Lester Melnick
Lester Melnick was born into an immigrant family and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father immigrated from Belarus, arriving through Ellis Island around 1916, and his mother came from a region she called Austria, which Lester believed was once part of southern Poland. His mother had a business school education and spoke English fluently, while his father, educated in Hebrew schools in Belarus, spoke with a Russian accent and loved reading Yiddish newspapers. The family grew up in a working-class neighborhood, living above his father's business. His father ran bar supplies during Prohibition, later operated a bar, and eventually opened a small package liquor store. Lester was a middle son with an older brother, a younger brother, and a younger sister who later lived many years in Dallas.
At sixteen, Lester and a friend joined the Marines during World War II. He served in the Pacific from 1943 until after the war, spending time in Japan just days after the atomic bombings and later being stationed in Hawaii, a place he grew to love. Using the GI Bill, he attended the University of Miami and earned a degree in accounting, supplementing his stipend with jobs delivering milk and hanging banners. After selling liquor for one of his father's suppliers and later working in a New York coat showroom, he came to Dallas on April 1, 1953, to sell coats. When that job ended, kindness from local people, including Harold Callenberg, led him to Neiman Marcus, where he worked for nine and a half years and rose to become a coat buyer known for creative merchandising that impressed Stanley Marcus.
In 1962, Lester bought a small store at Preston Royal, financing it with the help of a coat manufacturer and a Dallas banker who trusted his honesty. From that flagship store he expanded to as many as twelve locations, including Richardson, North Park, Plano, Casa Linda, and later Fort Worth. He married Cynthia, whom he met when she came to Neiman Marcus as a college board representative from the University of Arkansas, and together they raised three daughters. Their family embraced differing religious paths, with one daughter later an officer at Temple Emanu-El. Lester was active in civic life, serving on boards for the SMU lecture series and Dallas Summer Musicals and helping found Reunion Bank. He eventually closed his stores as taxes, insurance, and a changing apparel industry made the business difficult, and in retirement he traveled widely and treasured his family.
Full Transcript
okay this is an oral history interview with lester melnick on tuesday october 25th 2011 conducted by may siebel thank you for agreeing to do this interview lester uh first like to know about your family your parents where you're from their backgrounds all those kinds of well i'll be pranks my my dad immigrated from uh belarus he got to the east to came through ellis island about 1916. and and that was right prior to world war ii world war one excuse me and um what what the government at that time they were taking these young immigrant boys and just putting them right in the service so my father was back in europe uh two years later well when the america went in the world war world war one my mother emigrated from uh she claims austria but i believe it was southern poland i guess it's much more elegant to be from austria than poland i don't know but i think it's the part of the world that was once once austria and once poland so
she's from southern southern uh from austria and her family well i know that her her father came to america 100 years ago because we had a family reunion in new jersey last year one of my one of my second cousins sons put the family together and we all so i know about i know when he got here and so my mother came two years later because the pattern in those years was as it is today with the immigrants that come to this country today the father and the number one son come and they work and send money to the old country my mother tells me
her recollections of coming of course they left from bremen germany and and i don't know what year but maybe 19 14 15. and she says she does remember her mother and her sick her mother gathering her six siblings around her in this transport ship to keep the guys from hitting on her mother her mother used her kids as a defense against these other men because she was traveling alone with her young children but my mother had a business school education in this country and she spoke english fluently spoke well my father had that russian accent which really i found embarrassing as a kid now when i hear those wonderful people speaking from israel makes have an accent that sounds like my father it just sounds like beautiful music
to me and i really miss him and i miss that and i really didn't have a sufficient appreciation for who they were and what they went through when i was when i was a child if i would complain about something to my father and he would say to me you know what are you complaining about when i got here i couldn't even speak the language so don't complain like if joe dimaggio struck out a couple times that day he would really make me very sad well he never understood that but basically they were very very hard working people my father was a his whole education
was in the hebrew schools in belarus he had no education in this country he would rather read the forbids that was a week old and read today's paper in english he just loved reading paper in yiddish they spoke yiddish in the home when they wanted to keep secrets from the kids which i guess is pretty common in those years but we were very proud to be americans we were proud to be yankees and uh we they were very very interested in our getting an education and are being americans which i which i find a little different attitude from a lot of the immigrants that come
in this country today which i find very sad my father started a small business actually i really don't know the facts on this but he was in the liquor the bar supplies business during the prohibition when liquor was illegal and he was selling the makings the malt the hops the rock candy brown sugar glassware napkins things of that nature i think he might have even known some of those guys that were selling booze but i'm not sure at any rate once the law was changed and they repealed prohibition he opened a small bar and he had this bar for a few years and he said
and he got uh with the long hour they start at nine in the morning and they work till two in the morning and he would we lived above the store my uh you know that's i'm getting a little ahead of myself he had a partner at first and they missed bar well after about seven eight years with this part he decided he had enough of people sitting in his bar and he took his bar license which was an unusual thing at that time and decided he wanted to have a package liquor store where he sold it and people would buy it and go elsewhere so
