Thoughts on the closing of Rich’s Downtown store

All the people in the elevator had long faces. Maybe nowhere else on Earth is an old department store so close to the hearts of people as Rich’s is to the people of Atlanta and Georgia.

How can they bear to close the doors of the institution an immigrant boy named Morris Rich established on Whitehall Street in 1867 - almost before the ashes of Sherman’s fires had cooled?

How can we bear to lose the neighbor who bought cotton when Georgia farmers were close to starvation because of the low prices their bales were bringing, who redeemed scrip for schoolteachers during the Depression when the city didn’t have cash, who went out with clothes for people left standing on the street, barefooted and in their nightgowns after the Winecoff hotel fire?

Philanthrophy

The list of neighborly, loving things Rich’s has done for Atlanta is almost endless. You find that family’s names on hospitals. You find that family’s money in educational foundations. Richard Rich, grandson of the founder, spearheaded the fund-raising movement that built the Woodruff Memorial Arts Center in memory of Atlantans who lost their lives in an airplane crash at Orly Airport in Paris.

But the thing that brought Rich’s closest to the average Georgian was that it dealt so imaginatively and with such a friendly spirit in everyday matters, in the need for schools and winter coats, in putting a Christmas train together at 4 a.m. on Christmas Day for a little boy, in giving credit to a schoolteacher who longed to buy a piano for her talented daughter.

As a long-time Rich’s watcher, I know the store lost much of its hometown affection in dealing with customers after the death of Dick Rich and the sale of the store to a chain. From time to time there has been an effort over there to regain some of the class the old store was born with.

Never the same

New administrations came and went, always with the wistful idea that Rich’s true spirit could be recaptured. It never was and I guess disappointed customers stayed away and that’s why the dear old place is closing.

It’s possible that the new directors didn’t know that Rich’s routinely exchanged anything a dissatisfied customer brought back, even if it had been bought somewhere else 20 years ago.

I’m sure they put in a more modern telephone system, which disoriented old-time customers. We were accustomed to calling one number, which we knew by heart like the police and fire departments’, and asking for clerks by name. (The actress Norma Shearer, who bought a fur coat at Rich’s, didn’t think it amiss to call up and asked to speak to “Miss Annie Mae,” the fashion expert who helped her with the purchase.)

Unique employee

Maybe nowhere else in the annals of commerce was there a switchboard operator like Tommie Sears, who daily called old age pensioners who lived in the old Kimball House hotel and needed a friend to check on their health and give them a report on the weather.

Atlanta has lost many things off and on in its history, but I’m not sure we can sustain the loss of Rich’s Downtown.

Celestine Sibley wrote a book on the history of Rich’s called “Dear Store.” Her column appeared regularly in the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.