Alan Zell

Weinstein: Alan, I’d like to start out by asking you to tell me something about your family, when they came to this city or to this country. Start where you’re comfortable and tell me not only when, but why and how. Let’s start with that.
ZELL: Okay. Well, they lived in what is Galetsia, at that time was in the Austrian Empire, a little town outside of Limburg, which is now called Levinf, called Premitsylani, which is southeast of the town, probably part of the city now. I’m not too sure what their father did. He either owned a stable or was a beer deliverer or something like that. The story never got straight. Harry and Julius came over in about 1910 or 1911 to New York and came to Portland because they had a half-sister living here. And their sister was a parent of Judge Schwab and Mildred Schwab. They had a drugstore down by the railroad. They bought out from their half sister the drugstore. That’s how Zell Bros. got started. And of course they sold glasses and watches and everything in drugstores. They were sundries stores… down by the railroad depot.

And why they came over here, I don’t know. I think their father wanted to get them out. I’m not too sure why and never heard the story, really. The mother went by Messing over there, because of antisemitism. Why, I don’t know all, either. But Jean Zell told me that Milton told her that. And then they went back after World War One.

Weinstein: When you say Messing, do you mean she used that name, rather than Zell?
ZELL: Yes. Over there. But the birth certificates all say Tauba Zell. But that’s what Jean tells me. Jean says that’s what Milton said. Because every time you ask the family….they wouldn’t talk about it. Dan was in World War One in the Austrian army. Milton was too young. They came to this country in about 1917 and they all came to Portland. And that’s how Zell Bros. got started. Little by little, it grew to where it is today. So that’s kind of a background… as much as I know.

Weinstein: Where did they land when they got to the U.S.?
ZELL: They came to Ellis Island. The first time I don’t know because we don’t have a record of it. Because you can go to Ellis Island and get the rest of it, and we’ve got that. So we know what boat they came over in then. Supposedly, Eddie Cohen tells me, that his mother was supposed to or did come on the boat with Julius. Don’t know why. She must have been from the same area or they must have known each other or got put together at some point.

Weinstein: Very ironic.
ZELL: That’s ironic.

Weinstein: Because Eddie is close friends with you now.
ZELL: Yes. Yes.

Weinstein: So, how did they come from New York to Portland?
ZELL: I’m sure by train. That’s the only way I know they got here. I’ve never talked about it.

Weinstein: Interesting that you say that they didn’t talk about before very much. I’ve interviewed other people who have the same experience with their parents. They just didn’t talk about it. It’s like they started from year one in this country.
ZELL: Yes.

Weinstein: And your grandmother, or grandfather’s sister, was the mother to the Schwabs?
ZELL: No. Meier Zell had a first wife and they were the children of his first wife, so they are half-sisters to my father.

Weinstein: Oh, I understand.
ZELL: And then they moved back to New York. I think they’re still there, or some of the family is there. And I know they used to, when they went to New York, when Harry or Dan or Julius went to New York on business they would always talk about, “They’re your relatives.” Maybe Marty knows. I don’t know but maybe Marty knows.

Weinstein: Well, I’m going to talk to Marty. Now tell me about all of this family lore, because, as you say, Janet interviewed Julius, so there’s a lot of information. How was it shared with you? When you were little was there a lot of talk about the early days?
ZELL: No. No. Other than the store moving and growing up to where it is today. As a little boy growing up, we were at the store at Broadway & Morrison, where Abercrombie & Fitch is now. In those days the show windows had these big lift-up…. You know, in order to get into them we had to lift these things. And I used to sit up in the jeweler’s shop, which was on a kind of balcony or second floor, and they’d have to jiggle it once so I’d get off, because otherwise this thing would come up and sever me. You now… that type of thing. But it was there.

I started in the store at about eight years old. And my mother and Helen (my mother’s twin sister, Susie’s [Sue Milford Davis Morton] mother) would work in the back room. …I guess that was later… at eight years old, they weren’t here yet. My mother worked in the back room wrapping Christmas packages. My first job was to take the packages out and give them to the salespeople. And there was a certain routine you did with it. And I can remember sitting in the back, and they had a grill, like an air conditioning grill, but it had nothing behind it. I could see out in front of it. So I would take the package on top of a bag and say, “Here Mr. Zell or Mr. Brown,” whoever it was. “Here is your customer’s package.” 

Weinstein: And the customer was waiting for it.
ZELL: Yes. And I can remember doing that a lot. And there was a dumb waiter down to the basement. My father loved dumbwaiters, by the way. In every store we always had dumb waiters. And if something was too big it went down to the dumb waiter and then it would come back up in a bigger box than what we kept upstairs. They did the heavy wrapping down there. 
And in the basement, when I was a little boy, uh, let me see. One of the people who worked in the basement was Joe Metzger, who was a refugee. And then we had Fred Fuji, who was Japanese. We used to have the Axis down in the basement. And that I did until Christmastime until they moved into this store, which was 1949.

Weinstein: Did you always kind of know that you wanted to go into that? Did you have any other interests that you thought you might pursue?
ZELL: No. There were a lot of other things I wanted to be. At one time, because I was very good friends with Henry Berkowitz, the rabbi, I thought of becoming a rabbi. I’m glad I didn’t, but at the time, you know, a kid… And the other thing, because I used to go riding with Harry Zell all the time, I wanted to become a horse trainer. Those are . what kids go through.