that's what he did he had a small retail business and he rented himself he'd open up nine in the morning close at 10 at night at 12 o'clock my mother would we looked upstairs my mother would ring the bell he would he would walk up she would walk down his lunch would be his lunch would be on the table he would need his lunch she'd watch the store for that 20 minutes or half hour then at six o'clock she would ring the bell he would go up she would come down and that was what he did and that and and and he was a hard
working honest guy and uh and a good guy i realized now what a good guy he was and um when when he passed away my mother eventually moved here in her last four or five years but he never had very much money but she never asked me for a thing i did for her but he left her she he left her with enough money to do all the things that she needed to do for the rest of her life and basically that was it i mean i think that my father thought that i was too much of a playing on my mind too much about
go out and play ball he thought i was wasting my time i wanted to go buy a new shirt he thought i should save my money and so i had i had that we had that sort of a conflict as kids because they weren't very very modern people and they were you know essentially very conservative immigrant people they had very little my mother did have a uh education did i repeat that earlier she was a uh business school education and she spoke beautifully and wrote beautifully my didn't either of those two things but it was a good job did your mother work outside the home
no no not at all no she was just a homemade listen in those years you know if a woman had to go to work it was kind of a shameful thing for a man that he couldn't make enough money to support his family that was the mentality and how about brothers and sisters i was a middle son i have a younger sister i had an older brother a younger brother and my sister winters who will live here in dallas for many years she came down and then she came down with her husband alan and they got a divorce but she loved it here he never
he never really liked dallas he was a strictly a new york guy but she loved dallas and she had a wonderful wonderful circle of friends and she was very very happy here but she was my baby sister they're all gone now but my mother uh lived into her 90s i'll be 86 next week and i guess fortunately i have my mother's jeans but my brothers are all my father they all passed away in their in their 60s you know my sister been gone now about seven eight years and she was 1937. so she was she was in her 70s what was the neighborhood like well well it was you see those remember uh the old archie bunker tv show they were real happy they were row houses my father actually he bought this house what i don't know what he used for money i had no idea but it was a two-story house we lived upstairs and we had a downstairs neighbor and we were four of us the three i really don't remember the betting situation i'm i'm sure of course my sister came along quite a bit i think she's quite a bit young she was quite a bit
younger than i was she we were all but i know we had one bathroom remember i remember my father dominated that in the mornings and uh but for what once my father started his package store business he built this building i don't know where he got that money either but he built that building and we had an apartment above it and um of course but surely shortly after that happened that was early in 1941 1942 when the war started i joined the marines so i really left i was 16 years old when i left home so you're asking me to recall things that are that
that i'm not i'm not exactly sure of the sequence of events but i know that i know that i was not very happy in that environment i knew there was something better than they own new jersey and i found that i always give my credit for finding that out young in my life and i was so it wasn't new york it was neutral new jersey and i used to look across the water at the beautiful lights in new york and i saw that wonderful thing going across the way and we we had really very little you know my father let me know also at a
very early age you know european men know they have to provide a dowry for their daughters and my father with three sons and one daughter he told me when i was about 14 years old he said son i am not planning for you he let me know that straight up so i went out and i got a paper route and you know i just did jobs and i made my you know did whatever i could to make a few bucks and um then i went off to the service i joined the marines and i was in the uh i signed up for the regular so
i was in for four years so i stayed until after the war was over but as a result am i getting ahead of the game no go ahead but as a result of having been in the marines i qualified for the gi bill of rights and at that time they paid you college tuition they paid bought your books and gave you 50 bucks a month which was a very lucrative thing at that time i went to the school university of miami florida i decided for the same money might as well be in florida and be in new jersey we'll get back to your college experience
in a minute but i'm interested in knowing about your schooling and bayonne what the neighborhood was like your friends what you've got to do for amusement and kind of what the atmosphere was like back then like a lot of the small cities back east the environments were very parochialistic the the italian immigrants lived in their section the jews lived in their section the polls were there as it happened we lived in an eclectic section we had neighbors as matt and we're also colorblind we absolutely people other colors are we we just had no knowledge of any prejudices and then we we played ball on the
streets with uh rubber balls and sticks and we would we would get a chalk and put a base on the finger we might use the fender of a car for first base and the sewer plate for second base my dad put up a basketball hoop up on the pole out in front of our house and the basketballs that they had for the street had the the seams were on the outside because if you're bouncing a ball on the cement it's going to the seams are going to wear well these were balls that were specially designed with thick seams that are that are go out instead
of inside so the balls would last and of course they didn't bounce as well but at least they lasted longer but the kids they were most of them they were all first everybody everybody was first generation i don't think we knew anyone whose parents were born in this country everybody was first generation everybody was poor uh and actually my father being in business we were probably one of the few people on the block that got an occasional new shirt knew something and then of course on on weekends my mother had six siblings so that was our sunday sunday uh outings we would dry get all
