Stanley Marcus
Stanley Marcus traced his family's roots to Germany, Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe. His paternal grandfather emigrated by way of Louisville, Kentucky, before settling in Hillsboro, Texas, where he became a cotton broker. His father, Herbert Marcus, came to Hillsboro as a teenager, swept out a country store, and later moved to Dallas, where he sold insurance and then worked at Sanger Brothers as a salesman and buyer. In 1905, Herbert joined his sister Carrie and her husband Al Neiman in a sales promotion venture in Atlanta, Georgia. After selling the business, the partners returned to Dallas and, in 1907, opened Neiman Marcus at Elm and Murphy Streets, dedicated to offering fine ready-to-wear with personalized service. Stanley was born that same year.
Stanley worked in the store as a boy, running cash and helping with deliveries. He graduated from Forest Avenue High School in 1921, spent a difficult year at Amherst where he encountered antisemitism, then transferred to Harvard, which he loved, followed by a year of business school. He returned to Dallas to join the store as it doubled in size, and soon took on major responsibilities after Al Neiman and his father dissolved their partnership. Rising to executive vice president, he helped the store survive the Depression, thrive during World War II, and pioneer national advertising in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Under his leadership the company expanded to Preston Center, Fort Worth, Houston, and eventually across the country, later joining Broadway Department Stores.
Marcus was deeply involved in civic and cultural life, following his father, who had served as president of Temple Emanu-El and the Columbian Club. He stood publicly for civil rights, free expression, and the arts, resisting censorship during the McCarthy era while serving as president of the local museum. He led the peaceful integration of the store's facilities in the 1960s and was involved in the arrangements surrounding President Kennedy's 1963 Dallas visit, which he had privately urged against. A member of the American Council for Judaism, he held longstanding personal convictions on Jewish and communal matters. He married Mary Cantrell in 1932, and they had three children, Jerry and twins Richard and Wendy. In later years he wrote several successful books, including Minding the Store and Quest for the Best.
Full Transcript
Robert Beer for the Dallas Jewish Historical Society will be meeting with Mr. Marcus in his office at the 300 Crescent Building on Cedar Springs in Dallas on Tuesday afternoon, 1-28-92. It is our pleasure today to introduce and visit with Stanley Marcus, who on this January 28, 1992, is going to review the family history of the Marcuses and put on our permanent record some of the wonderful things that this merchant prince, but a great humanitarian and patron of the arts and so many things that have made Dallas and America and the world a better place. And we're thrilled to do this. How are you today? Thank you.
We'd like to start as far back as your memory will serve of where your two parents' families originated and what brought them to the United States, if you remember those countries and or cities that they came from. Well, my paternal grandfather came from Germany, I believe, although there is some question of the town in which he lived. They moved around. He lived in Germany the year he left, or Polish. My grandmother, maternal, paternal grandmother was born in Hanau, Montfort. How do I know? Because I visited her sister who still lived there back in about 1925. My mother father came also from a city I think it was K which was alternately German and Polish or German and Russian And my grandmother, who came from Liechtenstein, my grandfather Liechtenstein came from Königsberg.
My grandmother, who was Hattie Mettenthal, came from Russia. And her family came over in the, I guess, late 70s, 1870s, or early 80s. A source for identification of that date would be M. G. Mittenthal. His father was a brother of my grandmother, and so he would probably have that date pinned down. The Mittenwells somehow got out to Peoria, Illinois. And from Peoria, Illinois, they came back up with wagons of Dallas. About what year? I couldn't tell you. I don't know. My grandfather Liechtenstein, I cannot tell you how he arrived in Dallas. My grandfather Marcus had gone to Louisville, Kentucky where he had an auntsman and he founded his family in Louisville or a little town outside of Louisville called Camelsville.
His wife, I think, came from Germany. I don't, don't have any facts on that. My grandfather, Mittenthal, uh, grandfather Marcus, subsequently went to Hillsborough, Texas, where his elder daughter, uh, one of his eldest, uh, second eldest daughter had moved to Hillsborough with her husband a man named Abe Rosenbaum and who along with his brother Ike Rosendom ran a country store So my grandfather came down and became a cotton broker And my father, the young man, came there when he was about 15 or 16, swept out the country store, and eventually left Hillsborough for the brighter lights of Dallas and came to Dallas to sell insurance, which he did for a couple of years.
Didn't like it. Went to work for Sanger Brothers as a salesman. Soon became appointed as a buyer of Boy's Shoes and had a pretty successful career as a buyer and I think eventually bought Boy's clothing at Sanger's. About this time, which must have been about 1904, his sister Carrie who was his youngest sister came to Dallas and in fact the whole family moved from Hillsborough to Dallas Carrie got a job at a store called Goldsmiths not making a part went to A. Harrison Company and became a blouse buyer she met a traveling salesman by the name of Al Neiman from Cleveland and they flew into Dallas, and they became engaged and were married.
Mr. Neiman was a very energetic, ambitious old fellow, and he told of a wonderful opportunity he had outside of Atlanta, Georgia, to open a sales promotion business for country stores. and their objective was to go into small towns in Alabama and Georgia and raise money for stores that were short of cash. That meant putting on the street parade, banners, and all of the hoopla that went with it. And he wanted my father to give up his job at Sanger's to go down with him. Everybody thought it was crazy for my father to do so. He had a fine, established position in the Marshall Fields of Texas.
But nonetheless he went to Zanger and gave them an ultimatum and he thought he was entitled to salary increase And I think they offered him something like a dollar a week, something that size. And my father said that was inadequate. Mr. Sanger said, you're crazy. Herbert should never get anywhere if you're going to run off to places like Atlanta, Georgia. That's my final offer, and so my father walked out and went to Atlanta, Georgia. That was in 1905, because I was then six years old, six months old. And they carried me in arms to Atlanta, Georgia, where we lived for two years. and they were so successful.
