AS I REMEMBER HIM
Recollections about my uncle Jim Breese
Recollections about my uncle Jim Breese
“He gave me a desk and but never told me what he wanted me to do. For two weeks I sat there every day, waiting for something to happen. So I left.” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The scion of a noted New Mexico inventor and bon vivant was recalling his lost future when he, the only son of Jim Breese, Jr., could build a bigger and better Breese Burners, Inc.
James L. Breese III was my uncle on my mother’s side, and we were having a beer and sandwich in his neglected, cheap San Francisco apartment. Uncle Jim was an accomplished engineer in heating and air conditioning. For years I wondered why he hadn’t seized the opportunity to advance Breese Burners’ fortunes in the development and sale of oil burners for home heating and military applications. His father, the founder of the firm, had accumulated about 100 patents in this field.
Uncle Jim, my mother, her two sisters, and to some extent myself grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our place was many acres along the Santa Fe River on Upper Canyon Road. The main house was large with two stories and sloping lawns bordered by poplars and willows. We were a short horseback ride to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. My grandfather’s offices and development labs were at the north end of the property with a huge oval swimming pool in between. The pool had trapezes at both ends to add to the fun. The annual horseshow participated in by all our friends and grandfather’s passion for playing polo added to our diversions and accomplishments.
My grandfather entertained many prominent people during the 1930s through the 1960s, especially scientists and artists. They included scientists from the then secretive Los Alamos Laboratories, people in the arts like our neighbor Randall Davey, the White sisters, and Will Shuster. In the later years, the top singers would come over after the opera to sing around the pool.
With a cultural and material inheritance like this, how could the young Jim Breese back away from the call of fun and fortune?
Jim was a sensitive young man and not athletic like his sisters. He was not aggressive nor interested in leadership. Nevertheless, when he became draft age, he joined the Air Force near the end of World War II. He was a talented writer and was assigned to report on the Nuremberg Trials. With all the lurid descriptions of the Nazi death camps during the trials, this must have been traumatizing for him.
But things got worse. After returning to New Mexico, he often stayed with his mother in Albuquerque where he had begun studies at the University of New Mexico. She was divorced and had married an opportunistic drifter who specialized in marrying wealthy women. In 1948, at the impressionable age of 21, Jim found her dead, hanging in her closet. His mother, whom I never knew, was idealistic and had bouts of severe depression, but to this day there is no agreement about the cause of her death. Young Jim must have been further permanently traumatized.
Three years later Jim graduated in engineering from the university. He started his career working at the Los Alamos Laboratories on the Maniac, one of the first electronic digital computers. Things seemed to be going well but Jim was not an organization man who would be permanently happy in a bureaucratic government research lab.
So when his father called him to come down off The Hill (as Los Alamos was and still is known) and take a look at Breese Burners, Jim agreed. I can only speculate about what Grandfather Breese was thinking.
This was the mid-1950s. Breese Burners was prospering. Its traditional oil burner sales for home furnaces had dropped considerably due to new technologies taking over that market, but the Breese burners found a new customer. Grandfather Breese designed a new version for the Army to use as tent heaters during the Korean War. They were the only burners that could use kerosene, aviation fuel, or gasoline. Grandfather Breese was now in his late 60s and in poor health, so it would seem to be a good time to bring his son into the business.
Equally important, the proprietary technology of the Breese oil burners shifted from the burner designs to the electronic controls for them. Indeed, when Breese Burners, Inc. was sold several years later, the sale was to a major industrial controls company. Young Jim, the electronics whiz, would have had just the technical background to take the family business to the next level.
When Grandfather Breese gave his son a desk in the company, maybe he was hoping to see where his son’s curiosity and initiative would lead him. Perhaps he’d grab a file of sales correspondence and go visit customers—a traditional way for promising managers to start in small businesses. Maybe he’d look at burners in the development lab and see if he had some promising ideas for improving burner controls designs. Then he could develop a new patent portfolio for the company.
