| When Norman Barron (SMG’38) set out in the late fifties to found a discount clothing store on an empty lot in the middle of the suburbs, it wasn’t just his wife who thought the idea unrealistic. There was no such thing as a shopping mall: suburban shoppers had only a few local choices, and often headed to city department stores to find their clothes and shoes.
But Barron, who founded the Marshalls chain, was prescient. Now his widow, Adele Barron, is setting up another legacy in their names, the Norman and Adele Barron Professorship Fund in Management at the School of Management. A part of her donation to establish the chair takes advantage of the Leventhal Challenge matching gift program, established by Board of Trustees Chairman Alan Leventhal and his wife, Sherry.
Norman Barron, who died in 2003, clearly paid attention in SMG business classes. After graduating, he worked in insurance and then travel. But with World War II, the travel business dried up. Having flunked his Army physical, he went to work for the federal ordnance department in Boston, part of the war effort. Soon he saw a business opportunity in the excess war inventory the government had on its hands. He started buying from the government, and opened a war surplus store in Salem, Massachusetts, hiring a trusted co-worker to run it. By war’s end, he had several stores, which he re-named the Salem Army Navy Stores. Then he had a better idea: a discount clothing store on an empty lot in Beverly, the Massachusetts town where he and his wife lived.
Adele Barron tells the story best. Years later, a BusinessWeek reporter noted that her husband sought her opinion from time to time. “So the reporter asked me, ‘What did you think of his plan for Marshalls?’ And I told him exactly what I said to Norm. ‘You are going out of town, you’re going to take this big empty lot, you’re going to stick a store in it, you’re going to have people come in and you’re going to give them good buys and everything, but they’re going to have to push a basket cart through, and then go through a cash register, and then pick up their bundles and go out to the parking lot? And someday, you say, there will be a movie theater, a grocery store, and a drug store there? You’ve got to be crazy!’”
But her husband didn’t listen, and soon the American retail industry was following the trajectory he set. He also had a knack for hiring the right people to run his stores — “very bright people,” Adele Barron says. Soon Marshalls — it was to be called Barrons, but the name was taken — was expanding throughout the Northeast. By the time Barron sold the business in the mid-1970s, there were fifty-five stores, mostly on the East Coast, but also as far away as California and Nevada. The chain, now owned by TJX Companies (its several other chains include T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods), is nationwide, and the notion of suburban discount shopping is, well, hardly crazy anymore.
Though a trend setter, Barron never looked for personal publicity. Adele Barron tells the story of being at a dinner party several years after Barron had sold his business and retired. A former executive at their table went on and on about his accomplishments, very full of himself. “The man then turned to Norm, and asked him what he had done. And Norm said, ‘I was in retail.’ Afterwards I asked him why he didn’t say something more. He said, ‘I know who I am, and I’m not impressed with what he did. What do you think, I’m going to try to make it sound big? I’m not interested.’”
Their son, Douglas (CAS’71), also attended BU and Adele might have, too. “When I was sixteen I graduated from high school, and I got a scholarship to go to BU. I lived in a little town in New Hampshire, and my mother thought I was too young to go live in Boston, even in the dormitory. So I was not allowed to accept my scholarship,” she says.
“Norman loved BU, and early on we gave money from our charitable trust every year, and he was very pleased that he could do this. Once I lost him, I decided it would be a very good idea to set up a chair for the two of us,” Adele Barron says. “There are so many good charities, but doing something for a school that means a lot to the family I thought would be very good, and I know Norm would appreciate it.”
—Taylor McNeil
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