Jerry Della Femina is of course also the legendary advertising man.
- 4/20/11, "Jerry's Ink: Della Femina Restaurant is Sold," Long Island Press
I would own a restaurant in East Hampton.
It would be a warm, beautiful place with great food and wonderful service.
It would become one of the most popular restaurants in the Hamptons.
It would be a place my entire family— my kids, their spouses, my grandkids and our friends—would enjoy scrumptious feasts where we would all sit and just revel in our love for good food and each other.
Like I said, it was a dream.
But then, it happened.
In 1993 I was part of a group that bought a building at 99 North Main Street.
North Main Street at the time was viewed as being on “the other side of the tracks” compared to the rest of East Hampton.
The building at one time used to house a terrible Chinese restaurant where, at the dingy bar, more drugs were sold than egg rolls.
I decided to build a restaurant on that site.
It was an impetuous snap decision.
That’s the way it is with dreams.
What did I know about running a restaurant? Exactly what I know today, 18 years later: nothing.
But not knowing something is never bad—you can always learn, but thinking you know it all can be fatal.
I sought out and got help from a great restaurateur, Drew Nieporent. Without his help in the early days, we would never have made it.
I worked with a wonderful architect, Frank Greenwald, and together we designed a beautiful restaurant.
A talented artist, the late Kathe Tanous, made caricatures of our guests. Martha Stewart, Howard Stern, Billy Joel and fifty other Hamptons notables and customers went up on our walls.
With the help of Jane Lapin, a magician with flowers, we built a handsome planter outside the restaurant, filled it with fresh flowers, and suddenly North Main Street took on a nifty new look.
So why am I selling one of the most successful restaurants in East Hampton?
In 2008 I watched Barack Obama run over Hillary Clinton to become our President.
From the very first “Yes We Can” and “Change You Can Believe In,” I decided that this country was falling in love with an attractive, great-speechmaking hustler/socialist who, if he got into office, was going to pursue his agenda to destroy the best health care in the world and re-distribute wealth. Yours and mine.
I told my friends that from that moment on everything I owned—my houses, my advertising business, my newspaper and my restaurant—
- was for sale.
A lot of people have come around to my way of thinking, but there is no way in the world that Barack Obama won’t be reelected in 2012.
If you think that Obama’s plan for over-taxing everyone but the 46 percent who don’t pay any income tax (including his friend Jeffery Immelt and General Electric)
- will stop after he’s re-elected in 2012, you are naïve.
Why does this so go against my grain?
Maybe it’s because of where I’ve come from to get to where I am.
I’ve been broke, so broke with a wife and kids and no job that I had to borrow money from my parents, who didn’t have it for themselves but always managed to come up with it for me.
I got lucky and worked day and night and built a great advertising agency.
I have employed thousands of people in my lifetime. I’ve been good to them and they have been good to me.
I’m just not ready to have my wealth redistributed. I’m not ready to pay more tax money than the next guy because I provide jobs and because I work a 60-hour week and I earn more than $250,000 a year.
So why am I dropping out? Read a brilliant book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged, and you’ll know."...
via Atlas Shrugs
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