This one is. Oh. That's what I do, too. They were successful. At the end of two years, they had a chance of selling out. They had two propositions made to them. one was for the state of Missouri for a brand new product. Well, first they were offered $25,000 in cash, or a franchise for the state of Missouri for a brand new patent medicine-type drink called Coca-Cola. They were too smart to take the Coca-Cola franchise. They took the $25,000 cash and came back to Dallas to set up a store to run like they had always imagined they'd like to run the store. They had the money.
Well, $25,000 was hardly enough to get them started, so they borrowed from all members of the family, and everybody put up all the cash they had. and they did get started with a store in 1907 at the corner of Elm and Murphy Street they dedicated it to bringing to Dallas as they declared in their opening ad the finest ready to wear to be found anywhere in the United States for women and they would sell it with the greatest degree of personalized service. and satisfaction. It was more important for them to sell satisfaction than it was to sell merchandise. This was a great bit of idealism, but it was a very practical declaration of principles of doing business.
My father had, I think, barely gotten through high school. He didn't go to college. Mrs. Neiman didn't get a colleague. But they actually did what a dean of a business school would say to somebody who's thinking of going into business, well, put it down on paper and state what your objectives are. Well, that's what they did in their opening ad, which my father wrote because he couldn't afford a copywriter. As a matter of fact, at the time the store opened, he was in bed with high-fired fever and Mrs. Dieman was in bed recovering from his directing, I believe. So the brand new store got started without two of its major principles on hand.
Let's double check ourselves. It's moving now. Now it's moving. Now it's stopped. It's supposed to be an automatic one. When you're talking, it's supposed to go. and then you silence it. That's automatic. It's brand new, so. But they established this business with those principles, and they were very faithful to them as acts of faith all the time that they were active in the business. They did well, despite the fact that the 1970 when they opened was the beginning of a major recession, bank failures. But they started off well, made money their first year, and continued to make money. They had a fire on a Sunday morning in 1914, and were burnt out.
And they had to make a decision what to do, whether to rebuild on the old premises or to take a gamble and move way uptown. And they took the gamble of moving way uptown to Irving and Main Street opposite Teichgettinger who had moved there a year or two before across the street and W Green This was a wild venture. It was not proved territory. They took the gamble, and the year it took them to build the store, they took temporary quarters in a building called the Sumter Building, which was located in the middle of the block between Packard and Irby on Main Street. 1914, after again borrowing all the money the rest of the family had and borrowing from a few vendors, they succeeded in building this grand new store, which instead of being two stories like the first one was, They're now four stories.
They added a corset department, the lingerie department, to their apparel, department of the old store apparel and millinery. But they added these new departments together with a shoe department, a fur department. and I think that's the children's department and the young ladies department. They got that building finished just in time for the beginning of World War I, the drop of the price of cotton to ten cents a barrel, ten cents a pound, but they were able to continue to make a profit every year. until the war started and then the big rush to Texas started with that. They bought, well, very personally involved with it.
Neiman was personally involved in the selection of the so-called couture or dressmaker clothes. Mr. Neiman took charge of buying the women's coats, which was more of a tonnage operation than it was a highly selective one. My father took charge of administration, and then would go to New York occasionally to hold their hands in the market and give them courage to buy And they did very well during the wartime period on the succeeding inflation that occurred after World War, which ended up in a recession in 1921. they got through that adequately. You were born right back. Well, I was born in 1907, from 1905. And by 1914, I was nine years old and working on Saturdays, running cash, as they called it, carrying cash from the salesperson to the cashier.
and sometimes working on a delivery truck or as a stop point. 1921, I graduated from Forest Avenue High School in Dallas and went off to college. Went to Amherst for one year as a result of having failed a college entrance examinations at Harvard. My father took me up to New England to place me in the preparatory school on the grounds that I had not been adequately prepared for college boards and for Eastern colleges. And in the course of travels, we went to New Jersey, to the Morristown Academy, I recall. who were very nice to us until they discovered we were Jewish, and suddenly they decided they didn't have a place for me.
We ran on up to New England and ran into that experience several places. Finally, we landed in Boston, and my father said, I'd like to drop in and see my friend, Mr. Frank Waterman Stearns, who was then the head of R. H. Stearns & Company, the finest store in Boston. And so when he came into the office, Mr. Stern said, Herbert, what are you doing up here? And he said, well, I brought my son up here to put him in that prep school. And Mr Stern said what do you want to send him to a prep school for Looks like a strong healthy boy Why don you send him to Amherst And he said would you like to go to Amherst I didn know what Amherst was at all And I said, well, I don't know.
What is it? He said, well, it's a fine liberal arts college. And they have a president there by the name of Alexander Mikkeljohn. I said, well, I guess I'd like it all right. So he picks up as the secretary. He had Micklejohn on the phone. So he calls Micklejohn, and he said, Micklejohn, when does your new term start? Oh, next Monday? Well, I've got a boy here for me who wants to go to Amherst from Texas. Yeah, he'll be there. And that was how I got into Amherst. much the embarrassment of all my Amherst friends now. Always kidded Jack Kravitz who went there as the second strongest man in Amherst.
So it was a very miserable year for me because I ran into all sorts of prejudice that I had no idea existed, but I wanted to come home. My parents very wisely refused to let me come home. I said, you stay at all. And I made plans to transfer to Harvard, which I did at the end of the year. Got into Harvard and I was a transfer student in 1992, and had a gloriously fine time at Harvard. Enjoyed every bit of it. I then went to business school for one year in 1926, but I didn't graduate because I decided that my father was talking about enlarging the store and that if the store was going to be doubled in size, as he expressed, it seemed to me that my future would be better served by coming back and getting into the organization before it gelled which I did and which proved to be very fortuitous because the year after I came in Mr.
Neva and my father whose relations had been smoldering broke out into a hot fire and they had a by-yourself opposition Put to each other and my father chose to buy and even chose to sell. And at the same time a man named Herman Philipson, who was my father's right-hand assistant, advertising and promotion man, decided to leave the store too. That left my father with his store double in size, minus a partner and minus his right hand. so my coming in at that time pushed me into position that I had to do certain things that normally would have taken me five years to have gotten to do.