Whether he was afraid of or awed by his dad I’ll never know. Undoubtedly, to a certain degree, young Jim must have felt that his father, a womanizer who married four times, was at least partially guilty of his mother’s untimely death. All I know is that according to Uncle Jim, he just sat there at his desk, waiting for something to happen.
In 1959 Uncle Jim moved with his new young wife and baby daughter to San Francisco, her home town. They settled in a small but romantic apartment on Telegraph Hill. Jim set up an engineering consulting business in a low rent district near the waterfront. He specialized in heating and air condition systems design, and his clients included international airports, high tech silicon valley firms, and hotels. He was compensated by commissions from the sales of manufacturers’ equipment that he represented.
I didn’t see or hear from Uncle Jim over the next ten years because I had started college and was focused on starting my career. I was in Santa Fe off and on when my mother moved there from Rhode Island after her divorce. In 1958 Grandfather Breese sold his business and moved to southern California with his fourth wife. He died from a heart condition while walking the beach in La Jolla in 1959.
During the 1970s and 80s, my business travels took me to San Francisco once or twice a year. I decided to reconnect with Uncle Jim after a long silence. About all I knew was that he was divorced and apparently doing well in business. My mother, however, thought much of his business was financed by his modest inheritance.
First, he wanted to show me his prestigious office. It was a large room on the eighth floor of a modern office building near Market Street in the financial district. He sat behind a large desk piled high with books and folders. He was wearing a tweed jack and button-down shirt with a dirty rep tie. The scene made me think of a professor in his study. He stood up, smiling, and offered me a powdered coffee in a stained cup.
Then I noticed a woman in her 30s or 40s sitting silently behind another cluttered desk. She was Scandinavian-looking with braids. Jim, relaxing somewhat, said, “Larry, this is Ella. She is my assistant.” Ella didn’t look like either an engineer or secretary to me and it would take me some time to figure out their arrangement.
I was on an expense account so I invited Jim to a nice dinner at a well-reviewed gourmet restaurant near my hotel. He insisted on taking me to a little seafood place he frequented nearby and he also insisted that I stay at his house. The seafood place was hardly trendy. Everyone there seemed to be old men teetering around. The waiters were equally vintage and there was sawdust on the floors.
We had a nice conversation, catching up on everything. Jim said business was fair, but he was trying to increase customer contact by publishing a technical newsletter. Ella Leffland, a well-known novelist in California, was his editor and muse. He wanted to show me his house on nearby Russian Hill. It was typical San Francisco as a semidetached house half-way down a very steep hill. Uncle Jim lived upstairs and Ella lived downstairs. He explained she liked to live in almost total darkness, chain-smoking and writing her novels on her little Olivetti typewriter.
I couldn’t believe Jim’s apartment. It was a dingy beige color with a few threadbare carpets. The living room furniture was a maroon velvet couch with the springs pushing up and popping out. Books were strewn about and an ancient FM radio was always on and mostly playing Mozart. The kitchen was some ancient appliances set about on many times over stained and cracked Linoleum. Leaping about was Jim’s black cat, Mordred. Cat dander was everywhere. Jim said, “I don’t have a bed for you, but there’s a futon you can unfold and set by the bay window. We don’t have much hot water—the landlord’s always promising to fix it, but with rent-control, she says fixing it won’t pay.” Indeed, the shower was a dribbly shower head over a dirty bathtub. I don’t like to talk apparently disparagingly about my dear uncle, but these are the facts.
He reciprocated visits. In the 1980s he traveled to Pennsylvania several times and would work in a side trip to see me at a high tech company I had started in New Jersey. On one of those meeting when I had a contentious board meeting, he calmed the directors and may have saved my executive job.