of us get in the car my father had a packer it was a two-seater car with a rumble seat and my father and sister and mother would sit in the cab and my brothers and i the three of us would sit in the rumble seat and off we would go to one of my mother's sister's houses or one of her brother's houses and we would bring clothes we would bring the old folks who bring the clothes to the young folks and and then we would visit and that was our sundays and then occasionally on a sunday we lived in bayonne which is across the bay
from newark airport and in those days those big old airplanes would have been to propel us sometimes we would go on a sunday to the airport watch the planes and take off which was a very novel thing in the 30s as far as school was concerned in one place we lived right across the street from this one grammar school it's called woodrow wilson school on 56th street and bayonne and i remember we had a gymnasium class and the teacher would play the piano and we would march around the thing and then we are i believe our education though was proud for a public school education
i believe it was pretty good because you know in all fairness uh i'm just i i think i'm being very objective about this but you know cynthia's from arkansas and uh there are things about her background and education that i think that were not what not not really as highly developed as they were mine so even in those public schools back east in the 30s i believe that they probably did provide us with a fairly decent education when i went to bayonne high school i don't remember exactly what courses i took but i do remember after the 11th grade i felt like these guys can't
teach me anything else anyway there was a war going on and this buddy of mine went over and we just went over and joined the marines one day i didn't tell my parents we just went ahead and did it and about three weeks later he came to his notice you know so i told my mother my father tried to act as indignant as she was but i think he was kind of proud of what i but she really she really had a very difficult time with that and it was the first time i'd ever out of the out of the state of new jersey except
going over to an occasional ball game to see the new york giants with my dad he would take me a couple times in the summer to see the brooklyn dodgers or the new york giants or the new york yankees that was the only time i was ever out of the state of new jersey before i got on the train and went to paris island south carolina i went in the marine corps got in the marine corps and woke me up at 5 30 in the morning and i said what the heck did i do to myself i said john this one anyway they made marines
out of us if we had a rough rough two months in boot camp and then went overseas and then the rest so we beat him we came back so you were overseas i was in the pacific from i went over in june of 1943 and came back after the war as a matter of fact it's interesting i had two christmases in 1945 because we crossed the date line oh we were on one side of the dateline of december 25th so it was december 25th we left that we left sasebo japan somewhere around the 20th or so of december so i was in japan from august
until december came back back to san diego but but this is interesting i was at sea on the way to the philippines because i think they were getting all the troops rendezvous in the philippines for an invasion of japan when the when they dropped we were at sea and when they dropped the atom bomb in nagasaki the second bomb on the fourth and fifth of august we're at sea and we went right up into japan the japanese hadn't surrendered but they had quit fighting so we were the first troops in there on august like maybe two days or three days after that bombed up fortunately
the bomb was like 75 miles from where we were because no one didn't know a whole lot about radiation in those days so i we really i was kind of in the fringes of harm's way all through those years but never directly i was in a couple of air raids and and and this thing like that but never nobody i didn't shoot at anybody and no one shot at me unfortunately so when you came back you were have the gi bill that said go to college yes and you went to the university of miami university of miami and uh and when i was there the
first time i met some wealthy guys and i realized that there was a whole world out there that i was unfamiliar with a couple of my roommates were from were wealthy boys from one guys from chicago was from philadelphia and i started moving in that circle and i kind of liked the way i felt when i was with those guys you know and i had a job so i could supplement i supplemented my fifty dollar thing i also uh i was the milkman i was the only guy in the university mermaid allowed in the women's barracks because i was delivering milk so that was that
was a plus but i remember one morning we were at the copa cabana on miami beach coppa city copacabana i guess it was called then jerry lewis dean martin was just starting a business we were at that show at the copa cabana in 1949 1950 and uh i looked at my watch i said it's two two o'clock in the morning i've got to leave because i've got to go to work i had to go and deliver my milk so i left the party early before they were still partying i had to go back to work because i had to be aware to get my milk
and my deliveries then i had a job with a guy who was you know the banners that they put on telephone polls during the state fair and during the world series now well that was he had that contract for university for another university for the city of miami and we were all up and down biscayne boulevard climbing up those poles i did 75 cents an hour climbing up those poles and hanging those uh banners on those pulse light supplemented my 50 a month because my was not going to send me any money because he knew i was down there to play he knew that he
was partially right my mother on the other hand if she could you know save ten dollars out of her grocery money she would send me 10 bucks every once in a while yeah what did you major in a major in accounting i have a i have a you know just a bba in accounting and actually i'm not sure i got a very good college education at the time the universities were really an extension of high schools i think that the the the staff the professorial staff was probably just all patched together the students ranged in age everything from 17 to 47 because there are a
lot of guys coming back from the service over a bunch of kids there a bunch of old guys there and it was uh and the campus was uh was very small i was back there last year because my grandson is currently at the university of miami and i didn't see one thing not one thing that i recognized nothing at all what uh jewish affiliations did you have in your childhood did your parents belong to a seneca oh very much so yeah my father grew up in an orthodox environment a very orthodox environment my father his greatest pride was to walk to shawl on shabbos with