My father had really no choice unless he brought somebody else in and trained them so he decided to train me And, fortunately, my previous schoolboy experiences of having worked in different departments of the store proved valuable because I was familiar with the store's operation, general operation. And, I, thrown into the water, found that I could swim. So, 19, this was 1928, 29, just in time for the market collapse and the suppression of the 30s, which was a marvelous experience. because staff was at a minimum and you had to do all sorts of things yourself. You had to learn things quickly and you had to recognize the importance of holding on to your customers.
And that we did. It taught us to regard everybody who came in the door as a person of importance and treat them importantly because we didn't have anybody else coming in and take their place. They asked a question there whether your dad used to sit by the door. No, my father never sat by the door. My grandfather did. He provided the space at the Main Street door for my grandfather, who was then, I always thought, 180. I guess he must have been 78. He had a long white beard and he sat at the front door and I said hello to people and gave candy the little children who came in but that was not my father My father was always very active And during that period of time, when he built the new store, he doubled the size of the store and integrated it into one building and added more departments.
He added a gift department, which he leased to a man named Hallaby, who was an oriental drug dealer whose wife was a decorator, and they went in the decorating business under the demon market's name. They had a little son called Ned Halaby, who subsequently became the president of Pan-American Airlines and his daughter married the King of Jordan. That didn't last very long. They weren't very successful. So my father was faced with a problem of putting in his own decorating department, which we kept for a period of about 12 or 15 years until we finally got rid of it. He had leased two areas of the store out of necessity to drugstores, two corners.
And he leased one store to a fruit store, a fine deluxe fruit store, which was supposed to have been of the quality of Hicks on Fifth Avenue. It never turned out to be as good as Hicks. They took that over and decided to put it in a men's store. This was on Irby Street. And I helped develop the patronage for that store, learning how to bring it to the attention of people who had no interest in it. But most men were not interested in another men's store. They left with Neiman Marcus as being sort of an effete place for men, since it was primarily a women's store.
And they were customers of Gus Roos, of, uh, Stryfus, or Benson's, all well-established Dallas stores, or Reynolds-Penland. Those were the four big stores. But, bit by bit, we made inroads, and finally became the dominant men in the store. And now, we outlasted everybody. Stryfus went out of business Gus Roos went out of business Benson I think The other one I mentioned Ronald pendant and cans all run out of business I started out when I came out of school as a floor man, which didn't have much responsibility. But I didn't know much. Harvard didn't train its graduates to be retail floor managers. But bit by bit, I started taking on buying responsibilities and going to market and developing new departments in the store.
And about 1931 or two, I guess, I was made the executive vice president. And went through the pains of the Depression, which were finally relieved by the pains of war. War lifted us out of the Depression. Not Franklin Roosevelt, not the United States Congress. A lot of people would like to attribute to it, give a tribute, a recovery to, but it was war that brought in overtime employment that pulled us out of the Depression. And the mistake that Roosevelt made was that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars when he should have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to have gotten us out, which we've see being reenacted almost right now in our economy.
And the war started, two of my brothers had already joined up in the forces. I was called to Washington and offered an opportunity to become chief of the clothing Division of the War Production Board, which I did, and finally my brother Edward, who was next in age to me, was called into, from reserve status, and I left Washington and came back six months later to Dallas because my father was in ill health And uh during that time the store went through a tremendous boom and enlarged with sales At the time, I remember my father questioning why there was good judgment to take such big gambling positions on buying of stocks of goods, because he said, If you sell them all, you make a profit.
The government's going to take 80, 90 percent of the profit, so it's not worth the gamble. And I said, if you don't buy them, and you have just your regular-sized stocks, then who move? You've got to sell them to you. You've got to sell them to your regular customers and say to anybody who's new, with new money, who moved into town, no, we can't sell you because you're not an old customer. or you've got to gamble on the future that by selling them you will bank customers out and that I think you have to take the gamble whether you want to or not or whether it's really good business or not.
I think it's in order to take care of your old customers you have to be able to take care of the old and the new unless you're willing to close close your doors and admit people only by seniority cards. Well, that was obviously not a solution. It was acceptable. So, we did take the gambles, and we had, not nylon hosier, but rayon hosier. We had white shirts. We had whatever people wanted to the best of our ability, with any legal method of procurement. So, we took care of both customers, and the store grew tremendously, thousands and thousands of people came to Texas who never expected to be in Texas.
In their life, the only thing they knew about Texas was Alamo, Neiman Marcus, and they liked Neiman Marcus a bit. During that time, we started a program of national advertising in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. the first time that stores outside of New York metropolitan area had the nerve to advertise in national publications like Logan Harvest Bazaar I reasoned that Our biggest competition was going to, was coming in, would continue to come from stores in New York, California, and not from Dallas. And that when our Dallas customer went to New York, it was very important for us to protect ourselves against the temptation of shopping at Burgdorfs or at Saks Fifth Avenue.
And I figured that by advertising in the national magazines, it would tend to make these customers feel very proud of their association with a store that was a known commodity. And the people from small towns reacted positively to being considered in the know. That was the principle he took out. The first ads in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. they made great news and as a result of the news we were written up in all sorts of publications as the wonder store of the country here even the heart of Texas was a store that was selling more fine merchandise than any one single store of the city well that made great news and gave the store tremendous prestige And as the war was coming to an end, we started thinking about expansion, mainly as protection against competition rather than as aggressive expansion.
We figured that if anybody did come into the Dallas market, they'd probably come in downtown. I mean, in suburb rather than downtown. My brothers were back in the business. We had the manpower, and so we built our first store at Preston Center. Edward, Herbert, and Lawrence. Edward, Herbert, Herbert, Jr., and Lawrence. And each of them found a niche in the business and became participants in its planning and its successes. In 1950, we opened the first store at Preston Center, which turned out to be a tremendous success And we then looking to see where else in the market area we could go that would not subtract business from downtown but be a plus new business We found the calipers carried us to Fort Worth, and that became our second suburban store.
