THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507260045
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL SOUTH, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 148 lines
AT 91, SHE moves with the help of a walker. But on the main floor of the Roanoke Rapids, N.C., store that bears her name, there is no doubt that Fannye Marks is still the woman in charge.
``You don't leave a dress on the rack,'' she says firmly, removing a cool red and blue flower print frock. ``You have to present the dress.''
Almost as if touched by a miracle healer, the little woman steps away from the aluminum contraption and with a flourish, gracefully lays out the dress in all its glory.
``This is how you show a dress.''
It's been like that at Fannye's for more than six decades. But the store that has dressed governors' wives, sorority sweethearts and debutantes with style and grace will soon close its doors.
Fannye's grand finale won't be heralded by screaming commercials and flashy signs, but with quiet elegance and grace.
``This has been my heart, my life for all these years,'' Marks says.
She still works a full day, six hours at her store. And this woman who was defining style for customers across the country before Martha Stewart knew the difference between a salad and dinner fork, has a dash of Muhammad Ali.
``This is the `Miracle on Second Street,' she says. ``You know, like Macy's was the `Miracle on 42nd Street.' I'm a legend, an institution. Do you think that's too much braggadocio?
``Oh, what the hell, I'm going out of business.''
But on a warm Friday afternoon, there is still much to be done. In the front of the store, hats wait atop faceless, hairless plastic heads. On racks, there are dresses. In another room, boxes of jewelry marked ``SILVER'' and ``GOLD,'' ``PEARL EARRINGS.''
It is a much different place than when Fannye Marks took over her father's store in 1930 after he was struck and killed by a motorist.
``We used to have a parlor area where the women would come in for their appointments. They would buy their wardrobe for the entire season. I wish you could have seen it.''
From the beginning, she says, she knew she was meant to be in the clothing business.
``I was conceived on a buying trip to New York,'' she says. The daughter of a Ukrainian father and a Lithuanian mother who met in Baltimore, Fannye Marks weaves a rich tapestry of her family's life.
``My mother and father came through Ellis Island, just like Stanley Neiman of Neiman-Marcus,'' she said. ``My father went steerage class to Baltimore. He met my mother at an ethnic party there.''
The young couple whose paths would meet in Baltimore were among the thousands of Jews who sought refuge from the pogroms - campaigns of bloody terror waged by Russian Cossacks in the Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her father came to Baltimore to join relatives who had escaped earlier.
Later, he took a job with a brother-in-law, who had started a mercantile business in the small North Carolina town of Kinston. Benjamin Marks, better known as ``Mr. B,'' became a peddler, going by horse and carriage from farm to farm along the Carolina countryside.
``As Jews in the Ukraine, we were not allowed to own property, so we couldn't farm,'' Marks said. ``The only thing we could do was go into business.''
The young Ukrainian immigrant worked the dirt roads of northeastern North Carolina, until he came to the little town of Roanoke Rapids. The year was 1904.
``He saw two new buildings going up in town, and said to hell with his brother-in-law,'' Fanny Marks recalled. ``He bought out a hardware store, one block away from where we are now.''
Eventually, Marks would move the store to its current location, and it would grow to encompass an entire block.
While her father was growing a business, Fanny Marks was growing into a spirited young woman who would graduate from Westhampton College in 1925. She was once ``campused'' for going out into the lake that separates Westhampton from the University of Richmond to chew tobacco with some of her male counterparts from the U of R.
``I was a popular girl, a real jet setter. I used to drive around campus in a Peerless convertible. I thought it was Virginia Country Club.''
A math and English major, Marks said her campus shenanigans kept her from getting a teaching job in the Virginia Beach school system.
``They knew about me getting campused,'' she says.
In 1925 tuberculosis hit Fannye Marks.
``I spent three years in a sanitarium in Lake Placid, Va.,'' she says. ``Dear old consumption. My parents told everyone I was off teaching school. If the people in Roanoke Rapids had known I had tuberculosis, it would have killed our family business.''
But events as unforeseen did indeed almost do away with the family enterprise. B. Marks' death, coupled with the Great Depression, sent the Marks family into a tailspin.
``We were broke,'' Fannye Marks recalls. ``We had to borrow a nickel to buy bread.''
But Fannye's, run by Fannye and her mother, managed not only to survive but thrive as a women's specialty shop. The store hit its stride in the 1930s and '40s. After the war, Fannye's sister Marcella and her husband, Bob Liverman, joined the family business, she as vice president, he as secretary-treasurer.
``We only had two seasons in the '30s,'' Fannye says. ``I traveled all over the world. When we'd go to New York, we'd stay at the best hotels, and ate at the best restaurants, to see what was in fashion.''
Fannye ran the sales floor like a dictator. Her regular customers would schedule their appointments and buy for the entire season. For many, a buying trip to Fannye's included a hot dog lunch from the Second Street Lunch, a nearby diner.
``For years, the big question at Fannye's was `How do you want your hot dog?' '' Liverman says.
The business flourished despite never holding a sale, and never advertising.
The customers would come from southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, spending hours as Fannye worked her fashion magic. Clothed in her trademark black dress - ``My success dress,'' she says - she would work fashion magic.
``I make Cinderellas out of them,'' she says of her customers. ``My dressing rooms never had a mirror. The only mirror they had to look into was my eyes.''
Emily Newsom of Roanoke Rapids was one of Fannye's ``Cinderellas.''
``I remember being invited to dances at VPI,'' Newsom says. ``You'd tell Fannye what kind of function you were going to, and she'd get you right. And whatever dress you bought, you wouldn't see it on another person. She only had one of everything. It wouldn't matter if a millionaire wanted to buy the same dress, you'd never meet yourself.''
Elaine Few is another of Fannye's regulars, and one of the owner's biggest fans.
``Fannye is like a Ferrari,'' she says. ``She gets better with age.''
Few has built a successful business in her own right, designing her own fashion creations. An African American, Few says Fannye's was different from many white-owned businesses in the segregated South.
``I'd tell people, if your money was green, she'd sell to you,'' Few says. ``This town is going to miss Fannye's. It's hard to believe that store in a little town like this would draw people from all over.''
As Fannye's readies to close its doors later this summer, the letters come, all echoing the same sentiment. Fannye's will be missed.
``I've received over 200 fan letters,'' Marks says. ``They're all saying the same thing. `What are we going to do without you?' But my life here has been most rewarding. I don't have any regrets.''
Asked the secret to her 65 years of success, she says simply: ``Hard work. Ambition. Isn't that it?'' ILLUSTRATION: DREW WILSON/Staff color photos
ABOVE: Fannye Marks, 91, who took over the store from her late
father in 1930, will close it this summer.
LEFT: Marks coaches customers on style. ``I make Cinderellas out of
them,'' she says.
by CNB