his three sons we lived seven blocks from the little teeny synagogue of the women walked upstairs and you know and it was wooden benches and on on the holidays my father would sit on the end of the aisle and he wouldn't let us out and we sat and you know these old orthodox jews and young tiff they didn't brush their teeth they didn't shave they didn't you know and there was no air conditioning and it was a you know indian summer in new jersey and a lot of times it wasn't terribly pleasant but we sat there and my father loved it uh when i hear
some of the prayers today of course the services at the at the temple emanuel are significantly different than what i experienced as a child but when when i hear some of those prayers today and i remember hearing my father just singing out those prayers it really it just gives me such a great sensitivity toward toward my heritage that i really didn't realize when i'm at the time i was experiencing it so i i think i i i'm a lot a lot more jewish than i realized i was when when i left there did you go to hebrew school oh yeah went to hebrew school and
i have another interesting thing about that you know my mother family being from southern europe and my father being from from the russian area i was getting instructions from my mother's father and their dialects were different than these old russian guys and so every time i would say one word and he would and i mispronounced it he wouldn't tell me why he was whacking me on the rear but i would bend over and whack until till i figured out whether but that's the way they taught you and it was terribly unattractive and i really couldn't wait to get out of there and i remember the
first morning after my bar mitzvah my grandfather was over at our house and he was very very disappointed that i didn't get up with him in the morning and died i i i i decided once i got out through through hebrew school that was it for me for a while and i remember him being there and i remember his disappointment and i didn't care at the time i care now i didn't care at the time but i disappointed him that i wouldn't get up and diving with him on the sunday morning and he uh let me tell you about that guy he needed a cane
as he got older and these are one of the things that i really really disapprove of and dislike about the jewish religion his rabbi would not let him use that cane to walk to the shul on saturday and it broke his heart as an old man he could not go and pray in the show on saturday because the rabbi wouldn't let him use his cane and things like that there are several other things that that i found very unattractive and i really got away you know i i realize now that there are reasons for things that i'm much more sensitive about them now but at
the time i really i really was kind of kind of negative about all of them you know felt it was old-fashioned i felt there wasn't really no not too much room for that modern-day america matter of fact i'm surprised today when i see these young kids that are orthodox shoes i think our society and our environment is not very well designed for them to do it so i really admire the fact that they're making the sacrifices and doing the things that they're doing you know to be orthodox jews and modern day american tough so after you graduated from university of miami and what next well
i got back to bayonne new jersey my father being a big shot lick or retail and sally he did every year what we would do every week over here in preston royal that's the kind of business very small business but he did it all himself and if i was running my own little store myself i might still you know at any rate um so he got me a job with one of his suppliers selling booze so i went around and i'd go to all of these little bars in jersey city new jersey and hoboken new jersey on the waterfront it was the awfulest thing and
i'd go and won this one bar would buy three bottles at four dollars a bottle in this guy and i was a commissioned salesman and i went around bayonne jersey city hoboken west new york north bergen all the way up and down the coast of new jersey i had customers and that was i did that for a couple of years but i'd had enough then one of my roommates from college father was a coat manufacturer in new york and the rest is history that's right so i got a job working in a showroom on 37th street in manhattan that was my introduction in the apparel
business this guy his father died and he all of a sudden became very rich and he couldn't handle the money the wealth he couldn't handle he went a little at any rate that business went busted after a couple of years that he ran it my friend and but there was another man that wanted to sell his coats in texas and i didn't know enough to know that the kind of merchandise had was not appropriate for texas but i said i would go down and do that so i got here significantly on april fool's day in 1953 april 1st of 1953 i landed at the old
and i stayed at that old circle motel harry hines it was a you know well i was it was it was what it wasn't what it is today but it was really legit i remember spending the first night out there and um i had a little plymouth convertible which was inappropriate for this hot texas summer and i had these coats that were that thick plus they had inner linings and i went out to sell my coats well i met the nicest people the night merchants in this thing many people were really kind to me and i never had experienced this kind of kindness back east
and they didn't give me orders but one guy said please come home and have dinner with us tonight one fellow would say here give me your set of your color swatches so if i do get an order i can buy a code from you people were so kind to me but they didn't give me any orders and that was april and in june my boss came to dallas and took the line back and fired me and it never occurred to him to give me 50 bucks for gas back to new york i was here and at that time there was a wonderful man in this
town who was very very popular i think most people probably recognize the name of harold callenberg harold was a very successful salesman at the time and he invited on sunday afternoons all of the guys like me who were here you know schleppers who were trying to get along he would invite everybody was home for a buffet and we all and he just treated everybody and you know just everybody had a lovely social afternoon and one of the men i met there said once you go down and even marcus he said my wife works there and they're wonderful people who work for us so so i
i didn't know who they were i i i i guess i had heard of neiman marcus because i knew i remember that uh president eisenhower's wife had a dress made that's the first time i've ever heard of neiman marcus when president eisenhower so i went down to neiman marcus and they hired me uh 300 bucks and 325 hours a month i was i was on the fourth floor which is now the galleria it was then called younger set and i was the floor manager come off the elevator how do you do get your sales lady if the stock was messy i'd time things up make