When the YWCA was going to build their building, where they are now… they’re going to be leaving, but where it is now. they had a big fundraiser. It was a big table setting show at the old Portland Hotel, which is where Pioneer Square is now. And they picked all the stuff from Zell Bros. We were already in the new store, and my job was to help get it all ready. And that convinced me that that was what I wanted to do. At that point. And that was 1949, or 1950. No, just after the war. I was about 13. Just after the war.

Weinstein: So you were an adolescent.
ZELL: Yes.

Weinstein: So you really were always involved in the store.
ZELL: Oh, both Marty and I! Marty worked in the jewelry shop doing polishing. Marty and I both spent a lot of our childhood in the store.

Weinstein: Was that something you enjoyed doing?
ZELL: Yes. I think pretty much. 

Weinstein: Being near where your family was.
ZELL: I don’t know why I enjoyed it. I just did! You know, you filed cards. all the “go-fer” things … cleaned a few toilets, I guess, as I remember.

Weinstein: All of that prepared you… not necessarily the toilets. but all of that prepared you.
ZELL: But all during high school, in the summer time, I would take people’s vacations. So I worked in the shipping room; I worked in the stock room; I worked in . in all that. Which was great background training. So by the time I can out of the Air Force I had been in most of the … the background in most of the departments.

Weinstein: And it’s interesting. It wasn’t necessarily for the sake of training you. It was for expedience because you were filling in for people, and in the process, you learned everything.
ZELL: Yes. Because at Christmastime my mother worked, Helen, after they moved here, and Susie, worked there. Mildred Zell worked at Christmastime. So it was just part of it. You just did. I never thought about it being anything.

Weinstein: It was just something that you did and everyone else was doing it, too. Tell me about your education, about school. Where did you go to school? What was your experience being Jewish growing up, outside of the Jewish community?
ZELL: Well, going back, we used to live at 28th and Brazee–2826 N.E. Brazee. Across the street lived the Gumperts, the fur people, and the Hochfelds. I forget who lived around the corner. Al Fink lived over on N.E. Grant Place and that was Bedell’s store. And I went to Fernwood, and I can’t. and that was until 1939, because then we moved up here to Portland Heights. Stan Geffen’s aunt was a teacher. That’s interesting. And I don’t know if it was before that or while I was going there, we used to go to a Saturday class, Mr. Todd’’ class, at 18th & Tillamook. He had a wood crafting shop class for kids. All I remember about it was the fact that he had a… I don’t know whether it was a 2-door or 4-door car… but across the backseat he put a piece of plywood so he had two layers of kids sitting on it. The whole idea was to get in first so you could get on the plywood.

Weinstein: You know, I think my boys took classes from Mr. Todd.
ZELL: His son was Ted Todd.

Weinstein: Well, he was kind of an institution in Portland.
ZELL: Yeah. They used to have a camp up on the Sandy River.

Weinstein: So, you say you had a lot of Jewish neighbors.
ZELL: I never looked at it as being Jewish. I went to Sunday school.

Weinstein: That’s what I’m trying to find out.
ZELL: No. The only real Jewish relationship I had during those years is we went to Sunday school and the Sunday school was on 14th & Main, kind of a brick building… I think it’s on 14th. kind of a tan, brick building. That’s where Sunday School was. Because there was no place over at Temple to do that, as I can remember.

Weinstein: For religious school.
ZELL: For religious school. So the only part of religious school they had. high school classes, etc. And Henry Berkowitz used to live on Park Place, on the way up to the zoo, about the third or fourth house on the right hand side going up. And it was always open. So we used to go there. In fact that’s where sometimes Wednesday classes were. There was always milk and cookies there. Well, you went to Sunday School. Let me see. Jeannie Mittleman Newmark was in my class. David Strauss, Earl Freedman, Ron Tonkin. Four or five have already passed away. They passed away very early. Larry Hearns, Janet Cohn. Lloyd Rosenfeld.

Weinstein: So Rabbi Berkowitz was very hospitable and welcoming and inspirational.
ZELL: Whoa. For the kids he was marvelous. He was marvelous for the kids. In fact, I was a pallbearer at his funeral. The Temple had the Octagonal Club, which was the youth group, named because of the shape of the inside of the Temple. And I think they called it the Octagonal Club because then it didn’t put you off as being Jewish. Because in those days there was …that type of thing. But also, at the same time, there was a Jewish Community Center, which we all belonged to. Eta Phi, which was the group… didn’t Sandy belong to it?

Weinstein: Sandy grew up in Salem.
ZELL: But a whole bunch of us did there. The problem with the Temple was that in those days the Temples didn’t mix. So if we had a Temple party…. If you were dating somebody or saw somebody like Little or Big Rae Benveniste, for example, they didn’t come. In those days, I guess it was high school, I dated Leslie [Burnett New Wright].

Weinstein: Did they not come because they weren’t invited?
ZELL: They weren’t invited. It was a separate thing.

