Historic Moments in Berlin, a Personal Perspective

Thirty years ago today, the first cracks in the Berlin Wall appeared. Not cracks in the wall itself, but rather in the restrictions East Germans had in traveling to West Germany. Through a fortuitous, confusing and seemingly uncharacteristically incompetent set of actions by East German officials, unfettered access to and from East Berlin began 30 years ago on November 9 (for an hour by hour playback click on this link: https://mol.im/a/7666435).

Hanging on a wall in my home office is large chunk of the Berlin Wall. Another sizable portion, next to a picture of me chipping away at history, rests on the built-in wall unit of our living room. I wasn’t in Berlin November 9. I didn’t get there until February 16, 1990, a few days before the wall near the Brandenburg Gate was knocked down.

I flew in from Dusseldorf from where I had been attending EuroShop, a once every three year trade exposition devoted to store design and construction. I headed to a Woolworth store (btw, Germans for years thought Woolworth was a home grown company, not an America import), to buy a small chisel and standard-sized hammer. When I arrived at the Wall that rainy and snowy day, I discovered how pitiful my purchases were to the task at hand. I barely made a dent in the reinforced concrete.

Standing next to me was a man with a huge sledgehammer and 30-inch chisel. He was breaking off softball-size or larger chunks. He took pity on me and offered his tools. I still failed to break off pieces larger than a pebble. He pitied me once more. He gave the Wall a few choice whacks for me. I left Berlin with a bagful of souvenirs, most of which I gave away to family, friends and colleagues at work.

My memories of the Berlin Wall are tinged with personal links. November 9 is more than just the date unification of Berlin began. On that date in 1938 the Nazis began a massive pogrom against Jews under their control in Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig. Known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the assaults continued into Danzig on November 12-13. My father lived in Danzig (now known as Gdansk). He would leave for America within two months. 

February 16, when I visited Berlin in 1990, marked four years since my mother died on that very same date.

The Passing of a Corporate Gadfly

Among the tasks I assigned my staff and myself as editor and publisher of Chain Store Age was attending annual shareholders meetings of public retail companies. We would travel all over the country. To Minneapolis for Target, or as it was formerly known, Dayton Hudson. To Cincinnati for Federated Department Stores. To Bentonville, Ark., for Walmart. To Toronto for Campeau Corp., the real estate company that bought Federated and Allied Stores in an ill-fated attempt to marry shopping center ownership with department store companies. To Troy, Mich., for Kmart. Some retailers, like Woolworth and Sears, held meetings in different cities each year. So did J.C. Penney. 

During one of Penney’s meetings in New York in the late 1980s, attended by more than 500 shareholders, the highlight, or lowlight, depending on your point of view, was the shareholder question and answer period. 

(Now, if you never experienced an annual stockholders meeting, let me advise you they are mostly dry affairs. Corporate recitations of sales and earnings with a few pronouncements of new strategic initiatives. Sounds boring, and they are. My staff attended them because they often were the only time we had access to top executives as they usually held press conferences before or after the meeting). 

Most of the shareholders in the audience were current or retired company employees concerned their retirement pensions and benefits were not being jeopardized by mismanagement or profligate management.  

And then there were the corporate gadflies who challenged companies to be more transparent and democratic. Gadflies held stock in dozens if not hundreds of companies. They would criss-cross the country to pester executives with arcane, sometimes inane, inquiries. 

The most prominent of these stockholder gadflies were the Gilbert brothers and Evelyn Y. Davis. They did not like each other. At times they quarreled openly during meetings, the chairmen being unable to referee their repartee. 

I bring all this to your attention because Evelyn Y. Davis died Sunday. She was 89 (https://nyti.ms/2yYfr4h). She was unmistakeable. The New York Times obituary commented on her notable apparel. But it was her sharp Dutch-accented voice that impressed her presence on me, so much so that some 20 years later, while listening to but not watching a White House press conference, I was instantly drawn to the television when I heard her distinctive voice. 

Evelyn always got the microphone at corporate meetings. At the aforementioned Penney meeting she asked then chairman and CEO William Howell if the company was a fashion retailer. For sure, Howell replied. To which Evelyn wanted to know, why then did the wife of the vice president of merchandising wear a naugahyde dress to a recent fashion event? After the audience stopped laughing, Howell said he could offer no explanation. 

I haven’t been to an annual shareholders meeting in more than a dozen years. I am not aware if gadflies still exist to torment current chairmen. The Gilbert brothers are long gone as now so too is Evelyn Y. Davis. I’m glad I had the opportunity to witness them at the peak of their dedication to enlightened corporate governance. 

