Responsilibilty and Respect Run in the Rakeman Family

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and business to history, and everything in between, including your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And we love to bring you stories about families and about ethics,

and today we bring you a story about both. It’s the story of a father, Steve Rakeman, and his son, Mike. Here’s Robbie with the story. Mike Reikeman owns a mortgage company. Being in the real estate business runs in the family. From his father, Steve Sarr, he started off going to

school to become a priest, believe it or not. And luckily for me, he dropped out. But he and my mom were high school sweethearts and, you know, had five kids together and basically took over his father-in-law’s business, which was basically a damage appraiser. We were builders and consultants.

We did some contracting, mostly repairs of fire damage, and we did consulting to insurance companies. We would have to write up the specifications for repair and estimate the damage. I was the young guy, so I got to go to all the dangerous places. I was shot out a

few times. I had people come after me with knives. I was young, so I could run fast. One time, I was in the South Bronx, and a local group of, I guess it was a gang, saw me go into this full-story apartment house had multiple fires in, in that there’s no one living in it. And typically, I would go up to the roof to measure the building, and then I’d work my way down. So they thought it would be fun to set the building on fire alone. So I’m on the roof, and I see the smoke coming up, and I said, ‘I don’t know, this is

just a pain in the neck.’ So I had to jump across the courtyards to the building next to it, out and into the street, and got away from the gang. I wanted to either fry me or beat me up, or steal, steal whatever. That was just work. That’s what

we did every day. But what creates the kind of man that puts himself in the line like that? I was born and raised in Long Island. We lived in a small house with my mother’s parents, and there were my sister and my parents. My father was a very

strong Irish Catholic. I must have been around five or six, and we were sitting at the dinner table. All six of us would always eat together. And I was making fun of the garbage man, and he pulls me up

out of the dining room, and he furrows his eyebrows and says, ‘Never, ever make fun of any person that does an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. I don’t care what his color, what his speech is. An

honest man is to be respected.’ And that always stood with me. My father once said to me, ‘I’m giving you my name. There’s nothing wrong with it. Make sure you pass it on as clean as I gave it to you.’ It’s meant a lot, you know. He always

said this one thing: ‘You have two hands, and one is to work, and one is to help your neighbor.’ It’s basically the way my value system was structured from from a young man. Steve’s father also instilled in him a father’s duty to his family. When I got out

of college, I worked for a few years as a schoolteacher. But back then, the school populations were dropping, and although I had tenure, I had to wait at the end of every school year to see if someone would retire or die. And by this time, my

con child was on the way, and this was no way to support a family, being questioned if you have a job. So I got a job offer from a firm which I worked for in the summertime. My boss there was a guy named Bob Lange, and I

always used to like to say that if he walked up to a pay phone and there was a dime in the coin return, he put it back in the phone and wouldn’t use it because he was that honest. And that was, that was throughout our little office. Unfortunately,

sometimes, they had some unscrupulous people who would come and offer bribes, say, ‘Oh, you know what, I could really use sixty thousand dollars on this, and the damages are maybe worth ten thousand.’ My standard reply to that was, ‘Well,

if you give me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I’ll get you your sixty.’ And they look at you, and I said, ‘Well, because I’d be out of a job right away and possibly in jail, and someone has to take care of my family.’ And you’re listening to Steve Rakeman. You’ll be hearing from his son, Mike, too,

But listening to Steve talk about his dad, and what a profound experience to have at the age of six, making fun of the local garbage man, and the father just pulling you out and saying, ‘Never, ever make fun of any person who does an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Ever.’ And you can bet that young man never did. ‘I’m giving you my name. There’s

nothing wrong with it. Pass it along as clean as I gave it to you.’ What words of wisdom! And know this: it came from his devout upbringing. These are the kind of things that get instilled in young people through their faith, and then out came these principles by which to live. And we talk a lot about faith and how it animates good people’s lives in this great country.