We always regarded it as a suburban store. And then we had an opportunity to buy a store in Houston in 1956, and mistakenly we bought the store. We should not have bought it. We should have simply gone in and built one. But eventually we overcame that mistake by building a very handsome store at the Galleria in Houston, which was successful from the day it started. And from then on, the place to build. Florence went down there. Florence went down there. Yeah, well, Edward went down there first. First? And lived there for about a year. And then we sent a man named Ed Rose down as the manager, brought Eddie back to Dallas.
And then we brought Ed Rose back in St. Lawrence to Houston. He lived there about five or six years, seven years. Joe Ross post-war, I remember. Yes, we brought in. We felt the need of more talent. And we brought in Joe Ross, a young man from New York who had been at Macy's. He was a very bright man, and he served as a general merchandise manager. We were then beginning to develop some very capable people, all of whom made important contributions to the growth of the business. businesses. There's never the work of any single person as a result of a collection of people of different skills to make it work.
And we had some very bright people. We had a boy named Jack Gorin who was extremely able and Les Melnick who came in as his assistant A man named Nick Parker, who was a brilliant shoe buyer. He had leased our millinery departments to a couple of brothers from New York by the name of Neville, who operated the millinery departments very well. They brought in a Belgian woman by the name of De Winter, ran the millinery department, built one of the great millinery businesses, high-fashion millinery. They burnt De Winter high-fashion millinery businesses of the country. So, then we decided, let's go outside of Texas. We looked at San Antonio, couldn't feel that there was a solid enough market of people.
We felt the temptation to restore location in Bell Harbor, Florida, which became very successful. And then our next door was Atlanta, Georgia, which was a tough one to break into. Subsequently became one of the most successful locations we had. Then went to St. Louis, which was a tough nut and still is, there to Washington, D.C. And about that time, we had the opportunity, probably about that time, we sold to Broadway Department Stores of California, figuring that we had reached the end of our capital ability to expand and that if we just borrowed we'd run the risk of being over our heads with borrowings. Would that be your call?
No. Maybe over our heads and borrowings And if you fill the stop we be running the risk of being taken over by somebody So we decided to find our own takeover, and we made a deal with Broadway stores who promised us autonomy of operation, which they lived up to. We then expanded the store into, uh, from Washington. We went to, uh, took over the Bergdorf-Gudman store in White Plains, which they had not done very well with, which we made into a success. Then went to Chicago. and from Chicago to Newport Beach, Long Island, Newport Beach, Florida. Newport Beach, California, I'm sorry. Simply because we couldn't find locations in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
Then we went to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and from Las Vegas back into Chicago with two more stores. Mr. Marcus, having brought it to this splendid point, if I may steer you a little bit back in, because this is the Dallas Jewish Historical Society to some of the important places like your dad. and I believe was president of the temple at one time. He was president of Temple Emmanuel. He was president of the Colombian Club. He was very active in all sorts of social and civic organizations in the city. Mr. Neiman, who was on the road most of the time, did not become involved in many official positions, And Mrs.
Neiman was not a joiner. And so, she, uh, she did not become actively identified as a sisterhood chairman or any, anything of that. She left that to her sisters. Uh, but they, uh, had a very deep sense of responsibility. The community of putting back in what they'd taken out. The city had obviously been very good to them, and they in turn were important leaders, faith-setters in support of both Jewish causes and non-Jewish causes. They were totally cognizant of the fact that they had an obligation to all parts of the community. You have stood so importantly for progressive things at the time. After the war in particular where Dallas was less than liberal and through the years of open housing and civil rights and so on, when many others were afraid to come out for good things, you had the courage to do so.
And if you could talk a little bit about that. Someone mentioned that Picasso rose and he didn't want that color because he was a competent. Well, I think I became liberty-oriented during my period at Harvard because at that time censorship was very much in the mode of things and I saw book burnings in Boston by the Boston Watch and what do you call it? Something. Yeah, the Watch and Something Society. Society, where they burned books. And I remember H.L. Mencken coming up and having his book banned, and I met Mencken and I made up my mind then that I would never be a Herbert Hoover follower.
And all my adult life I have believed in civil rights. I believed in obligation of an affluent society to improve the lot of those who were less than affluent. and in fairness That seemed to me to be fairness and many people said well you can support those things You be pilloried You be criticized And I took the position that if I felt I was right, I was going to stand by what I believed in. I did not think it was heroic. I just thought it was the only way I could live. And so I never take credit for having stood up against rape and lynching.
I don't think anybody deserves credit for that. But I do think that people have to stand up. that they want to live in a free society. I want to live in a free society, and I don't want to live in an oppressive society. So I may have paid a price for that. I may have lost some customers for that, but if so, so be it. I have a clear conscience that I did what I thought was right. I was president of the museum during the McCarthy period when they wanted to ban paintings by perfectly innocent painters and sculptors on the grounds that they were painting communist works.
Well, I couldn't figure how a Ben Shahn picture of a baseball game contained a communist message, or a Zorak sculpture of a little boy fishing had a communist meaning. Could have been Red Snapper. And I refused to yield to a request from a prominent Jewish banker in Dulles to close an exhibition because the American Legion was going to ban it. I said, well, they can't, I can't change it. He said, why can't you? I said, because I didn't put it together. And he said, who did? or what you should call a radical fellow in New York who organized the show. It's a benefit for the American Olympic team going to Australia.
His name is Henry Luce. He publishes Time magazine, and he's the radical who organized the show, and he's the only man who can pick it apart. Well, they didn't. I called their bluff. that didn pick at us the museum or pick at the store Long at that time things were such in Dallas that they were very hesitant to play a Shostakovich overture because Shostakovich was obviously a communist living in Russia, and his music would do something to infect the genes of everybody who listened to it. The park board was censored for planting Picasso tulips. They were bright red tulips, and Picasso was a known member of the Communist Party, so therefore the flowers were going to poison little children and make communists on them.
It got that ridiculous in Dallas, and other parts of the country as well. So if I did anything to contribute to sanity at that time, I'll be very happy for that recollection. Do you recall anything about the time of the American Council for Judaism, in which there was some split in the community? Those who were for Israel were concerned that rather prominent... What was the other organization called? The Zionists. No, there was the American Council for Judaism. Yeah, that was the one that... Well, that's H. Rosenwald. Yes. Was that the American Council? That was the council. Well, I was a member... His brother, William, was on the other team.
