My Dad

Just did a mini edit of my father's life story for his 50-year high school reunion. Guess what, Dad has a pretty good story to tell. See for yourself: 

"My 50 Years Since Casady"

By Lee Bollinger

As a little boy life was tough: my teacher Mrs. Tuck threw erasers at me for pulling girls’ hair and sent me to the principle’s office on a daily basis. And my mother, Mrs. J.J. Bollinger, and her housekeeper, Viola, didn’t have much use for mischief makers who stuffed their pillows with snakes and frogs. I was sentenced to the basement where I whittled away the hours building miniature houses out of bricks—that is until I finally managed to blow up the cellar with my chemistry set. The next summer Mother sent me to military school.

Life began to pick up in 1952 the year I started at Casady. My history teacher. Mr. Guernicky, told us how the Romans conquered the world, and I stopped pulling girls’ hair and finally learned how to listen up. After high school graduation, I enrolled at the University of Oklahoma. Surprisingly, I did not make the football team, but I did spend four fun-filled years playing bridge and drinking beer in the Beta Theta Pi house, attending class often enough to finish with a degree in History and English, even ticking off a few honors along the way.

The old Law Barn, known as Monnet Hall, was home for the next three years, and I somehow managed to hit the books hard and receive my Doctor of Jurisprudence. But did I really want to be a lawyer? During one of my summers, I’d attended the Alliance Française in Paris, which awakened my life long fascination with foreign languages.  Even though I loved it, I couldn’t wait to come home. You see I had a girl waiting for me back on campus:  a lovely Delta Gamma, Miss Mary Gale Parker.  While returning on the Queen Elizabeth II, I called her constantly. Much to Mother’s relief I did not run her off. Gale agreed to marry me in 1965, and, in June of the following year, we tied the knot in a little white-steepled Methodist church in her hometown, Beckville, Texas.

It was time to settle down in Oklahoma City and earn a living. It was 1966, and I was one of the lucky ones. My brother-in-law helped me enter the US Army Reserves, and I escaped combat in Vietnam. I became a trust officer at the old First National Bank and Trust Company, known as the “oldest and coldest.” (Two decades later, as one of the first victims of the oil bust, it finally succumbed to the FDIC and went belly up.) I managed estates and trusts and corrected the mistakes of many incompetent lawyers.

Meanwhile Gale gave birth to our daughter, Caroline Lee. I took one look, and thought I can’t wait until she’s old enough to ski. (Moral of this story: Be careful what you wish for. By introducing her to the outdoors I’d be changing the course of our lives forever. Thirty years later she’d marry an Austrian rock climber, who would lead me to the summit of an Alp where I’d embrace—for dear life—a cross surrounded by 2000-foot drop offs on all sides, and live to tell about it.)  

 I knew I was not going to get rich being a banker unless I owned the bank, so after six years in the trust department, I sought entrepreneurship. Not that I’d get rich that way either, but at least I’d be my own boss. (I still wasn’t particularly fond of authority thanks to Viola and Mother.) A good friend ran a family bookstore and, after many discussions with him, I took the plunge. After all I loved books, and I had a great new concept: I’d open in North Park Mall, a brand new indoor retail center a mere two minutes from our house.

Bingo. With an endless stream of foot traffic from the four indoor movie theatres across the hall, business thrived. We began hosting book and author dinners, and attending yearly conferences put on by the American Booksellers Association. The work never ceased, but it was so much more fun than lawyering, and we were having a ball.

Slowly but surely shopping habits began to change. We noticed that people began to eschew the Mom and Pops for bigger, more sophisticated stores, and the chains (the dreaded chains!) were encroaching. In the spring 1992, after twenty years in North Park Mall, we purchased a small strip center on North May Ave. That fall, after an extensive redesign by the renowned east coast bookstore architect Ken White, we packed up our books and moved Bollinger’s into the center’s North wing. It was a l5,000-square-foot space, complete with a fireplace and adjacent café for coffee, just like the one in Nora Ephron’s blockbuster movie, Sleepless in Seattle. We were convinced no chain could touch it.

The store opened with a splash, and within weeks our new spot was the place to see and be seen. We knew all the local gossip. Gale organized author signing parties, Friday night jazz concerts and an endless stream of publicity. In those days, we were the largest store in the mid-south with 50 plus employees and as many PCs; we were open every day of the week. Our hair was going grey from all the late nights, and we loved every minute of it.           

Everybody in town thought our store was the cat’s meow, but it wasn’t enough to keep the chains at bay. Family run hardware stores and record shops had been closing up all across the country. We were the next victim, and before we knew it were sandwiched by the enemy. Barnes and Noble had gone in a mile south of us and a mile north of us, and business dropped at a rapid rate of speed. We called our daughter, by then out of college and working as a reporter at Glamour in New York, to tell her the news:  Our beloved bookstore’s final chapter had come.

             Now what? I thought, “I’ll close the store and become a landlord,” I told Gale. I’d already been leasing out the four spaces on the south end of the center for the last five years. If I could do it for myself, I could do it for others, so, in 1998, I broke up the bookstore and rented it out too. I took the test to become a commercial real estate agent with a specialty in retail and investment property and signed on with a local firm. In 2006, at the age of 64, after four consecutive years of one-week training sessions and four, five-hour tests (talk about grueling!), I earned my Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) accreditation. I’m proud to say I was the oldest person that year to pass the test.

In 2002, our daughter Caroline married Thomas Johnstone, the above mentioned Austrian rock climber, a math PhD with a personality as big as Mont Blanc itself. She’d met him at the climbing gym of all places. They now have two sons Peter (5) and Parker (2).  They live in Brooklyn where he is an assistant professor of Mathematics at City Technology College of New York. Caroline is a freelance writer specializing in health and fitness (and helping her father write his memoirs). She still writes for Good Housekeeping, Prevention, Self and Fitness among others.  

Thus you’ve read the overview of my life since the days of Viola and Mrs. Tuck—minus all my fishing trips. (My Adventures with a Fly Rod, will be coming to a blog near you soon, if my daughter has anything to do with it.) I feel very fortunate and blessed by the life I’ve led, but most of all I’m thankful for those whose lives I’ve touched or been touched by, for a man is nothing more than the sum of those that count him as a friend, or so Mother always told me.