When we come back, more of Mike and Steve Rakeman’s story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like

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That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with the story of Mike and Steve Rakeman. We heard from Steve about how his father

instilled in him the virtues and values to stand up to mobsters and to just do the right thing. Now we’ll hear from Steve’s son, Mike, and how Steve did his best to do the same. Here’s Mike: ‘Well, once I got to a certain age that kind of like

really sort of understand things and what was going on, it was clear to me that my dad was a man of principle. There was right, and there was wrong, and there was really nothing in between, that there was no gray area. He would tell me, he said, ‘You know, we would live,’ and again, quotes, ‘a much better life’ from a financial standpoint. When I was growing up as one of five kids, you know, he could have taken

all that money, and, you know, as a teen-year-old kid, I was like, ‘Well, why not? I could have got, you know, the Air Jordans. I could have got, you know, this, that, the other thing, all the stuff that I always wanted.’ But it was plain and simple. He’s like, ‘It’s wrong. It’s illegal. There’s no if, ands, or buts about it. And the time that

you do it, the first, the first error, it could be the only time that you do it. That’s it. Now you’ve got a target on your back. You always got to look behind you when you walk.’ It took me a little while to kind of like let that all sink in, but it was very eye-opening and connected a lot of the dots of what my dad had taught me. Since you’re from a very young age

gone forward. He would tell me stories. He would speak a lot about mafia guys, so a lot of his when he would go to claims and losses and stuff like that. He’d be in, you know, Brooklyn and the Bronx, stuff like that, where he would go in, and the building owner would be there when he got there,

sitting at a table, tell him, my dad, to come sit next to him. And he’d have a gun on the table, try to intimidate him, and tell him, like, ‘This is what’s got to happen.’ He kind of didn’t really necessarily know what he was walking into, and I’m like, ‘Well, Dad,

if you’re doing that, you might as well take it a cash to. Come on!’ It was interesting stuff, and I went to work with him maybe once or twice. And I think had he told my mom ahead of time where he was taking me, she probably would have tried to kill him, because we went to some really

nasty areas. As a fifteen-year-old kid, I probably should not have been there. But here I am today, unscathed from that. At least. You know, when I screwed up and I knew that I was gonna have to

face the music from my dad, it wasn’t — I wasn’t fearing like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna, he’s gonna slap me.’ It was the — I was fearing disappointing him because I know that he taught me better than that. I know that. You know, listen, we’re all going to make mistakes, we’re all going to — none of us are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But it was, ‘I know I should

have known better, and I let you down because you taught me to be better than what I was.’ Got into a really bad car accident when I was drunk in college. This was pre-cell phone era, and my parents were visiting my other brother in college, and I

couldn’t get a hold of them. And it happened on like a Friday night or something. I couldn’t — I had to sit there for forty-eight hours until I could even tell my parents what had happened. So the anxiety from that to say, ‘I made these bad decisions. I did this. Now I’m going to be in trouble, et cetera, et cetera.’

Finally got them on the phone, and, you know, they want to make sure I was okay. I, you know, I wasn’t hurt in any way, stuff like that. Later that week, I had the first time I had to go to work over it. So the drive up from

where my parents live on Long Island up to Upstate New York, my college, I was about six hours, so I knew my dad was getting on the road at like six a.m. He was going to be there by noon,

and, you know, so I knew, you know, what time about he was going to arrive in my apartment. I was dreading this, dreading this like I can’t even tell you. I was like, ‘Oh, man, I messed up so badly. You’ve given me so many lectures. When I

got my car to go to college about this exact thing.’ And sure enough, knock on the door. I opened it. I got a crack in the face, and then probably one of the biggest hugs I’ve ever got from him in my life, because it was like, ‘You’re an idiot, boom, but you’re my son, and I love you. You’re my idiot,

and we’re gonna get through this and fix it.’ I always had a good relationship with my dad, and at that point, you know what, one funny outcome of it was that I wasn’t allowed to drive a car for about a year and a half. So anytime I wanted

