St. Louis was “first in booze, first in shoes”—the latter largely because of the Edison brothers. Sons of a Latvian immigrant, Harry, Irving, Mark, Sam, and Simon grew their business into the nation’s largest retailer of women’s shoes, providing pumps and T-straps any working girl could afford. By 1926, they’d reached $1 million in sales, and not even the Great Depression slowed their expansion. During World War II, when the U.S. military requisitioned the nation’s sole leather, Sam Edison put in a casual hat bar, hoping a little millinery would tide them over. The minute rationing lifted, sales soared.
In 1958, sales topped $100 million. The following decade, they began to diversify, acquiring the Handyman Home Improvement Centers, then 5-7-9 shops, aimed at teeny-boppers still swooning over the Beatles, and then United Sporting Goods and Fashion Conspiracy, then J. Riggings, Oak Tree, and Jeans West. By 1973, Edison Brothers had 1,000 stores; six years later, that total had doubled.
In 1987, Julian Edison was succeeded as chairman by his nephew, Andrew E. Newman, and a non-Edison took over from Bernard Edison as president. In 1989, Edison Brothers added what looked like the hottest new idea in entertainment, video arcades, along with the Dave & Buster’s restaurant chain. But by now, most of the business was apparel, and most of that menswear, and the small-format mall stores were taking their toll on revenue.
In 1995, the company that had shod and energized St. Louis went bankrupt.
Andy Newman had resigned as chairman six months earlier, his father had left the board, and Peter Edison had gone off on his own. (He later bought two Edison chains, Bakers and Wild Pair, out of bankruptcy and ran them for a while.)
Andy remained chairman of Dave & Busters for five years, but he had other irons in the fire. He and Mark Vittert had started the St. Louis Business Journal, which expanded to seven journals before they sold it. He now serves on the boards of Lee Enterprises (which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), Washington University, and the Children’s Discovery Institute, and is chairman of Hackett Security. Over the years, he’s chaired the board of the St. Louis Science Center and St. Louis Children’s Hospital and presided over Civic Progress.
His parents are Evelyn Edison Newman, who grew up listening to marketing talk at the dinner table, and Eric Newman, a lawyer who collected coins—and became one of the nation’s leading numismatic scholars, hunting and finding a rare Audubon etching sought for more than a century.
Evelyn worked a while at the family company, then struck out on her own with the Evelyn E. Newman Group, inventing fundraisers so creative they become St. Louis traditions: the Greater St. Louis Book Fair, the Gypsy Caravan (benefiting the St. Louis Symphony), the ScholarShop (providing scholarships), the Camelot auction (for the Arts and Education Council), the Little Shop Around the Corner (benefiting the Missouri Botanical Garden). She was the first director of Forest Park Forever, and we owe her for the idea of the Sophia Sachs Butterfly House.
Eric worked many years at Edison Brothers. At their dinner tables, he provided the logic for his wife’s right-brained whimsy. Between them, they drove millions of dollars to the right places. They also traveled the world, Eric with his careful scholarly mind, Evelyn greeting every new person or idea with wide-open curiosity. She challenged St. Louis’ stuffy status quo whenever she could get away with it. Now 95, she’s been scheming about food trucks and learning to blog. Eric’s 104 and steering both the numismatic education society and the foundation they’ve established. He’s been selling portions of his collection and using the proceeds to make even more gifts to St. Louis institutions, focusing on education and libraries.
Those Edison Brothers shoes took off in a lot of directions.
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