sure that the everybody was scheduled properly and that's what i did and then fortunately i got this real a real wonderful thing happen there was a very important meeting at neiman marcus but there was a very important meeting that they had to have a representative in new york in the coat market well they knew that you know i could get off the plane in new york and know where i was going and they knew i had worked in the coal market so as a 75 a week guy they gave me a ticket to new york and represented neiman marcus in new york and came back
and then shortly after my buyer quit or i don't know but it was just a matter in the day when our sarah was born uh i was in the hospital at cynthia's bedside and i called the store and i asked her what was going on and they said that you've just been made the buyer so you know that thing where they say and are that with every child comes and that that was just a series of a series of events i mean i i i have been very very fortunate in that respect i've just had a series of things happen that just i just happen
to be there when good things happen you know i mean this woman i had absolutely no experience as a buyer but having been in new york and having worked with coats they i guess they took a chance you know gave me the buying job and my salary went all the way up to uh i think 500 a month from 350 or something like that so i was in tall cotton so you became the coat bar constantly coated and then i started doing things and people said and i didn't realize well i really didn't realize what i was doing but i i started doing things i
guess they considered creative like one time there was a wonderful uh fur called i think it's called a russian uh it's a flat fur the name fails me now but they were selling them on the fire department for like you know a couple thousand bucks well there was some guy had some inexpensive ones that he was selling for a hundred dollars so i went they weren't anywhere near the same quality but my department was the less expensive department so i went to that to the far market and i bought those hundred dollar jackets then i went to the sportswear market and bought 100 black skirts
i made suits out of them i brought him into neiman marcus the fur guy went nuts stanley marcus said to him would you like lester have it or would you like sanders to have it and so right well that was stanley i mean but he recognized that there was a market for all sorts of merchandise and there were things like that that that kept that i'm really wish i'm not even prepared to tell all the things but anyway that's just one of the things that happened there was a series a series of things like that where they they started recognizing that i was not just
going to go to the market and buy what was available but that i had some instincts i guess for i mean i really don't know what makes you like one color or not like another or realize that something's not going to sell and something's going to be you know just happens i remember i do remember there was a child my mother would put a hat on and say do you like that i said no i don't like that one i like that one so i mean that so that would happen when i was a kid so i guess that's where they came so how long
were you at neyman's nine and a half years and uh when i and we would come out on the sun you know preston road you all may remember was a little narrow macadam road this high with dirt on the sides and so we would put our kids in the car like i did as a child and drive way out to royal lane and i saw this little store there was owned by a name when it was gloria klein well her husband sam had been a partner of lou lattimore before albert lindsey bought later boys lou latimer owned it and one and then these three guys
bought it and one guy was sam kline there were three partners that owned that store and one was uh sam perlman sam klein and someone else but anyway albert bought this store from those guys but this sam perlman came out to preston oil opened up what he called pearlman's fashion previews and he built this beautiful store and he didn't get his deliveries on his merchandise he didn't get the store open before he was out of money so his ex-partner sam klein who had married this young woman gloria klein he took it over in bankruptcy and then sam klein died shortly after that and uh gloria
klein i recognized the name gloria klein one day this woman comes to neiman marcus to buy a coat well you know i called me in the fitting room because you could go in the fitting rooms of women who were buying coats you know so i went in the fitting room i recognized her name and she said my little store is for sale i said great i know a guy give me the name of your you know so i got the name of the attorney was harry harry friedman who was the loveliest loveliest guy and so i called harry that night and i told him who
a friend was which was me and um he said he said the price is i don't know fifteen thousand dollars i said fine i'll buy it i didn't have fifteen thousand dollars but the reason he was shocked he said fine what happened the price had been 20 a thousand everybody was waiting for it to get lower and higher i thought fifteen thousand dollars was a fantastically inexpensive price was a beautifully decorated store so i said i'll buy it so well there was a a very wealthy coat manufacturer who i was buying a lot of goods from at neiman's and he said to me at one
time this is another thing he said you know a kid like you want to have his own business and he said that to me and why he said that i don't know but he said if you ever need to money i will uh send you money so i called him up that evening and i said mr henry i think i've got my deal and the next morning air mail special delivery check for 25 000 bucks no signature no nothing 1962 the guy sent me a check for 25 000 i didn't pay the 15 000 because i needed cash to buy merchandise to start my business
and um then and he couldn't sell me merchandise because he was his goods were confined to neiman marcus but that wasn't his goal that wasn't his purpose so i went to new york and i went to his bank and the guy said well go on just transfer this uh note to dallas and pay me back the money i said you don't understand he said when you're going to pay me back i said well i'll pay you 500 this month well he was used to burn 25 000 and getting 25 000 back two days later i said i'll send you 500 this month and he said
you can't do that now i knew i had the money i said yeah yes i can because i already had the money and that man had endorsed a note anyway i got back to dallas i sent her a dress for his wife i sent him the 500 bucks like i said i would and after about about six months and i would have done some business i got him i had a appointment with the republican national bank mr florence bank the guy's name was walter brock walton took me to lunch i told him i wanted to transfer this 25 000 note to dallas he said to
