Gone are the days of the commonplace men’s and boys’ clothiers, but we can still look back on those that used to exist.
I first came across a small advertisement for Kempner’s in the 1948 edition of the Mauch Chunk Bruin yearbook. I couldn’t find much about the store itself, but a little detective work led me to the owner being Stanley J. PoKempner from Lansford (later Kentucky and New Jersey). In a book entitled Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series: 1953: January-June, it showed that Mr. PoKempner had something copyrighted in the Evening Record.
While we might never go back to a time when stores like this existed — at least not the near future — we can look back at see what was. Below I’ve attempted to enlarge and clean up the logo from the original yearbook version. In an effort to make it look a bit more defined, I had to use a different script typeface for the name and swash, but the basics of the original are all here.
Do you remember Kempner’s? I admit that it was long before my time, but I would have probably shopped there had I been around in the late-1940s and early-1950s.
