The New York City Seventh Avenue Garment District has been the center of fashion in the United States for generations. Historically, stores on New York's Fifth Avenue featured the latest styles because these stores would get their clothes directly from designers in the Garment District. It was at one of these stores that I worked in my first job.
This sight (picture below), of someone pushing a hand truck loaded with fabric, was quite common in the Garment District. I didn't walk through the District when I went to work, but it was an adjoining neighborhood. Before she was married, my mother worked there as a seamstress and when I was growing up my aunt worked there as a pattern maker. New York City's Garment District was in my blood, but somehow those fashion genes skipped me.
Dan Mc Coy, National Archives at College Park. 1973 Public Domain
My first job was part-time and temporary. The store was Ohrbach's, which featured high fashion at less than premium prices. I went to an employment agency to find the job and for some reason that agency thought I would be a good fit in the store. This was an interesting experience for someone who knew nothing about clothes and really didn't care much (at all) about fashion.
If I took an interest in my wardrobe it would be a serendipitous adventure. From time to time I'd buy an interesting piece of clothing, something that had caught my eye and was fun. That's how I got my purple hat. And my brocade shawl. The hat is long gone, but I still have the shawl. I love it. I think I am the only person who does.
I draped the shawl over a room divider/screen last night so I could get a picture of it for this blog. You can see it is a bit flamboyant, even by 1960s fashion standards. I think it might be the tassels that turn people off. Whatever your opinion of that shawl, you would probably agree it is not haute couture.
Below this paragraph is a picture of the jewelry department at Ohrbach's. The picture was taken in 1954, eleven years before I worked there. You can see the grand entrance. Those entrance doors opened directly onto 34th Street, which is a major New York City shopping/business thoroughfare. The store was in view of the Empire State Building. In the left of the picture you can see the cash register. That's where I'd be working.
Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain
Fortunately, as a cashier I was hidden mostly behind the counter. I wasn't in sales, or public relations, so my clothing didn't matter too much. I took an arithmetic test before being hired, because in those days, cash registers didn't compute sums. They didn't calculate tax. They didn't make change--so the person operating the cash register had to be able to add and subtract. A chart was provided that showed what the tax would be on different amounts. We would manually add the tax.
The picture below was taken in 1962. I worked at Ohrbach's in 1965, so this gives a pretty good idea of what the street looked like as I went to work back then. You can see the Empire State Building dominating the horizon.
Roger Wollstadt (roger4336)flickr. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Besides collecting money and making change, we also had other responsibilities. First of all, we were told to be personable. I don't know how personable I was, but I was certainly polite. Then, the store had a big problem with theft, and we were on the front lines when it came to detecting fraudulent purchases, shoplifters.
Ohrbach's employed undercover store detectives who wandered around, but the cash register was the final frontier, the final defense against theft. In order to understand my role in combating theft, you have to readjust your idea about how clothing was presented in those days.
There were no fancy price tags, no exploding markers, no electronic trackers. There were paper tags that were attached to the clothing with little pins. We were supposed to look at the tags, examine the pins and try to figure out if everything was in order. We would remove the pins and put the price tags aside before the clothing left the store.
One of the things we'd look for was to see if the pin was straight. The tip of the pin had to be tucked into the clothing. If it stuck out, we'd call for someone else to check on the price of the item. We also needed to be aware of what clothing was going for. Was the price on the item consistent with the price for that item we had seen before? We were supposed to challenge the customer and even alert the store detective if we were suspicious.
Store detectives were there to catch crooked shoppers. They were also there to catch crooked cashiers. Apparently, these did exist.
We carried clear, store-issued pouches for our personal possessions so we couldn't sneak out money or items. We were responsible for our own 'drawer'--that is, our bank, where the money was kept. At the end of the shift we reconciled our drawer's contents with the receipts. If the money didn't balance, we had a problem.
There was not one day, I believe, in which my drawer balanced. Sometimes it was under. Sometimes it was over. Usually by just a few cents. I don't know why they let me get away with it. I think I was so consistently wrong, they knew I was honest.
My husband can tell you, to this day I am no good with money. I can stick to a savings plan, and if I don't see money I don't think about it, but once it's in my hand, money is not safe.
Despite my problem reconciling my drawer at the end of each shift, human resources asked me to stay on when I was getting ready to go back to school.
Go figure.
I've read that though Ohrbach's was known for its distinctive, and affordable, first-line fashions, a few years later that sales persona changed. The store was sold and the new owners featured more mass market, low-end items. By 1987 that business model did not prove successful and the store went out of business.
I liked Ohrbach's. The people who ran the store were nice to me. It was a congenial place to get my working credentials, to understand what an employer would expect of me. Since then I've had so many jobs it's hard to remember. All those years, all those jobs, I've never been fired. Maybe Ohrbach's was the perfect place to start my working career.
Thank you for reading my blog. May the war end. May peace prevail in the ME and in the world.
@agmoore