Weinstein: It was just for Temple.
ZELL: It was just for Temple. When I was in high school, when I used to date Little Rae Benveniste, you know, taking out a Sephardic was… it was a shanda. That was terrible. You know, my mother sat and cried. You know… it was…

Weinstein: It’s interesting, how things change.
ZELL: Oh yes. How things have changed. You know, Eddie Cohen and I became friends because of summertime Wade Williams baseball school, which we started in the seventh grade. That’s when we first met. Which was at the old Lincoln… which was at Kamm Field, which was where the football field is now. And that’s how we met. I think it was between seventh and eighth grades.

Weinstein: I need to catch Eddy for an interview.
ZELL: Yeah. Now, as far going to Ainsworth. I’m trying to think of who lived on this hill. There weren’t too many. Leslie, because they lived on Summit Drive.

Weinstein: You have to identify….
ZELL: Oh, Leslie Burnett New Wright. Rick Ruben, who is a writer who lives in N.W. …? I think he went to Ainsworth. Steve Schildt, who has passed away since. His family lived up there. I’m trying to think who else. But it was not anything that we… other than Sunday School… that was our relationship. There was a lot of antisemitism. I got beat up a whole bunch of times. I should say this. We moved to Montgomery & Prospect in 1939. That’s a big white colonial house and so then we would walk up to Ainsworth. So there were a few times you got beat up by…

Weinstein: Could you tell me about that experience?
ZELL: I don’t remember too much about it. Well, you were Jewish, and the “Jews-killed-Christ” type of thing. You know, kids can be mean. I can’t remember how many times… I just know it happened. Next door to us was a big blue house that faces out over the city. Clayton Rothschild Jones lived in it. But they never used the term Rothschild, because they belonged to the Town Club. No Jews were invited to come in. My mother was invited one time and they almost had a fight over it. But they…. Red Jones and Marty were very, very close friends. The same age. And the lot across the street didn’t have houses on it; it was just an empty area, so we used to play baseball up there, and the kids had.

Weinstein: And this was on Montgomery Street?
ZELL: On Montgomery. There was a lot right across the street from the house. Now there’s five houses on it. There’s a little turn around … West Point View, or something like that. Uh, let’s see. I was friends with David Crone, who became a brigadier general in the Air Force? He was a pilot later and then there was another Jones family. I’ll tell you who also lived up there, in the two houses that Dr. Starr and his wife are redoing, was Eugene Oppenheimer and Russell Kaufman.

Weinstein: I didn’t know that.
ZELL: Yeah. But across the street was a big white colonial and Mrs. Jones was there, and I knew her son.

Weinstein: So you played with these people and went to school with these people and generally your experience was just fine.
ZELL: Oh yeah. Oh no, no. I can’t think other than the beatings…and the beatings with kids never happened at school. I maybe got called “kike” a couple of times at school but I can’t remember that being… it was pretty straightforward. We had a football team at Ainsworth called the Rainbows, because everybody had different colored uniforms. [laughter] Very, very practical. They used to in the summertime, you played baseball. Of course they had a gravel field, but you played baseball on it. Then Stroheckers had a store right across the street, right where Peter Sargent has his little decorating. Yes… that was a Stroheckers Store. And we’d go up there and steal olives and beer and then we’d go and jump over the back fence on the Montgomery side of the field and all have olives and beer and coke, or whatever we’d picked up.

Weinstein: I didn’t know Stroheckers was there.
ZELL: Yeah. It used to be in those days. You called Stroheckers and they delivered. And our house on Montgomery had a pantry so they would just come up on the back porch and leave it.

Weinstein: What about college?
ZELL: I went one year to Southern Cal and not an exemplary year. And then I went into the Air. Then I started at Vanport and then came the Air Force because of the Korean War.

Weinstein: Did you meet Janet when you were in school down there?
ZELL: No. I met Janet on a blind date. After I came back from Korea I was stationed in Victorville. And Robert Madlin Smith, they used to be Zell Brothers advertising agent here in Portland. And he moved to California because after World War One he wrote he wrote Robert Cummings first movie, You Came Along. So he moved to Beverly Hills and he had a son our age. They used to live in Dunthorpe in Portland. So I used to go stay with them and Bob Smith used to fix me up with some dates and they fixed me up on a Valentine’s day. This would have been ’54, ’53, I guess. Janet would probably remember those dates. And we went and we drove up to into the hills of California and drove back.

Weinstein: You were in the Air Force, stationed at Victorville.
ZELL: Yes. Victorville. And then I used to drive in on the weekends and we would date. But I dated some other girls. Janet was one date that kind of grew. Probably grew more when I got temporary duty and we went to north South Carolina, which is outside of Columbus, South Caroline. And we started to write, correspond. And then of course I got out of the service when my mother was very ill. Marty came down to tell me. He stayed at the Apple Valley Inn and called me over and said that my mother was dying of cancer. And I knew she had had a breast removal. Even when I was stationed in Denver, which was ’52, I guess, she had had a beast removed. But then by that time, you know, I got out of the service early. I was supposed to get out in November and I got out in September. Because of my mother’s illness. And then my mother passed away on September 26.

Weinstein: Do you remember anything about the type of treatment that was available to her?
ZELL: Oh, she had scars up and down her. In those days…

Weinstein: From surgery.
ZELL: From surgery. 

Weinstein: But was there any adjuvant therapy, like radiation?
ZELL: I don’t know because I wasn’t here. I do know that she went to the hospital and talked to other women who had had breast surgery. 

