Len, who read the
Wall Street Journal
from cover to cover every day, did not read
Barron’s,
so I am not sure whether he headed for the exits before the bloodbath occurred or went down with the ship like everybody else. He certainly loved talking about his investments, affectionately circling their spasmodic gyrations in the newspaper stock tables and regaling me with the juicy details of their latest vertiginous exploits. To Len, the stock market was a Balzacian saga, with the same heroes and villains resurfacing again and again. None of this meant anything to me at the time; Wall Street was as foreign to me as the lute. Nobody I knew owned stocks. I did not even know what stocks were, only that they were associated with Republicans. Nor did I know what bonds were, only that they were no fun to talk about, even for Republicans, which is why Len didn’t own any. I had no idea what Republicans were or what they stood for; I only knew that whatever they stood for, my family stood for something else, though there seemed to be less money in it. I knew that Republicans liked Nixon, while we liked Kennedy, and that members of the political entity inexplicably nicknamed the Grand Old Party could detect electrifying qualities in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personality that were not apparent to the naked eye, and probably still aren’t.
Len had grown up in North Philadelphia, a few blocks from Connie Mack Stadium—the ballyard named after Cornelius McGillicuddy, the ostentatiously patrician, maddeningly unpredictable owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics. Connie Mack, who always wore a three-piece suit and snappy headgear, had built a magnificent team in the 1910s, winning several World Series championships, but had then broken the city’s heart by capriciously dismantling it. He had assembled an even more potent squad in the late twenties—purists believe the 1929-1931 A’s were the best team to ever take the field—but enraged by his avaricious players and the state’s refusal to alter its notorious blue laws, which banned all commerce on Sunday, including sporting events, he busted up that club as well. This broke the city’s perennially broken heart for a second time, and this time it stayed that way. The A’s were listless and appalling for the next twenty years, usually finishing last or next-to-last, and by the time they limped off to Kansas City in 1954, the Phillies had supplanted them for pride of place in the city’s affections.
The upscale A’s had always been the Republican team, while the inept Phillies embodied the sewer values of the Democratic Party, and by the time I was born, the city was turning solidly Democratic. The A’s could boast of their glorious tradition, which they later revived in Oak-land, after their disastrous sojourn in Kansas City; the Phillies, except for two brief, shining moments, have been disgracing themselves both on and off the field virtually without interruption since 1883. Nothing in American history is more astonishing than the ability of the Philadelphia Phillies to maintain an enthusiastic fan base, given that the club, by any objective, nonemotional, nondelusional analysis of the factual data, is the least successful franchise in the history of sports. This attests to the fact that there’s no fool like an old fool, that youth is wasted on the young, and that a sucker is born every minute—except in the Quaker City, where the pace at which women give birth to chumps may move along at a slightly snappier clip. In my family, for instance.
Len was the youngest son of a man who was by then the oldest living firefighter in the City of Brotherly Love, as well as its last surviving tillerman. Mohr père was at least ninety when I met him, a widower living alone in a typically joyless North Philadelphia row home and a bit hard of hearing. I did not know what a tillerman was at the time, only that he was the oldest one extant, and that after him there would be no others. Very few white people were still living in the neighborhood by this point, but this was his home, and he was not leaving it. Like my uncle Joe, he had an ornate spittoon sitting in the middle of his living room but not much else. He was not a charmer. I never heard Len talk about his mother. His older brother, on a dare, had dived off a cliff into a creek or pond and died on impact when his body splintered to pieces on the rocks below. He was still in his teens when this occurred; he had leaped off the cliff to impress a girl. Len frequently warned me that the best swimmers were the ones most likely to die in the water, as they were the ones who took the most chances. Given that I did not learn to swim until age thirty, this admonition was unnecessary. Besides, I was not the kind of person who would ever jump off a cliff, least of all to impress a girl.
Len had a high school education, no more. Working as a salesman for several years before launching his own operation, he had parlayed his fortune into a well-appointed house in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, a ritzy suburban hamlet poised just across City Line Avenue on the tony Main Line. Scions of tillermen who hailed from the streets of North Philadelphia were not supposed to end up on the Main Line or in any other tony locality, and Len was proud of his achievement. But his accomplishments were his and his alone; he felt that most of the people who ended up in slums deserved to be there. He identified with the class he had joined, not the class from which he had sprung. Anything that smacked of class warfare was anathema to him; men made their own breaks, period.
