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February 01, 1985 - Image 14

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1985-02-01

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

14

Friday, February 1, 1985

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

BY ALAN ABRAMS
Special to The Jewish News

She was 17 and he was 20. She was
in high school, he was in college.
They met on a blind date. To this
day, Jack Robinson maintains that the
only reason he asked Aviva Freedman
out a second time was because she was
so quiet he couldn't believe it.
Judging by the look on her face,
Aviva Robinson has patiently listened,
to her husband tell that possibly apoc-
ryphal story at least 3,958 times dur-
ing their 32 years of marriage. But this
time, she isn't going to sit back and
take it.
The lake outside their art-filled
Bloomfield Hills house is thick with
ice, but the fire in her eyes could melt
it in seconds. "Anybody who knows me
knows that I've never had a quiet mo-
ment in my life," she says.
"As a teenager she was quiet," ex-
plains her husband.
"I was not," she replies.
"She was shy."
"I was not."
Regardless, they were married
two years later. Jack had just
graduated from Wayne University. He
wasn't even known as "Jack the phar-
macist" yet to the customers of his first
Perry Drug Store. That was still four
years down the line. Nor was Aviva
dreaming of an art career beyond that
of perhaps teaching art after her
gradukion from Wayne. While Jack
spent 1953-1955 in the army, Aviva
stayed in Detroit and finished school.
Today, of course, Jack Robinson is
chairman of the board and chief execu-
tive officer of Perry Drug Stores, Inc.,
one of the nation's fastest-growing re-
tail chains with 306 stores in eight
states as of mid-January. He is also an
active and tireless supporter of Jewish
communal organizations. And the
vivacious Aviva Robinson is one of the
Midwest's best known and most
talented artists. Her work is found in
more Michigan corporate boardrooms
than a copy oflacocca. Recently, one of
her paintings was added to the perma-
nent collection of the Detroit Institute
of Arts.
On Feb. 12, Wayne State Univer-
sity will present Jack Robinson with
its Corporate Leadership Award. It is

A D

the latest in a string of honors received
by the man who has made Perry
Street, a busy Pontiac thoroughfare,
into a household word.
Robinson recalls that his goal,
when he got out of college, "was to open
my own apothecary, a fine drugstore
filling maybe 75 prescriptions a day.
That was the dream — to get out there
and open a store without a soda foun-
tain and be very professioal.
"Rather than continuing to be an
idealist," continues Robinson, "I be-
came a realist, and when I bought the
Perry Drug Store on Pontiac's Perry
Street in 1957, it had a soda fountain."
Robinson kept the Perry name on the
store because he couldn't afford the
extra money it would have taken to
replace the letters on the store's neon
sign. In a little over a year, he was able
to purchase a second store. By 1973,
when the company went public, there
were 18 stores in the chain. And that's
when things really started to happen.
"We opened conventional drug
stores until 1976," explains Robinson,
"when we opened our first auto/home
center /drug store. We sold auto parts
along with home hardware, a major
breakthrough for drug stores. That
store was in Pontiac, on M-59 at
Elizabeth Lake Road. We continued to
open those stores until 1983 when we
established our first free-standing
auto parts store — Auto Works. Today
we have 156 of them, and our stores
are in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, In-
diana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, West
Virginia and Missouri."
Indeed, Perry has been opening
new stores — well, even faster than
you can say Jack Robinson. Recently
the company has diversified even
further — into health care. Perry has
entered into a joint venture with
Henry Ford Hospital known as Com-
fort Care; has opened Bioanalytic Lab-
oratory Procedures; has established a
Flint-based company called Flint Med-
ical and Surgical Supply Company;
and in a new vein of endeavor, now has
trained phlebotomists at selected drug
store sites who can draw blood and
send it to laboratories for analysis, a
procedure that previously was only

Aviva Robinson works with folded paper in her studio.

performed at medical clinics and doc-
tors' offices. It's all a long way from
soda fountains, but it is the type of
innovative merchandising and service
technology that has made Jack Robin-
son one of the most respected leaders
in a highly competitive field.
While Jack was building his Perry
empire, Aviva was raising their three
daughters: Shelby, now 29, and owner
of a handcrafted clothing business in
Fort Collins, Colorado; Beth, now 26,
and soon to be Dr. Beth Robinson (she
will practice as a pediatrician); and
Abigail, now 22, and working on her
master's degree in social work at Bos-
ton University. But even while she
was home with the children, Aviva
continued her interest in art. Her de-
gree is in art education because, she
says, "I knew I had to have a career
and just painting was i a risky busi-
ness." Before the children were born,

she taught art at Oak Park High
School. She was the first art teacher at
the school.
Aviva starting painting "about
1960." She remembers that "by the
time our youngest child started nur-
sery school, I was literally out the door
(in the morning) with her. I started
taking classes at DIA and Wayne and
learned absolutely everything I could
about painting.
"Within a couple of years I was
getting into shows — juried things,
like the Artists Market. It was very
encouraging and I was very excited
about it because even though I was
good at art, I had never painted. I just
kept at it, doing more and more self-
goal kinds of things. I'd like to try this,
I'd like to try that. Then at a certain
point I had more (of my work) than my
family or friends ever wanted as gifts,
so I put my portfolio together and took

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