Weinstein: To encourage them?
ZELL: To encourage them. That went on for a number of years. Two or three years. Until, by the time I came home she was bedridden. And then Janet and her parents came up. I remember Marty and I carrying Mother down in a wheelchair, down the stairs. She wasn’t supposed to get out of bed. Her back had all been… She met them, and then we carried her back up.

Weinstein: So she was gone by the time you got married.
ZELL: Oh yes. She died September 26, actually Lauren’s birthday. Lauren is our oldest daughter. And we got married in July. My father thought we should wait longer. In those days you were supposed to sit Shiva for the… He didn’t so I didn’t know why we should. But anyway. And that was a whole other ordeal. Because Julius likes to be the center of the show, you know, so that was another part…

Weinstein: You mean the wedding itself was. do you want to talk about it?
ZELL: Yes. It was at the Biltmore in Los Angeles. They had about 200 people to a sit-down dinner and dinner dancing. And the rabbi was late, and of course my father was in conniptions. 25 conniptions. Eddie Cohen, by the way, was my best man. And Julius had a slight drinking problem. To him, on the wagon was a bottle a day. He was not an easy person to handle. Marty will tell you more. Marty got along with him very well. To me growing up, both Dan and Harry were my surrogate fathers. Harry for riding. I fulfilled for Harry what I guess he didn’t get from Lenny, really. In looking back now, I don’t know, but I was riding all those years with Harry. At the horse shows, and doing all of that. And then Dan was my mentor in other things. Mildred taught me how to drive. You know, I guess in that kind of a family.

Weinstein: There were a lot of shared responsibilities.
ZELL: Yes. Yes. I don’t know why, it just was.

Weinstein: Well, were the brothers close? So they just felt they could step in for one another?
ZELL: Well, there was a closeness. They used to argue a lot. I mean, to them, arguing was just a way of life. And in our house on Montgomery they’d have meetings and my mother was kind of the peacemaker among them. She was the only wife who got into these meetings. And they’d close the doors to the living room and the walls would rattle. But they’d get up and they’d kiss each other on the cheek and that was it. It wasn’t until years later that some animosities grew. As far as working in the store, they each had their thing. And when they started to argue, if it was on the floor of the store, even when I came in, you weren’t supposed to hear, even if you were standing. People thought we were going to kill each other but that was the way it grew. It was that kind of interplay that worked.

Weinstein: So each of them had a distinct role in the store?
ZELL: Well, Harry was a salesman… not a great merchant. Dan was the student of the store. We didn’t go into anything that Dan didn’t study it. He became a watchmaker very early on. When this thing became a gem society he was one of the first people in the U.S., with a third grade Austrian education, to go become a gemologist, with all the chemistry and everything else. But he was the student of everything.

And they also surrounded themselves with very talented people. Fritz Von Schmidt, who did the…. I would say he packaged the Zells. He did all the gift wrapping and did the windows and did everything else, and he and Dan used to go, when Mannings was on Tenth and Morrison… Dan and I and sometimes Marty and Fritz Von Schmidt, we’d go and have coffee. Every morning. And sit around and talk. And I spent a lot of time with Von. And he was kind of my mentor in many different ways. So when I look back now at what I’m doing, I see myself saying a lot of things that Dan taught me or he taught me. I’d say I probably massaged it over the years. But it was a nice working relationship.

Weinstein: And Milton was an optometrist.
ZELL: As was my father, originally.

Weinstein: So did they incorporate the optometry right away in this store?
ZELL: Oh no. Actually. My father became an optometrist very early. And when Milton came into the family and went to optometry school…. After he got out of college (he went the University of Washington and then went to Pacific University) they opened up a separate optical shop. They had two optical shops because they had the two of them. It eventually came back to one. And then when they moved to this building, which was 1945, where they are now, from being on Broadway and Morrison. when they went to build that building or redo it, the Spellmans had a shoe store there on that corner. Julius kind of just got out of being active in the store. He went to build and do his thing. He went off on his own tangent.

Weinstein: In ’45?
ZELL: It would have been, let’s see. It probably was ’45 or ’46. I don’t know when that whole project got started. It got started because they wanted to remodel the store and Zukor owned the building and he wouldn’t pay for anything, any improvements, or anything else. So they bought that block that they’re in now and moved the store in there. Interesting, where it used to be the silver department, the watch department in the middle of the block on Morrison. During World War Two that was Thomas Watson’s, from IBM, that was his office, that area. 

Weinstein: I didn’t know there was an IBM connection.
ZELL: Well, because of the shipyards. And because this was the biggest shipbuilding area in the U.S. So he had an office here.

Weinstein: So he was renting from you?
ZELL: I don’t know. I just know he had an office here. I don’t know that he rented from us. And then we moved into this store. They opened up the optical department, and all that.

Weinstein: So when you moved into the new store the optical department became part of.
ZELL: Well it was part of it. It was part of it in a way. The family couldn’t own it. Milton owned it because, in those days (it may still be true today) another business can’t own an optical shop. So we were partners. It was like two separate businesses. I guess that’s the way you’d put it. The Zell Bros. couldn’t own the optical. That was just the legal restriction.

Weinstein: Probably because of licensing regulations.
ZELL: I presume so. I don’t know if that’s true or not today. Howard Stenger worked for us at one time. He is also a cousin, a distant cousin from my mother’s side, as was Bob. They were second cousins. So my mother’s mother was Augustina Freudenstein. Her sisters were parents of Bob and Howard Stenger. Bob was a dentist and Howard was an optometrist.