I was a member of that organization. I was opposed to establishment of a Jewish state. Still am. And I haven't changed my opinion on that one iota, which has not endeared me to the Jewish community, I know. But it's an honest conviction. and your children and your wonderful wife. I was married in 1932 to a girl by the name of Mary Cantrell who came to Dallas from southern Illinois. We had three children daughter Jerry and twins Richard and Wendy in turn they have had ten children collectively And as of yesterday I became a great I used to be a graduate student. Thank you. With a granddaughter who was born in Philadelphia where her mother and father attending graduate school at Horton.
So, my grandchildren are, two of them are at Harvard. One of them has just graduated from Colby. Another one's at the Rhode Island School of Design. One graduated from the London School of Economics. and is now with Morgan Company, Morgan Guaranty, and is married and wanted at SMU. So there's lots of territory between London and Dallas, and New England shows up heavily. No, I told my daughters when they were ready to go to school, they'd go to any place they wanted to go, except a school in Virginia, Florida, or Arkansas, or Mississippi. Otherwise, they'd go wherever they wanted to. Yes? What? What? As you had more time for yourself after the selling of the stores, you got into writing some books that had a great deal of popularity, and maybe you would like to comment on minding the store and quality and so forth.
Well, I had considerable success with my writing efforts. Minding the Stewart sold over a hundred thousand copies in hardback, as did its successor, Quest for the Best. His and Hers, my third book, was a little less successful than the others. I guess I can be pretty happy the two of them went over a hundred thousand. It was an enriching experience for me. People said, well, tell us who really worked for you. Did you have a coast fighter? And I said, they were written by my two index fingers because I picked them out on type batter. And what you're saying is your question is really insulting because she was insinuating that you don't believe that a retailer who's a college graduate is competent at writing a successful book.
And there's no more reason that a book that a retailer can't be literate than somebody who's a professional writer. I found that I enjoyed writing, enjoyed the process of... Thank you for your cooperation. Thanks, Fireman. The... But I did meet lots of people. I became better known to lots of people, And I only regret it if I didn't start earlier in life. I remember kidding you because there were a great many signings of the book. And I said to you that where in many books the sign by the author is the valuable one, in this case the unsigned one may be the more valuable one.
I probably signed a greater percentage of my books than the author ever lived on the theory that if you sign them, there's less likelihood they'd be brought back for credit. As a merchant, I knew that that would eventually affect my royalty statement. On the other hand, I think a lot of people wanted to meet you, so that gave them an opportunity to do so. If you could remember a bit about integration in Dallas in the 60s and your part in helping that along Well during the 60s we were faced with the same problem that everybody in the South was facing the laws that required integration of schools And we had had the example of Little Rock that required the National Guard being called out, and Dallas Citizens Group decided that it was going to obey the law even if it didn't like it as a whole.
And they employed Sam Bloom to act as organizing public relations head. he devised a concept that since it was the law of the land and we were law abiding citizens, we were going to obey the law, but we felt that it was up to the adult community to integrate themselves before requiring children to go through integration. And that led to the question of integrating hotels, ocean pictures, and stores. and speaking for the stores, I said that we would integrate our restaurant and we would integrate, which really meant we'd integrate our toilets. That was the stumbling block, the whole thing. People couldn't conceive of the idea of sitting down.
The toilets were black inside. There were a lot of people who didn't like the idea of trying on a hat that a black could try it on. And I announced to our staff that we were going to, after talking with my senior executive, who were not united in their opinion, that we would integrate completely. And I remember one of our senior executives, you remember him, Bob Ross. You said, Stanley, you were predicting the dissolution of your business. Your business is going to fall because this is the South and people just won't tolerate it. I said, well, if that's the case, then get ready for the dissolution.
I don think it will happen but if it does then we don deserve to be invigorated And on the day we integrated we had three people turning their charge counts The next day, two of them took them back. That was the extent of the threat. And we don't know how many customers we may have lost, but we couldn't have lost them for long because our business did continue to grow. Others came. On John, JFK, which of course with the new Stone movie is very much again in the forefront, I know you had a part in working for President Kennedy. Well, I had worked for the President and worked for the Vice President, and the Vice president had called me back in September, I think it was, and said, Stanley, President Kennedy's coming to Dallas, and they're going to need about $150,000 in funds to entertain him.
I want you to go out and raise the money. And I said, Lyndon, I think it's a great mistake for the president to come. I think that he is likely to be humiliated by a very vociferous Andy Kennedy group, and I would urge him not to come to Delvin. Were you present at the Stevenson? I had, he said, I said, I introduced Stevenson at United Nations Day, and he spat upon and the posters and our car was almost overturned and I would hate for that to happen to us in the United States. And Johnson said, listen Stanley, what I think and what you think doesn't mean a goddammit bit of difference.
Go out and get that money. He's coming. And he came. And I got the money. And I wasn't even in Dallas the day that happened. I was in New York. But it was very scary to me after having introduced Stevenson and having your car rocked to the point that you didn know they were going to turn it over It was a vicious crowd Sure it were at that time Oh, well, this in a sense relates because it was all pretty much at the same time. if you remembered any other instance about McCarthyism and communism in Dallas at that time and the effect it had on arts and music.
Well, it had a fearful effect that made people afraid of their own shadows. It made a lot of timid people unwilling to step out and express themselves, and the Lord didn't declare that everybody had to be bold and placed with timid people and they shouldn't be deprived of their citizenship, and yet they were being deprived. And there was a time during that period when you couldn't go to a dinner party and have a discussion about anything that didn't end up in a row. people started calling you're communist because you believe the human rights. So it was a happy time when Dallas did settle down and became a more humane place in which I live, and I had pretty bad not to change in the people of Dallas so much as I do to immigration that occurred, of people moving in from other parts of the country, and that tempered the spirit in Dallas.
