Florida

Manchester, TN

Simon Shoes, Henderson, KY

Wedding of Sori Chase and Eli Wechsler

Back in Yeshiva

Dairy Star Closing for the Season

October 20, 2023:  We started off the week in DelRay Beach, FL.  We spent four weeks in Florida, solely to help my kids in Boynton Beach.  Time to head back.  We said goodbye to the kids and were on the road by 8:30 AM.  We drove 13 hours and stopped overnight at a Comfort Inn in Manchester, TN.   

October 21, 2023:  This is me davening the next day outdoors.  When I stop overnight I always daven outdoors.  The air was crisp and refreshing.  

We had a good breakfast of oatmeal and were back on the road at 9:30 AM.  Normally I take 65 in Kentucky up through Louisville and into Indiana through Indianapolis.  However, Google maps led us to the western part of the state through Henderson, KY which is a twin city across the river to Evansville, IN, up through Terre Haute, IN traveling along Route 41.  Going through Indiana on Route 41 was using the back roads of Indiana.  I drove through many small towns and stretches of farmland, ending up in Hammond, Indiana.  Quite scenic.

In Henderson,Kentucky I stopped by Simon Shoes.  Simon Shoes was honored by Rand Paul in June 2022 on the Simon Bros 100th year anniversary.  I receive Rand Paul’s monthly newsletter.  Since then I wanted to stop by and say hello.  They are the remnants of the Jewish merchants that dotted small town America throughout the South and the entire country.   They are an old style shoe store that fits their customers and they shoe generations of families.  There are also few of these types of stores that fit shoes properly.   Many of these communities had Shuls and Jewish cemetaries.  Brian Simon, the third generation to operate the store, told me that Jeiwsh merchants just closed up shop when they were old.  Mostly, their children were not interested in keeping the store going.  July 5, 2022 article when they were honored by the Governor of Kentucky, Rand Paul..

A downtown Henderson shoe store has risen from humble beginnings to honors from a senator

Chuck Stinnett   Special to The Gleaner  July 5, 2022

HENDERSON, Ky. – Simon’s Shoes has long been an anchor in downtown Henderson, a magnet for shoppers from near and far seeking quality shoes in a range of sizes wider than a typical department store offers.

It could hardly have had more humble beginnings. Yet more than a century later, a U.S. senator recently visited the store to present it a statewide honor that celebrates its rich history.

Store founder Jacob W. “Jake” Simon immigrated to Henderson from Lithuania in 1910, following his two brothers who made Henderson their new home years before.

He disembarked from a train at the local Union Station and hailed a fellow who provided transportation with his horse and wagon. Simon, who knew essentially no English, uttered three words he had memorized: “Mrs. Youngbecker’s Hotel.”

That’s where, in an earlier letter, his older brother Ben had told him to go.

“Mrs. Youngbecker was German, and I could talk to her,” Simon told a Gleaner reporter more than 60 years later. 

“Her hotel was located where Tapp’s Funeral Home is now,” he recalled. “The food there was wonderful — good German dishes.”

Within a few weeks, Simon had gone into business for himself. Like many immigrants without a trade, he became an itinerant peddler. His brother bought him his first $26 of merchandise to peddle.

“I had a big pack on my back and two smaller packs under my arms,” Simon, who stood 5-foot-6 as a young man, said in the mid-1970s interview. “They were filled with buttons, laces, combs, bedspreads and needles. I carried all my stock.”

His first sale was a comb, for 10 cents, according to a short history written many years later by his granddaughter, Ellen Simon.

“I walked into the county to sell my wares. I went to Baskett Station, Spottsville, all those little country towns. Because I couldn’t speak English, the people were at first a little suspicious of me,” Simon said.

In those early days, farmers unsure of this foreigner would permit him only to sleep in their barns. “Sometimes he was so lonesome he would cry because they wouldn’t keep him at night,” Ellen Simon wrote.

“After a while, my face became familiar to them and my language seemed a little less strange,” Jacob Simon recalled. “Then the children began to look forward to my visits as if I were Santa Claus. The wares in my packs fascinated them.

“In the hot summer months, elderly ladies would spot me coming down the road and run out to the cistern where they kept cold jugs of buttermilk. They would draw me out a cup full, and it would taste better than anything. Those ladies began to call me their ‘boy.’ When they saw me walking toward their houses, they would say, ‘Here’s my boy!’ “

Eventually, some came to trust the young peddler and allowed him to spend the night in their farmhouses.

“In a short while, I grew to love these people … I was a stranger in a strange land, and they made me feel at home,” Simon recalled warmly.

Jacob Simon gradually prospered. Within two years, he was able to afford a horse named Prince and a buggy — perhaps a Delker-brand buggy manufactured in Henderson.

In 1916, he became an American citizen and he mastered English, speaking with only a “very slight” accent, according to his son, Larry.

After four years on the road, Simon established a small dry goods’ business on Elm Street, then moved to First Street. In January 1918, he sold his business to enter the army in World War I, though the war ended before he was deployed overseas.

