Morton Jay May was born on July 13, 1881 in Denver, Colorado. He was the son of David May, a merchant, and Rosa Schoenberg. His father was a German immigrant who had gone to Colorado for his health in 1877 and had stayed to start a dry-goods store in Leadville during the silver strike. In the year of Morton May's birth, his father owned six stores in Colorado, but in 1888 he shifted his headquarters to Denver when he and his brother-in-law, Louis Schoenberg, acquired a bankrupt store there and made it a success.
Education
May attended preparatory schools in Denver and entered the University of Colorado in 1899. During summer vacations he learned the clothing business by unloading freight and clerking in the Denver store. In the summer of 1901 he toured Europe with his parents, and when they returned home too late for the fall semester, he decided to leave college and enter his father's business. He went to the May Company store in Cleveland and learned the department-store business from the ground up, beginning as a stock boy and working up through all the menial jobs to salesman and floorman.
Career
In 1903, when his father moved his headquarters to St. Louis, May went there to work in the May-owned Famous store. In 1910, David May's partnership with his brother-in-law was dissolved and the company was incorporated, with Morton May as a member of its board of directors. The company then began a vigorous program of store acquisition. In 1912 the May firm purchased the William Barr Dry Goods Company in St. Louis and merged it with the Famous store; the Famous-Barr Company became the biggest department store west of the Mississippi. Later the May Department Stores Company acquired Boggs and Buhl in Pittsburgh and M. O'Neil and Company in Akron, and in 1923 it bought A. Hamburger and Sons in Los Angeles. In 1926, sales of the May group passed $100 million. During the Great Depression the company attracted shoppers by maintaining large stocks of merchandise and thus consistently showed profits and paid dividends. May became president in 1917 when his father retired to the chairmanship of the board. When his father died in 1927, May became chief executive officer. He served as president until 1951 and as chief executive officer until 1957, when he surrendered the former office to his son, Morton David May. He remained chairman of the board until 1967. During the thirty-four years May was president, the chain grew to twenty-five stores. In 1939 the company acquired control of the William Taylor, Son and Company store in Cleveland and built the company's Wilshire Boulevard store in Los Angeles. The May stores, which featured a tremendous assortment of goods and large inventories, had always appealed to lower- and middle-income groups. The Wilshire store was the first designed to appeal to upper- and middle-income shoppers. In 1946, May acquired Kaufman's in Pittsburgh, and in 1948, the Strouss-Hirshberg Company in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1958, May acquired the Hecht Company stores in Baltimore and Washington, and in 1965, the G. Fox store in Hartford, Connecticut, and Meier and Frank in Portland, Oreg. Under May's management, the May Company was conservative in business but daring in merchandising. Because the company operated stores in various parts of the country under a variety of names, May preferred not to employ a system of central purchasing. Rather, he gave each store autonomy and let local buyers run the stores. By 1968 the May chain, with eighty stores in nine states and the District of Columbia and sales of $1 billion, was the fourth-largest chain in the United States. There were fifteen May Company stores in Los Angeles, seven in Cleveland, four Kaufman stores in Pittsburgh, six Famous-Barr stores in St. Louis, fourteen Hecht stores in Baltimore and Washington, and twelve O'Neil stores in Akron, among others. He died on May 17, 1968 in Clayton, Mo.
Achievements
May was a chairman of the May Department Stores Company. Although May was Jewish, his fund-raising work on behalf of the St. Louis University library prompted Pope John XXIII to award him the Knighthood in the Order of Pope St. Sylvester, the oldest of papal orders. In 1959, May founded the Morton J. May Foundation.
Personality
May was quiet, unassuming, and apparently indifferent to fame. (He made it a practice, for example, to throw his Who's Who questionnaire into the wastebasket. ) He surrounded himself with capable subordinates, to whom he delegated considerable responsibility; he never let his wealth or success keep him from taking their advice. He was attuned to his customers and made a habit of walking the floors of his stores to be sure that their needs were being served. Until the end of his life he appeared at his office in St. Louis almost every day. With little publicity, May engaged in a variety of philanthropic enterprises. He was an active supporter of various St. Louis cultural and philanthropic institutions and bestowed large benefactions on St. Louis, Washington, Brandeis, and Fisk universities.
Connections
In 1909 he married Florence Goldman; they had two children.
