[PRCo] Re: Boggs & Buhl train

[Fred Schneider]

PLEASE GENTLEMAN ... BEFORE YOU READ THIS ... SOME THINGS IN HERE MAY  
SMELL OF A PREJUDICE.   I am only commenting on fact.   There is no  
prejudice involved in any way nor do I want there to be.

They made money and they had prestiege.    Most were probably owned  
by local families or partnerships of local families.   I suspect that  
many of them were people willing, at least for the first 20 or more  
years, to work 60 to 80 hours a week.   Probably a fairly large  
number were Jewish.

Here in Lancaster we had five major department stores when I moved  
here in 1949.   Hagers was owned by John C. Hager III at that time.    
He lived in a rather secluded home in the woods on the hill behind  
me.   It would be more correct to say he owned one end of the  
hill.    Watt and Shands Department Store was the upper end.   Peter  
Watt got out fairly early.   He owned a huge ornate Victorian mansion  
in the west end of town which still stands at Marietta and President  
Avenues with his name on the entrance pillars.  I'm not sure how  
wealthy the Shands were.   Milton T. Garvin owned the lower end  
department store ... he was a Unitarian Universalist and rather  
conservative.   The other two department stores were chains ... J. C.  
Penny and Sears Roebuck and Company.

And there was one other local guy who built his very first store here  
and then moved on to bigger and better things. His name was Frank W.  
Woolworth.

Derrick ...

You should stop by the library at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on a  
Wednesday when the guys are working in the library and look for Dick  
Hutzler.   His family owned Hutzler's Department Store on Howard  
Street in downtown Baltimore.  My mother spent a fortune there on  
Saturdays in the 1950s and 1960s.   It was probably typical ...  
Jewish family as were most of the stores in Baltimore according to Dick.

I think the money was there in retailing as long as the public wanted  
and was willing to pay for service.   Once they accepted the slob in  
the box concept of marketing, then all the purveyor of merchandise  
could do is cut his margin and increase the number of stores in order  
to make a living.   The family could no longer aspire to have a  
single store and live well off of it.





On Apr 11, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> The Boggs mansion is a few blocks from Federal on North. It's a
> bed&breakfast now. I was in the bar there one night a month or so ago
> after a play nearby and had a hand in stopping a fire on their  
> porch. In
> any case, the mansion's pretty nice. I guess being a department store
> maven meant something then
>
>
>