One day I got to see where he lived. The house was a graceful Colonial with a manicured lawn, a white picket fence, and an Airedale despotically frolicking behind it. Len would constantly expound on why Airedales were tougher than German shepherds or Dobermans; he had convinced himself that there was an ongoing argument regarding the relative fighting abilities of these breeds—indeed, that the dispute was the center of a national debate that had been raging since Grant took Vicksburg. Airedales, he grumbled, suffered from a deceptively cuddly image—those avuncular little goatees didn’t help—and this explained why they had made no formal combat appearance in the Pacific theater. Yet, when the chips were down and an Airedale was locked in a battle royal with a Doberman or a German shepherd, it was invariably the Airedale—no longer so cuddly, no longer so cute—that would prevail. He never divulged the source of his data, but I eventually came to the conclusion that he ceaselessly wandered the streets of Bala Cynwyd keeping his eyes peeled for Dobermans and Alsatians that his pet Airedale could savage just so he could pad the statistics.
Len’s wife, Barbara, whom he referred to as Babs, was a White Russian who was reputed to have served as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Of his three children, the one he talked about most was a son named Bing, who hated school and had opened an auto-repair business at the age of sixteen. This would have been something of a disappointment to many fathers, as few would dream of prevailing in the rag trade just so they could bankroll their kid’s career as a grease monkey. But Bing made his own rules, and Len respected them. Each of his two daughters was a nurse, each married to an osteopath. I never met either of them, as they never visited the store. They were allegorical creatures who inhabited some vaporous paramedical utopia and were seen only in photographs. They, too, resided in swish neighborhoods. Osteopaths at the time were viewed as witch doctors by society at large, but Len clearly reveled in having bookend sorcerers for sons-in-law, as it was in his nature to go against the grain. All in all, it was quite a family.
By the time I met Len, the Mohrs, to use one of his catchphrases, were “feeling no pain” financially. Len drove a gray-and-white Pontiac station wagon the size of Kentucky, played pool on a sleek table in the basement of his house, got to wear the kinds of fancy Ban-Lon sweaters he would never dream of selling to his roughneck clientele, and was the beneficiary of seemingly unlimited free time. He was never down in the dumps, rarely lost his temper, didn’t hold grudges, was always chipper and upbeat. He was the first man I ever met who did not drink to excess—to the best of my knowledge, he did not drink at all—and the first potential role model who was neither pushing up the daisies nor pulling hard time.
As noted, Len’s dilapidated clothing store was located in a humdrum, out-of-the-way neighborhood. There were no other retail establishments nearby, save a grocery and a convenience store, not much parking, and not a whole lot in the way of pedestrian traffic. It was as barmy a location for a clothier’s as any I have ever seen; opening what he referred to as a haberdashery where he did was like opening a nightclub in a cemetery. It wasn’t just a case of our being off the beaten track. We were marooned.
The store occupied the entire first floor of the two-story building. Upstairs was a space where Len stored—“concealed” is more like it—stock he had given up any hopes of selling. I always thought of this room as his personal shrine to Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, which in this case involved vintage women’s footwear. Len allowed me to go upstairs exactly once in the seven years I was on his payroll, and only then to see if pigeons were flying through a broken window and nesting up there. They were not. What I did find were hundreds upon hundreds of shoeboxes filled with fading, decaying, unsightly, ludicrously out-of-fashion alligator-skin wedgies. For whatever the reason, Len wanted me to see them, but only that once. Perhaps it was his way of discouraging hero worship on my part, since this hidden cavern of unsold shoes provided incontestable evidence that even the master of retail sometimes nodded. Shakespeare, Bard of Avon, had his
Pericles, Prince of Tyre;
Len Mohr had his alligator-skin wedgies.
