Dickie Loeb, with his brilliant academic record and seemingly impeccable behavior, was such a paragon that he had been cited as a model after whom JR’s two youngest children, Marion and William, were to pattern themselves. The crime horrified the nation at large, but none were more shocked than members of the tightly knit wealthy and prominent South Side German Jewish families to which all of the principals belonged. The Leopold and Loeb “crime of the century” inspired Meyer Levin’s best-selling book Compulsion and the film of the same name, as well as the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rope. In May 1924, Loeb’s son, Richard “Dickie” Loeb, collaborated with his lover, Nathan Leopold, in the appalling kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks, which quickly made him far better known than his father.ĭickie Loeb and Nathan Leopold murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for “the thrill of it.” With JR, whose talent for organization equaled Richard Sears’ gift for generating sales, the company prospered however, by 1908, a basic tension between the two had grown so strong that Sears retired from the business and JR became president, with an ally, Albert Loeb, as vice president.īy 1910, the mammoth Sears plant stretched across 40 acres of a residential area on Chicago’s West Side.Īlbert Loeb was a fine partner however, his life was interrupted by horrific personal tragedy. Moreover, he had arrived just in time to address the catalog firm’s major underlying problem: inefficient follow-up to superb marketing. ![]() Thus, by 1895, Roebuck was out of the business and Rosenwald-universally known as JR-was in, with a $37,500 investment, which gave him a quarter interest in the company. ![]() And, in a life-changing connection, he found such a manufacturer in Julius Rosenwald, who not only provided the suits but would also transform the company-as well as his own future and that of Richard Sears.Īlvah Roebuck, meanwhile, had become exhausted by the workaholic habits of the frenetic Sears at a time when the company was also in need of an infusion of new capital. When 5,000 requests poured in for a cheap men’s suit, the swamped Sears searched for a manufacturer of cheap suits. Richard Sears, although a brilliant marketing genius, was a dismally disorganized businessman whose scintillating catalog copy was often so effective that it produced orders too massive to be filled. By 1893, the two men were partners in Sears, Roebuck and Company, a catalog business headquartered in Chicago. ![]() The brash 22-year-old, who according to a contemporary “could sell a breath of air,” paid $12 each for the watches and sold them for $14 apiece to fellow station agents, who could then resell them at a profit.Īfter repeating the process with additional shipments and clearing almost $5,000, Sears moved on to Minneapolis, where he joined forces with watch repairman Alvah Curtis Roebuck. When a COD shipment of watches was refused by a jewelry company that year, Sears bought the lot. And the story of “Sears Roebuck,” which began in 1885 with Richard Warren Sears, an ambitious local railroad stationmaster in North Redwood Falls, Minnesota. ![]() The first major catalog was established in 1872 by traveling salesman Aaron Montgomery Ward, who, while journeying through the American countryside, observed the keen desire of rural customers for quality “city” goods at prices they could afford.Īaron Montgomery Ward, another great Chicago philanthropist-in a completely different way.īut this is the Julius Rosenwald story. The vast American mail order catalog industry was born in Chicago, where it was headquartered for decades,fulfilling the needs and the desires of families on farms and in small towns throughout the nation. Before the internet, before television, even before radio, families throughout America spent long winter nights fantasizing over their Wish Books.
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