Look Who’s in the News!

As a premier in Hartford’s world of retailing, G. Fox & Co., and those at its helm, frequently made headlines. Many of these stories have been preserved in scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. In most cases, clippings concerning the store were kept in separate scrapbooks from those concerning the family, but there is some overlap.

A few of the scrapbooks act as memorials to Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s husband, George S. Auerbach. In these volumes, there are letters of condolences from area organizations in addition to the newspaper clippings of his obituary as it appeared in several different papers, including Salt Lake City publications.

The scrapbooks about G. Fox & Co. include articles from 1931-1968, almost the entirety of Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s presidency. There are even scrapbooks that were specifically created to house many the newspaper articles that resulted after the G. Fox & Co./May Co. merger.

If you’re just beginning to research G. Fox & Co. or if you’re looking for information about a specific event in Fox’s history, these scrapbooks are an excellent place to start. Additional newspaper articles can also be found in the collection. These articles are either duplicated in the scrapbooks or never made it into one, but are also a great resource for background information about G. Fox & Co. as well as members of the Fox family, particularly Beatrice Fox Auerbach and her father, Moses Fox.

The Tobé Award

In 1947, the same year that G. Fox & Co. celebrated its centennial, Beatrice Fox Auerbach was honored with one of retail’s most prestigious awards. At the 13th Annual Tobé Bosses Dinner, the fifth annual Tobé Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Retailing was bestowed upon Mrs. Auerbach “for demonstrating that a department store can and must exert a positive social force in its community.”

Beatrice Fox Auerbach, in her acceptance speech, said in part, “To be singled out by one whom I have so long esteemed as a woman in business, and so deeply regarded as a friend, as worthy to receive an award that bears her name is one of those rare experience in a lifetime that one cherishes and remembers. I accept it proudly, aware of the high standards by which its recipients are chosen. Yet my pride is tempered with humility. Whatever I may have done to be named for this distinction is not mine alone. It is but part of a heritage from the past, a partnership with the present, and a trusteeship for the future.” (More of the speech appears at the end of the post.)

The Tobé Award was considered to be the highest honor one could achieve in the field of retail and had previously been bestowed upon such prestigious individuals as Walter Hoving and Dorothy Shaver of Lord and Taylor, Adam L. Gimbel of Saks Fifth Avenue, H. Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus, and Walter H. Rich of Rich’s in Atlanta. For Beatrice Fox Auerbach to be awarded such a distinction reflects greatly upon her importance in the world of retailing during the better part of the 20th century.

The image to the left depicts the letter from then-President of the Connecticut Historical Society, Edgar Waterman, who offers his own message of congratulations on behalf of the Society. This letter was one among dozens from institutions, businesses, and personal friends of Mrs. Auerbach that were included in the book, “A Tribute to Beatrice Fox Auerbach, Tobé Award Winner for 1947.” Telegram messages also fill the pages as do clippings of newspaper articles concerning the awards ceremony.

Richard Koopman Joins the Fox Family

On June 21, 1940, Richard Koopman became a member of the Fox/Auerbach family when he married Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s daughter, Georgette Auerbach. Two years later, on October 18, 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Corps. In 1946, after being discharged from the service, Richard Koopman became a member of another Fox family when he began working for his mother-in-law at G. Fox & Co.

Among his materials in the collection, there is a training booklet, specially prepared to introduce Mr. Koopman to the store. The booklet contains a daily schedule that includes training assignments for his first six weeks of employment, divided into two categories: salescheck system & sales training and non-selling training. Because of the depth of this training program, it is possible to obtain from it a basic understanding of the responsibilities of each department.

Mr. Koopman continued working at G. Fox & Co. for several years until his retirement in 1979. During his thirty-three year tenure at the store, he served as both store president (from 1967-1969) and vice-chairman (from 1969-1979). In this way, he continued the family tradition of long-term service to the department store following in the steps of his mother-in-law, Beatrice Fox Auerbach and her father and grandfather, Moses and Gerson Fox, who devoted a total of 132 years (41, 58, and 33, respectively) to building and managing G. Fox & Co., Hartford’s largest department store.

