My father, Marvin Sugar, owned a men’s clothing store for thirty years. The store was in Langley Park, in one of the four shopping centers that lined the intersection of University and New Hampshire Avenues. With the help of his older brother Harold, he started Halmar Brothers in 1960. For the next three decades, he worked alone out of the small retail space. He was satisfied that he was his own boss, enjoyed working with his customers, and earned a good living. He worked long hours but always seemed happy when he came home with his shirt pocked stuffed with a wad of money removed from the register.
He was 20 in 1950 when he married my mother, Thelma. They were high school sweethearts, and my father wanted to provide for her immediately. College was out of the question, but in the post-war years, the American Dream didn’t necessarily require higher education. Hard work, some smarts and support from the family was enough to get started. He finally landed a steady job at a clothing store—Cohen’s Quality Shop in Virginia.
Working for years selling suits at someone else’s business honed his sales skills, helped by a genial personality and a great memory for names and previous purchases. He had the talent of looking at a new customer and literally “sizing him up,” accurately guessing his measurements. He was confident he could take his learned skills and the knowledge of the trade to start his own store.
It must have been difficult in the beginning. I recall stumbling across a folder of old business papers that included tax forms from 1961 in which he declared a gross income of $6,300, not a lot even by the standards of the time. But our family, which by then included me, my brother and a baby sister, had moved into a three-bedroom split-level in a new subdivision just off University Boulevard. We eventually had two cars, whole-house air-conditioning, and a color TV, so I guess we were pretty well-off.
My father always seemed happy at work. Occasionally I would ride my bike to Langley Park after school (back then if you were ten, it was no big deal) and ride home with him, my bike tucked into the trunk. Usually, I would come into the store, and he would be contentedly sitting in a wooden captain’s chair near the sales desk, reading the newspaper or a magazine. He seemed perfectly happy to wait for customers. I don’t believe I ever saw more than one person in the shop at a time. If he had a customer, I would quietly sit out of the way as he attended to them, marking a new suit with tailors’ soap in front of the three-way mirrors, tugging on a pant leg or pulling at the shoulder line; a yellow cloth tape measure slung around his neck. He would chat amiably all the while, asking about family and work. He built his business by growing a clientele that would come in reliably twice a year to buy a new suit, a few shirts, ties, and occasionally an overcoat. By the late sixties, he had a large list of names and addresses culled from his alteration tags. He would send postcards to encourage a visit, and that was enough to maintain a profitable business.
As time progressed, Langley Park changed. New generations of Asian immigrants replaced the white, middle-class business workers, and his evergreen clientele grew older and less in need of business attire. Shoppers had changed, and people went to malls, not strip centers. Still, he welcomed new customers and was satisfied with the business he had.
One summer morning in July 1980, two men came in, robbed the store, and then, on their way out, shot my father in the gut as he lay curled on the floor. Losing blood, he still managed to get up, go out of the store—locking it as he left—and stagger next door to the tile shop where they called an ambulance. By the time I arrived at the hospital, he had been wheeled into surgery. It was touch-and-go for the next few days. Mom, heavily fortified with Valium, and the family stayed at home waiting. It was the last time I ever slept in my childhood bed. By the end of the week Dad was out of danger, but he spent the next 70 days in the hospital, struggling to recover.
The men who shot him later killed a security guard at a W.Bells in White Oak, and that’s the crime for which they were ultimately caught, convicted, and sentenced to life. So we were never given the satisfaction of seeing them pay specifically for what they did to my father. But Dad was lucky—he hadn’t died.
When he finally came home, Dad was a shell of his former self, thin, weak, and fragile. Gradually he recovered, and almost immediately wanted to get back to his store. My mother was a “nervous wreck” at the thought of going back to the scene of the crime, but for my dad, it was the most important proof he had survived.
Fortified with an electronic door lock, he spent another 15 years at Halmar Bros. The stores around him slowly left, along with the business friends he’d known for years. Things finally changed so much that, facing an untenable rent hike, he finally retired at 65, making my mother less of a “wreck,” as she often complained. I’m that age now.
Years later, when he was in his last days, I was sitting with him in an emergency room bay at Holy Cross Hospital, waiting to move to a room, and we were discussing the differences between his business and mine. He said how much he enjoyed owning his store, and how proud he was that I had grown a business doing something that I loved and had leveraged it into something larger than myself—something he had never managed, but he was still satisfied to go into work each day. Maybe it was the drugs in the IV drip, but it was the first time I had ever heard him being the least bit wistful or sentimental. It actually scared me. The last thing he told me when they had situated him in his room was, “The biggest mistake I ever made was closing that damn store. Don’t ever retire, you’ll regret it.”
I’m not sure what “retirement” even means these days, but I do know that I’m still more than satisfied arriving at work each day.
