Container Traffic Jam Off Both US Coasts
There are 153 container ships waiting to get into US ports, two thirds of them off the east coast and the Gulf of Mexico. The backlog is up 66% in the past seven weeks.
That means more stuff stuck on ships waiting to get to manufactures and retail stores. Merry Christmas. It guarantees higher prices and that will add to inflation.
Car companies can charge full price for cars because of strong demand, recession or no recession. Used car prices are strong, especially electrics.
Shift Electric sells electric vehicles from its lot in Oakville, Ontario. It has a used 2022 Tesla Y Performance with 2,901 km is listed at C$119,950.
The same model new from Tesla is C$91,900 (still an outrageous price), October delivery. $28,000 is a lot of dough to pay for instant gratification.
2022 Tesla Model Y PERFORMANCE FULL SELF DRIVING, HEATED STEERING!
Est. Finance Payment$776/bw7.79% for 96 Months
Dealer Price$119,950+ Tax
Shipping Profits Up: What a Surprise
Container shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd said this week its profits for the first half of this year are up 145% to $10.9-billion.
The German firm is the fifth largest container line.
All the big carriers are making more money as what they charge for a 20 foot container is up 80%. Guess who pays for that? You, when you buy made in China Christmas Tree lights.
Land-Locked Switzerland Owns the Largest Container Shipping Company
The graphic says Danish Maersk is number 1 but The Mediterranean Shipping Company has since moved into first place. It is Swiss owned.
Cosco is not owned by Costco, but by the Chinese government.
Want to Buy a Yacht?
The Axioma was seized in Gibraltar in March. Not only is it owned by Dmitry Pumpyansky, a friend of Vladimir Putin, but there is also a $12-million dollar loan on it. Dmitry didn’t cough up the payment, so the bank, JP Morgan, seized it.
The 236 foot yacht can accommodate 12 guests has a swimming pool and a 3D movie theatre, among other things.
The original cost: $75-million, so Dmitry, who made his loot in gas and steel, will lose it all since he is on the sanctions list. It was will sold on August 23 in a one day action on an `as is, where is’ basis. There is no reserve, or guaranteed minimum price, so it will probably go below replacement value. Dmitry must be steaming. Boo-hoo.
What About a House?
“Baby, you’re the Ginchiest”
A old rock station was on in the kitchen playing Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb. The final line was “Baby you’re the Ginchiest.” I thought I knew slang. Never heard of Ginchiest. A quick run to the Oxford English Dictionary. There it is at the bottom.
ginch, n.
slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). An attractive woman, esp. (frequently depreciative) one regarded as an object of sexual gratification. Also as a mass noun: such women collectively.
1934 J. D. Carr Eight of Swords ix. 98 He found himself walking away beside this lithe, bright-eyed, altogether luscious ginch in the tennis frock.
1960 Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune 5 Dec. 3/3 Flip little ginch, ain't yuh?
1971 E. Tidyman & W. Friedkin French Connection (film script) (Electronic text) 6 A close shot of a chorus line, with lots of tits and ass and lean, long legs... Russo takes the seat on the right, eyes immediately on all that ginch.
1992 C. Nova Trombone iii. 242 Well, I guess that's Dean's last piece of ginch, isn't it? There isn't any romance or desperate women where he's going.
Derivatives
Categories »
ginchy adj. attractive, esp. sexually; cool, excellent, fashionable.
1959 I. Taylor Kookie Kookie (song) in Time 11 May 72/1 B-a-aby, you're the ginchiest!
Edd`Kookie’ Byrnes and Connie Stevens who sang Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb
Essay of the Week
Sam Ciccolini and his family operate Master’s Insurance, a giant in the world of construction in Toronto. Someone once told me that if you had an aerial shot of the Greater Toronto area, Master’s Insurance would insure one crane in three. Not just the crane, but the site.
Not bad for a family that arrived with just a few dollars in the 1950s. This chapter is from the book I wrote on Sam’s life.
Chapter 9
The First Insurance Agency
When people look at Sam Ciccolini today, they might say, “What a successful guy. I guess getting there was easy for him.” Well, easy it was not. It started when Frank was selling life insurance, and Sam was still working on contract for the engineering firm.
