58-3

ISBN: 9780943015637

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Grateful acknowledgements to Nigel J. Yorwerth and Patricia Spadaro of Yorwerth Associates/PublishingCoaches.com for their expert packaging, editing, and guidance of this book through all of its phases.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I humbly apologize to my women readers for using he, his, and him in this work. Using he/she becomes cumbersome for the reader and disturbs the flow of thought. I have, therefore, chosen to use the masculine form to make the reading easy and the wisdom simple to understand.

For Taylor

Foreword

“Never tell the truth!” I was three and half, and it was the first of the lessons my mother, Bea, was to teach me over the next twenty years. She said, “Only fools tell the truth.” And she followed it up with “Never tell the truth when a good lie will suffice.” One of her lessons in lying was “a good liar has to have a good memory.” So I memorized endless poems to improve my memory. I was never permitted to call her mom or mother, only Bea.

Bea was born in New York City in 1900. Her father was a longshoreman who worked on the docks, and her mother was a stay-at-home mom, who took care of her and her two sisters and brother. When Bea was fifteen, she was raped by an older man and became pregnant. In those days, it was a time of shotgun weddings and they forced this older man to marry Bea. They hated each other, and Bea said he delighted in tormenting her. She sewed buttons on shirts for fifty cents a day to get spending money. When she got out of the marriage three years later, she was tough and hard.

She was also totally unforgiving, never forgetting a wrongdoing and waiting patiently to pay back a wrong done to her. Her motto was “six times double.” That meant she would repay the wrongdoer six times double for the pain he or she had caused her. I saw her wait twenty-four years to repay one man who had wronged her, and the glee and happiness she experienced kept her laughing for months. As for the man who raped her, she caused him endless pain through the years. She spread rumors and lies about him, sporadically ruining his life every few years until she was satisfied he had been repaid six times double.

In the roaring twenties, Bea was in her twenties. She was poor and learned to live by her wits in a wild and lawless element of New York City. She turned to a life of crime. By the time she was twenty-one, she ran the largest stolen car ring in New Jersey and had a gang of con artists working for her in New York City. When prohibition began, Bea was immediately on the scene running whiskey to the speakeasies. She became successful living outside the law and was determined that I, too, should become successful in the same way.

By the time I was four, Bea had taught me shoplifting, and I was praised warmly for my little successes. A single parent, she taught me to survive by any means, and I learned well. My early business career was characterized by deceit, trickery, and fraud. No one was safe. I even cheated my friends. It was great fun and I made some money doing it. In the evening, Bea and I would sit and talk about the cheating and conniving we had done, and we shared many a good laugh over our trickery. Bea also had a wonderful sense of humor, but it was not the usual kind of humor. She would laugh heartily over someone else’s misery—not in a mean way, but in a genuinely funny way that was so comical that everyone listening would join in.

Two small stories about Bea will further reveal her character to you. When I was in the sixth grade, my two brothers and I went to a sophisticated private school. It had its own golf course. Toward the end of the school year, my two brothers, who had been less than studious, were in danger of failing. The night before the final exams, Bea climbed the wall surrounding the school, broke into the headmaster’s office, stole the final exams, came home and tutored us for several hours, then returned to the school and put the exams back.

The next story was told to me by my father, Ralph Prentice, whom I first met when I was forty-four. He was a writer who made part of his living writing stories for The Saturday Evening Post. He and Bea were driving around in one of her beautiful cars when Ralph spotted a magnificent sedan. He exclaimed, “Bea, look at the wonderful car!” She said, “Do you like that car, Ralph? That’s a Stutz Bearcat.” The next morning there was a Stutz Bearcat parked in Ralph’s driveway. He was overwhelmed with gratitude and remembers saying, “Oh, Bea, what a wonderful gift! You shouldn’t have done it—it’s so expensive.” Of course, Bea had stolen the car and she laughed for a whole month while she waited for Ralph to be arrested, which he was. Bea had paid off the police and nothing came of it except a huge joke at Ralph’s expense.

One of Bea’s many saving graces was her generosity. I’ve never met anyone as tough and hard but also as courageous, resourceful, and wonderfully giving as Bea. We moved to New Jersey in 1940, one step ahead of the law, and she became a real estate broker and insurance agent. She gave away most of her commissions to help people get started in new homes. She was loved by everyone, except those who managed to get on her bad side, and then she was an implacable enemy.