Jake's

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The Michigan-based Jacobson's
clothing chain had a long and
elegant history.

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ALAN ABRAMS
Special to the Jewish News

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hopping at Jacobson's for the latest in
farm machinery, flour and crackers was
the thing to do if you lived in Reed City,
Michigan, in 1869.
The line of merchandise offered in the first
Jacobson's store, 60 miles north of Grand Rapids,
was a far cry from the fashionable and sophisticat-
ed women's clothing that eventually was to become
synonymous with the Jacobson's name.
Three years before the optimistically named Reed
City became a village in 1872, Abram Jacobson
opened a general store in the Osceola County set-
tlement. It also carried a line of clothing.
Abram's son, Moses, who traveled across
Michigan selling women's wear from trunks, settled
in Jackson and opened the second Jacobson's store
in 1904. It concentrated exclusively on women's
clothing.
Jackson was good to Jacobson's. Moses soon built
a four-story structure he named the Esther
Jacobson Building in memory of his mother.
Contemporary newspaper articles hailed the new
store as the largest women's ready-to-wear retailer
between Detroit and Chicago, and certainly the
most upscale.
By the time the store celebrated its 25th anniver-
sary in Jackson, there were stores in Ann Arbor and
Battle Creek and plans to open more. The compa-
ny said its annual sales just prior to the Depression
were $650,000.
Moses died in 1930 and his brother William,
and later William's son, Richard, took over man-
agement of the store. Moses and William had run
the original three stores as a partnership. Richard
left law school in 1936 to run the business but
apparently had little interest in retail. And both he

The Esther Jacobson Building in Jackson

and his father had serious health problems. By
1939, when Richard was 27, they were looking for
a buyer.

The Rosenfelds

That's when the Rosenfelds, the second Jewish
family to play a key role in the Jacobson's saga,
entered the picture. Nathan Rosenfeld was look-
ing for an investment and stumbled across
Jacobson's.
On Sept. 17, 1939, less than three weeks after
Hitler's invasion of Poland launched World War
II, Nathan Rosenfeld wrote a three-page letter to
his brother, Zola, telling him of his find.
Rosenfeld liked this deal so much that "I am
ready to tie myself up in any way necessary to
make the purchase. I am rushing this information
to you because action must be taken as quickly as
possible — because I don't want it to get away
and secondly I think advantage should be taken of

the fall season.
"... Each of these stores without any reservation
is the number one women's apparel and accessory
store, able to get Best & Co. markups, not
because the management understands the tech-
nique of getting a high markup but because these
stores established over a period of many years
have won the right to get top lines exclusively."
The purchase price, set by Richard Jacobson,
who was eager to return to law school, was
$100,000, half-down in cash and "very satisfacto-
ry terms" on the balance.
Rosenfeld acknowledged his brother was
"department store-minded, but these stores are
not exactly cloak stores; they are well rounded out
women's specialty shops with real strength in
shoes, millinery, hosiery, underwear and sports-
wear ... the ready-to-wear volume of these stores
per unit is as large as that of most $1,000,000
small town department stores."

JAKE'S

A Long Line

Although the Jacobson's stores lost
all semblance of their Jewish owner-
ship after Mark Rosenfeld's ouster in
1995, their origins are the same as a
host of Jewish-founded women's spe-
cialty stores once prominent in the
Detroit area.

on page 118

Left: Nathan Rosenfeld led the expansion ofJacobson's
into a regional powerhouse.

Those stores included B. Siegel,
Himelhoch, Winkelman's, Alberts
and Kay Baum.
Another Jewish-founded chain,
although specializing in men's
clothes, was Hughes Hatcher Suffrin.
It, too, is now history.

Left: Madorie and
Nathan Rosenfeld at
an anniversary event.