Weinstein: And what other than Zell cousins? Did you have other cousins in town?
ZELL: No, other than the Schwabs. Well, Richard Neuberger, because she was also a Stenger. His parents were Ruth and Ike Neuberger, who owned the Bohemian Restaurant. That was my mother’s second cousin… or my mother’s cousin. Richard was my mother’s second cousin. I can’t think of any others that I know of.

Weinstein: And so did you say that your dad kind of left the jewelry business?
ZELL: Yeah. He left being active in the store.

Weinstein: And he went into other businesses.
ZELL: Yes. He bought buildings and remodeled them. That kind of thing.

Weinstein: That was an interest of his anyway. He liked to tinker…
ZELL: Yes. Yes. The normal things of business he didn’t want anything to do with.

Weinstein: So would you characterize him as being very creative, I mean, imagining doing things?
ZELL: Yes. He used to be in the Civic Theatre. He should have been an actor, probably, in his life. He loved the theater. He was in the Civic Theatre for years, with Ron Myron and Edris Morrison. They used to have a Julius Zell Award at the Civic Theater. I don’t know whatever happened to it.  [It was] for original plays. I’m trying to think of who the writer for the Oregonian was that won it one year, because I presented it. I forget what his name was. He loved that. He loved that.
They had very close friends. Certainly the Burnetts, Sally and Norman Burnett. Harriet and Mo Mesher, and of course the kids. I knew Ronnie and Ted, who were our age. The Schildts. Steve Schildt was the son who grew up with me. I’m trying to think of who else.
Well then, Russell Kaufman, the Oppenheimers, they were very close friends.

Weinstein: What about your experience in the military? How did that come about? Were you drafted? Were you in ROTC?
ZELL: No. Instead of being drafted I enlisted in the Air Force. I went to Lackland Air Force Base.

Weinstein: How did your parents react to that?
ZELL: Well, it was part of what you had to do, or wait to be drafted. In those days draft numbers were coming up.

Weinstein: So this was in the early ‘50s.
ZELL: 1949. Yes. I enlisted in ’49. I was going to Vanport and I decided it was better than the other people getting called up. I figured in the Air Force you don’t have to shoot a gun. So we went to Lackland Air Force by train. You took the train to Los Angeles, and then another train to Dallas, or Houston, I forget. And then we got on a Tunaville Trolley type of train. I mean with the cane seats and that type of thing. There were some blacks on the train also going to the Air Force. So we all started to get together to talk about where we were from. And they stopped the train. And they said, “No, you guys got to sit up here. They sit in the back. And you can’t get together.” And we refused. We said, “We’re all going into the Air Force. What difference does it make?” The train didn’t move. Until we separated. So I was at Lackland. That was in November. We lived in tarpaper shacks, because that was what they had temporary down there.

Weinstein: Do you remember anything that set you apart in the military, as far as being Jewish?
ZELL: The only time, and this was in either Lackland or Biloxi, Mississippi (I won’t say which one it was because I don’t remember). They marched you to church on Sunday. So they are all going and … etc., and they get down to two left. Brothers named of Bernstein and Zell. So I figured we’re all going to the services. They stop in front of the Catholic Chapel and the Bernsteins go off and I went down to the other. That was the only time I can ever think that there was something. Nobody paid any attention to it.

Weinstein: They just disregarded the fact.
ZELL: Disregarded the fact. I don’t know of any place where there was any discrimination. I’ll put it that way.

Weinstein: No singling you out, or.
ZELL: No. No.

Weinstein: And how long were you in the Air Force?
ZELL: Almost four years. I got out three months early because of my mother. Two months early.

Weinstein: So what were your duties?
ZELL: Well I went to Biloxi. I went to radar school and then became a radar instructor, which was interesting. From there I went up to Denver, which is a great GI city. Bill Tannenbaum, I think his wife used to live here, they were in Denver. And they had a son, Kenny Schneider. Don’t know why his name was different. But, anyway, they were very nice to me, and I met other Jewish families there. There was one family named Minsk.

Weinstein: Was Leslie living there yet?
ZELL: By then I’m not too sure whether she was or not. Whether she was married and living there or not. I don’t remember. There was a place where she was. But I don’t think we got together at all. I knew her parents. And probably did. I don’t remember a lot about it. There was a family named Minsk who had some daughters. Their house was open to me. Anytime I came in there was a place for me to stay in Denver. It was a great GI city. And I became a radar instructor there.

And you talk about discrimination, there was a Japanese boy in the class, and he said, “Just call me Smith. You can never pronounce my name right, so just call me Smith.” So I did. And I got called up before a court martial board because somebody had reported that I was discriminating against him by calling him Smith. And we had to get him down to prove that I was not the one; that he had said to just call him Smith. In those days nobody pronounced Japanese names. From there I went to Korea.

Weinstein: What did you do in Korea?
ZELL: I was in a radar shop. I headed a radar shop.

Weinstein: The war was going on then.
ZELL: The war was going on then. I was there at the end. at the transition. Some of it wasn’t so nice, but other parts of it…. You’re young and you get away with stuff and you don’t remember it. You remember mostly good things. You had houseboys in the barracks, so you didn’t have to do a damn thing. They took care of everything.