“Once Upon a Time…”

As I mentioned several months ago in my special “Happy Birthday, Beatrice” post, Beatrice Fox Auerbach often received birthday gifts from her employees. For her birthday in 1945, the employees from one of her departments presented Mrs. Auerbach with a book titled “Once Upon a Time…” that presents a minimalist’s version of her life story in the form of a children’s book, complete with illustrations (even if they are stick figures). The entire book has too many pages for me to post all of them, but I have included a couple of images below. You might also like to read the story so here it is:

Once Upon a Time…there was a little girl…whose papa owned a store…a very little store…every night her papa told her how BIG the store would be some day…and how thrift and good will and hard work would make it so…and sure enough the store grew and grew and grew…until…it was a very BIG store indeed

! all Connecticut shopped there…and suddenly one day the little girl who had grown up and married and had little girls of her own…found herself President of the great big bewildering store! And she didn’t know a thing about being President…except…what her papa had taught her…

• thrift
• hard work
• buy right
• sell right

and the customer is always right…which was enough!…and so for 17 years… the store grew even bigger and bigger and better and better…and other store owners from all over the country came to see and try and find out what made it tick…and they looked and asked questions and huffed and puffed because they never found the answer…because the answer was so simple and simple things are so hard to see and understand…YOU know, of course, because you work here…the little girl who grew up but never forgot papa’s teachings…still isn’t very big…and couldn’t have changed much…her desk still looks like this…and probably always will!

The Fox Way: Honesty, Courtesy, Service

As a store, G. Fox & Co. thrived for well over a century and outlasted all other department stores in downtown Hartford. Part of the reason for its enduring success has to do with Gerson Fox’s business philosophy, expressed best in his motto: “Honesty, Courtesy, Service.” This philosophy, and the principles it shaped, determined the way in which business was conducted by all members of the store’s team, from the president to the part-time employee.

It was this business philosophy, and the family’s unwavering devotion to it, that really set Fox’s apart from other stores. All store policies stemmed from this simple motto; the most enduring and memorable of which are the following four principles:

1. The customer is always right!
2. We will not knowingly be undersold!
3. If Fox’s says so, it must be so!
4. If you can get it anywhere, you can get it at Fox’s!

There are many anecdotes from customers and employees alike that attest to the fact that these sentences were more than mere words; they were a way of doing business. According to an article in the Hartford Courant on April 17, 1927, honoring the store’s 80th anniversary, G. Fox & Co. is “firmly entrenched in the hearts of thousands as the home of honesty, courtesy, and service. And this trinity, which breeds success in any enterprise, were the materials from which Gerson Fox fashioned the cornerstone of his career.”

The unique nature of G. Fox & Co. as a store is evident from many of the business records in this collection. The item that stands out most in my mind as a testament to Gerson’s motto of “Honesty, Courtesy, Service” is Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s letter to her employees after the sale of the store to May Company. She is not only forthcoming about the situation, but confident that the change in ownership would not impact the level of service for which Fox’s was so fondly known. While those dearly-held ideals did seem to die with Beatrice Fox Auerbach as the May Co. made ever-increasing changes to the department store, the Fox way of honesty, courtesy, and service continue to be remembered with affection, and a hint of nostalgia, as a testament to an age in retail that has long since passed.

Thanksgiving at Fox’s

Thanksgiving is generally a time for reflecting, with a sense of gratefulness, upon the good in life. For Beatrice Fox Auerbach, Thanksgiving was often a time to express her appreciation to her staff for their loyalty and hard work throughout the year. One example of this expression is seen in an issue of the employee newsletter, the Go-Getter, and exemplifies generosity of spirit that came to characterize Beatrice Fox Auerbach.

Although the year was “marked by increased expenses of operation and customer services with narrowed rewards,” the decrease in profits did not prevent Beatrice Fox Auerbach from bestowing upon her employees a generous end-of-year bonus. She indicated that the company, through her, still “wishes to express tangible recognition of [her employees'] devoted work.”