Frank found out that a friend of the family, Steve Perzia, wanted to sell his small insurance agency. Seems Steve had been trained as an architectural draftsman and figured he could make a lot more money doing drawings and getting permits for all the garages that were going up in the laneways and back alleys of Little Italy.
The agency was for sale for $4,000 and Frank asked Sam if he was interested in going into business together. Neither had the money so that night at dinner they asked their parents it they could lend them $4,000. It shows how frugal Pasquale and Filomena Ciccolini were, that they could have that kind of money in the bank on a working man’s paycheque.
“My father looked at my mother and she looked at him and she said, ‘I think we should give them the money’ because she and I--I keep coming back to my mother, she was the brain trust of the family,” says Sam. “So Frank got in touch with Steve and told him that we were interested, and my contract with the engineering firm was almost over and so was the position. So on September 20, 1966, we met with Steve Perzia and we shook hands and said yes we were interested.”
Steve’s office was at 1224 St Clair West on the second floor of a bank known as the County Savings and Loan Corporation. There was another small room for rent on the second floor, and Sam walked into the bank and asked to speak to the manager. Out came a man he would know for the rest of his life: Con Di Nino.
“We sat down and he said yes, great, it’s $25 a week and so we went upstairs to see the room and it was six feet by nine feet. I said, ‘Mr. Di Nino this room is very small.’ He said what do you want for $25, furniture too? I started laughing. Now we had a room, we had an agency, but we had no furniture. I called one of my friends, Frank DelCore, and asked him, since he was moving, if he had anything we could use and he said he had a desk, two chairs, and a steel cabinet. So we bought all that stuff from Frank DelCore for nine bucks. I still have the desk and the two chairs. I got them refurbished and they’re at my house.”
October 1, 1966, was the start of Ciccolini and Perzia Insurance; the brothers were $4,000 in hock to their parents and not a prospect in sight. They kept the Perzia name for continuity and to keep operating legally under his licence. It would be years before Sam took a salary from the agency. He started to walk the streets of his neighbourhood, banging on doors to see who wanted to insure their car or their house.
This was also the start of what is arguably the hardest working part of his life, which, when it comes to someone like Sam Ciccolini, is really saying something. He arrived at the insurance office every day at 8 a.m. and left around 5 p.m. He then went home, grabbed something to eat, and headed out to his paying job at Oshawa Wholesale at the Ontario Food Terminal on the Queensway. The company was the wholesale distributor for all the IGA stores in southern Ontario and the near north, places such as Parry Sound and North Bay. It was a different era back then, and many small towns had IGA franchises run by local families.
Sam was part of an eight-person inventory crew that would go out at night and do an inventory of stores, driving hours outside the city to do the job. On the weekends the crew would visit IGA stores in far off locations such as North Bay or Ganonoque past Kingston. On weeknights he would finish in time to get home around three in the morning, grab a few hours sleep, and head into the insurance office. This went on for seven years.
Max Wolfe was the boss of Oshawa Wholesale, and he encouraged Sam and the other members of the crew to do a little overtime at the Food Terminal when they returned. That was extra money, and Sam never turned it down.
“Max Wolfe would say, boys, anyone want to work overtime? To sweep the warehouse ready for the workers at 7 o’clock. I used to stay there for an hour which would give me two hours pay instead of an hour,” says Sam. “Then I actually started going on a Saturday morning and my job was to make sure that all the fridges full of bananas had proper gas flow and proper heating to turn the green bananas the right color. I did that two hours on a Saturday and got paid four hours.”
Back at the insurance agency, times were tough. In their first month in business they made $3.25. Good thing Sam was making $125 a week, plus overtime, from Max Wolfe at Oshawa Foods. The third Ciccolini brother, Livio, had joined the team, but soon left and went back to his job at Dominion Stores. It was sheer will power that kept the tiny agency going.
Most weekends were spent knocking on doors, most of them belonging to strangers. This is the “cold call,” one of the toughest things to do in any line of work, but particularly in the insurance business because most people think they don’t need insurance. It is a product that is sold, seldom a product someone goes out to buy.