In 1982 things were looking up for him in business. He moved his company to a larger but cheaper industrial space in the south side of San Francisco. He won a number of industrial refrigeration contracts with the booming semiconductor manufacturing industry in “Silicon Valley” further down the peninsula. His daughter Gretchen worked there as a general assistant when she wasn’t at college and she was very instrumental in his success in the early to mid-1980s.
Again, for the most part, I lost track of Jim while I was involved with building a company in New Jersey. When I did visit, we played tennis on a court near the airport and had tacos at a famous taco bar, La Taqueria, on the way back to his place. He had moved to a multifamily house south of The Presidio, near the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside, it looked similar to but in better condition than his last apartment, but the cat dander was worse than ever. Ella did not move in but found an apartment about eleven blocks away. She still kept seeing Jim.
Meanwhile, Jim was getting his share of the hotel building boom in San Francisco. Around 2002 he received a big contract to retrofit heating equipment in the San Francisco Hilton. The hotel subcontracted the equipment installation to Western Plumbing & Heating, an old-line firm whose president Jim knew well. Western Plumbing would buy the equipment that Jim specified.
On October 31, 2003, Western Plumbing’s president and owner, Victor Bach, was found bludgeoned to death in his plumbing shop. Kathleen Bach, Victor Bach’s much younger wife, was charged with embezzling $1.9 million. The theft was discovered just a few days before he was murdered. On November 14, 2008, Kathleen Bach was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison. The murder was never solved.
Jim was never able to recover the considerable sum that western Plumbing & Heating owed him. Everything was going wrong. He lost much of his savings in the stock market in the 2008 crash, and he became seriously overweight and bloated. That could have been a reaction to the cat dander. Prior to that, he was trim and fit for his 82 years. On March 14, 2009, he died of cardiovascular disease.
His obituary published in the San Francisco Chronicle summarized by saying, “Jim will be remembered especially for two things, fundamental to his nature, his kindness to others, and his integrity.”
His memorial service was held at the Columbarium, a copper-domed, neo-classical structure, that looked like it had been floated over from Rome. It has a large rotunda, mosaic tile floors, ornate stained-glass windows, and a domed skylight. Its 45-foot atrium is ringed with balconies stacked up four floors high. His ashes were scattered out to sea.
Jim Breese, at last, had a powerful recognition of his worth. He was free to go.
James L. Breese III was my uncle on my mother’s side, and we were having a beer and sandwich in his neglected, cheap San Francisco apartment. Uncle Jim was an accomplished engineer in heating and air conditioning. For years I wondered why he hadn’t seized the opportunity to advance Breese Burners’ fortunes in the development and sale of oil burners for home heating and military applications. His father, the founder of the firm, had accumulated about 100 patents in this field.
Uncle Jim, my mother, her two sisters, and to some extent myself grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our place was many acres along the Santa Fe River on Upper Canyon Road. The main house was large with two stories and sloping lawns bordered by poplars and willows. We were a short horseback ride to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. My grandfather’s offices and development labs were at the north end of the property with a huge oval swimming pool in between. The pool had trapezes at both ends to add to the fun. The annual horseshow participated in by all our friends and grandfather’s passion for playing polo added to our diversions and accomplishments.
My grandfather entertained many prominent people during the 1930s through the 1960s, especially scientists and artists. They included scientists from the then secretive Los Alamos Laboratories, people in the arts like our neighbor Randall Davey, the White sisters, and Will Shuster. In the later years, the top singers would come over after the opera to sing around the pool.
With a cultural and material inheritance like this, how could the young Jim Breese back away from the call of fun and fortune?
Jim was a sensitive young man and not athletic like his sisters. He was not aggressive nor interested in leadership. Nevertheless, when he became draft age, he joined the Air Force near the end of World War II. He was a talented writer and was assigned to report on the Nuremberg Trials. With all the lurid descriptions of the Nazi death camps during the trials, this must have been traumatizing for him.
