as a child, until he was apprenticed to a tailor at the age of twelve. One day, his closest friend came running to the shop to tell him excitedly that a traveling cantor had arrived in town and was auditioning boy singers to accompany him on his tour of the great synagogues of Poland and Russia. My father’s sweet voice won him employment, and the two boys found themselves celebrities, warmly applauded by congregations whose women showered them with attention and fine food.
When a year had elapsed, his voice began to change with the onset of puberty. The First World War had begun and the cantor abruptly fled to America, abandoning him in a distant city without funds. Desperate, the boy approached a well-dressed stranger on the train platform and told him of his plight. He asked to borrow the train fare, requesting the man’s name and address, and insisted that he would repay the loan when he reached his home. The man gave him the fare and refused my father’s offer. This generous gesture left an indelible impression on him, and he recounted it with wonderment to me half a century later.
My mother, Julia Friedman, lived in Jurewicz, a small town on the border of Lithuania and Poland. She had four sisters and a brother. Her father had attended university to study accounting, and he was the town scribe as well as a schochet [kosher butcher]. She and her brother, Boris, were raised by their grandmother, a strong woman who owned the town’s livery stable, which housed the coaches that the czar would use when visiting the region. My mother attended the local grade school for three years under the new communist regime. Her father had left his family to go to the United States in 1913, in order to earn enough money to bring them over. When the war broke out in 1914, he could not return. His family was stranded without funds, so their living conditions were very harsh. The money that he accumulated was lost to a swindler. He was finally able to return in 1920. When she saw him, my mother angrily accused him of abandoning them.
When she arrived in the United States at the age of thirteen, she attended high school at night and worked in a department store during the day. She learned English and eventually spoke impeccably. My father was twenty-two when he arrived. He learned to speak reasonably well, with almost no accent. Both had come to the United States in 1920, the last year the doors were open to immigration. They met for the first time two years later, in the balcony of a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side. She was not interested in him, but she had three older unmarried sisters she thought he might consider. He was not to be deterred and, after two years, they married. His three older brothers had come to America earlier in the century and peddled fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn carts in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He acquired his own horse and wagon, and among his customers was the Johnson family, founders of Johnson & Johnson. My mother decided they should open a dry goods store in Rahway, New Jersey, where they initially settled.
In the fall of 1929, four months after my birth in New Brunswick, we moved to Plattsburgh, New York, where my mother’s parents and sisters had settled. A city of seventeen thousand, Plattsburgh is, like much of upstate New York, scenically beautiful, with a long history of economic distress. On the shores of Lake Champlain, thirty miles south of the Canadian border, it has one of the finest sand beaches in North America. It housed the barracks of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Division and a paper mill, a teachers college, and little else of note. My parents opened a dress shop there in 1930, just a few months after the great crash on Wall Street, at the beginning of the Depression. Plattsburgh was composed largely of two population groups, both Catholic: the descendants of French Canadians, many of whom spoke French at home, and the Irish. Each group had its own bishop, church, and parochial schools. There was little mixing between the two communities.
Was there an Old World orientation in the family when you were growing up?
My parents thought America was paradise. They never talked about the old country. They had dark, negative feelings about their early years and never expressed an interest in returning.
They were very progressive, and not at all religious, but they were honest and ethical. Mother’s father combined the roles of rabbi and schochet. Before making their home in Plattsburgh, they had lived in towns up and down the East Coast. Wherever they went, they lasted about a year. To survive, her father surreptitiously became a conventional butcher. So he’d be butchering hogs, and it didn’t take long for the Jewish community to become upset. He would lose his position, and they would move to another town.
My parents developed few social ties in the Plattsburgh community. They worked around the clock, spending much of their time traveling to small towns in northern New York and Vermont, where they opened six additional stores to form a small chain. My mother had good business sense, and my father’s training as a tailor proved invaluable. He was an excellent window draper. His window displays were successful in drawing customers, which gave them an edge over the competition. He was a superb salesman who charmed the local farm women, to whom they supplied inexpensive and tasteful garments for their difficult figures. The stores became magnets for Canadian tourists, including prostitutes, for whom the Plattsburgh store stocked gaudy, vividly decorated dresses that resembled the Parisian bordello attire depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec in his paintings.
When they traveled to their stores, my father would drape the windows and teach the managers to display garments. While the name of most of the shops was Stollman’s, in Burlington and St. Albans, Vermont, my brother Solomon, who had earned an industrial design degree from Pratt, installed modern stores for them, with my assistance, and those were called Bernsol’s. My parents were astute merchandisers. Dad used a unit control system on flip cards that I had designed for him, which showed every item in every store, and he loved to sit at home and observe what sold in which stores. If a store manager or a saleswoman liked a particular item, and it was selling well, they would transfer these garments there from their other stores.
Where were they buying the clothes?
New York had a flourishing garment district in the West 30s. On the avenues were the higher-priced manufacturers, and my parents bought coats and suits from them. They stocked well-made, inexpensive garments. For a number of years, my parents used a resident buyer in the garment district who knew all the manufacturers. They made seasonal buying trips to New York, driving down Route 9, an eight-hour trip, and they would stay at the Hotel New Yorker, adjacent to the garment district. The manufacturers had great respect for them—my mother was a lovely woman; my dad was a gregarious, dapper individual. They were a striking couple. One day I said to them, “You’ve just become resident buyers. Print up your order book; you’re going to become the AAA Buying Service.” They did that and began to get the 6 percent commission that the resident buyer had obtained from the manufacturers. The manufacturers didn’t mind, as it was factored into their prices.
As a youth I would travel down with them once a year, making the rounds of the showrooms with them. I knew nothing about women’s fashions. But I reacted instinctively to colors and designs. Besides, the raincoat showrooms had models wearing black slips to make it easier to don and remove the coats, and they were beautiful girls. I was thirteen or fourteen, and it was mind-boggling for me.
What sort of perspective came with being the oldest of seven kids?
My parents were away a lot. Our French-Irish live-in housekeeper cooked for us and looked after the younger ones, but she had two children of her own. She was divorced, and her children were being raised by her parents. I felt a responsibility to my siblings. I was the surrogate father. The youngest was about fourteen years younger than me. I’m told that the oldest child in a family often does not marry. I had many opportunities, but I just let them go by—until I was in my forties, which is late.
As the firstborn son, did you feel particular expectations from your parents or within yourself?
Both. During the years I was growing up, I had to get a hundred in my exams. My parents never raised this subject, but somehow it was implicit that I would have to excel. I was totally absorbed in school and in every extracurricular
