school. Friedman was, at the time, what we would today call "economically disadvantaged." He was an inner-city kid from the Bronx, neither of whose parents went to college. But look at how easy it was for him to get a good education. He graduated from his public high school in New York at a time when New York City public schools were the envy of the world. His first option, City College, was free, and his second option, the University of Michigan, cost just $450.and the admissions process was casual enough, apparently, that he could try one school one day and the other the next.
And how did he get there? He hitchhiked, with the money that he made in the summer in his pocket, and when he arrived, he immediately got a series of really good jobs to help pay his way, because the factories were "looking for people." And of course they were: they had to feed the needs of the big generation just ahead of those born in the demographic trough of the 1930s, and the big generation of baby boomers coming up behind them. The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would- be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.
Today, Mort Janklow has an office high above Park Avenue filled with gorgeous works of modern art—a Dubuffet, an Anselm Kiefer. He tells hilarious stories. ("My mother had two sisters. One lived to be ninety- nine and the other died at ninety. The ninety-nine-yearold was a smart woman. She married my Uncle Al, who was the chief of sales for Maidenform. Once I said to him, 'What's the rest of the country like, Uncle Al?' And he said, 'Kiddo. When you leave New York, every place is Bridgeport.' ") He gives the sense that the world is his for the taking. "I've always been a big risk taker," he says. "When I built the cable company, in the early stages, I was making deals where I would have been bankrupt if I hadn't pulled it off. I had confidence that I could make it work."
Mort Janklow went to New York City public schools when they were at their best. Maurice Janklow went to New York City public schools when they were at their most overcrowded. Mort Janklow went to Columbia University Law School, because demographic trough babies have their pick of selective schools. Maurice Janklow went to Brooklyn Law School, which was as good as an immigrant child could do in 1919. Mort Janklow sold his cable business for tens of millions of dollars. Maurice Janklow closed titles for twenty-five dollars. The story of the Janklows tells us that the meteoric rise of Joe Flom could not have happened at just any time. Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.
"My mother was coherent until the last five or six months of her life," Mort Janklow said. "And in her delirium she talked about things that she'd never talked about before. She shed tears over her friends dying in the 1918 flu epidemic. That generation—my parents' generation—lived through a lot. They lived through that epidemic, which took, what? ten percent of the world's population. Panic in the streets. Friends dying. And then the First World War, then the Depression, then the Second World War. They didn't have much of a chance. That was a very tough period. My father would have been much more successful in a different kind of world."
Lesson Number Three: The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work
8.
In 1889, Louis and Regina Borgenicht boarded an ocean liner in Hamburg bound for America. Louis was from Galacia, in what was then Poland. Regina was from a small town in Hungary. They had been married only a few years and had one small child and a second on the way. For the thirteen-day journey, they slept on straw mattresses on a deck above the engine room, hanging tight to their bunk beds as the ship pitched and rolled. They knew one person in New York: Borgenicht's sister, Sallie, who had immigrated ten years before. They had enough money to last a