April 2005
My grandfather, my father’s father, was born in 1907, and died in December of 1983, eight months after I was born. There is an old family movie filmed the week I was born, where he is holding me, but he says nothing. H is just looking down at me with a blank expression. When the lighting above is perfect, it even looks like a scowl. That was the extent of my relationship with him. All these years, and I never even really bothered to ask about his life. I was talking with my father this weekend, and somehow he came up in conversation. In ten minutes I learned more than in all my previous twenty-one and a half years. I also realized why it took so long, why no one seemed nostalgic enough to mention his name, Sam.
At a young age, Sam had already laid claim to some of his greatest accomplishments. He had settled in Patterson, New Jersey with his wife May, and opened a shoe store called Uncle Sam’s shoes. It did well, so he began to open more stores. When the stock market crashed on October 29th, 1929 (a date which coincided with the birth of the couple’s first son, Robert), Uncle Sam’s had expanded to nine locations. Sam kept his business alive, despite losing a few stores during the Great Depression. He even held weekly raffles where he gave away one-half-ton of coal to a family each week one ton of coal — enough to heat a household for several months. A few years later, Sam and May welcomed their second child, Howard. In 1946, my father Walter was born.
Sam cared a great deal about the local community, and set up numerous scholarships to help student athletes further their educations. At one point he even sponsored a local semi-pro baseball team, Uncle Sam’s Phillies. The A-ball team featured several future major league baseball players such as Danny O’Connell and Larry Doby, who played for two years before joining the Newark Negro League team and eventually the Cleveland Indians in 1947. I still have several letters sent from Mr. Doby to my grandfather through the years and they remain one of my only links to his lifetime.
After Walter was born Sam began to sell his shoe businesses. He saw the advent of stores moving to highway discount locations, and decided to enter that field. He started building Great Eastern Mills in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Great Eastern Mills was a unique concept for the time period in that it was groups of individual businesses under the umbrella of a central store. Sam oversaw the day-to-day operation, while his son Robert handled the shoe department, and one of Robert’s friends, Eugene Kalkin, owned the linen department. Eugene eventually went on to start his own company, Linens N’ Things. Meanwhile, Howard decided to leave the family business and focus on insurance, and Walter worked weekends and summers while attending college and law school.
When he was fifty years old, Sam was diagnosed with a form of polio in his throat called bulbar polio. Despite its crippling effects, Sam endured and actually became certified as the oldest living survivor of the disease. At that time, he decided to slow down, and remove himself from the business world. In the late 1960s, Great Eastern Mills was purchased by a public company. There was mandatory retirement at the age of 65, so in 1972 Sam stopped working completely. By then, Great Eastern had merged with another corporation, and eventually declared bankruptcy. Luckily, Sam was out of the business by then. In 1976 he saw Walter, his youngest son, my father, get married. Six years later my sister was born, and thirteen months after that, I was born. After battling leukemia, Sam died in the winter of 1983.
My father describes his own dad as a hard-nosed taskmaster. His public persona differed vastly from that of his personal life. He was caring, generous, and philanthropic to those who were not members of his family. Some of my father’s clients knew and befriended Sam, and they have described him as a wonderful man. At home he was strict and rigid. That is all my father really cared to say about him.
My mother remembers one story in particular about her father-in-law. She was visiting him in the hospital during his last days. He was tired, and did not bother speaking much. Like everyone else in the family, she understood that there was no sense in trying to converse with Sam about anything other than business. He simply could not connect with anyone on a personal level. She sat down next to Sam in his hospital room, with the old man lying on his deathbed. Silence permeated the room until she mentioned, “Some friends of mine are opening an outlet store in Secaucus.”
“How many square feet?” he whispered.
“I really don’t know, it’s a big store but I just don’t know.”
For a few minutes, no one said a word. It was Sam who broke the silence.
“How much are they paying per square foot?”
It was the last conversation anyone would have with him.
