Free Executive Actions by Gary Grossman Page A

Massachusetts.
     
    Teddy Lodge was born in Marblehead, just north of Boston. He had a famous New England political name, however he wasn’t related to the more famous Lodges and their relatives the Cabots. His parents were successful and no less wealthy, but their fortune was owed to his grandfather’s Northshore real estate holdings.
    During the Depression, when everyone was selling off property to survive, Oliver Lodge leveraged the small bus company that he owned for cash from a prominent Marblehead doctor named Elias R. Crannell.
    They had met quite coincidentally during a snow storm in February, 1930. The good doctor’s 1929 $4,500 luxury Dusenberg had spun off Route 129 on the way to a reception at Tedesco Country Club. Lodge, driving one of his three buses, stopped to help the stranded doctor. Despite the fact that it was nearly 10-degrees below zero, Oliver offered to assist the doctor. He dug out the Dusey, then pushed and pulled until the vehicle rolled back on the road. He followed the doctor to his destination just to make sure he made it safely.
    One week later Dr. Crannell wrote a thank you letter and expressed his willingness to help the young man. Oliver Lodge was not shy and his wife was out of work. He had come from a hard working apple farming family in the Connecticut River Valley near Springfield, Massachusetts. But unlike his father and grandfather, he didn’t want to live his life climbing ladders. So one day he told his wife Edna they were leaving for Boston. They packed up their family and what little they owned in their 1924 Model T four-door touring car and set off across the state.
    Boston was the first real city they had ever been in and he soon realized it was too big. They followed the roads up the North Shore and settled in Marblehead; a town with a name that he recognized from sea stories he’d read as a kid.
    After a number of years and a variety of jobs, Oliver scraped enough money together to put one bus, then two and three into service. Then the Depression hit everyone’s pocketbooks. Even bus fare was a luxury. So his chance meeting gave him an idea. His wife told him he was crazy, but Oliver Lodge decided to propose an outrageous business proposition to the rich doctor with the expensive car.
    “Give me $3,500 cash for 80 percent of my bus company. All but $500 of the money will go into real estate. I’ll split any of my profits in that business fifty-fifty.”
    The bus company was a nickel and dime business. Dr. Crannell didn’t expect any kind of return. But the doctor saw merit in Lodge’s business plan and he admired his entrepreneurial spirit in the worst economic times. His land grab could mean tens of thousands, if not more, when the economy recovered. Crannell agreed to the terms without argument.
    Actually, neither Oliver Lodge nor Dr. Crannell could have imagined what this simple deal ultimately would be worth. They acquired, developed and sold their way from rural property to city blocks. There was prime real estate along the ocean for homes and farmland that the state bought up for highways.
    By the late 1940s, the $3,500 loan paid dividends of $2.4 million. By the mid 1950s, the Lodge estate was valued at $14 million dollars.
    Oliver Lodge died in the mid-1960s, four years after his grandson Theodore Wilson Lodge was born.
    Teddy’s father, Oliver Jr., continued to manage the business, Lodge Properties. His mother, Katharine, donated her time to proper Northshore charities. They enjoyed their second-generation wealth, but raised Teddy in a supportive, normal small town environment.
    O’Connell wrote extensively about the next years in Teddy’s life. He noted how Lodge excelled in school and in sports. He was reading well in First Grade, winning the spelling bees in Second. In Fourth Grade he won a Library Association Achievement Award for submitting the most book reports in a year. In Fifth Grade, he was introduced to music. He loved rock, and felt that James