Finding Thalhimers

Here’s what I do know: this photograph was taken at a Thalhimers “Old Timers” party in 1959. Old Timers was an employee recognition group that recognized Thalhimers associates with careers of 10+ years. Can you imagine that today? How many people work for 10+ years at a single company? Even more unbelievable, some Thalhimers associates worked at the store for 50, 60 and even 70 years! Almost unfathomable today.

The gentleman in the photo is my great-grandfather, William B. Thalhimer Sr. Do you recognize any of the ladies?

It’s just a check, but I’ve been fascinated by it for years. It lives on the wall of my dad’s office, but he has no idea why he even owns it.

Why was it issued to the William Thalhimer & Sons store in 1871 from Planters National Bank? What happened that was so very important that the check was kept by generations of our family? Was it an insurance reimbursement for a fire or flood at the store? I can’t find any information about such an event at 601 East Broad, the store’s location in 1871, but fires and floods certainly impacted lots of other stores in the area. There was a major flood in Shockoe Bottom in 1870. Did the store suffer damage during the Civil War and not receive insurance money until the Reconstruction Era? Was signee W.L. Cowardin related to Richmond’s jewelry store, ironically still in business after nearly 150 years? Surely he was…the jewelry store was founded by W.H. Cowardin. Did William Cowardin and William Thalhimer talk business over pints of beer?

Yes, it’s just a check…but it’s also an unknown story. Your guess is as good as mine!

Although Finding Thalhimers is about my father’s side of the family, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my maternal grandmother Mimi. Mimi (Edalleen Morgan Brush) encouraged my sisters and me to read books from a very early age. I have so many memories of her reading books to us…among our favorites were Ping, Eloise, The Wreck of The Zephyr, Tikki Tikki Tembo, The Polar Express, Caps for Sale, and too many others to name. She was the children’s book buyer for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for many years, and brought hundreds of books into our lives. As we grew up, she encouraged us to read “big kids” books — from traditional classics to modern ones.

When I was about 10 years old, I won a book contest at Collegiate for my book “The Creaky House Mystery.” I made the dust jacket out of blue felt, and illustrated it with colored pencils. I was allowed to invite one guest to join me for lunch on the stage in the cafeteria/auditorium, and I invited Mimi. I have such fond memories of eating cherry pie on stage with Mimi, and delivering my “thank you” speech. No one was listening because they were all eating lunch (and we were 10, for Lord’s sake), but I said, “Thank you to Mimi for encouraging me to write. I intend to be a famous author someday. Thank you.”

It goes without saying that it was a poignant moment when I showed Mimi my book for the first time yesterday. Immediately, she asked me to sign it and we took a photograph of us looking at it together.

Thank you Mimi for encouraging me to be a reader and writer. I love you.

Come one! Come all!

Not only will October 16 at the Virginia Historical Society celebrate the long-awaited (for me, anyway) release of Finding Thalhimers, but it promises to be the biggest Thalhimers reunion since the store became Hechts in 1992. Be sure to invite anyone who worked or shopped at Thalhimers!

The event will take place at the Virginia Historical Society (corner of Boulevard and Kensington) in Richmond, VA, on Saturday, October 16 from 1-3pm. It will feature book signings by the author, special acknowledgment of former Thalhimers associates, Snow Bear, door prizes, story-sharing, memorabilia, and authentic six-layer chocolate cake bites.

Hope to see you there!

Thalhimers at Richmond's 6th & Broad, 1936

Hey, Richmonders: remember Thalhimers’ headquarters on Broad Street between 6th and 7th?

Before the aluminum façade was installed in 1955, Thalhimers was a series of old buildings that were gradually connected as the store grew to encompass most of the block. The aluminum panels, installed by Reynolds Metals, allowed Thalhimers to appear as a continuous, modern structure at the heart of the city. It was the first aluminum-covered façade in America.

This photo shows Richmond’s downtown Thalhimers in 1936. At the time, it was the only Thalhimers in existence. The store would expand across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee over the 50 years to come.

I recently had a stellar customer service experience that reminded me of Thalhimers. Afterwards, I asked the helpful phone representative if I could email his manager to commend him, and — unbeknownst to me — he gave me the email address for the CEO of the company. Read on…

Hi, Jerry…
I’m writing to let you know about the superb experience I just had with Branders.com. I ordered 600 non-woven bags, of which 200 “aqua” and “khaki” bags were not true to the colors as described (they were more like deep turquoise and brown) and the navy logo was nearly unreadable. I thought I would just settle for them and accept that I had made a mistake, never again to order promotional materials online. When “Happiness Fairy” Catherine contacted me and put me in touch with Gabe Santiago, he understood the problem and quickly replaced 200 aqua and khaki bags with 200 white ones, perfectly displaying the logo. I haven’t experienced customer service like this in a long time and want to commend Catherine and Gabe for helping make my order perfect. Now I have gorgeous bags to promote the book I’ve written! Thanks so much.
Best…
Elizabeth

Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt
Author of /Finding Thalhimers/
Dementi Milestone, 2010
Pre-order your copy today at http://www.FindingThalhimers.com

Elizabeth,

Thank you for your business, for allowing us to fix our mistake, and for your note. I wish we had gotten it right for you the first time, though you might not have discovered how serious we really are about making people happy. We are lucky to be in a “happy” business – there aren’t many people out there glumly celebrating events and milestones with logoed stuff. We feel blessed to be involved in these events in peoples’ lives.