Weinstein: Who were the houseboys? Were they Koreans?
ZELL: Korean boys. We had a radar shop and we’d run into characters. And one kid, can’t even think of his name now, he couldn’t read a schematic, but he could take apart a very technical piece, like a gyroscope, and put it back together and it would work. He had hands of gold. And he was a good scrounger. I learned to scrounge from him. And we went out and found a brand new wind tank from a plane that had been left, and we brought that back. And we had fresh water. And he fixed the whole thing. At Christmastime they took a tree and took old tubes, and if you turned radar on them they’d shine. So we had a Christmas tree, with all the tubes, all bright-colored. You know, we made coffee at night and it was freezing…general mobilizations? All the things that go on at night. But I learned a lot from it I learned a lot of how to be around people and work with people and that type of thing.

Weinstein: And so you got out of the military in ’54.
ZELL: Yes. And then went into the store. And spent my apprenticeship mostly in the jewelry area. But, of course, Marty was there and Lenny was there and, of course, Harry and Dan. Lenny being my cousin, Marty my brother, Uncle Harry and Uncle Dan. Plus, some other long time employees. I never wanted to compete with them. My first job was vice president of watchbands. Every son of an owner has to have a title. Dan had arranged, and, it was a theory I still use today, it was a theory of how the watch bands were arranged and how they were put into trays into show, and from there, he took that all over. It’s a long theory. I wont’ go into it here, but it works.

Weinstein: Does it deal with color? With size?
ZELL: Yes. I ended up calling it “editing.” To give you a quick example, first I had trays with men’s and ladies’ watchbands. And these were watchbands you added onto watches. You had cords and others straps. So it was an extra sale. Maybe from $8.95 to $15.95. But in those days that was a 20% to 30% increase in the sale. Then the men’s were divided between yellow-gold filled, white gold or stainless steel, and then there were a few pinks. There were still pink-gold watches in those days. The ladies’ had the same thing. And then they were divided by expansion and non-expansion, and within the tray by price. But it was fast. You didn’t have to go fumble through. You only showed them what they needed to know. Bang. So you could take that theory anywhere. And that theory was used everywhere. It was something that we just… and it was probably Dan’s doing. But you had to decide what you were going to divide it by.

Weinstein: So this was kind of a secret code that the salespeople knew.
ZELL: It was just an editing. It’d be like, if I used it like, for example, women’s blouses. You’d go in and you’d like to see all your size there. You don’t care whose name is on it. You want the whites together, the reds together, the blues together. That’s what you want. Well, that’s the way you buy. First you get your size, because if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t make any difference what it is. Then you want to look at whether it’s light or colored or whatever. So that makes it easy shopping for you. So it was an editing type of thing. You could take it… if you went up to the china department, for a long time we divided the dinner ware between what we call, put all the bone china patterns together, all the cream colored chinas, which was a….? Felspathic? type of china, Lenox, and that type of thing. And you had the European, which was kind of a grey white. And then you divided by companies within that. Because people who wanted the cream color didn’t want the white, and the people who wanted the white didn’t want the cream, so why send them around. The only thing is that we put all the whites together. Because people who want white don’t want to look around at anything else. I remember we used to have one red pattern. What do you do with a red pattern? So we stuck it with the whites because it was … You learned to put it so that it made it faster for people to go. Sometimes it was by brand, sometimes by price. There were…? three levels. I am sure that in every business if you look at it there is that kind of thing. So, anyway, from that, we took it out throughout the store. This was all Dan’s doing. You get it ready, so that when the customer is there you don’t fumble. You had samples in the.

You know, now the store’s put everything in the cases and that’s it. But in those days we had to under stock, and you had some samples of things, like men’s leather goods. We sold very expensive wallets at that time, so we had some out, but if somebody was interested in alligator we could take out a nice felt pouch that had all the wallets in it, and then you could show it, so that they didn’t have to look at all the other stuff. Everything was done that way throughout the store.

Weinstein: There’s a lot of psychology in that.
ZELL: It was all psychology. That was Dan’s part of it. He was the student.

Weinstein: But you learned a lot from that. how that carried over into what you do now.
ZELL: Oh yes. I would say today if I looked back between Vaya? And Fritz and maybe a couple of the other people… you know, Paul Lavender. Did you know Paul Lavender. He worked for the store. He came to Zell Bros. as a refugee from Germany as an efficiency expert. He became the silver buyer. He was a good one. We learned a lot from him… record keeping and certain types of things that we learned. Oh yes. Even in the basement, just the boxing system we used.

Weinstein: Tell me about that. That’s very interesting. 
ZELL: Well, they had it set up, especially at Christmastime, it was set up. Julius and his like of remodeling bought sock drawers, you know, that had the glass fronts on them. And they had a bank of them, maybe, 10 – 15 …? On a shelf. And then they were divided by price range. The kind of jewelry that went into these went by price range. I figured whether it was by earrings, bracelets, etc., or whether it was just by price range, and then within that. But anyway, so when you put the sales slip you knew it was a pair of earrings for $25 you went to a certain box. You didn’t give them a $2 box on a $15 sale. And all the paper was precut. Starting at Christmastime my mother and Helen would sit in our house on Montgomery and Prospect and they would sit starting September 15 and start tying bows. That was every night.

