Simcha (Sim) Shain // UrgentFlights.com and ParaFlight Aviation

I was born in Lakewood, New Jersey. It was a much smaller town than it is now, and I was in the first parallel class of Lakewood Cheder. I bounced around as a kid. I went to Lakewood Cheder through the second grade, then I went to Satmar for the third and fourth grades even though I’m Litvish, then it was back to Lakewood Cheder for the seventh grade.
“My father, Rabbi Yehuda Shain, went through the BMG yeshivah system here in Lakewood. He used to own a hotel back in the 1970s, having opened it with Reb Yekusiel Weinstein, z”l, who was a pillar of the Lakewood community. My father went into various industries over the years, including real estate and mortgage brokering. Then he went into the hashgachah business many years ago.
“Hatzalah started in Lakewood in 1981, when I was eight years old. My father was one of the founding members. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to be a paramedic and help people.
“In the summers, I went to a few different camps. I went wherever my father got the best deal. One time I went to a camp called Kol Rina in Livingston Manor. My father was friendly with Itche Meyer Greenwald, who was Dr. Greenwald’s son. I went to camp a few days late because my father didn’t negotiate the deal until after camp opened. He called to see if there was a bed available and then gave them an offer of what he could pay.
“My parents were of limited means. We always had what we needed, but there was never money for anything extra. I’ll tell you about my first business deal. As I was leaving for camp, my mother took out two frozen 9 x13 cakes and gave them to me. On our way to camp, the person who was driving me there, who happened to be a bag salesman, stopped off at a famous weight-loss camp called Camp Shane in Ferndale, New York. I was sitting in the car waiting when a few kids came over and asked me if I had any food and they saw my mother’s cakes. I felt guilty selling them, but everything has its price. I sold the cakes to these kids for $90—that’s like $400 today! I had never felt so rich. I kept the money in my sock.
“I went to Telshe Cleveland for the ninth grade, then to Adelphia Yeshiva until the end of high school because my uncle, Rav Yerucham Shain, had founded the yeshivah. Then I went to Denver for my first year of beis midrash.
“I was entrepreneurial as a teenager. I used to sell aravos for my father before Sukkos. I also worked for Reb Barry Goldberg, z”l, who owned a bakery. I would go there every Erev Shabbos at 4:00 in the morning and bag challahs. I would make a few dollars doing whatever I could, any type of hustling I was able to do.
“I left Denver in 1990 and went back to Adelphia Yeshiva for a little bit. Then I spent a short time in Eretz Yisrael, but I came back because I felt that I had to start making money so I could build a family. Looking back, Hashem guided me every step of the way, and every job I had helped get me to where I am today.
“The first thing I did was open a store in Lakewood. My friend Louie Follman told me that his cousin wanted to open a clothing store, and he asked if I was interested in joining in and running it. I knew absolutely nothing about clothing, but I decided to go for it. We bought all of our suits from a store in Brooklyn. We would go there at 11:00 at night and clean out half his stock. We bought white shirts from Williamsburg and ties off the back of some truck belonging to a guy from New Jersey. We opened the store and it was doing well, but I soon realized that I wasn’t cut out to sit in a store all day long waiting for customers. I just didn’t have the zitzfleish.
“This was followed by a job working as a manager in a limousine service. Then my father, who worked in kashrus, got me a job working at a place in Lakewood called The Old Fashioned Kitchen. They manufactured Golden Blintzes and Golden Latkes. I would go with my father to kasher various factories and even tanker trucks. It was pretty exciting.
“In 1993, before I got married, I became an EMT. As I said, I’d known since I was eight years old that it was something I wanted to do. I joined one of the local Hatzalah squads in Howell Township, right outside of Lakewood. I got married shortly thereafter, when I was 22. Then in 1996, six months after I got married, I joined Hatzalah of Lakewood. We had one ambulance at the time. Today we have 16.
“I got a job working for Reb Itche Meir Greenwald and Greenwald Caterers and stayed there for about five years, until my second son was born. I helped run Pesach and Shabbos programs. I spent every other weekend in a hotel as a manager. It was a nice job but not a fulfilling one. I wanted to go out and see what else I could do.
“My next venture was altogether different: the bail bond industry. My friend and I bought into a bail agency in New Jersey and then we started buying other agencies. We began in Freehold and then moved to Perth Amboy and Jersey City. At one point, we owned the largest bail agency in the state. We were representatives of insurance companies.
“When someone has to pay bail, they either have to pay the full amount or put 10% down. We were able to pay a lot less and charge the client the difference. But as with any bail, if the client didn’t show up to court we would lose the full amount. We had a lot of bail agents who worked for us, and I used to write bail as well. Any person who had to be bailed anywhere in the country probably gave me a phone call at some point. We had networks with other places and I would try to negotiate better deals for them.
“I was a bounty hunter as well. We used to go out and pick up ‘skips’ (someone who skips his court appearance) and turn them in either to jail or to the courts. In the event that they actually skipped, we would be responsible for the entire amount.
“After 9/11, there were a lot of changes in the rules and I realized that it was time for me to sell my position to my partner. It was also a very challenging business, really high pressure with a lot of things going on all the time. Then I was shot at by someone who skipped bail in Newark, which really scared my wife. So I got out of the business. I had a growing family and needed to be there for them.
“After that, I went into day trading. By then, I was 30 years old. Baruch Hashem, I have a gift for math. I was able to calculate my commissions, profits and spreads. Every morning I would be on my computer by 8:30 a.m. and prepare my trades for 9:30. I would then trade until 11:00 a.m. Then I’d go back to the computer from 2:30 to 4:00 to finish my trades for the day. I did well for a bit, but then the stock market crashed and I lost a lot of money, so I thought to myself, I’d better get into something else. I stopped trading in 2004. At that point, I went into real estate and real estate development, but I left after the 2008 crash.
“The year before, in 2007, I had officially became a paramedic. Avraham Moshe Muller and I were the cofounders of the paramedic program of Lakewood Hatzalah. There used to be just one paramedic program to cover the entire Lakewood and some of the surrounding towns, so the chance of getting a paramedic unit when it was needed was small. So we went to petition the state because the paramedic program was controlled by a monopoly, a company called Monarch. The state only allowed people to obtain licenses for specific areas. They would allocate it and assign it to certain hospital systems over which they had full control. We went to this hospital system and told them we wanted to open a volunteer paramedic program and wanted licenses for our areas. They said no, so we hired a lobbying firm to work on it. We went to the governor’s office and the commissioner of health and explained that we were simply looking to save lives, not open a business. The governor made them work with us. It took two years to establish our paramedic program, but ultimately we started the first volunteer Hatzalah paramedic program in New Jersey.