In keeping with her father’s long-standing tradition of providing exceedingly generous yearly bonuses, the 1960 was no exception. This year, Beatrice Fox Auerbach awarded all employees who worked at least 20 hours a week for the past five years or more, “a sum equivalent to such person’s salary for two full weeks.” Those individuals who had been with the company for between five years and three years were given “a sum equivalent to such person’s salary for one and one-half weeks.” One week’s salary was given to those employees who had been with the store between three years and one year and those employees who had worked there for at least six months were given a half and week’s salary. But Mrs. Auerbach didn’t forget those employees who had been at Fox’s for less than six months; they were given the sum of $7.50.

Bonuses were one expression of Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s generosity to her employees, but there were certainly many others, including her establishment of the Theresa Stern Fox Fund, which provided interest-free loans to her employees during times of crisis. More examples can be found among the many materials in the collection and I urge anyone who’s interested to come and check it out for themselves. To conclude this week’s entry, I’d just like to say, in the words of Beatrice Fox Auerbach, “my warmest Thanksgiving wishes to you and your family, as you celebrate the holiday together.”

The “Scary” Side of the Store

Happy Halloween, everybody! It looks like the G. Fox building once had a few bats in its belfry! (Not really, of course! Mrs. Auerbach wouldn’t stand for it!)

Since there really isn’t anything Halloween-related in the G. Fox & Co. materials in our collection, I thought I would take this opportunity to write about the aspect of this collection that really “scares” me off. There’s really nothing scary about these materials; it’s just that in the diverse range of items that form this collection, these documents are not among my favorites. That’s not to say that some of you might not find them irresistible, however! Just what are these items I have heretofore been somewhat afraid to talk about? Legal documents.

The majority of legal documents in the collection were created by Moses Fox. Some of the more interesting ones concern the agreement between him and his sister, Emma Fox Plaut, and sister-in-law, Sadie Fox, regarding the transfer of ownership of the store over to him. After his death, Gerson Fox had left shares of the store to each of his children, but by 1917, Moses Fox was the sole owner of the company. There are also materials relating to Moses Fox’s purchase of the Brown Thomson & Co., a store he (and later his daughter, Beatrice) continued to operate independently of his own department store.

While many of the legal materials help to document aspects of the company, a few of them are just downright bizarre. The ones I am specifically referring to are the patent assignments that Moses Fox had in his possession. What makes them so odd is that none of them are made out to Moses Fox himself, or anyone else in the Fox family. In fact, some of these patent assignments concern individuals from New Jersey and New York while others concern the Smyth Manufacturing Company of Hartford. Perhaps Moses Fox was involved in some way with the Smyth Manufacturing Company, but I have yet to find a connection.

I am sure a researcher will come in one day and be able to uncover all their hidden secrets, but I’m afraid these documents will just have to wait until such a person arrives because all their legalese leaves me with a slight case of the shivers.

Service Bureau for Women’s Organizations

Today, October 24th, is United Nations Day and when I think about the United Nations, I always think about Eleanor Roosevelt because she was chairperson of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights. However, instead of writing yet another entry about Eleanor Roosevelt’s connection to this collection of G. Fox materials, I thought I would discuss an important organization that she supported: the Service Bureau for Women’s Organizations.

In January of 1945, the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation sponsored a Woman’s Service Bureau in order to increase the effectiveness of women’s work through organized efforts. From the beginning, Beatrice Fox Auerbach was deeply involved in the organization. She was the first chairman of the advisory board for the Service Bureau and donated space on the eleventh floor of G. Fox & Co. for the Bureau’s director to use as her office. In fact, the Service Bureau was never far from Mrs. Auerbach’s mind. When traveling abroad, Mrs. Auerbach would speak with women in other countries about the Service Bureau and would often invite them to come speak at the organization’s meetings.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Mrs. Auerbach never took a vacation from promoting the Service Bureau while abroad was that her close friend and frequent traveling companion, Chase Going Woodhouse, was also a co-founder of the Service Bureau. Mrs. Woodhouse also served as the Bureau’s second director, a position she held from 1954 until 1981.

Under the adept leadership of Mrs. Woodhouse, the Service Bureau thrived as a clearing house for women’s organizations in Connecticut.  The agency also researched and developed program materials for use by those organizations.  The Service Bureau’s name was changed in 1970 to the Service Bureau for Connecticut Organizations to be more gender-inclusive.  In the library’s collection, we have two publications created by the Service Bureau as well as a number of their annual reports.