Weinstein: So everything was ready.
ZELL: Everything was ready. It was all done. We became so well known for our packaging that we saw papers on the market the year before they came on the market. And that was all Fritz Von. …
Jack Esser told me that his wife and his sister-in-law worked in the basement. All the time. And that my mother and Aunt Helen would work until Helen got married and they opened up across the street, where Nordstrom’s loading is, with Stenger’s beauty supply, which happened to be part of the family’s, my mother’s side of the family’s, thing. 

Oh, the bow-box system was very organized. So things went fast. Because you’re working fast. My daughter Lauren was going with a young boy, Dan Skolnik, who lived here, and he was a mechanical engineer. And he had fallen in love or learned or whatever a program of project management called the Critical Chain, written by Goldref?, who happens to be Jewish. So I kind of got interested in it and I went to one of the meetings with him with all these high tech people who are basically mechanical engineers, talking about the process of getting jobs done. And I’m listening to them and I’m saying, you know, this was Zell Bros. basement. We just didn’t know it was a theory. We didn’t have a name for it! But it was. It worked. It worked exactly the same way as they were doing. They had two lines. William Wexler used to work for us in the basement. Who else? Hal Broughten from Broughten Lumber. Just the other day we were reminiscing about it.

Weinstein: So you incorporate all this information in your presentation.
ZELL: Well, yes. You take. you bend it. You massage it. Yes. Zell Bros. is very unusual. We have a whole warehouse system. The basement was an unbelievable thing. We had two refugees working down there, Simon Kinaut and Sam Rubens. Did you know Sam Rubens?

Weinstein: I don’t think I did.
ZELL: His daughters went to the University of Chicago. Sam had been a diamond cutter in Latvia and he had come here as a refugee. And worked in the basement. We had it all set up. In fact at one time we had to count plates, you know, stacks of plates. He came up with an idea of putting a red tag every six plates. So when you had to take inventory of how many you had, you walked over and counted the red tags and how many were on top.

Weinstein: It seems so logical.
ZELL: There was a way of what we called folding cups, where you made four cups sitting on the side sit into a saucer. So you just count those. So, yes. It was innovative because the Zell men were innovative in their own way. They tried to make things so that when you got ready to make the sale there was no hunting around. Every Sunday we went down to the store. Every Sunday morning that I can remember we were at the store. They were going through drawers, checking out things. I would go through all the under stock to make sure that whatever was sold. took off the floor… got replaced. We did this every Sunday morning that I can remember. So it was ready to go.

Weinstein: So that carried over, probably into your personal life, as well, as far as keeping a household going…
ZELL: Oh yes. Well I can’t say about a household going, because I can’t spell household, so I’m not…But in my business, you know, Dan Zell had a very interesting theory which he called being 70% ready. And the whole idea was to keep working on ideas and get them 70% ready so that when the time would come, they were ready to go…. To be finished off. And that was. it was a way of life. I don’t know that I’ve turned it into an actual system. But in those days, it was just done. We did it. You kept going back to it and back to it and back to it. Maybe it wasn’t ready. But when the time came…

One idea I can remember and I’ll just tell you, it lasted, I’ll bet it was in a folder four or five years. In those days they had silver trade-ins. Go back before that. We used to take trade in on watches, so if you had a watch and wanted to buy a new watch, you got $25 or whatever it is. As Dan says, “You can’t get the new one on until you get the old one off.” And the silver trade-in thing started when… Well, he had another one… we used to keep Timexes under the counter for when somebody wanted Timexes. Somebody asked, “Why do you keep Timexes here?” He used to say, “A Timex on the wrist today is a Rolex on the wrist tomorrow.” 

So when the silver prices started to go crazy, as they did in the ‘60s, early ‘70s I guess, and the silver firms had trade ins and people came who wanted a china trade in. And we didn’t know what in the hell to do with it. You know, we couldn’t take it back, couldn’t put it on the shelf. But we started to play around with the idea, and kept working on it, and working on it, and working on it. One day Gary White from Newberg (White’s) came in. In those days we had collectors plates. He used to come and buy collector’s plates because he didn’t have access to them, so he used to buy them from me. You know, when something would come, he would buy my overstock or whatever. So he came in and he says, “Al, people are asking me for old plates matching plates and things like that. Do you have anything like that?” And of course we had this thing almost ready to go, and we turned it in and then we also did it for Christmas. It was unbelievable! It was, at one time, 20% of the dinnerware department’s sales were trade-in. The Zale Corporation made them stop it because they couldn’t figure out how to bookkeep it. It was phenomenal.

Weinstein: So, what you took in, you sold to White.
ZELL: We sold to him. We found out that it was cheaper to break it up. Rather than give somebody a discount. I can tell you a story, somebody we know, I won’t give you a name, 25th anniversary, comes in and brings back their wedding stemware, odds and ends. ?… in those days there were shrimp cocktails, wine glasses and all this stuff. And they wanted to be able to buy something. Well I think they had about 35 or maybe 40 pieces, odds and ends. And they picked something that was very expensive. And I think the trade-in value against what they were buying was $12.50 per glass. We give a percentage off, so it was a percentage, item for item. They thought they gave us the biggest screwing in the world. We wrote up a $2500 sale. And they bought everything. The most expensive thing we had. I have enough war stories about this to go on about the trade-in thing. …. And then it got too big, and then “Replacements” was just getting started.

