Dear Elizabeth,
My father, Bernard “Barney” Raskind, was an employee of Thalhimers for more than 40 years before his retirement in the mid 1960s. He died in 1969. As a shoe buyer for the basement ladies shoes department he often came home from work with stories about the people with whom he was associated.
He worked with people like Bert Brent, Howard Klugman, Effie Haight, and Robert Green. These people were also long time Thalhimers employees.
Though a serious and conscientious employee, he loved to express his sense of humor at various Thalhimers parties. A line of women’s shoes that was sold in the basement was Enna Jettick. He would don a dress and be known as Miss Enna Jettick. I have attached an old photograph from March 14, 1957, of one of these parties.
One of the most interesting stories I can tell you happened just a few years ago only a year or two before Mr. William Thalhimer died. I was sitting in Padow’s Deli when I noticed Mr. Thalhimer sitting a few tables away having lunch.
I went over to Mr. Thalhimer and introduced myself as Harris Raskind and said that you might not know me, but my father worked downtown for 40 years. He shook my hand, looked up at me and said “Oh sure, you mean Barney.”
How remarkable that he remembered my father more than 40 years after his death and about 45 years since his retirement from service at Thalhimers.
Sincerely,
Harris
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As a sidebar, I shared this lovely note from Harris Raskind with my father. He said, “I remember Barney Raskind! My first job at Thalhimers was working in the Men’s Furnishings department where Bert Brent was the buyer. Barney was the shoe buyer and I knew him well.”
Thalhimers was, indeed, a small world! Please reply and share your own story…
Finding Thalhimers 
My Aunt Fern Randall worked for years as a waitress at Thalhimers all through the sixtyy seventies and early eighty’s I was a eastern Kentucky child she would come to visit in the summers and tell me stories…..describe the Christmases there I was thought she was so cosmopolitan, I regret I never got to witness the glamour I envisioned in my head..I did Follow a little in her footsteps by working in mens furnishings at Dawhares a Kentucky based department store in the early Eighty’s Nothing like the hum and atmosphere of a finely tuned retail establishment, everyone left feeling a little taller in those days ( insert wishful sigh here)…..