Hesped (Eulogy) for Henry Muller
by Jerry Muller
March 2, 2017
Henry Muller was a remarkable person.
Today I want to talk about some of the key elements of his life and his character.
A couple of days ago, when it became clear that the end of his life was near, and I sat down to prepare this, my wife, Sharon, said, “Jerry, are you sure you can do this?” And I said, “It’s a role I’ve been studying for all my life.” For the last 62 1/2 years I’ve been observing and contemplating Henry Muller. And then. a couple of years ago, for the sake of completeness we sat down together and I conducted six hours of interviews with him, on tape, about the course of his life. So let me try to tell you a little bit about his life, and evoke a little bit of his character.
He was born 1930 in Slovakia, the first of two children of Ferdinand and Magda Muller. His father, Ferdinand, was a successful merchant of foodstuffs.
In early 1939, after Slovakia came under the control of Nazi Germany, and its government was dominated by Slovak fascists, his father was beaten up; his grandfather, that is to say his mother’s father, who was a physician, was arrested and eventually released; and my grandfather decided that they should get out of there as quickly as possible. They managed, when it was almost impossible to do so, to come to Canada in,1939: his father, Ferdinand, his mother, Magda, Henry and his sister, Alice, and my grandfather’s brother and his wife, and their two children, George and Agnes. At the time it was very difficult to get into Canada, and they could only enter only as farmers. And so they did. They bought a farm in Thorold, Ontario, not too far from Niagara Falls. The problem was they had been merchants for generations – they didn’t know anything about farming. And so, under difficult circumstances, they lived on the farm for almost a decade, eking out a meager living.
To help make ends meet, when he was a teenager, Henry and his father on Saturday mornings when there was a market nearby would slaughter a pig or a cow, and take it to the local market. And then, to make more money, Henry would spend the rest of the day boning out cattle for a local butcher, working in a refrigerated room, till his hands were cold and stiff.
At about the same time as they came, a number of other families of Hungarian speaking Jews moved to the area, and they used to hold High Holiday services together on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Henry learned to conduct those, and from that experience he developed a love of the liturgy, and of cantorial music, that remained with him for his entire life.
He was nine when he came, and children are often adaptable, and he adapted quickly to his new environment, so by the age of eleven, he was already winning public speaking competitions – this is from a kid who new hardly a word of English when he came to Canada two years earlier.
Perhaps because of his speaking ability he intended to go to law school. But toward the end of high school, when he was in about grade 12, his father had a discussion with him. He said, ”Don’t go to college, don’t go to law school; let’s go into business together, and we’ll make a success of it, and be able to support generations to come.“ And they did. Through a lot of hard work, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of smarts. In the late 1940s, they moved from the farm to Niagara Falls, and opened a business, Muller’s Meats.
The next year, 1951, Henry’s only sibling, his sister Alice, passed away. That meant that he was the eldest child in an immigrant family, and then the only child. And from early on, he was the anchor of the family.
In December, 1952, he married Bella Zucker, and they lived in an apartment above Muller’s Meats, on Centre Street in Niagara Falls, just as his parents had lived in an apartment above their store in Slovakia – though this apartment was a lot smaller. They all worked in an office together. Henry at one desk, with a phone first on one ear and eventually on two ears, and an adding machine at his fingertips in case he had to do quick calculations. Across from him sat his father, Nandor. On the other side of the office, sat Bella and Henry’s mother, Magda. And from time to time, when Magda was needed, she also worked out in the front of the store with the customers.
So they worked very hard to make a living. He worked hard to make a living and continued to do so really until the week that he died.
He was really smart, something that struck me from early on. Let me give you just a couple of examples. He was able to do mathematical calculations in his head, and he was able to do them faster than he could on the adding machine. And that was actually very helpful in business, when you were talking to somebody on the phone and you were negotiating prices and could figure out at what rate something would actually be profitable without having to look it up, as it were.
He was also, in very many respects, self-taught. He didn’t go to business school. He learned about how to do business first of all from his father (who was an excellent businessman, but he didn’t have the knowledge of English or of local circumstances to be a success on his own). He also learned through trial and error. He also picked up things on his own. I remember when I was a kid, he learned about how to trade stocks from books that he bought; and he had these books on charting, a kind of proto-algorithm, to try to find out where the stocks were going to go.
Henry Muller did something that was quite extraordinary: he supported his family for six generations. You might ask, “How is that possible?” Well, as I’ve indicated, by going into the business with his father, he made it possible for his parents to conduct that business, first on the farm, and later in Niagara Falls. So he supported his own generation, and he helped support the generation of his parents. They, in turn supported my grandmother’s parents, when they came to Canada in 1951. Then he supported his children, his grandchildren, and some of his great- grandchildren. So indirectly or directly, he supported his grandparents, his parents, his four children, his eleven grandchildren, and his seven great-grandchildren.
He worked to provide opportunities for his descendants that he had not had himself.
One of the most remarkable things about him was that gave his four children remarkable support to follow their own stars, even when it led to fields about which he knew nothing (like intellectual history), or even when they decided to do something radical like living in Israel.
He loved his grandchildren, who now range in age from their late teens to their mid-30s (and they are all here). He was always concerned about them: concerned about their problems, taking pride in their accomplishments, and interested in the various careers that they were pursuing. He loved his great-grandchildren, with a love that radiated when he saw them, or spoke to them via Facetime, or spoke of them.
So, business and family were central in his life. One of the most important roles of business for him was as a way of supporting his family. It was also a source of interest to him, and it was one of the ways in which he measured his success.
And he moved from business to business: from the retail meat business, to the wholesale meat business in Muller’s Meats in Niagara Falls, selling to restaurants, eventually to selling internationally. At one time he was actually the largest exporter of boneless beef from Canada to the US.
