What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [90]
He might never have left Germany if his aunt in Flushing hadn’t grown impatient (because there were other family members who wanted to be sponsored for visas) and given him an ultimatum. Either come to New York now or forget about it. “I won’t sponsor you anymore,” she wrote. So on February 3, 1956, Ted Ludwiczak sailed for the United States from Bremerhaven, Germany, aboard a government transport, the USNS General W. C. Langfitt, and arrived in New York harbor on Valentine’s Day. After briefly working at a Bohack Supermarket in Bayside, stocking shelves, slicing cheese, and cleaning machinery, he took a job at a contact lens factory on Forty-second Street in Manhattan that he had heard about from a landsman from Otwock. Contact lens manufacturers needed employees who were exacting and mathematical. The cutting tools were mostly made in Europe, and prescriptions had to be converted to metrics, and Ted had a facility for math. He wasn’t excited about the job, but it was a living. Besides, it had its benefits. “It was close to the library and to Tad’s Steakhouse. You could get a good T-bone steak, a baked potato, and a salad for a dollar nineteen. That was great!”
In the late 1950s one of the lab’s customers, an ophthalmologist from Westchester County, asked Ted if he would help him open his own contact lens business in Mount Vernon, thirty minutes north of Manhattan. Ted wasn’t ready to risk giving up a steady job, so he convinced a friend, Dusan Milkowicz, to go instead. He promised Milkowicz, a foreign national whom he’d met in Germany, where Milkowicz was working as a translator for American intelligence, that he would take the train to Mount Vernon every night after work and on weekends to help. Within a year, the doctor lost his entrepreneurial zeal and offered the business to the two immigrants. By then Ted had saved enough money to cosign a loan, and they bought Optimum Contact Lens for $1,000.
The popularity of contacts grew quickly, and Optimum burgeoned, along with the skill and reputation of its new owners. “He was a very gifted young man,” Ted said of his partner as a sad dreaminess entered his face. “We were the only contact lab in Westchester County or even New Jersey. We were going to be millionaires.”
Ted’s personal life advanced, too. One night, he met Anna Spang, a pretty seventeen-year-old, at a dance in Manhattan. They were soon married, and a daughter, Renee, was born in November 1961.
With the Berlin crisis coming to a boil, world events would once again have a powerful impact on Ted’s life. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was making threats about the future of democratic West Berlin, then surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany. President John F. Kennedy responded, first by reminding Americans of the sacrifices that had won Germany’s freedom from fascism and then by calling up 117,000 army reservists. Milkowicz was among them. Ted and his partner were convinced the call-up would be only a temporary inconvenience. The following spring, the twenty-nine-year-old Milkowicz, stationed in Georgia, was granted a leave and headed home, with another soldier, to see his fiancée. “They were driving through North Carolina and a big rig ran them over,” Ted said. “I was left all alone with the business, and without my friend.”
Ted poured himself into the company, but the dream of what might have been receded. “I couldn’t expand. I hired someone to help, but it