Moses Fox Club

Because last week I wrote about the employee newsletter, Go-Getter, I thought it appropriate to quote from one of the early Go-Getters regarding the founding of the Moses Fox Club. The following excerpt is from the February 9, 1940 edition of the Go-Getter.

Moses Fox Club Formed at Annual Dinner for Twenty-Five Year Employees

At the very festive annual dinner for veteran Foxonians on Saturday night, Mrs. Beatrice Fox Auerbach announced the formation of the MOSES FOX CLUB - to be composed of employees who had been Foxonians for twenty-five years or more. Mrs. Auerbach, introduced by Judge S. Elsner, Toastmaster, spoke as follows:

“A year has passed since those who have been associated with G. Fox & Co. for 25 years or more were gathered together. . .

“The store, in the past year, has undergone marked changes. All have been of a progressive nature. The growing pains have almost completely subsided and we may feel that in its growth the store has now become an institution.

“Last year, we met in the cafeteria. This year, we are meeting in our Connecticut Room, which typifies the reconstructed G. Fox & Co. It is particularly fitting that the first formal, private dinner to be held here should be tonight’s occasion, celebrated by those having intimate association with the store. . .

“The significance of occasions such as this is very deep, and it seemed to me that some form of permanency should be given to them. I believe that it is safe to say that there isn’t a person here tonight who doesn’t revere the memory of my father, Moses Fox. We are all conscious of that extraordinary bond of sympathy which existed between him and every person, regardless of station, connected with G. Fox & Co. Those who knew him - and none knew him better than you who are here tonight - constantly saw in him the signs of greatness and with it all an unparalleled and unusual modesty. His life was devoted to his business and to those associated with him. He held no public office and shunned the spotlight of publicity; however, he was ever ready to throw his strong support behind every movement to further the interests of the community and of humanity. His life is the story of fulfillment of American ideal - the story of one who, through his own efforts, his understanding, his tolerance and his great appreciation for the value of service, raised from humble beginnings a great institution. It is appropriate, therefore, to inaugurate at this time, in his memory, and as a tribute to him THE MOSES FOX CLUB membership to which shall be enjoyed by all whose employment with G. Fox & Co. now extends over a period of 25 years or more. I have designed, and had caused to be made, emblems of membership. This will now be distributed to you all.”

The whole 77 25-year Foxonians received the gold Moses Fox Club pins, engraved with their initials and dates of employment.

The Moses Fox Club annual dinners were one of the highlights of the entire year for employees and being inducted into the club was considered to be quite an honor. The annual event was such a big to-do that it was almost always covered by the local papers.

The library’s collection of G. Fox materials contains a fair amount of materials relating to the Moses Fox Club, including the Moses Fox Club pin pictured here that belonged to Carmelo Brutto, who was inducted into the Moses Fox Club in 1966.

Girl Scout diary

Jean Harrison of Bridgeport kept a diary in 1946 and it recently found its way into the CHS library. The entries are written in what is entitled a Girl Scout Diary, with information on the history of scouting at the front, essays on safety toward the back, and historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the volume. I wish I knew her age, because some of Jean’s comments have an air of discovery about them. For example, January 4, she wrote, “Went ice skating for the first time in my life. It was fun. Didn’t fall.”

Jean mentions attending confirmation class on Sundays, attending scout meetings, going to the dentist, attending school, and, on January 13, a very momentous occasion, “I had my first date. Went to a roller skating with Richard Busher.” She also makes oblique comments about rationing, although the family did have a new car. On Sunday, January 19, after Confirmation class, she “went to hunt for butter.”

According to her records in the back of the diary, Jean only read two books during the course of the year. One was Sue Barton, Student Nurse. The second book was a biography of Clara Barton. Perhaps Jean was considering becoming a nurse. However, it is her comments about the book that are of most interest. She wrote, “A very good book if you are interested in nursing and in the early life of our country. It is about war.” One wonders how much she really understood about war.