me looking at your balance sheet i shouldn't even be buying you this tuna fish sandwich but he said i'm going to lend you the money because i think you're an honest guy and i think you're going to pay me and that's the way business was done in 1962 that today it wouldn't be possible for those things to happen today so i transferred the note i got out of the bank of new york and got it here and started establishing credit here and then we just started then we started opening stores every time we opened the store people would show up and start buying from us
right away it doesn't happen anymore like that but that's what happened in those years so you had the preston royal store and then you opened up out in richardson well the reason i went to richardson they came in and that was owned by the hunt interests the wealthy people and that guy parked himself at my doorstep every day before he'd go to work uh he would come to my office and stand outside my office till i would see him because he wanted me to open up out well that was a time when rest his soul we just lost my dear friend bud knight who passed
away this year but it was at neiman's and i saw met but in new york and i said bud you want to remain being a little fish in the big pond you want to come be a big shot and he said so i figured bud would run that store and i'd run this store and that was really wasn't back to that expansion because i knew that getting butt in there we would need more business what would be a bigger expense because at that time there was no expense except meeting cynthia and my visa card you know and so that was and then and then once
we started doing that we started advertising then people came to us and they made us made us attractive offers to expand our business which which we did and most most of them were okay some weren't so good and so we opened some close some and but we had a business you know we were really busy where did you open and close i just remember preston royal and richard's oh well we had a store in actually out where the cowboy stadium is right uh that intersection on collins and randall mill in collins we're on that center i wish i owned that center today with a cowboy
center but we had a store we had a store in uh you know where cole wills is on hillcrest well we there was a we took a lease in the store adjacent to that we opened we had a store in casa linda by the old theater we had a couple of leslie stores in plano one on the east side of expressway one on one at park park we had one at uh by bachmann lake which was a disaster the north side by the new shopping center and the guy said i'm gonna build your store and all i had to do was put the merchandise in
and put a manager in so you know sort of put a store there but that so anything anytime that's another land you get something for nothing that's about you know it's work um we had north fork we had several stores in north park yeah we uh opened up what happened as a matter of fact is harry harry friedman the attorney that i first did business with who was so kind to me when when their small store was going out of business you remember the page boy maternity they had that corner store at north park well they were going out of business and he needed someone
to come in there and take that lease or buy the fixtures and he said that dude that was that doing business was so easy the last time and he called me right away and i said yeah great so we got into north park and we got in at their lease terms so we had a very you know north bar became very very prohibitively expensive for a small business but at that time they probably had an original lease and we get in there very inexpensive lease and that was our entree in the north park then we opened up across the way where the oscar de la
renta store is because then we went upstairs when they when they built the second level we we had that corner lease upstairs and then we had to store upstairs and store downstairs we had leslie's downstairs and all that so i think there were 12 stores at one time something like that i i i had been better prepared if i would ask me that question were you being so busy with these stores and opening them and all the things things that requires to run a store were you active in any jewish organizations tell me about some of your involvement in the community well i was in
that esmu i was on the board of the smu lecture series i was on the board of the dallas summer musicals i was um i was the founder of the reunion bank which is now the energy it's now amateur bank but it was one of the original [Music] um um i i must confess i really wasn't terribly active in the jewish community you know cynthia is not jewish um uh what we had a very very are are we really let our children really decide how they wanted to live their lives with their social activities and actually it was a bit of a problem for our
daughters in that uh if if i i think the the community didn't know if there was some lovely jewish boy came into the southwestern medical who didn't know whether they were introducing one of my daughters or not as it happens now my daughter sarah is the officer over at temple emanuel and she's very very involved in the i think our other two daughters have chosen to take other other avenues for their religions but i'll tell you that has never been an issue in our family we all get together my sarah's daughter loves to go to christmas services at the methodist church uh leslie's daughter comes
to russia shuttle services with clara's daughters it was clear with sarah's daughter so i mean we have a wonderful wonderful um experience in our fitness never been in our family at all how did you meet sent there marcus she was neiman you might remember this hearing that vintage uh neiman's had a college board where they would bring girls in from the southwest conference schools as as counselors to the new freshman girls going to that school so she had been at smu one year and this woman who she was a roommate of at smu she was back at the university of arkansas cynthia was well this
girl knew cynthia and invited her to come and represent the university of arkansas the college board i started neiman's uh the weekend of july the 4th of 53. cynthia came in on july the 15th of 1953 and it's an interesting story but about 10 years later one of the sales leaders that worked with me at neiman's was working for me at preston royal and she told me it was a big joke there because they used to see me sneaking to the model's office in the afternoons you know so they were wise to my game i never knew it at the time but they told me ten years after the fact so that was it and she she we got married the following june in in arkansas which almost heralded my mother and father but
