Julius Lewis

For Julius Lewis philanthropy was never incidental; it was a way of life. A modest, soft-spoken man, always impeccably dressed, Julius did not seek public adulation for his good deeds, many of which were known only to a few members of his family. He exemplified the adage “Actions speak louder than words” and often followed Maimonides’ principle that the highest degree of charity is helping those in need to help themselves.

Julius Lewis was born in Memphis in 1891, the youngest child of Moses Lewis and Jennie Alperin Lewis. The primary inspiration for his generosity and kindness came from his parents, who set a precedent for helping others which has been followed by their descendants even to this day.

Moses Lewis came to America in approximately 1880 from Bardichev, a shtetl in Russia. The family name originally was Tarshis, but like that of many immigrants, it was misunderstood by the authorities and thus recorded as Lewis.

Moses began his career as a peddler with a horse and buggy. He sold his goods in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he sometimes encountered signs that stated, “No Jews and No Dogs Allowed.” His first enterprise in Memphis was a used clothing store near Main and Jackson; later he began to sell new dry goods which he purchased wholesale from B. Lowenstein. This new business prospered and subsequently was moved to the Randolph Building at Main and Beale.

Few social agencies existed in Moses’s and Jennie’s time, and they expressed gratitude for their own good fortune by helping those who were less fortunate, including other recent immigrants who came to live in Memphis. Above all, they believed in family taking care of family, and one of their great pleasures was delivering gelt to all the children in the family every year at Chanukah.

As he became more affluent, Moses was able to replace his horse and buggy with a car, and he hired a chauffeur to drive Jennie. On the first day that she was to ride in the car, the black chauffeur politely opened the rear door of the car for her. Jennie shook her head. No! She was not interested in riding in the back seat. She insisted on riding in the front seat beside the chauffeur. Jennie’s independent spirit had served her well when she lived in Russia. As the story goes, when the Cossacks came, she scrambled under the house and thus was able to escape.

Moses was a devout Orthodox Jew who was known as an authority on Jewish law at Baron Hirsch. When a group wanted to hold a dance at the shul on an evening immediately following the Yom Kippur closing service, it caused a controversy in the congregation. Moses was consulted and resolved the question by determining that once the service was over, Yom Kippur was over, so the dance could be held.

Moses and Jennie had four children, Bessie, Abe, Sam, and Julius. Julius attended school through the tenth grade, then took a business course, after which he went to work for his father. The dry goods business, however, did not appeal to him. He was interested in selling finer merchandise, so in about 1915, he started a men’s haberdashery adjacent to Moses’s store on Beale, where he specialized in Borsalino hats, silk shirts and underwear, and fine neckwear. Many of his early customers who could afford these luxuries were gamblers and bootleggers.

Jennie suffered from diabetes and was only in her late 50s when she predeceased her husband by about a year. Moses died in his early 70s in 1924, and Julius and his brother Sam inherited their father’s business. One day a man came in, announced that he was from the Internal Revenue Service, and said he wanted to see Moses’s books. “You can see them but you can’t read them,” replied Julius. “What do you mean, I can see them but I can’t read them?” demanded the irate IRS agent. Julius handed the man his father’s books, which were written entirely in Yiddish. “I told you that you couldn’t read them,” Julius responded calmly. The tax questions were ultimately settled with the help of a family member who was an attorney in Washington.

On October 10, 1915, Julius married Lena Sarsar, and they went to Chicago on their honeymoon. They stayed at the Palmer House, and Julius bought a beautiful coat for his bride. Evidently Julius already had a reputation for following in his father’s footsteps as a benevolent man who would respond to family members in need of assistance, for much to the newlyweds’ surprise, a cousin showed up at their hotel and announced that he was broke. After Julius gave him some money, he left, and the couple resumed their private time together.

The Lewis brothers, Abe, Sam, and Julius (their sister Bessie married and moved to Philadelphia), often acted together to perform good deeds—stories of their generosity abound. A woman affectionately referred to as “Aunt Ollie” (although she was not a relative), came to work in the store in 1915. Her parents had died in the yellow fever epidemic, and she never married. When she grew too old to work, Julius made sure she was taken care of financially; in the 1950s she became one of the first residents of the Ave Maria Home. Meanwhile another store employee, an Irishman named Jim Cleary, developed tuberculosis. He could no longer work and had four sons to support. Every Sunday a pay envelope was delivered to his door until his death in 1952. When various family members fell upon hard times, Julius helped by providing housing or setting them up in businesses which he enabled them to eventually own by making generous loans that they could pay out over a long period of time. He often extended credit to customers and said, “Pay when you can.”