to come home from school, basically my dad had to drive up, pick me up, and then we’d drive back. So I would get to spend those six, six and a half hours in the car with him, driving from Upstate New York back down to Long Island, whether it was coming home for Christmas, coming home for Thanksgiving, or

just for the summer. And he would do up and back the same day. I mean, we’d maybe stop for a sandwich. So he’s in a car twelve, thirteen hours, and I’m in there, you know, just, just the way down with him, or the way up, depending which way

we were going. We still would talk about. Although it was a lot of driving, and maybe at the time, you know, it’s like, ‘Oh, I just want to get home,’ but it just was nice to have six hours of, you know, just dad-son time. Now, having kids on my own, I can understand that your time when you have siblings, your one-on-one time with your parents

or one of your parents, is a lot different than when you’re competing for their attention or they’re competing for your attention with all your other siblings. And we were, you know, for better for worse. I had six and a half hours to kill in the car up my dad. So, you know, I’m a mortgage banker. We arrange residential

home mortgages for people looking to buy or refinance a house. And, you know, I could easily, you know, have made fraudulent documents in order to qualify someone for a loan that they may not really be able to pay back. But the customer wanted, ‘Oh, I want to buy this house,’ so I could wipe something out, change the number here,

change a comma there, and all of a sudden, they qualify for it, which basically is going to catch up to them sooner or later. That they’re not gonna be able to afford this place, all for the sake of a commission check. That’s certainly not something that I ever did or wanted to do. And, yeah, I like to thank my father for instilling those values into me as

a young kid, because I saw so many people go the other way that they wanted to make the quick buck and they didn’t care at whose expense it was. And then, eventually, it was a lost loss because whoever they did that for — that person, they were going to put that — they were putting that person into a worse situation. In addition to that, eventually they were gonna get it — it was gonna catch up to them. They were going to lose their license as well. And throughout five, six, seven,

eight, during what they would call the wild, wild West of mortgages, where people were doing things they shouldn’t do, and eventually it all caught up to them, and they would get, you know, barred from the industry. They would never be able to work in mortgages again. And, you know, like myself and a lot of the other guys that

work here, didn’t partake in any of that, and that’s why we’re still here today with healthy licenses. That we don’t have to fear over ever having revoked or anything like that. We have a lot of younger guys that work here, too, that we’ve mentored as well and can

kind of, you know, trickle down all those same things that were instilled in us as young people and have gone through this and sought in the industry as well. Um, it’s, it’s not something that, that we would do here. And, you know, you’re basically jeopardizing things for, for the

whole company as well. You’ve got to also be able to answer to the man upstairs, so that, that certainly plays a role in everything as well. And, uh, you know, when you, when you have that, it’s the focal point of your business, you’re gonna land in good hands. My

dad sends me at a young age, ‘God blessed you with two hands. One is to take care of yourself and your family, and the other one is to help other people.’ And I actually told him that, uh, that I remember him telling me a couple of years ago. And he — my dad is not a crier, but I

saw him — he got like a little emotional because his father passed away when he was like fourteen or fifteen years old, and it was something that his dad told him. And he didn’t think that I remembered him telling that story when I was a kid, but I still do. I definitely remember it. It’s something I passed on to my kids as well. And a great job on the

storytelling by Robbie. And thanks so much to Steve and Mike Rakeman for sharing their father-son stories. Steve talking about his father, the values and principles that got passed along to him; Steve then passing those along to his son, Mike, and Mike sharing those principles and values as well. And ethics. In the end, ‘my dad was a man

of principle. There is a right and a wrong. And if you’re listening and you’re a guy, well, can your son say that about you or your daughter? When I screwed up, I wasn’t fearing he would slap me. I

feared disappointing him.’ And every dad, every mom knows that discipline and love, while they’re two sides of the same coin. A beautiful story about fathers and sons, about love, about discipline, about God. Here on Our American Stories.