There was also the kindness of people who wanted to give the struggling agency a leg up. Marino Di Nino, Con Di Nino’s father, was one of them. “He was one of the pillars of our foundation apart from my parents because he kind of took me under his wing and said, ‘come with me, one of my friends needs insurance.’ So that was our first client, Diodoro Cocca and we still have him. He lived across the road from Marino on Hillmount Avenue, and we went to see him and that was the first policy I wrote,” says Sam. “Jane and Finch was another part of the city that was a success for us. We did business with the Zito, Savo, and Ciampa families.”
It wasn’t until 1972 that Sam left Oshawa Wholesale and started working full time at the insurance agency. His job was to sell and it still is. Today, Masters Insurance has about 110 people working in its Concord office and not one of them is in sales. The members of the Ciccolini family who work there, four of the older generation and ten of the next, do the selling.
“We are the sales force. We’re so highly oriented around our community that we never needed sales people,” says Sam. “We tried on two occasions to have sales people. Our first person to come and work with us was a fellow by the name of Mario Bonfini, still a great friend and client. That was in 1969, and he didn’t last very long because there was no money.”
But back to their first office at 1224 St. Clair West. It was 1972, and Sam and his brother started taking a paycheque of $100 a week with a bonus at the end of the year when the profits would be split 50-50 since each owned half the business. Along with knocking on doors there was non-stop networking, though sometimes the networking had nothing to do with selling insurance.
It was also the year Max Ciccolini was recruited into the family insurance business. He was reluctant at first. Unlike Sam, Max had been a star student at Harbord Collegiate, and after graduating in 1965 went on to York University where he studied history and political science. Max was one of the first students at York University when the Keele campus began in 1965.
After graduating from York, Max was accepted in law school at Queen’s University, but left after a year. He was looking for a job, and by chance while Sam was selling drinks at an Argos game, he spotted Mr. Kaye, one of Max’s former teachers, and asked him if he had a position for Max at his school. He did, and soon Max was teaching history at Danforth Tech.
By the time Sam approached him about joining the family agency, Max was making $9,800 a year with long summer holidays, a dental plan, and a pension. None of this was on offer at Ciccolini Insurance, as it had become known by 1972. There were 168 teaching days a year in Ontario high schools, while Ciccolini Insurance was a six days a week commitment, or 312 days a year. “In January Sam comes along and he and Frank had been in the insurance business for six years since 1966 and they had people working with them but as soon as they [the employee] realized that they could sell insurance on their own, they left,” remembers Max. “Sam said to me, ‘Max, if Frank and I are going to continue and go out and drum up business, we will need somebody in the office to do administration.’ I said, ‘Sam, are you crazy? I’ve got a permanent job with summer holidays, March Break, Christmas and Easter.’”
There was another thing, the status of being the first member of the family to earn a university degree. “To Italians a ‘professore’ is status.”
We all know the outcome. Sam closed the deal. Max never stood a chance, and he took a cut in pay—from about $200 a week to $125— gave up his benefits, and by September 1972 was on board at Ciccolini Insurance.
Sam and Frank had moved from St. Clair Avenue, upstairs from Con Di Nino’s County Savings & Loan Corporation, to John Cocomile’s building at 1710 Dufferin Street just around the corner. When Max started, so did a new bookkeeper, Josie Bertucci, who took over from her sister Anne. Josie still works at Masters Insurance sitting right near Max’s office.
Max’s job was to answer the phones and handle the administration of the business, while learning as much as he could about the insurance business. A clever man, his academic training made him a quick study. It didn’t take him long to pass the exams, and get his insurance licence. Max ran the office pretty much the same as he does today. That left Frank free to specialise in his side of the business: life insurance and health and benefit insurance, and let Sam concentrate on what he did best: meeting people, selling insurance, and networking.
With Max covering the office and the detail work, Sam went out to subdivisions that were under construction, lining up insurance on the new houses. Max says his brother Sam is “the best salesman in the family, by far.”