Weinstein: Tell me again what you said… Did you say a percentage of your business was on …
ZELL: When I left the store in ’83 or ’82, it was approximately 20% of the business.

Weinstein: People thought they were getting …
ZELL: In the first place, they would tell me, “I hated that stuff ever since…” You haven’t got enough tapes to go… It was an interesting thing. It came out-of the idea… because Dan did this type of thing. When you had a problem you keep working on it. You just don’t say it’s a problem. Another one, once we had a lot of kickbacks, and nobody could figure out what it was.

Weinstein: What is a kickback?
ZELL: A return. Somebody who doesn’t like it and returns it. Whatever. We kept track of it. We didn’t know what to do. So one day, we had a young man named Terry Hiller, who worked in the stock room. Far more talented than that. One of these kinds of kids who could do everything. Hardest job was keeping him doing something.

Weinstein: What you wanted him to do.
ZELL: Yes. But he says, give me all this stuff. And he came back. And he says, here it is. There are 14 categories: one for silver, one for china, one for crystal, Different points into which you could put all these complaints. Which I’ve closed down for my business to ten. Just because ten sounds better than 14. And what we did was make a checklist. And when the staff was working with somebody, we made sure they showed the customer the checklist. “I want to make sure I’ve covered all these points.” Because those were the points that were kicking us in the fanny. We did a lot of commiserating about problems, the solutions, and what could have done or should have done.

Weinstein: Brainstorming is what they call it now.
ZELL: Brainstorming. Yes. A lot of things happened. One of them, for example, was plates with an embossed design like this. Some of them were heavier embossed. The way china is made, you use a form about 25 times. But the first one has always got more depth than the last one because the clay gets absorbed. You get build up. Somebody comes back in and says, “You sold me seconds.” “Why did we sell you seconds?” “ Well, look, it’s all different.” Well, now we’ve got to explain to someone, this is the nature of the beast. That there will be some differences, because they are made by hand. ….? Pieces. Things wouldn’t stack. You try to stack plates and they’re never level They’re never even.

Weinstein: Because they’re individually made.
ZELL: No. Because the clay shrinks in different ways when they fire it. It shrinks 25%. This was 25% larger when they fired it. And if you try to stack plates, especially, they never stack like they would be absolutely even.

Weinstein: So did people accept that?
ZELL: No. We had to tell them that. Because people would say, they don’t stack. It was all these kinds of things. My father, Julius, used to say it’s not the big things. It’s the trivia that kills you. It’s the little things. So we made sure that when people would talk about it, you had to be ready. We made handouts. We used to have a handout about dishwashers, and how to take care of it.

Weinstein: I have some still in my drawers, caring for linens. I have some.
ZELL: Yes. Because when dishwashers came out, people wanted to know, can you put it in the dishwasher. So we did a lot of research. It was because of Dan’s thinking that when you did something, you went into it deep. And you found out before everybody else did. So we knew, somehow we had to learn more about it than our customers knew. When we went into the linen business, I spent some time. I learned all about linens.

Weinstein: I wanted to ask you about that. I know one of the things that you are interested in are paperweights. And there’s a whole science and history and culture about paperweights.
ZELL: Yes. How it got started was interesting. Baccarat came, and of course we were a big account of theirs, but they had paperweights. Norman Yeon, an architect, had a shop on 10th Street, I can’t think of the name of it, but he had all kinds of contemporary stuff. And he had Baccarat paperweights, so the president of Baccarat was in the store and he says … ??he’s got paperweights. ??We don’t have them. What do you know about paper? Well there’s a paper weight society and they have a meeting. I said, “Well, I’ll go to it.” And he introduced me and that’s how I started to learn. We had bought some Italian paperweights, but not really high quality. So you learn it because it was brand new. That’s how we got. And that developed into the art glass business. We were doing art glass before art glass had a title. It all came out of that.

Actually, we had art glass when I came in the store in 1955. We had art glass. Orrefors had what they called a studio collection. In fact some of the pieces they’re making again today. All done just like the art classes make today. We had Venini, which is an Italian line. In those days a top Italian line. After the way, Dan, in his study, we used to import crystal from Germany and Italy. Glass figurines from Italy, like Victorian ladies, and all that. In fact, one time when I was in Italy, I figure this would have been in the ‘80s, late ‘70s, and I walked into one place called Nerovian Toso, [?] which happens to be a 400 year old Jewish family in Milano. I’d written I wanted to come see them. Oh Mr. Zell, she says, and she pulled out the list of all the things we used to buy from them, Dan Zell used to buy, all by mail. 

They were very innovative. The four brothers were very innovative. They looked to do things that were different. During the Depression, in the early ‘30s, they had a $100 wedding sets, zircon, and for many years, zircons were known nationally as the Zell zircon, because diamonds were too expensive. So they used zircons. After the war, they jumped on jade before it was… Some of our ads were in trade magazines all over the world on jade. They were always doing that.

Waterproof watches. Dan, because he was a watchmaker. They wanted… In waterproof watches. Rolex had the water Rolex Oyster. It was the first one. Of course, we couldn’t use the name Oyster, so they called it Turtle. That’s where the Turtle name came from, but Rolex made it for them originally. And they just put our name on the bottom.