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captainsblogMy first boss died this week. Unlike any other now-deceased ones who followed, his death made the New York Times obituary page. Anyone who grew up on Long Island, or follows sports in any major northeast U.S. city, has probably heard of him. No, he wouldn't have remembered me from a hole in the ground, other than maybe to demand that I fill the hole with hot tar.
I didn't work, beyond newspaper carrier jobs, until my senior year of high school. My lack of a car and desire to get the hell off that Island were impediments. In that town at that time, the only realistic option (that didn't involve shredding lettuce at Hardee's) was therefore to get a job at the local cheap-goods department store, which I could walk or bike home from.
If you're over the age of about 30, you've been to that store. Probably not in that location and probably not even under that name, but every region had a few of them, usually unique to a 50-mile radius. Others in our world included TSS, Korvettes and Great Eastern. Visiting my sister in Binghamton or, where I later settled in Ithaca, nobody'd heard of those, but they had Jamesway and Westons and Hills- the latter also in Buffalo by the time I got there, along with Twin Fair and Sattlers and Gold Circle. Dead as doornails, every one.
Except for that one oddity I worked for. Modell's had been founded by a Hungarian immigrant on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s, and for much of the 20th century focused on army surplus clothing and sporting goods. His son William served in the Army in World War II and moved, as did many of his fellow veterans, to the former potato fields of Long Island after the war. He saw the potential in that army of buyers and opened the first of his more general-retail stores, known as "Modell's Shoppers World," about a mile from the home my parents bought in 1949.
By the time I became old enough to work there, "big box" retailing was still a glimmer in Sam Walton's eye. Sears was the only national chain of department stores, and it had only one full-service department store for our entire part of the county. Macy's was at Roosevelt Field, but so were 5-and-dimes and even a supermarket back then. Most retailing was still in the hands of local sellers, who knew their communities and employed many of their students and retirees.
I was there for less than a year before college beckoned. Hired to do maintenance chores, I eventually hung around the place enough to learn cashiering, inventory and even run the massive switchboard for the whole building and, through "trunk lines," the other five stores in the modest Modell chain:
That's not it, but that's pretty close. I can still hear the boop-boop-boop sound of a department phone being picked up needing to be connected to an outside line, or another department, or, holy of holies, to the Executive Office suite way in the back between the lighting and lumber departments.
That's where Bill Modell would have been hanging out, with an entourage of other light-suited muckety-mucks who we were all scared to death of. They were the ones who ordered odd lots of off-brand product and pushed them on the selling floor like they were as good as the real thing; to this day, I have bad memories of something called British-American brand cola. They were the ones who showed up late in the day after doing who knows what and, rumor had it, kept an eye out for the prettiest cashiers. Today, they probably would have made their fortunes in sub-prime mortgage lending, since the pickings of local retail have been packed up in big boxes and taken away from them.
Years later, I drove by the old store and saw that it had been big-boxed. A Home Depot now stood (and as of this past November, still stands) where I once swept the aisles and answered calls from "the Lakes" and the Bay Shore store. Yet, at the front of the old footprint, the Modell name is still there- as a much smaller corner of the building now selling just sporting goods, as the business had always done in Manhattan and, after some other acquisitions in the 90s, does even more famously today. It's still 2000 Hempstead Turnpike and the number's still 794-9000, but I somehow suspect the other end of that phone is answered by something a lot smaller these days.
Oh, the two inevitable questions. Yes, these Modells were related to the football one, although we were only vaguely aware of that in the 1970s: Bill and Art Modells' fathers were brothers. And my header? That was our shoplifting code: Jimmy the Beak, the retired cop who worked as the only full-time security guard on the payroll, would answer any page of "15, 15" to catch a crook or other miscreant. That's another one that, 30 years later, I still most associate with the number rather than any sports uniform or date in history.
I didn't work, beyond newspaper carrier jobs, until my senior year of high school. My lack of a car and desire to get the hell off that Island were impediments. In that town at that time, the only realistic option (that didn't involve shredding lettuce at Hardee's) was therefore to get a job at the local cheap-goods department store, which I could walk or bike home from.
If you're over the age of about 30, you've been to that store. Probably not in that location and probably not even under that name, but every region had a few of them, usually unique to a 50-mile radius. Others in our world included TSS, Korvettes and Great Eastern. Visiting my sister in Binghamton or, where I later settled in Ithaca, nobody'd heard of those, but they had Jamesway and Westons and Hills- the latter also in Buffalo by the time I got there, along with Twin Fair and Sattlers and Gold Circle. Dead as doornails, every one.
Except for that one oddity I worked for. Modell's had been founded by a Hungarian immigrant on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s, and for much of the 20th century focused on army surplus clothing and sporting goods. His son William served in the Army in World War II and moved, as did many of his fellow veterans, to the former potato fields of Long Island after the war. He saw the potential in that army of buyers and opened the first of his more general-retail stores, known as "Modell's Shoppers World," about a mile from the home my parents bought in 1949.
By the time I became old enough to work there, "big box" retailing was still a glimmer in Sam Walton's eye. Sears was the only national chain of department stores, and it had only one full-service department store for our entire part of the county. Macy's was at Roosevelt Field, but so were 5-and-dimes and even a supermarket back then. Most retailing was still in the hands of local sellers, who knew their communities and employed many of their students and retirees.
I was there for less than a year before college beckoned. Hired to do maintenance chores, I eventually hung around the place enough to learn cashiering, inventory and even run the massive switchboard for the whole building and, through "trunk lines," the other five stores in the modest Modell chain:
That's not it, but that's pretty close. I can still hear the boop-boop-boop sound of a department phone being picked up needing to be connected to an outside line, or another department, or, holy of holies, to the Executive Office suite way in the back between the lighting and lumber departments.
That's where Bill Modell would have been hanging out, with an entourage of other light-suited muckety-mucks who we were all scared to death of. They were the ones who ordered odd lots of off-brand product and pushed them on the selling floor like they were as good as the real thing; to this day, I have bad memories of something called British-American brand cola. They were the ones who showed up late in the day after doing who knows what and, rumor had it, kept an eye out for the prettiest cashiers. Today, they probably would have made their fortunes in sub-prime mortgage lending, since the pickings of local retail have been packed up in big boxes and taken away from them.
Years later, I drove by the old store and saw that it had been big-boxed. A Home Depot now stood (and as of this past November, still stands) where I once swept the aisles and answered calls from "the Lakes" and the Bay Shore store. Yet, at the front of the old footprint, the Modell name is still there- as a much smaller corner of the building now selling just sporting goods, as the business had always done in Manhattan and, after some other acquisitions in the 90s, does even more famously today. It's still 2000 Hempstead Turnpike and the number's still 794-9000, but I somehow suspect the other end of that phone is answered by something a lot smaller these days.
Oh, the two inevitable questions. Yes, these Modells were related to the football one, although we were only vaguely aware of that in the 1970s: Bill and Art Modells' fathers were brothers. And my header? That was our shoplifting code: Jimmy the Beak, the retired cop who worked as the only full-time security guard on the payroll, would answer any page of "15, 15" to catch a crook or other miscreant. That's another one that, 30 years later, I still most associate with the number rather than any sports uniform or date in history.