Israel
Himelhoch (Cropped from The Detroit Free Press Photo on “Personalities” Page,
05 February 2018)
Israel Himelhoch, the renowned Mr. I., died in 1973 at age 87.
Because he was the last surviving brother, his long tenure, and the performance status the
store achieved, he was by far the best-known. He had none of the empire-builder
traits of his father and brothers, having first been a lawyer in New York
before joining the store in Detroit in 1915, eight years after it opened. He made the
most in his life as a Detroiter. He dined weekly at the Statler Hotel, lived in
the Whittier Hotel on Detroit’s riverfront, and took regular morning
swims, walks, and rode horseback on Belle Isle. He was a Wilsonian
Democrat, a vivid contrast to his staunch Republican brothers. He was the only
brother with a college education, having graduated from both Columbia University and
Harvard Law School. A brilliant student, he financed his education with a
series of scholarships and extra financial awards he received three years in a
row. As part of one scholarship from the Curtis Publishing Company, he led a team of 50,000 magazine agents. He
accomplished all this as a high school student on summer vacations, traveling the Midwest to major cities canvasing key office buildings throughout the territory.
He had both the equivalent theoretical and technical
merchandising management knowledge of any top-rated Harvard Business School
professor, but as a merchant, he was far removed from the skills of a
Herman Himelhoch. His grasp of the sales promotion goals concept and its sophisticated
implementation were light-years ahead of his three brothers combined, but his
delegation of Mose Himelhoch’s financial and
operational control to a Controller executive was disastrous.
Two of his strong convictions were counterproductive to the
store’s growth: his obsession
with downtown Detroit and riding the coattails of the J.L. Hudson Company. From
1954 until 1965, the most opportune time for expansion which coincided with the
store’s peak dominance, he
refused to expand without Hudson’s. When he did, Hudson’s chose an inferior location, and in the meantime Himelhoch’s™ lost market share.
His greatest asset was the tremendous respect and trust he
universally commanded whether people agreed or disagreed with him. His greatest
weakness was his gracious patience and generous tolerance in listening to
others. Whoever got to him last, won, and that was always his wife! Chuck was
only an infant when his mother, Lilian Goldstein, Israel’s first wife, died, but he recounts being told
this was true then. He is “absolutely certain it was true in the case of my
stepmother, who he brought into the store in the position of top
decision-making management. She was an accomplished teaching and educational
administrator, but never understood the retail business.”
Israel was a trustee of the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra and the Detroit Civic Theater, member of the Detroit Library
Commission, the Economic Club of Detroit, director of the Detroit Shopping
News, the Retail Merchants Association, the Better Business Bureau and the
Central Business District Association. He served as president of Temple Beth
El for five years and was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the
Michigan Regional Labor Board during the Depression.
Next Page -> Charles
Himelhoch-3rd Generation President of Himehoch’s™
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