Simon returned to Henderson and went into partnership with Arnold Kahn, who operated a small shoe and clothing store at First and Main streets. A year later, Kahn sold his interest to Simon.

On Jan. 19, 1919, Simon’s store was established, though it rented only a fraction of the big brick building it occupies today. In the 1950s, for instance, a portion of the ground floor of the building housed the Dairy Whip lunch counter and a jewelry store; the second floor directly above Simon’s held a lawyer’s and a doctor’s office, while the top floor housed a meeting hall.

The store proved to be a life-changing event for Jacob Simon, and not merely professionally. He periodically visited Louisville, where he purchased merchandise from a wholesaler named Louis Grossman. He became acquainted with his supplier’s daughter, and in 1921 Goldie Grossman became his wife. They remained together more than a half-century.

The store survived the Depression. But his poor upbringing, his lean early years in America and the turmoil of the Depression left a powerful impression on Jake Simon.

“He was a very conservative man,” like many who lived through the Depression, Larry Simon said in a Gleaner interview several years ago.

“My dad was always very conscious to pay his bills on time,” he said.

“He was very frugal,” Larry said. “He was a concerned person, a worrier.”

Simon’s in recent decades has principally been a shoe and leather goods store. But for decades, it sold other merchandise, ranging from men’s suits and ties to long underwear. Beneath a large Florsheim sign on the side of the building in 1955, a smaller sign advertised Duck Head overalls. It even sold tobacco canvas that was used to protect tender young plants from late spring freezes.

During the infamous 1937 Ohio River flood, “We had to stay open on Sundays. Farmers wanted hip boots,” Larry Simon said.

“Farmers came in February or early March and bought on credit,” he said. “In November, after they sold their tobacco, they’d pay him.”

Larry joined the business in 1949 and, despite resistance from his father, nudged the business toward specializing in footwear.

Eventually, Larry bought the business, then later purchased the big building at First and Main. Years later, he acquired the former J.C. Penney building next door, which helps house the store’s large inventory.

During the past generation, Simon’s Shoes has become a destination store, drawing customers from Evansville, Owensboro, Louisville, even St. Louis, plus tourists traveling on Ohio River riverboats in recent years.

Today, the business is owned by Larry’s son, Bruce, who became the third generation of the family when he joined the business in 1979.

In 1975, then-85-year-old Jake Simon told The Gleaner, “When I draw my last breath, that store will be in my consciousness.”

The elder Simon might well have been astonished that U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, on June 28 visited the store to proclaim Simon’s Shoes the Senate Small Business of the Week.

“Congratulations to the entire Simon family and to the whole team at Simon’s Shoes,” Paul said in a statement entered into the Congressional Record. “I look forward to seeing their continued growth and success in Kentucky.”

Brian Simon and myself purchasing socks.

We arrived back in Chicago at 7:30 PM. 

October 24, 2023:

 On Tuesday October 24, 2023, I was back in Yeshiva.  Tonight is Sori Chase’s wedding in Lakewood, NJ.  I had tickets but cancelled.becuase I could not miss Yeshiva.  I called Ephraim Chase, the Kallah’s father, the night before and said I cannot make it to the wedding. At 10:00 AM my son-in-law calls me and insists that I go into the wedding.  He booked a ticket on the 2:17 PM flight to Newark.  Normally I would be in the Bais Medrash at this time and would ot even know I was getting a phone call.  My Chavrusa was late and I was pacing out of the building listening to a Shiur.   My proble was how to get to Lakewood from Newark.    B’Siatta Dismaya, Uri Kahanow was on the flight.  He was leaving the NIC conference early.  He was a customer of mine when I worked and  had wanted to contact me.  He had a driver picking him to to take him and Avi Katz  home to Lakewood and I got a ride with him.  

I was able to surprise the family by showing up at the wedding.  I stayed at the wedding until the end at 12:30 PM, went to Yakov Chase’s house and took a LYFT to the airport at 1:45 PM.  Took the 6:00 AM flight back to Chicago and was back at yeshiva at 10:00 AM.

The Chosson and Kallah.

Aaron Chase, Ephreim and Chavie Chase’s son.

October 25, 2023

I come back to the Yeshiva and discover that Chaim Weg is a new Bais Medrash Rebbe.  I walked into his Shiur and hugged him. He told me that I am a Navi because  I told him six months ago that he should be.will be a Rebbe in Skokie Yeshiva.   I sold him my previous house in 2021 and he paid top dollar for it.  I felt terrible that he paid such a high price.   I only used a broker because I did not want to meet the people purchasing my house at the top of the market.  I did not want to get involved at all, but it did not work.   I told him that I would guarantee appliances for twelve months.   I gave him $20,000 to pay for repairs and other incidentals, and gave him another $2,000 to support a Talmud Chacom.  Last month I had the outside railing of the house scraped and painted.  I had wanted to do this for years.   If I would not have given him the money I would not have been able to look him in the face.  He is a Talmud Chacom and I am associated with him. Boruch Hashem. 

October 26, 2023

Dairy Star is closing for the season and I loaded up.