On Dec.10, Lewiston-Auburn lost a prince of a man and a merchant prince – Morris Silverman.
Morris, who died at the age of 82, was not only a close family friend but epitomized for me the best of a way of life that is sadly becoming part of a bygone era – the era of Main Street, USA.
For 65 years, Morris worked in family-owned retail clothing stores, first on Lisbon Street in Lewiston and later on Center Street in Auburn. Their names — Louie’s, Edwards, the Barefoot Trader and Bargainland USA — were familiar to generations of locals who shopped there for sturdy jeans, steel-toed boots and other work clothes (which, by the late 1960s, had also caught on as fashionable casual wear).
Morris learned the retail trade from a young age by working for his father, Louis, who started Louie’s Clothing & Shoe Store. When his father died, Morris dropped out of the University of Maine to take over the family shop and keep it going.
Louie’s was one of a number of Jewish retail businesses that lined Lisbon Street in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and provided a livelihood for the area’s robust Jewish community. For Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children, these small stores were a big step up the economic and social ladder from the peddler’s wagon.
I got to know Morris shortly after moving to L-A in 1978. I developed a deep affection and respect for him. He seems to have had a similar effect on everyone he met — whether as a customer, business associate, employee, friend or neighbor. He was unfailingly affable, courtly in manner, meticulous in habit, scrupulously honest and generous to a fault. When you spoke with him, you knew he was listening intently, his head cocked to the side as if to catch every syllable.
Morris was also a devoted husband and family man, actively engaged in civic affairs and a dedicated member of Beth Jacob Synagogue and its successor, Temple Shalom. In short, he was a pillar of the community.
Morris didn’t just work to live. He lived to work. He loved his livelihood, knew his merchandise inside out, and relished the relationships he formed with his customers and suppliers. He never considered retirement and, though often ill and limited in mobility during his last few years, continued working until about a week before his death. As one story goes, he told a customer who recently came to his store looking for a pair of boots that they were in “partnership” together. If the customer would agree to pull boxes down from high shelves Morris couldn’t reach, Morris would find him the right style and fit.
By the time I arrived in L-A in 1978, the downtown retail establishments of Lewiston and Auburn generally, and Lisbon Street, in particular, were already in steep decline due to the rise of the Auburn, Lewiston and Promenade Malls. Over time, these, in turn, have given way to big-box stores, like Walmart, Lowe’s and Home Depot, and ultimately to internet commerce, typified by Amazon.
As a result, nearly all family-owned retail stores on Lisbon Street have disappeared, along with the tradition of passing along ownership from one generation to the next. The close personal relationship of small retail proprietor and customer has been the long-term victim of this shift. Taking its place have been poor substitutes — corporate platitudes about “customer satisfaction,” the “service desk” and, worst of all, the “customer service line,” answered in faraway places like Bangalore, India.
Yet I’ve heard so many warmly remembered stories of a bustling, prosperous Lisbon Street in its heyday – a cross between the ambiance of Norman Rockwell and Fiddler on the Roof – I almost feel as though I experienced it first hand.
Shakespeare gave Jewish merchants a bad name in his late 16th century play, “The Merchant of Venice,” which portrayed Shylock as a predatory, vindictive money lender. And Shakespeare was echoing long-held medieval beliefs, which saw Jews as outcasts in an overwhelmingly Christian Europe and merchants as social inferiors in a society which elevated the status of nobility, landed gentry and clergy to the top of the hierarchical pyramid.
In truth, however, the merchants and money lenders (bankers) of Shakespeare’s time, many of them Jewish, played an important role in the explosion of economic growth and cultural enrichment known as the Renaissance, which transformed a continent that had been mired for a millennium in military conflict, political instability and profound ignorance. And they continued to advance the progress of Western Civilization long after Shakespeare’s time. Their skills were eventually transplanted in the United States, where large numbers settled during the period between 1880 and 1924.
The most effective tool in the merchant’s tool kit was not what he sold but what he was. The “what” can be summed up in a single word — trustworthy. Trust is earned by those who display competence, dependability, diligence, honesty and likeability. Who, after all, would place gold or other valuables in the safe-keeping of a money lender, or pay for or consign goods or agricultural produce to a merchant on the promise of future payment or delivery, if that person wasn’t considered trustworthy?
The word “trust” is little more than an advertising slogan nowadays. But for centuries, it was the lodestar of personal commercial relationships.
Perhaps that’s the quality this community will miss most about Morris Silverman.
Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is the founder of Museum L-A and author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be reached atepsteinel@yahoo.com.
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