“Within two or three years, by 1975, we had already built up a good book of business because they [Frank and Sam] hustled. Sam hustled every night, and I would venture to say that out of every ten people that he went to see he probably wrote [sold a policy to] at least five of them. He had a fantastic hit ratio, and that’s how we base our things even today. Companies quote a hundred and if they get twenty they’re laughing. So we were doing a lot better than the average at the time, and that’s how we grew,” says Max.
One of the people Sam met was an energetic, ambitious young man, nine years younger than Sam, who had moved from Windsor, Ontario to Toronto. His name was Sergio Marchionne and, after graduating from university, took a job with Con Di Nino’s bank branch. Sergio was in charge of the account for the Ciccolini Insurance Agency.
Sam and Sergio would have lunch most days at the Harvey’s at the corner of St. Clair and Lansdowne. They would talk about everything except insurance, and for Sam it was a bit of an education and an eye-opener to a wider world that, as yet, he knew little about.
Today Sergio Marchionne is CEO of Fiat Chrysler. He and Sam are still friends, and as Sergio travels and lives abroad, Sam keeps an eye on Sergio’s mother who still lives in Toronto. Back when Sergio was just a bank trainee, those lunches meant contacts for both of them in the local Italian Canadian business community.
There was an important chance meeting at the Sidewalk Restaurant at the corner of St. Clair and Dufferin. The man Sam met was Emilio Gambin of the law firm Gambin & Bratty. “So, Mr. Gambin asked, what do you do, young man? A staunch dignified sort of an individual who looked like he had just come from seeing the Queen. Very sharp and everything to the nines. I told him I was in the insurance business, and he asked what type of insurance and I told him we had just started and we weren’t doing very well but we were going to stick it out,” says Sam.
That was when Mr. Gambin decided to give the young Sam Ciccolini a chance, not something easy, but a test to see if he could pull off a difficult task that his current insurer had some trouble delivering. “He asked if we could produce insurance policies on the last Friday of every month and I said, ‘sure, why not’ but I was stretching the truth because I didn’t know what he was talking about. You see at that time they used to close deals on the last Friday of every month. They didn’t close deals every day or at three in the morning or two in the afternoon. He said you know every month we may close as many as two hundred homes and anyone who has a mortgage on the house we need to have an insurance policy. I said, ‘Mr. Gambin, I can do that with my eyes closed.’”
What happened next was the test. At the end of that month Mr. George Della Rocca and Mr. Gambin told Sam they would give him the closings, and he provided the details of what his law firm needed.
Sam went back to the office and called the Boston Old Colony Insurance Company (now Northbridge General Insurance) and Gibraltar Insurance and figured out how to work on the closings. What had to be done was to make sure the houses had insurance, and to do it all on the same day of the closing. It was complicated, and at first Sam, in his own words, “had no clue” what he was doing, but he learned and in a hurry.
“We got the names of the husband, the wife, the description of the house, how big the house was and which neighbourhood, and whether or not there was a fire hydrant in front, or it was close to a fire station. All that had to be part of the actual policy. Then I asked the insurance company executives, Charlie Mist and Peter Acmem, how much we needed to put on the policy, and if the house is, say, 1100 square feet, how much would you need to replace it? That part I knew at around $20-$25 a square foot. The actual policy was for $8000 and I convinced him [the client] to take $2000 of contents and it cost $32 for three years.”
The deal was done late Thursday night and at 9:30 the next morning Sam showed up at the office of Gambin & Bratty with the five policies. The lawyer was dumbfounded. He had to pull teeth to get his regular insurance firm to deliver the policies by 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, close to the closing deadline. Bingo. Out went the other agency, and soon the Ciccolini brothers were doing 80 to 85 closings a month, almost all the law firm’s business.
“It wasn’t rocket science. You had a four-page policy all with carbon copy paper and you had to type it, but I had two ladies, Marion Mainprize and Tina Naccarato, with Josie doing the invoicing. So I typed and they typed, so we knocked them off in one day,” says Sam. “Now, were there mistakes? You’re darn right there were mistakes, nobody’s perfect, but we actually did it. Of the four-page policy, one copy went to the client, one to your office, and two you sent to the company. And we used to deliver them to the company so they could set up files, and the company would actually give us a stack of policies with those red numbers in the right hand top corner of the page.”