cynthia has since become their favorite granddaughter their favorite i had become their favorite daughter-in-law because she really she's what she is uh tell me about your grandchildren well i'm very proud of my grandchildren i've uh had three daughters they have five granddaughters and a grandson baby joseph he's he's he's presently himself a junior at the university of miami joseph is but jessica our first granddaughter is now in a computer executive in fort worth she graduated from tcu she's a computer exec he's very very bright and and very very capable computer personal language which is just somewhat familiar to me or leslie's oldest daughter meredith is
a peace corps volunteer in albania and she's actually just taken some her sats to go back to graduate school when she when she finishes her her tour of duty which will be the following spring so i think she's going to go back to graduate school next fall she's 24. sarah's daughter claire is with the interfaith youth organization in chicago jacqueline correct just graduated from northwest from colorado state and she's uh actually in the retail business she's she's uh nordstrom's but she also has made a connection with a with a uh uh united states representative and she's going to work on his re-election campaign starting january for a politician in chicago and i really don't know what his politics are or anything about it but and then leslie's younger daughter tracy is a senior at smu majoring in advertising last summer she was a a volunteer at uh at a uh advertising agency in boston and so
she's getting very you know getting a lot of experience and she's uh interviewed with a couple of places here in dallas and i think she apparently is very interested in the advertising that's five and then the sixth one is joseph whose father is an architect you know mark builds homes mark albert builds homes in dallas and joseph you've got joseph interested in the architect business and joseph seems to like it very much and be very successful at it so he's and he apparently is prospering university of miami i think he write the president i get the impression he's more interested in the football team and
what the price of coors beer is but but you know i guess that's part of the university um you've seen a lot of changes in doubt um you've seen a lot of changes in dallas since you moved here i'm particularly interested in knowing in the apparel business what you've seen happen here this was such a fashion center in the country i think the third behind new york and los angeles and look what's happened to no apparel mark very little no manufacturing local manufacturing of women's apparel and men's apparel as there used to be talk about that a little bit well the nature of the business
is it just changed very radically once when i first went business if i wanted my merchandise i'd get on the plane and go to new york and walk in the back room and take the dresses off the rack and ship them to dallas then the back rooms became north carolina's where the fabrics were made then the back rooms became japan where they started importing fabrics from then the back rooms became bangladesh and well once once the manufacturing function became so far away from the from the seasons then this fashions necessarily had to be more classic in other words when they produced something and they could
deliver it in six weeks or eight weeks then you could do something that was very very fashionable but if you buy something in january which is going to be delivered to you in june you really need to be very very careful about the classic nature of what you buy so that when it gets into your store it's going to be something that people are going to want to buy and not be out of date because six months when i first went to business was a lifetime and now it's just a wink the other thing that was really what really made our business more difficult is
that if i bought 10 of this and 10 of this if i sold these 10 i could get 10 more flown in tomorrow these 10 are never going to sell so i have to eat those or mark those to nothing get rid of those but if i can capitalize on the good 10 i can overcome the losses on the bed well you sell a good ten in one day and you say fine i'd like to buy 10 more they say fine let's do whatever you want we'll ship them to you in four months so well i can't use them for four months i need them
in four days but we couldn't so we couldn't capitalize on our gains and we had to take care of our losses that's what happened to a business like mine big businesses tend to dominate their suppliers to a greater extent than we would in a small business so they could they could promote things make things happen but they still would have to buy very far in advance and uh and they would and and i think that as a result of that this in response to your question i think that's probably what happened to this really advanced fashion market that we have it's just it just it's
just not possible for it for it to exist with with the markets being so far from the from the with a place where things are consumed that's just one one aspect of it i think the other thing was the the dominance of the of the the uh businesses with the dollars there were people that if if i did a lot of business with a vendor and i said you know i've got these couple things i'm not selling he said i'll swap them out and get them back to you got to be where the guys came lester let me tell you i really love your business
i'd love to do for you but mr nordstrom needs me to support his mr neiman marcus needs me to support him and i just can't help you anymore i love your business i'll do whatever i can for you but i can't do any more advertising i can't help you out with any of this because i don't have the wherefore to do that because these big companies started putting so many demands upon their suppliers so when they start dominating their suppliers they tell them what they want and and the you know retailers are not essentially not designers not creators the creativity and design came from the
small design rooms in new york and the creative people who incidentally an awful lot of them are gone too because of this terrible epidemic of aids many of them from the gay community and we lost a whole lot of very very creative people for between the seven between you know the last 25 years you go right down the line and mention the names that'll be familiar to all of us it's not with us any longer so that's also what happened to you what about the city of dallas and just you know doing in dallas what what changes did you see up until the time you
decided to close your store well when i first opened it was very very personal people would come in and and they wanted to know me and i wanted to know them and we knew where the weddings and the bar mitzvahs were and who was going off on holidays and we knew all that well a lot of that went away and i didn't realize how much it went away until i opened up a shop in fort worth in the middle 90s and when i got to fort worth i said god the atmosphere here the attitude in fort worth is comparable to what it was in dallas