I think Dallas benefited by all the Californians and Middle Westerners who moved to Dallas in the post-war period. I think that liberalized city. Do you have some thoughts of your own that you want to express other than the questions that I've asked you about? It's coming to Waterfront very well. I can't tell you how much we appreciate this, and you're doing something again that will be helpful to those who come after us who want to hear the sage itself. Always a delight. Thank you so much. This is the first American Jewish family. The one I have on the chart is the second edition. I don't have the third edition because we just got it.
And it hasn't been cataloged yet. But this one says up until 1654 to 1977. And the third edition is 1654 to 1988. So, anyway, I'm going to close and I wish, you know, I realize that a lot, genealogy isn't something you can study, it's something you have to do. And it is challenging and it's really interesting and I hope that you would try to do it, not just for yourself, but for your family. It is something good to be doing. And I really thank you. Andy Riceberg is a native Dallasite. He's a graduate of St. Mark's in the UT Austin. Andy and his wife Becky have been preservation consultants for over 10 years.
Their clientele includes meteorologists, libraries, societies, photographers, collectors. They operate a unique business called Photographic Archives Lab and Gallery, which specializes in the preservation of photographs and documents. Andy's going to talk about preserving physical records for future generations, and he'll show us a few safe techniques and products widely used by archives. Thank you. Good evening. I'm very proud to be part of the first inaugural meeting tonight. And I keep good company here. I recognize a lot of heritage in this room. But I'm going to stand in front of the table because I get excited when I'm talking about photography and preserving photography. You might see me slip this glove on from time to time, and I'll get to the reason behind that, too.
But I going to speak tonight about the technically about photographs and how any family papers and certificates and ways in which we can preserve them for future generations Because when we talking about history well we living history now The photographs we take casual snapshots family redeemed these are the material for future generations. We're not just concerned about what has been handed down to us. But often this is what is exciting about studying our family histories and collecting notes is are the photographs that we encounter. And I wanted to put this in perspective some way. And I came up with a notion that I hope you'll latch on to.
And And that is that photographs are really the precious jewels of our memories. And I say that figuratively and I say that literally. Now, of course we all know that photographs, they stir up emotions in us. Well, at least once we rediscover photographs of our relatives and brothers and sisters that we thought were long gone, our parents. And then those relatives, as Lee described, finding her grandkids and great grandkids pictures, it opens up a whole new world for us. We can connect suddenly with these notes, with the letters, the correspondences that we may be privileged to have. We can put those together with faces. And photographs are also jewels because they are like jewelry.
And let me explain what I mean. The photograph is a very delicate, very sensitive and fragile object. It's a very complex thing. I'm not going to get into the history of photography, but let me first say that photography is only 152 years old. It was first patented in 1839. And so don't be looking, don't go searching for photographs of ancestors from 1836. They just won't exist. And I'm talking about, this is a period of roughly 25 years before the Civil War is when photography first came back. So what other imagery might you have in your collection? Maybe paintings or lithographs and things like that emission paintings are more replaced by photography But photographs are made of silver Let me put it to you that way That's why they are like our jewelry, like our silverware.
The image that makes up the photograph that we see is actually metallic silver. And so what happens to our silverware, our silver service, our jewelry? It tarnishes because of various conditions in the atmosphere, the pollution. Silver tarnishes when we touch it with our fingers, the oils and perspirations in our skin. Think of any number of reasons why white's jewelry and silver must be protected. We should protect our photographs in much the same way. How else do photographs suffer? Let me say this, that the human race, human beings are the biggest enemy that photography has. There is mold, there is insects, there is dust. But mainly it's our mishandling of photographs that cause them to deteriorate.
Now, so what can we do? We can have a pair of white gloves when we're sorting out our family photographs at a reunion, or just have a little sensitivity now towards the photograph that you hold. It can crack. It can start to blister. It reacts to the cold weather and to the air conditioning and heating. It can react to putting it in the attic. Again, that's extreme for temperature. We don't put our photographs in the rain. So handle them with care. Handle your photographs by the edges. You get excited when you see a photograph. It will start handling it like this, waving it around the room.
That's all very dangerous. And in time, our fingerprints today are going to show off and spoil the image for future generations. So if you think of your photographs as jewelry, maybe then Maybe then you'll begin to think about where do you keep your photographs now? There are three basic environments that are the most common places to store photographs And this is what I bringing to you tonight are alternatives to the shoebox alternatives to the cedar closet Basically, let's consider the photograph album. That's an environment, that's a safe place to store photographs. Then we can talk about the picture frame. That is also a self-contained environment if it's done properly.
From the front it's protected from dust and contamination in the air, mold in the air. And from the back if it's sealed off, it's further protected. Albums, frames, and finally storage boxes. And that is where I'm going to show you what you'll see in Rose Biederman's collection and Jerry Crystal. I'm proud to say we're in the company of two famous archivists and curators of our Jewish heritage in Dallas. Rose Biederman, the Dallas Jewish Historical Society. And I want to acknowledge Jerry Crystal from Temple Emanuel Archives. If I go too fast and you can't catch up with me after I leave tonight, these are two sources of inspiration right here.
But you'll see these kind of new boxes. These are the state-of-the-art acid-free boxes for photographs and family papers. And they come in all sorts of sizes for various special purposes. Let me first start with the photograph album. And I've got a piece of information here. I so feel liberty if there's any sheriffs or vigilantes in the room. I Xerox this without permission, but I think I'm spreading a wealth of information here. But this is addressing the photograph albums that are so common, the so-called magnetic photo albums. There's nothing magnetic about them. They're basically a sticky page with a plastic cover sheet. These are notoriously harmful for photography.
In an album, the structure itself, the physical protection, the binder, is not really important. This is not what you should be considering, but it's Rather the page that the photographs are mounted on, and it is a plastic cover sheet that should come down to protect the surface of the photographs. As in many albums, you've got photographs on facing pages, and this is a source of deterioration when they're allowed to rub against each other. Again, this is handling, how we handle our photographs. So the plastic cover sheet is a very important element of the photographic album as an environment. And there are only a few safe plastics to use and only one type of mounting paper or board to mount photographs to.