I am especially grateful for the opportunity to have pleased you as a customer, given your family’s long history of retailing magic. Obviously, we are a specialty retailer; we think we have our spiritual roots in the great retailers that went before us. My library is full of books – popular and obscure – recounting the stories of these fascinating companies and the people and personalities that made them. Congratulations on your book, soon to be the newest in my library (I just added it to my Amazon pre-order list). I understand it was 12 years in the making (and many lifetimes before that). I am eager to read it.

I appreciate you taking the time to give Catherine and Gabe the special recognition you want them to have. To help you get that done for them, I have copied every member of Branders in all of our locations throughout the world on this email. If there is anything more I or anyone else at Branders can do for you, please let us know. We love to be of service.

All the best,

Jerry McLaughlin

Chairman & CEO
Branders.com, Inc.
The World’s Largest Online Seller of Promotional Items
Branders has put more logos on more stuff for more people than any other company on the planet

I often rode the Trailway Bus from Bowling Green to RIchmond to get my braces adjusted. I walked from the Bus Terminal (located where the City Hall is now) to the dentist office near 6th and Franklin. Afterwards, I walked through one of the two big department stores. If Miller & Rhoads, I stopped in the book department which was on the first floor. If Thalhimers, I stopped at the lunch counter on the first floor. If it was lunch time, it was so crowded that I sometimes had to wait behind the stool of a customer who was finishing up. I always ordered the same thing. “May I have a piece of pound cake with ice cream and chocolate sauce?” I can’t remember the cost but I usually had only a few coins with me so I’d guess the price to be less than fifty cents. This was back in the mid 1940s.

– Frances Burch

My family had a very special relationship with Thalhimers. My grandfather was Louis D. Junes and he owned and operated Angelo’s Hot Dogs. When the city of Richmond exercised its right to eminent domain to make way for Sixth Street Marketplace (forcing my grandfather to sell all of the properties he owned along 5th Street including Angelo’s, Pop’s Lunch, Bunny Cleaners, and an insurance company). Mr. Thalhimer came into the restaurant and offered to provide a space in Thalhimers basement to reopen Angelo’s! All of the store fixtures were removed and — with great fanfare — “The Famous Hot Dog King” came back to life in the basement of the most wonderful department store in the whole world! They even opened a smaller Angelo’s at Thalhimers Westmoreland. Thank you again Thalhimers for all that you did to preserve a wonderful Richmond landmark restaurant!!!

– Kathy Hoffarth Pantele

Got a Thalhimers story? Share it! Just click “Leave a Comment” below and type away.

We had some older friends over for dinner this weekend, and when they saw my book cover both of them said, “I used to work at a department store like Thalhimers!”  Their memories of their hometown stores were nostalgic, old-fashioned, and totally charming.

My friend Tom recalled his local store in rural Wisconsin that had pneumatic tubes that would “suck” a container full of money up from the sales floor up to the accountants on the mezzanine so they could make change and send it back downstairs to the customer. The containers traveled ingeniously by air compression through the tubes, whirring back and forth across the ceiling.

Thalhimers had such a device when they were located at Richmond’s 5th and Broad Streets in the early part of the 1900s. My great-great-grandfather Isaac and his brother Moses sat at desks on the mezzanine of their store, Thalhimer Brothers, where they would ink purchases into their ledgers and handle customers’ transactions. Here’s a little excerpt about it from Finding Thalhimers:

With each sale, a salesperson put the customer’s money and a certificate of transaction into a wire basket. Pulling the ropes of a pulley caused the basket to spring across the ceiling from the sales floor to the mezzanine. There, Moses inked his pen and entered each transaction into a large ledger book. He placed a receipt and the customer’s change back in the basket, and back to the cashier it would fly.

The traveling basket delighted Isaac’s children, and many years later his grandchildren, who would cradle mugs of hot Horlick’s Malted Milk as they sat in the balcony and cheered the bouncing basket along. Sometimes Isaac would let them fetch the money from the basket and hand it to him. To the children, this was not just a balcony: it was Seventh Heaven.

Now pneumatic tubes can only be found at bank drive-thrus, where they transport my deposit to the banker and a lollipop in return (if the banker sees my daughter waving frantically from her car seat). Imagine if instead of swiping your credit card at Target, you and your kids could watch your money go flying up through a tube and come back with your change…and a lollipop, of course!

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When I recently came across my old Thalhimers credit card, I ran my fingers across the raised letters just like I did the day I got it. It was 1989, so I must have been about fourteen years old. Just before the ribbon-cutting ceremony opening the newest Thalhimers store at South Park Mall in Colonial Heights, my dad, William B. Thalhimer III, called me to come forward.

Standing before the store’s employees, Dad said, “Elizabeth, this is an important day. It’s a day of excitement and fresh beginnings, but not just because hundreds of people are waiting to celebrate the new store. Because it’s the day you receive your Thalhimers charge card, the first new account opened here at Thalhimers SouthPark.” With a hand on my shoulder, Dad handed me a charge slip and a pen. “Sign right here, Elizabeth,” he said. “Congratulations!” Everyone cheered.

As Dad went on to encourage employees to open credit accounts for new customers, I carefully signed my name in cursive on the line beside the X. I couldn’t believe it! My very own credit card.

Do you remember your first credit card? Do you still have it? Did it have a story? If so, please share…