Finding the Truth Behind the Numbers

The news Friday that Dow Chemical and DuPont are seeking approval to merge brought back memories of my first meeting with Leo J. Shapiro, whose expertise in social science research was instrumental in enhancing my journalism career and in making Chain Store Age unique, informative, must reading for retailers in the last two decades of the 20th century and the first 10 years of the 21st. Leo passed away in Tucson last month. He was 94.

The first time I met Leo, in 1979, in his firm’s then offices on the 37th floor of Lake Point Tower on the edge of Lake Michigan in Chicago, he observed that companies often choose a branding message in conflict with their everyday functions. 

Dow Chemical’s slogan back then was “Common Sense - Uncommon Chemistry.” DuPont’s was “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry.” Yet both companies produced napalm and Agent Orange, the notorious herbicide used by the American military to defoliate much of Vietnam and consequently, tragically, causing “serious health issues—including tumors, birth defects, rashes, psychological symptoms and cancer—among returning U.S. servicemen and their families as well as among the Vietnamese population.”

In 1979 I had recently taken over as editor of Chain Store Age, inheriting a tradition of publishing a full-issue study in December on what we called a Great Retail Institution. The retailer we profiled always cooperated. For 1979 it was the F.W. Woolworth Corporation. 

Cooperation would not be the case for our 1980 profile—Kmart, at the time the second largest general merchandise retailer in the world with $14.8 billion in sales, behind Sears’ $16.9 billion (by comparison, Wal-Mart was a minuscule though growing chain with sales of only $1.6 billion. For 2014, Wal-Mart’s sales exceeded $473 billion; for the now combined Sears/Kmart, sales reached just $31.2 billion, of which $12.1 billion came from Kmart). 

Without Kmart’s cooperation we had to devise an alternative plan to secure information about the strengths and weaknesses of the chain. Publication director Paul Reuter spotted Leo’s name in an article in Advertising Age. It said his research firm, Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, had been following Kmart for many years. 

During that first meeting Leo explained that retailers, as do many companies, persist in doing things the same old way instead of moving on to the next wave of innovation. Sears, he opined, should have started a discount chain à la Kmart. Kmart, in turn, should have evolved into the more upscale Target or the more rural Wal-Mart. 

With Leo’s help Chain Store Age produced a publishing home run—more advertising than ever before and an editorial product recognized for its clarity and insight not only within the retail industry but also by our publishing brethren. The Kmart full-issue study was one of five finalists for a National Magazine Award, a rare achievement for a trade publication. 

Success in 1980 meant 1981’s December issue would be more challenging. Rather than profile a retailer we opted to work with Leo to produce the retail industry’s “1st Consumer Buying Intentions Study: Who, What, Where & Why They’ll Buy.” The study did not, as we expected, sell as well as the Kmart issue. 

But I almost fell off my chair when Stewart Orton, then chairman and CEO of Foley’s Department Store in Houston, in his speech accepting the Gold Medal Award of the National Retail Federation at its January 1982 annual luncheon, exhorted the thousands in attendance to read Chain Store Age’s December buying intentions study issue. 

Over the 30 years I worked with Leo and his partner, George Rosenbaum, Chain Store Age expanded the role of trade publishing. We innovated and published monthly and annual buying intentions studies as well as surveys on technology, credit trends, payment systems, loss prevention, store atmospherics, logistics and other topics never before distributed by a publication for the retail industry. Moreover, by including topical questions in their omnibus monthly national polls, Leo and George provided Chain Store Age with up to the moment insights on consumers.

“Garbage in, garbage out” is a widely held adage for anyone doing research. I always thought I knew what I wanted to study, but it was only after talking with Leo or George that I discovered what was truly worth researching. 

Recalling History at the Berlin Wall

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the breach in the Berlin Wall, when East Germans streamed across the unnatural divide that kept them apart from West Berliners. It would be another three months before the Wall was torn down with a little, read that miniscule, assist by yours truly. I’ve reprinted my chiseling exploits from a blog posting five years ago. 

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Chipping Away at History 

Today marks the official twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the climactic events of the last century.

I wasn’t present when East Germany relaxed the rules on border crossings on Nov. 9, 1989. East and West Berliners rushed to the Wall, climbing atop the 12-foot high barrier to celebrate. But I did make a side trip to Berlin on February 16, 1990, just three days before the section of the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate was to be torn down.

I had been attending a conference in Dusseldorf, inside Germany’s western border. It was a no-brainer to make a quick, one-day jaunt to Berlin and back, to be able to walk through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, to say, “I was there.”