But things got worse. After returning to New Mexico, he often stayed with his mother in Albuquerque where he had begun studies at the University of New Mexico. She was divorced and had married an opportunistic drifter who specialized in marrying wealthy women. In 1948, at the impressionable age of 21, Jim found her dead, hanging in her closet. His mother, whom I never knew, was idealistic and had bouts of severe depression, but to this day there is no agreement about the cause of her death. Young Jim must have been further permanently traumatized.
Three years later Jim graduated in engineering from the university. He started his career working at the Los Alamos Laboratories on the Maniac, one of the first electronic digital computers. Things seemed to be going well but Jim was not an organization man who would be permanently happy in a bureaucratic government research lab.
So when his father called him to come down off The Hill (as Los Alamos was and still is known) and take a look at Breese Burners, Jim agreed. I can only speculate about what Grandfather Breese was thinking.
This was the mid-1950s. Breese Burners was prospering. Its traditional oil burner sales for home furnaces had dropped considerably due to new technologies taking over that market, but the Breese burners found a new customer. Grandfather Breese designed a new version for the Army to use as tent heaters during the Korean War. They were the only burners that could use kerosene, aviation fuel, or gasoline. Grandfather Breese was now in his late 60s and in poor health, so it would seem to be a good time to bring his son into the business.
Equally important, the proprietary technology of the Breese oil burners shifted from the burner designs to the electronic controls for them. Indeed, when Breese Burners, Inc. was sold several years later, the sale was to a major industrial controls company. Young Jim, the electronics whiz, would have had just the technical background to take the family business to the next level.
When Grandfather Breese gave his son a desk in the company, maybe he was hoping to see where his son’s curiosity and initiative would lead him. Perhaps he’d grab a file of sales correspondence and go visit customers—a traditional way for promising managers to start in small businesses. Maybe he’d look at burners in the development lab and see if he had some promising ideas for improving burner controls designs. Then he could develop a new patent portfolio for the company.
Whether he was afraid of or awed by his dad I’ll never know. Undoubtedly, to a certain degree, young Jim must have felt that his father, a womanizer who married four times, was at least partially guilty of his mother’s untimely death. All I know is that according to Uncle Jim, he just sat there at his desk, waiting for something to happen.
In 1959 Uncle Jim moved with his new young wife and baby daughter to San Francisco, her home town. They settled in a small but romantic apartment on Telegraph Hill. Jim set up an engineering consulting business in a low rent district near the waterfront. He specialized in heating and air condition systems design, and his clients included international airports, high tech silicon valley firms, and hotels. He was compensated by commissions from the sales of manufacturers’ equipment that he represented.
I didn’t see or hear from Uncle Jim over the next ten years because I had started college and was focused on starting my career. I was in Santa Fe off and on when my mother moved there from Rhode Island after her divorce. In 1958 Grandfather Breese sold his business and moved to southern California with his fourth wife. He died from a heart condition while walking the beach in La Jolla in 1959.
During the 1970s and 80s, my business travels took me to San Francisco once or twice a year. I decided to reconnect with Uncle Jim after a long silence. About all I knew was that he was divorced and apparently doing well in business. My mother, however, thought much of his business was financed by his modest inheritance.
First, he wanted to show me his prestigious office. It was a large room on the eighth floor of a modern office building near Market Street in the financial district. He sat behind a large desk piled high with books and folders. He was wearing a tweed jack and button-down shirt with a dirty rep tie. The scene made me think of a professor in his study. He stood up, smiling, and offered me a powdered coffee in a stained cup.
Then I noticed a woman in her 30s or 40s sitting silently behind another cluttered desk. She was Scandinavian-looking with braids. Jim, relaxing somewhat, said, “Larry, this is Ella. She is my assistant.” Ella didn’t look like either an engineer or secretary to me and it would take me some time to figure out their arrangement.
I was on an expense account so I invited Jim to a nice dinner at a well-reviewed gourmet restaurant near my hotel. He insisted on taking me to a little seafood place he frequented nearby and he also insisted that I stay at his house. The seafood place was hardly trendy. Everyone there seemed to be old men teetering around. The waiters were equally vintage and there was sawdust on the floors.
