Uncle Jake - on rent, shoes, and jobs!

 In 1949 my Uncle Jake made news by reducing the rent on some of his apartments. A photographer captured the moment, and the picture may have even appeared in the Milwaukee Journal. I found a print of that photo recently, a reminder of how Jake always seemed to do things in his own way.

Most people in Milwaukee knew him through Friedman’s Clothing Stores. The West Allis location was his flagship, but he also had a shop downtown—possibly in the Pfister Hotel—and another on the North Side. With my cousin Zal, he started a store in Southgate Mall, Milwaukee’s very first shopping mall. Zal eventually took over that store, but the family name was etched into Milwaukee retail for decades.

Jake’s path there was anything but straightforward. He came to America in the late 1800s and began by selling cigars on trains. Eventually, he drifted to Wisconsin and opened a shoe store in Potosi. Times were lean—so lean that Jake lined the shelves with empty boxes to create the illusion of inventory. In truth, he owned only a single pair of shoes. When a customer asked for their size, he would apologize and promise to order it, showing them the one pair he did have as an example. That bit of ingenuity was the start of a lifetime in retail.

I heard that story from Aunt Rose, Jake’s wife. She laughed when I told her about my own first job interview after college, which, by coincidence, took me to Potosi. The hiring committee, looking for a youth director, worried I might not be happy there—it was, after all, a Catholic town, and they guessed I was Jewish. I didn’t get the job. Only later did I learn that Jake himself had once been treasurer of the Potosi Catholic Church.

That was Jake in a nutshell: an immigrant with nothing but hustle who built something real, a Jewish shopkeeper who ended up managing the books for a Catholic parish, and a man who made his way forward with wit, grit, and a knack for turning empty boxes into possibility.