Beneath the store was a dank, unfinished basement with a floor made of some harsh substance that seemed to antedate coal. The first room one ventured into was empty, but the second had a toilet mounted clumsily on a pile of concrete blocks. There was also a sink but no hot water. It was as black as night down there—the only illumination provided by a naked forty-watt bulb suspended from the ceiling—and it reeked of oil. It had the feel of a dungeon, a pit lacking only a pendulum. There were no rats on hand, though there should have been; perhaps they, too, had been put off by the scent of kerosene and pulled up stakes. I dreaded going down there—I kept expecting Charon or Nosferatu to turn up. Because of the condition of the lavatory, it would mortify me when female customers would ask to use it, as I did not deem it appropriate for women to relieve themselves in such unladylike surroundings. When they resurfaced, they would try to act as if they had not just visited a cesspool. Sometimes their clothes would be smudged with dirt. It was not at all refined. I could never understand why a man as prosperous as Len didn’t bother to install a presentable bathroom in the building where he spent most of his waking hours. Apparently, he didn’t want people getting into the habit of using it. Their first visit was usually their last.
Len sold cheap, serviceable clothing intended to be worn by working-class people who were going nowhere fast. The product mix included black naval officer’s brogans, Wrangler jeans, Fruit of the Loom underwear, Converse sneakers, Hanes sweatshirts, and masses of off-brand merchandise. Our inventory consisted almost entirely of attire Len himself would not have been caught dead in, dapper ex-marine that he was. He stocked virtually no women’s or girl’s clothing, because he believed that females were fickle, that feminine styles quickly went out of fashion, and that when you tried to reap the distaff whirlwind, you always ended up stranded with a funeral pyre of out-of-favor goods you would never be able to unload. What’s more, it was merchandise that would take up valuable retail space forever, because Len would never admit that he was wrong about anything, so he would never get rid of old stock, no matter how unlikely it was that he would ever sell it. Instead, he would stuff it beneath tables already groaning under the weight of men’s slacks or sequester it upstairs in his retail equivalent of a mausoleum, his own personal potter’s field for alligator-skin wedgies.
This was not because he was cheap; it was because he had inexhaustible faith in his abilities as a salesman. By virtue of being a crackerjack salesman, Len had amassed enough cash to get his own business off the ground. But to remain a crackerjack salesman, he needed to believe that there was nothing he could not sell, no matter how unfashionable, grotesque, or
dépassé,
given a favorable economic environment and a suitably impressionable customer. On the back wall hung a rack of men’s outerwear: dozens of blue denim jackets that were popular with men of all ages, and an assortment of reasonably snappy windbreakers and rain slickers. But all the way over in the corner hung a foreboding collection of merchandise that even the most wretched, clownishly attired consumer would steer clear of. Much of it was plaid, but plaid in the wrong places. The top-of-the-line items in this fashion ghetto were a pair of dinky golf jackets that nobody in this defiantly working-class neighborhood would ever dream of buying. You couldn’t even get anybody to look at these Medusas in gabardine: One glance and the customer might turn to Naugahyde. “Moving the merchandise” was a very popular expression back in that era, but this merchandise never, ever budged.
It is worth noting that in the late fifties and early sixties, irony had not yet arrived in America, and certainly not in Philadelphia, so no secondary market of snarky hipsters salivating over the prospect of sporting fusty old duds at their tongue-in-cheek social gatherings yet existed. This was the era of shiny, pointy-toed Cuban-heel shoes and space-age fabrics like Orlon; everyone wanted to look suave and cool, like Chubby Checker. It would never have occurred to anyone in that social milieu to deliberately dress like a fuckhead.
Len was an extremely generous man. True, he would never extend credit to his customers, because he believed that extending credit to the misbegotten merely encouraged them to become even more misbegotten. But he would give people things, as he had the common touch. He realized that one of the most important elements in dealing with the poor was to enter their physical space without acting as if you were going to contract leprosy. He would drive me home to the project at night and not worry about getting his station wagon nicked or his tires slashed. He would drop off turkeys for poor people the night before Thanksgiving, which required venturing into their crummy neighborhoods. And he would make surprise deliveries of clothes to the unemployed, usually merchandise that had been hanging around for a year or two but not the out-and-out slop that nobody wanted.