We had a nice conversation, catching up on everything. Jim said business was fair, but he was trying to increase customer contact by publishing a technical newsletter. Ella Leffland, a well-known novelist in California, was his editor and muse. He wanted to show me his house on nearby Russian Hill. It was typical San Francisco as a semidetached house half-way down a very steep hill. Uncle Jim lived upstairs and Ella lived downstairs. He explained she liked to live in almost total darkness, chain-smoking and writing her novels on her little Olivetti typewriter.
I couldn’t believe Jim’s apartment. It was a dingy beige color with a few threadbare carpets. The living room furniture was a maroon velvet couch with the springs pushing up and popping out. Books were strewn about and an ancient FM radio was always on and mostly playing Mozart. The kitchen was some ancient appliances set about on many times over stained and cracked Linoleum. Leaping about was Jim’s black cat, Mordred. Cat dander was everywhere. Jim said, “I don’t have a bed for you, but there’s a futon you can unfold and set by the bay window. We don’t have much hot water—the landlord’s always promising to fix it, but with rent-control, she says fixing it won’t pay.” Indeed, the shower was a dribbly shower head over a dirty bathtub. I don’t like to talk apparently disparagingly about my dear uncle, but these are the facts.
He reciprocated visits. In the 1980s he traveled to Pennsylvania several times and would work in a side trip to see me at a high tech company I had started in New Jersey. On one of those meeting when I had a contentious board meeting, he calmed the directors and may have saved my executive job.
In 1982 things were looking up for him in business. He moved his company to a larger but cheaper industrial space in the south side of San Francisco. He won a number of industrial refrigeration contracts with the booming semiconductor manufacturing industry in “Silicon Valley” further down the peninsula. His daughter Gretchen worked there as a general assistant when she wasn’t at college and she was very instrumental in his success in the early to mid-1980s.
Again, for the most part, I lost track of Jim while I was involved with building a company in New Jersey. When I did visit, we played tennis on a court near the airport and had tacos at a famous taco bar, La Taqueria, on the way back to his place. He had moved to a multifamily house south of The Presidio, near the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside, it looked similar to but in better condition than his last apartment, but the cat dander was worse than ever. Ella did not move in but found an apartment about eleven blocks away. She still kept seeing Jim.
Meanwhile, Jim was getting his share of the hotel building boom in San Francisco. Around 2002 he received a big contract to retrofit heating equipment in the San Francisco Hilton. The hotel subcontracted the equipment installation to Western Plumbing & Heating, an old-line firm whose president Jim knew well. Western Plumbing would buy the equipment that Jim specified.
On October 31, 2003, Western Plumbing’s president and owner, Victor Bach, was found bludgeoned to death in his plumbing shop. Kathleen Bach, Victor Bach’s much younger wife, was charged with embezzling $1.9 million. The theft was discovered just a few days before he was murdered. On November 14, 2008, Kathleen Bach was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison. The murder was never solved.
Jim was never able to recover the considerable sum that western Plumbing & Heating owed him. Everything was going wrong. He lost much of his savings in the stock market in the 2008 crash, and he became seriously overweight and bloated. That could have been a reaction to the cat dander. Prior to that, he was trim and fit for his 82 years. On March 14, 2009, he died of cardiovascular disease.
His obituary published in the San Francisco Chronicle summarized by saying, “Jim will be remembered especially for two things, fundamental to his nature, his kindness to others, and his integrity.”
His memorial service was held at the Columbarium, a copper-domed, neo-classical structure, that looked like it had been floated over from Rome. It has a large rotunda, mosaic tile floors, ornate stained-glass windows, and a domed skylight. Its 45-foot atrium is ringed with balconies stacked up four floors high. His ashes were scattered out to sea.
Jim Breese, at last, had a powerful recognition of his worth. He was free to go.