Word: gimbels
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When 20-year-old Adam, immigrant Bavarian peddler, opened his "Palace of Trade" in Vincennes in 1842, his policies looked mighty suspicious to the 1,700 townspeople: no haggling, one price to all. But it worked. His seven sons, banding together as the Gimbel Brothers, mushroomed the business into a chain of nine great stores, whose sales in 1941 were probably about $115,000,000, profits (before taxes...
Isaac, Adam's second son, was the spark plug. He started the tradition that every Gimbel should start at the bottom of the retail ladder, work up. Practically every male Gimbel since has done so, though not all stuck...
Bernard is Isaac's oldest son. Big, barrel-chested, clean-living, popular, he was an amateur boxer in his youth, owns Bellows' Stag at Sharkey's, and is called "Uncle Bernie" by the children of his friend Gene Tunney. He achieved his Gimbel hegemony partly through the backing of Julius Rosenwald, then financially interested. Close friend of Horace Saks, Bernard promoted the Saks-Gimbel merger in 1923. Bernard and Horace worked out the deal while riding on a coffin in a baggage car, the smoking car being too crowded...
Though head of the clan, Bernard is not its patriarch. That is Ellis, 76, board chairman and only survivor of the original Gimbel Brothers. Bernard's brother Frederic, a vice president, has made newspaper trouble for the family in a small way; breach-of-promise suits have taken him twice to court, though never to the altar. But the only real rift in the clan was between Bernard and his cousin, old Ellis' brilliant son Richard...
Another escaped Gimbel is Richard's brother Ellis Jr. Two years after leaving Yale (class of '19) he launched Philadelphia's first radio station (Gimbel-owned WIP), soon ran the Philadelphia store, in 1929 became executive vice president of the corporation. But in 1940 Ellis Jr. resigned to go into the brokerage business (now Gimbel...