I knew in advance people were chipping away at the Wall, so I stopped at a Woolworth store in Berlin to buy a small chisel and standard-sized hammer. When I arrived at the Wall that rainy and snowy day, I discovered how pitiful my purchases were to the task at hand. The reinforced concrete gave no quarter. You couldn’t even classify as pebbles the pieces I managed to dislodge.

Standing next to me was a man with a huge sledgehammer and 30-inch chisel. He was breaking off softball-size or larger chunks. He took pity on me and offered me his tools. As I remember it today, my new efforts were hardly more rewarding. He took pity on me once more, and gave the Wall a few choice whacks for me. I left Berlin with a bagful of souvenirs, most of which I gave away to family, friends and colleagues at work. I kept the two largest pieces, one to display in our living room, the other to be mounted on a plaque and hung in my office.

For the April 1990 issue of Chain Store Age, I wrote a column about my exploits, aptly titled, “Chipping Away at History.” Berlin today is a vibrant city, unified and culturally important. It’s hard to reconcile the Berlin of today with what I saw 20 years ago. But all I have to do is pick up the piece of the Wall in my living room to recall the divisions of an earlier era. And recall that I was there when at least part of it ended.

Etch A Sketch Draws Memories

The intense renewed interest in Etch A Sketch reminded me that Gilda and I knew the owners of the Ohio Art Co. that manufactures the toy that has come to symbolize Mitt Romney.

We met Bill Killgallon, chairman, and his brother, Larry, president and chief operating officer, a little more than 30 years ago, at the annual conferences of the Association of General Merchandise Chains every October. The AGMC was mostly a networking, social gathering of old line variety store executives from companies such as M.H. Lamston, McCrory, Winn’s, G.C. Murphy, Kresge, Rose’s, T.G.&Y. and Woolworth. Some of them had diversified with a discount store division under such nameplates as Murphy Mart, Kmart, Woolco and even a little company at the time called Wal-Mart. Don’t feel too ignorant if you don’t recognize some of those retail companies. Most of the AGMC membership of regional retailers have vanished under the weight of competing with Wal-Mart and Target.

Along with the retailers, the AGMC attracted key suppliers, Ohio Art among them. If any business travel could be considered a perq, attendance at the AGMC conference would fall under that rubric. By long-standing tradition of my publishing house in recognizing that a spouse could be an essential contributor to forging business relationships, the editor’s wife was permitted to attend on the company dime. I can truly attest that Gilda opened as many or even more contacts than I did during those AGMC meetings, oftentimes through her association with the spouses of the retail executives. It also didn’t hurt that from the time they were toddlers we brought our children to these conferences. One of the first words Dan learned to say was “croissant” as he and Gilda enjoyed breakfast on the patio of our room at the Arizona Biltmore when he was just two years old. One of my favorite pictures, hanging on our den wall, shows me wearing a straw cowboy hat while carrying Ellie asleep on my chest, a bandanna covering her head, during a cocktail reception two months before Ellie’s second birthday.


Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee, but I don’t want to pay for it.

It’s not surprising to me that a NY Times/CBS News survey has found widespread opposition to all or parts of the health care measure, the legality of which is now being debated at the Supreme Court. The survey found 47% disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, with only 36% approving it. Why wouldn’t our lemming-like public have negative opinions when they’ve been bombarded for the last year by Republican presidential candidate after candidate trashing the law (without offering a realistic alternative, mind you) and with hardly any aggressive defense mounted by President Obama (perhaps he’s waiting for the official re-election campaign to begin his counter-attack)?

Of course, the public shows its selfishness by also telling The Times/CBS News poll it favors coverage of pre-existing conditions (85%) and the extension of insurance to children until they turn 26 (68%) but not wanting to support a mandate to require everyone to buy insurance or be fined (51%). Just how do those people think the added benefits can be funded? Do they think insurance grows on trees?


“Nothing discredits religion quite like the gap between what believers profess and how they live.” I liked that sentence in a column (“Tebow in Babylon”) by Ross Douthat in Sunday’s NY Times Review section. But what I really liked from that section was Frank Bruni’s essay, "Rethinking His Religion," about the transformation his former college roommate has undergone over the last 30 years. I won’t ruin it for you. Here’s a link, with my suggestion to read it all the way through. The ending is priceless: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-catholic-classmate-rethinks-his-religion.html?_r=1&ref=frankbruni


On another spiritual note, did anyone else think it slightly incongruous that the National Geographic cable TV network chose to air “Only for God: Inside Hasidim” on a Friday night? Not that any Hasidim would be watching regardless of the night, but it did show a lack of sensitivity to broadcast the program last Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.