In the mid-1960s, when the store on Centre Street became too small, he decided to move the plant to a much larger facility on what was then the QEW, and that got him into some other businesses. First, in the mid-1960s, he built the Cavalier Motel, along with his partner, Vince DeLorenzo. And then once they decided to move from the rather small place on Centre Street to the highway, they needed to find something to do with the Centre Street property. He and Bella both read an article about the fact that an old magician by the name of Joseph Dunninger was selling the paraphernalia of the great magician, Harry Houdini, someone who my father knew only by name, and I think it’s fair to say, at that point knew nothing about. But they bought that collection, they built a museum there, the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame, and that was yet another business.
Later, in the 1980s, as factories started to close in Niagara Falls, he bought a number of them, mostly with his partners, Bruce Ward and Bruce Peters, and turned to the warehousing business in the Niagara Industrial Mall. And then later, together with some other partners, he bought the Fort Erie Race Track, and then sold it. And then, in the last fifteen years, on the initiative of our cousin, Richard Leibtag, he was involved in the development of Spencer Creek, where hundreds of people now live. There were many, many more business ventures and adventures along the way – including the time he financially staked some Protestant evangelists, who went on to do very well, and who attended one of our seders.
Those were the projects that worked out reasonably well. A list of the failures would be equally long. And then there were the schemes that never came to fruition. If for every business that worked out, there was another that didn’t, there were five or ten more that were pursued and never materialized. To mention only one, four years ago, when he was 82, he devoted the better part of a year to trying to get into the medicinal cannabis business.
So Henry Muller was entrepreneurial. An entrepreneur is a person who sees opportunities that others don’t; or who finds uses for resources that don’t occur to others. He was an entrepreneur.
Part of being an entrepreneur was that he had a high tolerance for risk, indeed he had a love of it.
Another element of his character that was a part of his entrepreneurialism was that he that was determined, or you could say he was stubborn, or at times you could say he was pig-headed – they all went together. He was high energy: he was a really hard worker, and really admired hard work in others.
Another of his character traits was that he had a strong sense of duty. That was manifested in his relationship to his parents, and to the rest of his family, but also to the Jewish community. In Niagara Falls, where he lived for many years, at one time – at the same time, as I recall – he was president of the synagogue, the chair of the Board of Education, and head of the burial society, the chevre kadisha. He used to say that he provided cradle to grave service.
He did other philanthropic work. When he was a young man in his 20s he belonged to a men’s club called the Hermes Club. And later, when that folded, for many years he belonged to the Lions Club, and one of their main ways of fundraising was through an annual carnival, where he was in charge of the Thunderbolt booth for many years, with help from the rest of the members of the family. I remember he was very proud the week that they beat “Chuck-a-Luck.”
He was also very generous: in his familial life, in his communal life, and beyond. He helped countless people over the years, sometime financially, sometimes by making a useful connection for them, sometimes with advice. He was really always on the lookout for how he might help someone, and when he did so it was always anonymously, which in the Jewish tradition is the way such things are supposed to be done.
He was blessed with many satisfying relationships in his business life. That included his partners over the years: Vince DeLorenzo, Eddie Weisz, Bruce Ward, Bruce Peters, Richard Leibtag, who was a partner but much more than a partner for both Henry and Bella. A key person in his life over many decades was George Waters, his accountant, who was not just an accountant but really an indispensable business advisor: a frequent phrase in our household, whenever there was a deal to be done, was “You had better ask George Waters about that.”
Then there were the many people to whom he was so grateful and we were so grateful: who worked with him in matters of his personal business and matters of the household, and in a household where business was done in the household those things were intimately connected: Martin Levy, his business manager for many years; Shelley Cooper, Paul Lehman, Burim Hashani, Marion Visente, and Merlene Ellis, who has been part of our family for almost four decades and is here today.
He was blessed with an extended family in Hamilton of the various offshoots of the Zucker family, including the Yellins and the Leibtags.
And now I’m going to talk a bit about Bella. In 1948, Henry went to an intercity gathering of Jewish youth at the Hamilton JCC. He saw her on the dance floor, and he said to a friend, “I think I’m going to marry that girl.” And eventually he did. He courted her in the only vehicle that his family had, namely a delivery truck. It wasn’t a fancy truck, it was a truck that only had one seat, and that was the driver’s seat. So he courted Bella sitting on a chair in what would ordinarily be the passenger section.
Henry, his parents, and everyone who knew them well agreed that she was the best thing that ever happened to him. That was true not only in the realm of the family, but in the realm of business as well. When they got engaged, she gave up an opportunity to study medicine at the University of Toronto in order to learn book-keeping, so that she could she be part of the family business. And she was: bringing some needed order to his frenetic activity; and after she formally retired, serving as a sounding board, and retraining some of his riskier schemes. Typically, she would make a suggestion, and Henry would respond “that’s ridiculous,” or sometimes, “Are you crazy?” And then, after a while, he would do it.
One last thing I should talk about was his optimism. In his business life as well as in his personal life, he was focused on possible positive outcomes, even if they were unlikely. For example: his father died at the age of 87 from diabetes and heart failure that knocked out his kidneys. But Henry, when he thought about the trajectory of his life, never mentioned that. He mentioned his grandmother, who lived to the age of 103, and his mother, who died at the age of 100. So in this case, he overestimated his chances.
But who would have thought, in September, 1939, when he came to this country knowing not a word of English, that he would found so many businesses, sire and support so extensive a family, and contribute so much to the communities in which he lived?
If he was optimistic, it was with good reason.
May his memory be a blessing.
