WSJHS: Jewish Businesses Exhibit and Celebration

Who’s Minding the Store? Travels to Spokane
Exhibit Dates: February 22 - March 22
Where: Temple Beth Shalom • 1322 E. 30th Avenue • Spokane, WA 99203
Cost: WSJHS Members - Free

Featuring 16 different Spokane businesses from 1850 -1999, this exhibit tells the stories of the Spokane community through individual narratives, photographs and documents. Community business leaders such as: Grossman Brother's Paint Company, Huppin's, and Miller and Hahn's Menswear all got their start in Spokane. The WSJHS is proud to partner up with Temple Beth Shalom to share these, along with many other, stories.

Story by Carol Oseran Starin

I talk about "Who’s Minding The Store?"everywhere I go. And, I haven’t gone anywhere in the last 8 months where someone didn’t say, "You know, my grandfather had a men’s clothing store in Tacoma, or "My father and his brothers worked at the family grocery store in Greenwood," or "You need to talk to my

grandmother – she remembers hearing from her mother who, at age 12, was the ’runner’ for the grocery store that was in their living room."

I couldn’t have imagined how excited people would be to tell their stories. And we have 150 of them from around the state! We tell of businesses from Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Spokane, Elma, Walla Walla, Bellingham, Toppenish, Aberdeen and more. Families met to write their stories together. Sisters had coffee to sort through their photographs. And now we know the words to the advertising jingle for the Bi-Rite drug store in Toppenish, as well as the secret behind their famous special ointment!

As the stories poured in, the threads of the tapestry that is the history of the Jews in Washington State began to weave together. The store that one family lost during the Depression was purchased by another Seattle family. Ben Bridge worked at Schwabacher’s in the tobacco and candy department.

A family business in Toppenish led a friend to a long lost Chicago cousin, whose family also had a business in Toppenish.

It’s the little details that make the history come alive. Sol Amon, who joined his father Jack, in the Pike Place market, is now known as the "Cod Father." Ralph Mackoff, who had men’s wear stores in Spokane, was known as "2 pants Ralph." Morris Rosen, who became the founder of Alaskan Copper Works, worked on the construction of the Panama Canal, earning 68 cents an hour. Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones shopped at Myers Music. When Bert and Sid Thal bought Fox’s Gem Shop in 1948, they couldn’t afford to change the name on the store, and that’s why it’s still Fox’s and not Thal’s. Jack Richlen learned how to pickle meats while working as a clean up boy at McIntosh’s meat market. It was Johnny Cohn’s job, as a 12 year old, to walk down the line of hanging chickens and chop off their heads.