‘If you want to get out and hustle and work like hell, you can become a millionaire too’ : Being Good and Tough

Sam, you’re a 77-year-old multimillionaire, a city official and philanthropist.

So what are you doing lugging that overflowing garbage pail down those steps? And Sam, the Formica desk in that musty office of yours has got to go. One more thing: Do something about the stain on your monogrammed Oxford shirt.

“Hey,” he protested when told of the yellow smudge. “Don’t bug me about the spot. I’m going to hide it with my tie.”

Meet Sam Greenberg, a lifelong Van Nuys resident and one of the less ostentatious men of wealth you’re likely to encounter. Why, for 25 years, he boasts, he cleaned his company’s urinals. “Your hands get a little shriveled. So what?”

He’s a shoot-from-the-hip old-timer, a “hustler,” as he calls himself, who relentlessly delivers an arsenal of anecdotes and yarns. In the span of an hour, he used the word “hustle” 17 times.

“I let go,” he admitted. “Even in these interviews. I don’t care who I’m talking to. I just tell ‘em what I think.”

An Airport Commissioner

Greenberg owns the sprawling Sam’s U-Drive Rentals on Oxnard Boulevard and is a Los Angeles airport commissioner, but he’s known for his philanthropy as much as for his political or business endeavors. This year, he said, he expects to give about a quarter of his income to New Horizons Workshop, a Sepulveda facility for mentally retarded adults, and to other charities.

“He’s the softest touch of the Valley,” said Dodo Meyer, San Fernando Valley deputy for Mayor Tom Bradley, a frequent beneficiary of Greenberg’s magnanimity in the form of campaign contributions. Greenberg said he gave about $2,500 to Bradley’s gubernatorial effort last year.

Indeed, according to a four-page list he prepared for tax purposes, the organizations he supported in 1986 number well over 100. Most of the recipients are in the Valley, including Van Nuys High School, a preschool workshop and a young-artist competition, for instance.

Wealth to Spare

“Look, what am I going to do?” he said in his trophy-lined office, when asked to explain the roots of his charity. “I’ve got a few million bucks, and my four kids are fairly well off. My years are getting short, and I thought I might just as well do something in a way of spreading my estate.”

Greenberg said his father, an immigrant blacksmith from Kiev, in the Ukraine, inculcated liberal values that contributed to his benevolent impulses.

“Being in Russia and under the Czarist regime, he saw the ruthless way they handled the population over there,” he said. “My father appreciated what it was like not to have.”

A sizable part of Greenberg’s financial gifts goes to New Horizons, a nonprofit organization for developmentally disabled adults who have IQs equivalent to children from 3 to 12. Marilyn Peshek, director of the organization, said Greenberg has promised to give as much as $250,000 in matching funds to build a new kitchen and cafeteria for the facility.

His stocky build and proletarian face are familiar to those who work for nominal salaries packaging goods in the facility’s sheltered workshop. As he wound his way through the factory-like hall, several of them approached Greenberg, extending their hands.

“He’s our angel,” Peshek said.

But Greenberg makes no effort to act like a saint. His wandering monologues are laced with profanities. He trumpets that he earned Cs and Ds when attending Van Nuys High School because he “was out horsing around, raising hell.” And, during his 13-year tenure on the airport commission, Greenberg has been the focus of a modest amount of controversy and of some criticism from homeowner groups.

The five members of the Board of Airport Commissioners are appointed by the mayor to set policy for Van Nuys Airport and three other airports owned by the city--Los Angeles International, Ontario and Palmdale.

Traveling Criticized

In 1978, Ira Reiner, then Los Angeles city controller and now district attorney, accused Greenberg and other airport commissioners of excessive junketing. He said the commissioners “ignored the message of Proposition 13” by spending more on travel after its passage than before.

Greenberg said any trips he took as a commissioner were necessary. “I’ve been around the world 12 times,” he said. “I don’t need to travel anymore.”

Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, which has locked horns with airport commissioners over noise from Van Nuys Airport, said, “Greenberg’s done a terrible job as commissioner. He’s belittled community leaders such as myself in public hearings. He has discounted the legitimate concerns of the homeowners.”

Greenberg brushes aside Silver’s remarks, terming them “dirty” and “unfair.” “We need the Van Nuys Airport,” he said. “I thought we’ve tried to accommodate homeowners as much as possible.”

Silver said Greenberg received his position on the panel because of political patronage. But that is something Greenberg, who has often contributed to the campaign coffers of other Democratic candidates besides Bradley, freely admits.

“After 20 years of giving money and hustling for votes, I said to my wife, my God, we’ve never asked for a thing in our lives politically. And I said I wanted to be an airport commissioner.”

History Lesson

A conversation with Greenberg evolves into a free-wheeling history seminar on the Valley. When he arrived in 1911 (after a two-day journey from Norwalk in a horse-drawn wagon) sheep ranching, sugar beets and beans were staples of the Valley’s economy.

Wistfully, he remembers that, when he was a teen-ager, most of its 2,000 residents would dawdle on Van Nuys Boulevard each Saturday evening, sipping nickel Coca-Colas.

Then he shifts gears to Prohibition to reflect on “my good friends Clark, Crane and Hudson,” all Valley policemen sent to San Quentin prison for running liquor stills they had previously closed down.

The picture Greenberg paints of his youth conjures up a real-life Horatio Alger. He proudly retraced the Depression days when he and his brother were forced to scrounge seven cents to buy a loaf of day-old bread and a can of salmon. Or when he came home to discover his family evicted from its apartment (unrented office space) and the furniture moved onto the street.

“Talk about the bottom of hell,” he said.

Greenberg said he got his start in the vehicle rental business in 1934.

“It was mostly luck. This guy came along and wanted to borrow a truck that was for sale to move some furniture. First, we said, ‘No, you’ll have to buy it to move the furniture.’ Then we came up with the idea to let him rent the truck.”

He claims Sam’s U-Drive was the world’s first company to rent trucks to the public.

The key to his later financial successes, he said, “was nothing but hard work, because I don’t have too many book smarts.” To bolster that statement, Greenberg said he attended the University of Arizona because no in-state school would accept him.

Anyone Could Enter

“Arizona didn’t care if you had a grammar school diploma. Come on down! Anybody could get in there,” he said. Greenberg later transferred to University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated.

A Spartan work ethic apparently continues to burn inside him: He said he routinely wakes up at 4:30 a.m.

Before leaving his office, he paused to point out a favorite wall hanging--a sketch of a tired workhorse dragging a plow who, like Boxer in “Animal Farm,” looks as if he’s thinking, “I will work harder.”

Greenberg’s wife, Helen, a 20-year member of the state Democratic Central Committee, died last year after a yearlong illness.

“I was married 52 years before she passed away, and we had a happy marriage,” Greenberg said. “She did a hell of a good job in bringing up four kids with a really, really good attitude. And my wife was a very ordinary person. Minks didn’t mean anything to her, or fancy clothes or fancy living.”

Greenberg retains his joie de vivre.

“If you want to get out and hustle and work like hell, you can become a millionaire too. It’s right here,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Give me the job across the street as a janitor, and in six months I’ll be the general manager.”