in the 60s it's still a small city the people came in they were happy to have the store there they were really personal and obviously weren't there as much as i was here but i got there quite often and i met the people and it was the same kind of attitude which we had lost here in the house dallas became became a big city and the uh and then and then of course my sales ladies many of them were suffering from being too successful and i had a very difficult time managing some of them they started making a lot of money they got a little
independent with some of their clientele and they were very selective about who they would wait on some i mean there were things i really had a lot of a lot of bowser and then i got to where i said well if i ask this lady to leave i know there's a circle of about 40 customers there might be she might be serving 100 but there might be about 30 or 40 that are really loyal to her and i really you know so you know you met things with mixed emotions and i i really wasn't running my business myself anymore it got to be bigger than
you know and and i'll tell you another thing as far as organization i don't think i was ever as well organized i know that we didn't do as well in any branch store as we did at preston royal it just seems whatever the boss is around everybody acts a little bit better and we never and we were successful we did well at north park and we did well but never never and any problems we ever had in the business was always overcome by our successes at preston royal preston royal paid for everything so what ultimately determined that you were going to close the store well
the last couple of years we were working very very hard we were paying a huge amount of money in taxes between the avalor taxes between and the the in our insurance things our health insurance for our coastal no insurance companies don't like women clients because a lot of things can go wrong with mature women as you well know and so my insurance premiums got very high the uh the uh oh there's a uh oh i forget what it's called now had to do with with with one of your employees getting hurt on the job uh workers comp bingo workers comp got to be prohibitively expensive
so between insurance and workers comp the avalorm tax each year you pay a tax on the size of your inventory plus what it costs to get your inventory to dallas there's no state tax in dallas in texas rather but we pay a tax on that level or in tax so i said to my daughter leslie who was working seven days a week as i was i said you know leslie between all these insurance things and these taxes the government is getting about twice as much out of this company as you and i and we're working very hard and we really we're going to make any
progress and and it was it was a very difficult thing because i know when i closed that business i turned we had about you know 75 or 80 employees before we closed up and about 25 of them were really spectacular and i know i turned loose about 25 really great employees on this town so i've done done at least there was something good came out came out of our closing up but it just wasn't in the car it's the we kind of painted ourselves in the corner we had a whole lot of space at preston royal the millers who had always were very very kind
to me and very good to me as landlords well they needed to get much more revenue out of that center the center it became in our space we had a huge amount of space it would have cost me an awful lot of money to to remodel the space and i had to decide do i what have you been doing with yourself since you retired well i've been taking my wife to lunch i've been taking my grandkids to lunch and i've been playing a lot of golf and we've been doing a lot of traveling we never celebrated we did celebrate thanksgiving and we did celebrate christmas
but never never like normal people because thanksgiving we always had to get ready for the after thanksgiving sale before that i mean from from early november to january 15th was like one long day and i was never never really totally totally ease because it was always something i mean many times i run over there on a christmas morning to do something or or take some last minute markdowns i'd forgotten to take or something because we just lived we live you know seven days a week 24 hours a day we go on a holiday we spend half the time looking at stores now we go on
a holiday and we go on a cruise and we go out like normal human beings and we've been doing a lot of traveling we spent a month this year actually we visited our granddaughter she came from albania to dubrovnik and we spent a week with our department which was really great and we took we had a cruise before and a cruise after so that i mean that's kind of things i really feel very privileged that i'm able to do those kind of things you know so that's what we did this summer and next summer i'm going to get the heck out of this town again
anything else you'd like to add uh this is the fact that i'm very very flattered by the fact that she wanted me to do this um i i think that i've really uh i've glossed over you know much of my uh much of my history uh i really i really don't know i think that for any specific questions but i think you really got the essence of of my experience here i would like to add though however being here in a marvelous place like dallas texas really had been a complete revelation to me i just never knew places like this existed and when i got
here the reception that we received and and the reception that we got all through our years and even to today to the reception i've read from to you to wonderful women it's just it's just a wonderful thing for me when i look back at my background and where and all the wonderful things that's happened to me over the years just very fortunate i do would like to have also my affection for hawaii when i was in the marines i was stationed there for a year and i met some marvelous people there and that's like some people who invited me into their home they had a
guest home which was my residence on the week when i had liberties they left why they this woman called me her war baby her kids were off and you know away from a while and i i was there and they took me around and introduced me to this society in hilo hawaii and as a result of that cynthia and i've been back and forth to hawaii maybe 20 times and we really then we did the things and then we made a business out of it also with those hawaiian things we did in the store and all those hawaiian clothes we saw so the whole thing
it was just just a lot of wonderful things been happening to me all my life and continue to happen to me thank you so much this has been terrific well i hope so you