In the 1930s, Julius helped two cousins get out of Germany. He had corresponded with an uncle who lived in Leipzig. The uncle was in the fur business and had visited Memphis on several occasions. Julius received a letter from his uncle’s son saying that he desperately needed to get his two teenaged children, Alexander Rolf and Sonia, out of Germany. Julius paid for their passage. Alexander Rolf moved in with Julius and Lena, and Sonia lived with another member of the family.

Over the years Julius became involved in a number of enterprises, some profitable and others charitable, as opportunities arose. He retained the store on Beale, setting up a cousin as manager. Through the dry goods business, he bid on work clothes for the penitentiary and penal farm. In 1937, when there was a major flood in the Mississippi Delta, the Red Cross needed single blankets for emergency shelters that had been set up in Memphis schools and at the Fairgrounds. None were available, so Julius bought doubles and cut them in half. He had a good eye for diamonds and sometimes obtained them for friends or family.

He generously supported numerous Jewish as well as civic causes and institutions. In the early 1940s, Julius read an article about Boys’ Town and, as a project, provided clothing for the boys. A Baptist orphanage requested clothes and he took on that project as well. He belonged to Temple Israel, served as treasurer of Baron Hirsch, and was on the boards of St. Joseph Hospital and the Memphis Housing Authority, which honored his service by naming a street Julius Lewis Drive.

Meanwhile, Lena, an elegant and gracious woman, acquired a reputation for her own good works. She could walk into a sick room or a home of bereavement and take charge. When relatives died, she might buy a black dress for the widow or make a lace collar for the shroud. In one relative’s home, Lena decided the curtains needed to be replaced, so she bought new ones and hung them. When she and Julius celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary, their picture appeared in the newspaper. Shortly thereafter, she received a letter with a plea for help from a destitute family in Mississippi who had just had a baby, and she sent them a complete layette, kept in touch, and continued to send gifts for a number of years. She knitted, crocheted, sewed, and trimmed cashmere sweaters to look like those in the latest fashion magazines. She could begin to make a dress in the morning, lay it out and cut it on the dining room table, have one of her children pin the hem, and finish it in time to wear to dinner.

In 1920 Lena and Julius built a home at the corner of Melrose and Harbert to make more room for their growing family. They had four children: Bobette (Bobbie), Aileen, Jack, and Erma. The Lewis home was open for anyone who needed a place to stay, whether for a night, a week, or a year. The home also was the setting for a cousin’s wedding. On Sundays the living room was often filled with friends and family who had dropped in for a visit and who sometimes stayed for lunch, dinner, or both. There was always room at the table and plenty of food, thanks to Mabel, who cooked for the Lewis family for many years. In 1950 the house on Melrose was sold and Lena and Julius moved to another home on Rose Road, where their hospitality continued.

Julius moved his store in 1933 to a building that had once housed the Majestic Theater at 145 S. Main. The building was owned by a member of the Snowden family, who recognized Julius as an up-and-coming merchant. In a gesture of good faith, Mr. Snowden offered him fixtures and six months free rent. At first the store carried both men’s and women’s clothing, but then switched to men’s furnishings only. The business flourished, and in about 1941, women’s clothes were again added. Later, keeping up the family tradition, Jack Lewis went into business with his father Julius, and in 1952, a new, upscale store bearing the name of its founder, “Julius Lewis,” was opened at the corner of Union and McNeil.

In a city in which water fountains still were labeled “White” and “Colored,” Julius Lewis was one of the earliest stores to offer charge accounts to African-American customers, one of the first to permit them to try on clothing in its dressing rooms, and the first to send an African-American woman to New York as a buyer in their children’s department. At one point during the civil rights movement, a picket line was set up and people were urged to boycott the store, despite its liberal hiring policies. Concerned about the safety of their African-American employees, Jack Lewis called them together and told them to stay home until the picketing had ended, adding that they would receive full pay and not be required to make up the workdays. Then he escorted them out the back, away from the crowd.

Throughout his life, Julius Lewis cultivated a cadre of business and personal friends, and when his health began to fail, they, along with members of his family, made every effort to share with him the same kindness and concern that he had shown to others. After his wife Lena died in 1971, Julius’s children made sure he would never eat dinner alone, and on Sundays they came to his home or invited him to theirs to spend the day. Until permanent help could be hired, Jack spent the night with his father. In the entrance hall of the home was a grandfather clock that chimed every fifteen minutes. Unable to sleep one night, Jack turned off the chimes but soon heard Julius, awake and wandering around the house. “What happened to the clock?” asked Julius, having spent years of sleeping through the night lulled by the sound of the chimes. Jack immediately restored the chimes.

Julius Lewis died in 1975. His life was a paradigm for a kinder, gentler era—a time when people went visiting on Sunday afternoons, family took care of family, and business was conducted on a handshake. He touched the lives of many who never knew that he was their benefactor and of others who remembered him not only as a philanthropist, but also as a gentleman.