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He told off his teacher in kindergarten and has never regretted it
Hugo Gerstl – Great Lives by TONY SETON
Carmel Pine Cone Article
IT MIGHT sound like hyperbole, but Hugo Gerstl saved my life. I went to see this noted Monterey attorney when two business partners stabbed me in the back and I was at my wit’s end. After 15 minutes of talking with Hugo, I had a sense that everything would be fixed, and it was. An arbitrator induced the miscreants to pay for their sins.
Hugo in no way fits the traditional image of an attorney. He is boisterous and funny, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. That’s probably a result of his upbringing. His father escaped from Austria after the Anschluss and came to the United States. “My dad opened a delicatessen in the worst district of Baltimore, but went broke there. So on the heels of bankruptcy or whatever, he decided to take his last few bucks, buy a ’46 Ford, take the family in it, and off we went to Los Angeles.” Hugo was 5 years old at the time.
His contentiousness surfaced in kindergarten. “I was reading, and the teacher wanted me to be in the regular little group of kids talking. I wanted to read. And she said, ‘Well, why is that? You think you’re smarter than everybody else?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then she went on and on and on. And I told her, ‘Why don’t you just shut your big mouth?’ That did not go down well.” His parents were called to the school, to get their son, and Hugo was sent to his room. “I spent the entire afternoon listening to ‘Portia Faces Life,’ ‘Jack Armstrong,’ the ‘All-American Boy,’ and similar soap operas. I had a ball. At the end of the day, I heard my parents actually laughing in the bedroom that I had the gumption to tell the teacher that. But they made me write a letter of apology to the teacher. So I wrote, ‘Dear Miss Piper: I’m sorry I told you to shut your mouth. You can open it any time you want.’”
At 12, Hugo knew that he didn’t want to work in a delicatessen on his feet 14 hours a day, and was weighing whether he should be a rabbi, a foreign correspondent or a lawyer. “I had my first foray into the publishing business. I was typing up a five-page neighborhood newspaper, which I was typing on many carbons, and I would sell the single sheet thing for a nickel apiece. I made money.”
Music was important in the Gerstl household. “I went into piano, and I took about eight or nine years of classical piano. And then when I was 16, I was working in a pickle factory. At that time, you put pickles in a jar, you smashed the jar down. The first day on the job, the pickle jar broke and sliced my finger off. Not fun. At that time, I remember I was playing the Rachmaninov C Minor concerto.”
At 16, Hugo also formed his first band, and a year or so later, “we recorded our first record, which was the first of 75 commercially released records we had. Three of them ultimately went gold. It was a nice way to make a living. We had ‘Express Yourself,’ ‘Do Your Thing’ and ‘Love Land,’ the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band.” He was partners with Charles Wright — “we were color blind and we were religion blind” — and they are still close friends today.
Why didn’t he stay in music? Why did he go into law? “My parents had already drummed that into me to be a doctor, be a lawyer. Well, you know what a lawyer is? A nice Jewish boy who can’t stand the sight of blood.” So he became a lawyer and served four years in the Air Force, during which time he was stationed in Turkey along with a good friend who would later be his law partner for a couple of decades. Back in the United States and out of the service, Hugo thought Monterey would be a great place to practice, and he was right. “In ’96, I decided to retire from law, make my fortune opening up a publishing company, which subsequently morphed into a food and publishing company. By the end of five years, I not only found that I had lost everything, but I was $873,000 in debt, which was more money than I ever heard of in my life. So at the ripe young age of 60, I came back to the full-time practice of law, and it saved my bacon.”Hugo is still writing and publishing, and loving his life. In large part because he married Lorraine. He made her a vow. He said, “Everything I do — everything I do will be designed with one thing in mind, to make you happy. I will make every day a honeymoon, a birthday, the beginning of the world and the last day of our life.” And that’s how Hugo has lived his life, nearly 30 years later.
Carmel Pine Cone Article, March 15, 2013, Page 27A