And the magnetic albums rely on very low quality material. and in fact the glue that is used to hold the page of the photographs to the page contain compounds that are will cause yellowing and staining it's a lot like rubber cement and also I have a sheet here I hope those of you didn't see this might pick this up also on your way out tonight things you should and should not do when handling photographs and documents and it talks about don't use any kind of rubber bands or rubber cement because these things contain sulfur. Is sulfur responsible for yellowing? So then we've got albums, the new albums come in all sizes and all varieties.
This happens to be a three ring binder album and there's also a variety of pages that can be easily rearranged because of the album design. There are also multiple ring binders that are more decorative, and there are also the scrapbook style albums which have a post, two posts, and they can be added to or subtracted from. But this is This is considered a safe system for storing photographs. Interrupt me if anyone has any questions at any time. What were the plastic plates that were safe? The question the safe plastics may not always be readily identified wherever you buy your plastic sleeves The best plastic to use is pure, uncoated polyester.
And if you're shopping at office supply stores, you form them without a polyester piece. there are a lot of lookalikes but polyester is basically crystal clear it goes by the name of Mylar that's a Dupont name but it is this is a real McCoy here this is what all of our polyester goods were stemmed from it's not to be confused with acetate polyester will not tear, it doesn't get brittle it doesn't yellow and it's crystal clear and rigid. Flammable? It will melt. Indeed it will. The second safe plastic and most common plastic is polyethylene or polypropylene. Those are two very different formulas. But I can pass these around too.
But the polyethylene is a little more not as crisp, but it is definitely an economical alternative and equally safe. Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about safekeeping of photographs, and the manufacturers of these type of pages are paying attention to the consumer. And there's a great demand for more information, when people find out that the albums they've been using forever and ever are actually accelerating the deterioration of their photographs, then they're getting mad. I can relate an interesting story, but I think I won't. But you need to be more demanding. The watch words on the side of the box would be polyester or polypropylene, or polyethylene is probably more common.
If it says archival quality, well, what does that mean? That doesn say enough to me Archival quality may mean it not the notorious polyvinyl chloride the PVC I don want to get too deep with this I be glad to discuss this later But I want to move right along because our time is limited. Just one question. What's the one safe mounting board? Okay, well it is practically speaking and it's an acid-free, non-buffered, sturdy material. These kind of products are available from a variety of mail order companies and there are a few retail stores such as ours in the area that you can pick these up.
And I encourage you to come by after the session tonight and just touch it and familiarize yourself with it. But it is a sturdy type of material. Also, the third component of an album is the way to mount the photographs. And there are, again, basically a paper corner and a plastic corner. Now, the old black lick-em-and-stick-em type of mounting corners are, you may guess That's what I'm going to say. They're inappropriate for the most valuable photographs. They're really inappropriate for all photographs, but they are easy to use. It's a low-quality paper, and the glue that's used will ultimately attract moisture, attract insects, and cause some staining.
But the corner technology has really come a long way, and now they have them in rolls that you can, they're already folded, they already have a safe acrylic adhesive on the back, and you peel them off and apply them. And I think Crum and Michael can testify how easy they are to use. The album is a safe environment to store photographs for many reasons, but they are protecting your collections from light, from failure, and light is a very, a very detrimental element to photographs as well as family letters and correspondences and certificates. If I would suggest also an alternative to the album if you collecting your research you not ready to put the album together yet because you may want to collect a few more items By the way, your album doesn't consist entirely of photographs.
You'll have other memorabilia in an album. You'll have letters and you name it. But in the process of organizing your collections, you may want to adopt this system, which I know Rhodes has used quite successfully. And that is a filing folder system and a box that sits on a shelf vertically, like this. And the filing folders, naturally they make acid-free filing folders. everything that comes in contact with your valuables your collections should be acid-free now you can use a filing folder to store photographs and you merely need to place the photographs directly in this type of enclosure and feel safe about it and this is your primary protection the box is your secondary protection against accidental dents against dust again against any kind of contamination that may want to get into the box there are sleeves that you might also consider and these again i'm showing you polyester sleeves uh to i'm recklessly handling this because it's just a reproduction hoping she's not related to anyone here but please i'm sorry mark but these again offer you uh safe protection again handle basically if you're at your family reunion and you have a new photograph that you found, a group portrait, and you want to pass it around, treat yourself to a little protection.
Again, remember the fingerprints, the oils in our skin. You may adapt some discipline yourself. You'll have more reverence for your photographs than others may not. So to sleeve your photographs, Graphs in these kind of sleeves would be very helpful too. Yes sir, use your light. If the sleeve says acetate, that means you shouldn't use it. Acetate, there are several types of acetate. Kodak makes triacetate. That's the only acetate that's been tested for permanence. There's acetate, diacetate, triacetate. Agitate. A rule of thumb, here's something you can try yourself. Go home to your albums tonight and smell the plastic. If you smell the slightest bit of plastic odor, then your sleeve contains plasticizers.
It contains harmful additives. The plastic that's safe for housing photographs should be odorless. That's just a rule of thumb. So if you suddenly open up your album and you get an aroma that's somewhat puzzling to you, you should consider perhaps remaking your album. Ann, may I ask this question? A number of people, and I included, came across a bunch of old photos in a box, say on my mother's desk. and some of the photos, they were old photos, the people couldn't be identified. So the problem is, have they ever come up with something where, I know that some of them had names written on the back, but I don't think that's a good idea because sometimes it bleeds through, and so on.
Do they have any safe way of identifying people on a photograph, either when they're being temporarily stored in a box like that, or in an album? And do they have stickers or something that they can use? That's a very good question. I knew that was an important topic to mention. In identifying photographs, what should you use? Pencil basically To be very succinct Yes an ordinary number two pencil And to write lightly that the On the rear of the Yes on the backside of the photograph And in fact, if I were to be so bold to suggest that, okay, sometimes, you know, photographs, here's an example of a photograph that is smaller than the actual board it's mounted on, let's say.
do your identifying smack dab in the image area on the center of the back, not down in the margin. Somebody may come along and cut it off for the frame later on. Yes, Ms. Kravitz was right that all this identifying names and dates in ink can lead to problems later on. In the event of a flood, your water pipes burst in your home, God forbid everything gets soaked. The inks are going to bleed from one photograph to another. Now you ask yourself, well, pencil can be erased. So what good is writing? You want a permanent record, in fact. Well, there is a pencil that I can recommend, and it goes by the name of, the brand name Stabilo.
