End of a Legend

"She is as silent as Ulysses S. Grant. . . . She is as wise as Benjamin Franklin and just as self contained. . . . Napoleon fought his battles with his marshals and so does Mrs. Netcher."

The object of this Elbert Hubbard rhapsody was Mrs. Mollie Netcher Newbury. He might better have compared her to Hetty Green. From her huge office, bare except for a big rolltop desk and green velvet couch, Mrs. Newbury had run Chicago's Boston Store for 42 years with a hand as firm as it was unknown. So doing, she had become a State Street legend.

Last week, at the age of 79, she had had enough of moneymaking. She sold the store for $14,000,000 to a syndicate headed by Edgar L. Schnadig, board chairman of Chicago's up & coming mail-order house, Alden's Inc.

No Time to Travel. Chicago's seventh biggest department store, the Boston had always reeked with a quaint, Victorian mustiness. In its old-fashioned ways, it reflected its owner.

She kept aloof from her customers, her employes and the press. She lived for the store, building it from the small, five-floor institution she inherited in 1905 into today's 17-story, half-block-long edifice. In the process, she parlayed the $3,500,000 fortune left her by her first husband into $20,000,000.

She had taken to business the way most women take to marriage. That had attracted her first husband, Charles Netcher. A silent, fantastically hard-working man, he had lashed himself from a $1.50-3-week job to ownership of the Boston Store by working 18 hours a day, sleeping on store-counters at night so as to save time.

Noting that one Mollie Alpiner, the store's buyer of knit underwear, was as shrewd and diligent a worker as he, Charles Netcher married her in 1891. They had four children (none of the three still living has any interest in the store), but business came first. Once Mrs. Newbury commented: "We talked business just as other people talk love."

After his death in 1905, Mrs. Newbury took over. She ran the store so shrewdly that sales kept soaring. How had she done it? "It was just within me, that's all," she once said. "I used good judgment and good people. . . . I ran the store with silent force."

Time on Her Hands. The Boston had its biggest year in 1922, when sales hit $32,500,000. Since then it has slipped (1945 sales: $16,000,000). Even the diligence of Mrs. Newbury could not make up for the store's failure to modernize. But she did her best.

Every morning she arrived at the store at precisely 9:45--with her second husband, Saul Newbury, 76, whom she married in 1913. He usually worked over his stamp collection while she ran the store

At 4:30 the Newburys left for a quiet evening in their Edgewater Beach Hotel apartment. They have few friends do almost no entertaining. Mrs. Newbury never had the time nor inclination to spend the money she made. To pass the time, she and her husband used to go to the movies six or seven times a week, but now they go only about twice. Said Mrs. Newbury last week: "I really don't want to go much any more. But you have to do something."

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