1.
Dear Mr. Berry:
First, I would like to point out the humor that our son, named by my husband, is a Loren M.
But that is MY branch of the family, the Kay Daniel Picot branch, aka Katherine Ann Kryder of Fort Wayne, IN, the genius behind the sham gourmet
Leonce Picot, who got him as far as his financing for the Down Under, which she named. I named his last restaurant, Go Fish.
Look at the Books. For instance, Restaurants of Puerto Rico, Kay's first book. Do you see her name on it? Because, I watched her write it, in our little humble home off Dixie Highway in Oakland Park, Florida. I was in school vomiting with anxiety because my mother was traveling to write that book. Leonce never wrote a word. He sold the ads, for all Kay's books.
More coincidence- our street address was 1001. It was Kay's mother who gave Leonce the down payment for our house. I named her Bunny.
Kay was Laura's mother too, though Laura publishes herself as Carolyn's daughter. We were being raised as quite proper little girls.Leonce was very critical of the way his family appeared. But he would never go to church with us, which was supposed to be a family thing. At an early age I could dine at Le Manoir with ease, ten eating utensils on each side of my plate, knowing how to place them to cue the waiter if I was finished or just resting.
The four other books Kay wrote which Leonce built his career with, using the books as his credential claiming authorship or editorship, were all written by my gorgeous Indiana movie star mother. She met him in high school. Leonce was a skinny, fun, high-minded person with no father, family money or graces bestowed. Kay believed she could make him into his best self. She taught him about gentlemanliness, taste, table manners, and frugal elegance. Al Kocab adored my mother- everyone did, which is what made Leonce so jealous of her.
Kay Daniel Picot was both a literary and household genius, and a gourmet cook. She entertained Leslie Charteris and Audrey Long at our house yearly when they came to Palm Beach. The year she killed herself, 1972, they closed their Florida corporation and never returned. Kay cooked every morsel for this world-traveled couple. Mr. Charteris was interested in Kay's mind, not Leonce's, for when he wrote his SAINT series during WWII and the Korean War, he described buildings, streets, hotels exactly as they were at that time in the world. He was an archivist, beneath the mystery writer. Gallatin's is in Kay's Restaurants of San Francisco. Many of the former classic Manhattan area establishments no longer exist, except in Restaurants of New York.
I don't imagine the second Mrs. Picot ever served you a gourmet repast that she cooked. She could not cook.
So that is why I was never introduced to the fantastic Mr. Berry, inventor of the Yellow Pages. They hid me because I would have said I was not Carolyn's daughter when introduced as such. I was never shown anything about the big California scene. All I knew was that Leonce went there in his mother's last two years of life and she died alone in a nursing home. She begged him not to go. She didn't like Dave Edgerton whom she had known since he first came to Florida. Had I been older, I would have had the wisdom to let my grandmother live in her own apartment with an aide under daily family supervision, such as me.
One day wonderful Mr. Berry became the arch-enemy of all we lived on for our meager recompense from the Picot enterprises.
"If we lose this lawsuit, the Down Under goes on the block," Leonce sternly admonished.
He threatened my little family everyday with loss of employment and our living because of Mr. Berry.
Carolyn said, in her sardonic nasal pitch, "Can you imagine, a guy like that being so rich and suing us over a million dollars?
Then, after the lawsuit she was gloating all over the Down Under bar saying, "All the jury were waving and winking at us after we won the case."
It should have been Kay at Nob Hill. Simple as that. Your group got the SHAM version which was Leonce and Carolyn, plus Al Kocab, he was real. Mr. Kocab was one of my favorite artists, but Leonce believed the Restaurants, like the books, were all his Creation. You were tricked, or were you?
I think the lawsuit was a staged show for money going off the books. I think Leonce was leased money from Kay's family estate as early as 1966, the formation of RESCON. He might also have improperly received another benefit on the date of her death, 9/15/1972.
Did he lure you to sue him so he could hide the million as though it was "lost?"
Here's another thing you might help me with, because Kay's immediate family were real estate developers who owned all their land, living on tax-free interest, with one descendant, her father. We are deeded their corporate and personal interest per stirpes in a certain 1943 REIT but we were intercepted in 1993.
I have researched many a Polk's, Moody's even, and various pre- Great Depression phone books.
In 1927, The Red Book was published in Fort Wayne and distributed by whim. The phone company in 1924 had decided all numbers had to be changed by 1927. Four digit phone numbers identified the location of Trust Company Safes, though the correspondent bank or insurance institution had a different location and phone number. It is a good thing this was done because by 1933 many trails had been dusted over in The First National Company.
In 1927, Fort Wayne listed four Secret Service Agencies, two located inside a bank on Berry Street. It wasn't at all a big town, but Raytheon, Magnavox, and Harvester were there. In 1921 Grandfather Frank was partners with R. Ross Berry, though I have not been able to get a proper history of the naming of Berry Street in Fort Wayne, or whether R.Ross Berry was in your line, only that the street was platted over an easement of the Pennsy RR.
R.Ross moved along, right after which Grandfather Frank, it is published in the Fort Wayne Journal and Gazette, conceived and formed the nation's first Property Management Company, a concern to collect rents, maintain, and or sell as agents for owners of real estate.
Something else I am trying to solve is whether you and Borchers had a long existing intention to interfere with Leonce? His intentions toward my mother were evil, and he gave me a good deal of trouble for objecting to his claiming her copyrights in the press and on radio. He also heavily penalized me for protesting when he and Carolyn took the furniture out of my dead mother's house, re-upholstered it, and put it in their Mossack Fonseca Mansion on Flamingo Drive.
What is this all about? Leonce bought dead Mickey Borchers' jewels for Carolyn when I lost my house because the Down Under closed without notice, not because of Mr. Berry. Boy, did Borchers ever hose Daddy on that jewels deal. But really, I was the one who got hosed. Especially since I never wear jewelry or nail polish and own no real estate.
So was Borchers after me or what?
And why?
Yours Truly,
Michele Picot
12/17/1953