Stabilo. It's a German pencil. It costs about a dollar and a half. And they're called ALS. A-L-L. Get them in art supply stores, drafting supplies. They write on all non-torous surfaces, and they do not erase all the way. And they don't bleed like ink. And so they'll write on the modern color photographs. You may have tried writing on your photographs in pencil, and it just doesn't stick. Those are the modern photographic papers that have a plastic coating. well this this pencil and it's red it's got a red barrel to it will write on those type of papers what about when it's mounted on a mounting board though you don't want to have to tear it off no no no but let's assume that it's never going to be unmounted so right on the back of the board or well can you write on that on the in the album oh yes right Right, right.
Yes, that's what I was getting to next. And the charm of the photo page, the album page, is that really you should be identifying in the margin of the photograph on the paper itself whenever possible Also there are alternatives to the sleeve and I showed you the plastic sleeve for photograph storage. There are paper sleeves also, but they're considered more long-term in ancestry paper envelopes can be easily identified in great detail and whoever is the custodian of the family collection you know should guard over it so the photographs don't get switched out of their envelope but there are a variety of sleeves for storing photographs but but it's considered more or less a long-term storage.
It's more difficult to appreciate the photographs within. Before I forget, if I don't see anything more tonight, I want to mention, and I want to go back to the part about light being very important in photography. Photography was made by light striking a special paper that was prepared by the photographers. It was given birth by life, but it's also destroyed by life. And whenever possible, if you have the desire to frame your photographs, bring them out, enjoy them, I might suggest that you make copies. Let's store the original photographs away. Let's rather make copy negatives and make prints for displaying purposes. Because remember, it's these original artifacts.
Call them what they are. They're original to the period of our ancestors. And we are custodians of them. They've been handed down to us. And it's our duty to make sure that they do not get destroyed in our lifetime and that we can pass them on. and so it's when we bring the photographs out put them on the wall think about placing your photographs in a dim part of the house in the hallway is a very, very good place to mount your photographs certainly not directly opposite a bright window a window that open all day but that still not enough because the fading of light is cumulative Color photography has a very short life Its main enemy is life That's the irony of photography, you know, to preserve it, to make it last as long as you can.
You have to put it in the dark where you can't see it. But color photography optimally lasts 25 years. That goes for negatives and prints. Black and white photography on the other hand has the potential to last for generations and generations, but unfortunately it doesn't for reasons that we've talked about. Because they break, because things that you love to eat on, because life makes them fade. But the negatives are when you go looking for a service to make copies for you, be sure that the negatives become your property because if only we had all of our grandparents' negatives and all of the oldest negatives, we could print from those today.
We could make new copies. And the negatives are a very valuable tool. And you should also take stock of that as well. The negative likewise has its own specialized sleeve, and it should be kept in the dark. Negatives in general last infinitely longer than the photographs themselves. So when the photograph is destroyed accidentally, maybe you've got your negatives stored in another place, and you can pull them out, and you can make new copies. Now I also want to talk a bit about documents and how to handle them as well. And just very briefly, as I was talking about making copies of photographs for research or for display, so can you make copies of your documents too.
Now what documents do you have? Lee mentioned the naturalization papers, obviously birth certificates and wedding announcements. correspondence, you name it. A document is anything in Ketubha. Exactly. And you probably have the Ketubhas framed and they may be suffering because of it. We don't know that for a fact. as well. It's acid-free copies, in fact, an original letter. The same sort of pages that you can house your photographs, you can also use for your documents as well. There is a technique that you should know about called encapsulation. And encapsulation is a very different thing than lamination. Lamination is what they do to your driver's license. They melt plastic over it and then they trim it out and it's forever bonded to the plastic.
Whereas encapsulation is basically a custom envelope. It's a customized envelope, again polyester, that Mylar product shows up. But this is something you can do in your home with just 30 minutes of training. I cut the top of this one off but you see basically what it is It a two It viewable from both sides And this allows you to handle your documents safely Likewise, there are document boxes. But they're different than your photograph boxes because you want to keep them flat. You really don't want to store documents on edge because then they can begin to slow. So you need to be careful about the documents that you want to preserve.
If you want to open letters up and lay them flat, you don't want to keep them folded up. Because who carries those boxes? Most of the companies are in New York and New Jersey and Virginia. There's a company on Lover's Lane in Dallas called Photographic Archive's Lab in Dallas. One more thing Thank you Mr Marks Give me an opportunity there I set him up I paid him off I connect later Thank you Mark Give me an opportunity there I set him up I made him off I connect later The picture frame is probably the most common type of way to preserve a photograph, but two things I want you to be aware of.
There is new glass. There is a glass product that is useful for framing photographs and documents, and it basically blocks all of the harmful light. Did I say blocks all of the light? I'm sorry. I'm getting enthusiastic here. It's called conservation glass, and it blocks about 97% of the light that's responsible for fading photographs. The matting and all of the materials inside the frame shall be acid-free. And again, I can go into more detail on that later, but the backing paper is very important. Take a look at your antique frames at home Now I don mean to say that all your photographs are antique but all of this discussion that I have just presented to you tonight is only about 25 years old The whole science of preserving photographs and documents.
And any kind of framing that was done before 1975 is likely to be inadequate. And you should maybe consider reframing photographs with modern materials and with the proper types of paper and barriers on the back. Now, this is a very broad subject, and I think I've touched upon a lot of these subjects. Thank you very much for your .. Our last speaker is David Chapin. David has been in Dallas for eight years. He's originally from Baltimore. He's a theologist for ARCO, and he's been interested in genealogy for 20 years. And he's only 34 now, so you can imagine how he began.