Next Rudy Bratty asked if Sam could do some legal work involving letters of credit that were stranded in Alberta, which was followed by work on bonds. It is a relationship that has lasted to this day. “We do most of Bratty’s work and Remington’s [a subsidiary firm] work downstairs. They have our trust, and Rudy Bratty is the most prolific lawyer/developer in Ontario, probably one of the biggest philanthropists that I know, and just a totally all-round great family,” says Sam. “Imagine, we’ve been Rudy and Jerry Bratty’s tenants from 1970, for 45 years. Isn’t that something?
“In the spring of 1973 Rudy Bratty was so happy with our service and product delivery that he recommended that we see a friend and business associate, Marco Muzzo, at Marel Contractors,” says Sam.
Sam made the appointment with his assistant, Maria Acocella, and saw Mr. Muzzo at 6a.m. one Monday morning. He asked him about repatriating letters of credit from Alberta, and Sam went to work. After Sam delivered the letters of credit by replacing them with maintenance bonds, Mr. Muzzo asked Sam to take over his entire insurance portfolio as his broker. “I asked him if he wanted to know how much it would cost, to which he replied, ‘Sam, I don’t care about the cost because if you ever take me for a penny, you will never get the chance to do it again.’ And today we still do all of Marel’s insurance and bonding work,” says Sam.
In 1972 Frank met Antonio Tiberini, whose family took a liking to the Ciccolinis. “He was a giant of a man in every way. Along with his son Galliano [Galli] and daughter Josephine, they have been trusted clients, and I have a special relationship with Galli that spans 42 years. Galli advises and mentors me on business decisions along with generous help in looking after the Sisters [Sisters of Sacred Heart Incarnate Word] and their needs,” says Sam.
“Celeste Iacobelli is a close friend and confidante of Galli Tiberini and an amazing lawyer. He is a real community giver and was one of the members of the committee that actually built St. Clare of Assisi Church in Woodbridge. I was involved with that from 1994 until its opening in 2003 as their fundraising chair. Celeste was quite instrumental in being the actual solicitor who kind of put all the contracts together, with the help of my friend and solicitor for the Diocese, Bill Pigott, for the St. Clare of Assisi parish and the diocese of Toronto so that the five of us could build a church.”
Over the years Sam has come to know all the major builders in Ontario. One of them is Mario Romano, who Sam met early on his career when he was knocking on doors looking for business. “Mario Romano is one of the greatest land assemblers during the period when all the development has been going on in Vaughn, Markham, and Brampton,” says Sam. He adds that Mario is a highly cultured man, and an accomplished classical pianist.
Carlo Baldasarra came to Canada in 1959, three years after Sam. He started as a carpenter and today his family owns and operates the Greenpark Group, which has built over 68,000 new homes and condos and developed millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space mostly in southern Ontario. “I had the opportunity of meeting him in the early 1980s when so many houses were being sold in the GTA. Carlo Baldasarra has taken Greenpark Homes, with his partners and his sons Mauro, Armando, and Michael, to new heights in home-building in the Canadian market. They are the largest home builders in Canada and known for quality of what they build,” says Sam,
Not all of Sam’s connections are Italian and Catholic. In 1972 he met Joseph Silver, who was a devout Orthodox Jew. The Silver family purchased the St. Anna Medical Centre from Sam’s close friend, Dr. Olindo Casullo.
Sam became close to the Silver family including Joseph’s son, Avrom, who started a string of medical laboratories, and Sam was entrusted with looking after their finances through insurance coverage.
Sam and Donna attended Avrom’s wedding to Bonny Vogel and watched as their three children, Jeffrey, Jeremy, and Sherry grew. In 1995 Sam and Donna flew to Jerusalem to attend Jeffrey’s Bar Mitzvah as a guest of Avrom and Bonny. “Avrom died in the summer of 1996, at age 42 and I miss him dearly. He was a special person,” says Sam.