Morning Sentinel
A homecoming
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By LARRY GRARD
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 06/26/2009

WATERVILLE — It’s been 13 years since Levine’s closed, leaving a hole in the heart of the downtown.

The North End’s Levine family homestead is in the family no more, having been sold.

And the family itself moved away. When Dorothy “Bibby” (Levine) Alfond died on the final day of 2005, none of William and Sarah Levine’s nine children remained.

The Levine’s sign is still on the family’s former store downtown, but the clothier known as “the store for men and boys,” and run for decades by sons Ludy and Pacy Levine and their nephew, Howard Miller, is dark and empty.

The memories, however, are bright and full for Miller’s three daughters, and likely so for many of the other descendants of William and Sarah Levine. One hundred of them, for years scattered across many states, will gather in Waterville and in Sidney for a big reunion on the Fourth of July weekend.

The family helped grow Waterville.

Waterville lawyer Paul Mitchell said he had patronized Levine’s since he was a boy, in the early 1940s.

“The loss of Levine’s was a big, big loss to the downtown,” Mitchell recalled. “There were four stores that dominated the downtown — Levine’s, Sterns, Dunham’s and Butler’s. They were the magnet.”

Winslow resident Leonel Libby remembers Levine’s from the inside, as an employee. He was a salesman there from the time he was a junior in high school, in 1953, until the store closed.
There is nothing to replace the store or the kind of service it provided, he said.

“You can’t go into a store today and get waited on,” he noted.

“I was the best seller and I made the best commission,” he recalled. “I was nice to everybody who I sold to. I even made deliveries.

“I did everything. I cleaned the storefront windows and put in the new displays, I painted and I handled the upstairs apartments. In the end I took care of the store. I had the key and everything.”

Now, the Levine family is embarking on a new enterprise — one intended to reflect how the family’s history became so entwined with that of their city.

Cinematographer Francois Choquet, described as an extended-family member, will have three cameras and a sound crew here to film the reunion activities for a documentary.

“This is the beginning of something that my sisters and I are working on, and that’s ‘The Levines of Maine,’” said Sara (Miller) Arnon, daughter of the late Howard Miller.

“It’s multi-layered,” she said of the film project. “We want to preserve this for future generations.”
She and sisters Wendy Cohen of Kensington, Md., and Julie Soros of Soquel, Calif., will try to pack into the documentary all the memories that they can.

“The filming’s the easy thing,” said Arnon, now living in New Rochelle, N.Y. “The editing will take much more time. It’s the kind of thing the public channels might be interested in. We would like to do something that the general public is able to see.”

The sisters have organized the mammoth reunion, which begins with Sabbath services and a reception at Beth Israel Congregation, in Waterville, at 7 p.m. July 3. Between 80 and 100 family members could attend the service, organizers say.

On July 4 and on July 5, they will gather at the family summer camp in Sidney, and then meet at Miller’s old home on Johnson Heights, on July 6.

The Levine uncles and cousins are well-versed in family history, Arnon said, but fifth- and sixth-generation family members might be unfamiliar with the Levine story.

“We have on paper how all of us are related to William and Sarah Levine, at the synagogue,” Cohen said. “I even feel like crying when I’m working on it. Friday night’s service is just going to be amazing.”

Arnon, a 1963 graduate of the former Coburn Classical Institute, joked that it seemed to her like she was one of four children.

“Howard Miller had three daughters and a men’s clothing store,” she said.

In the past, when relatives came to town from other towns in Maine or from Boston, they would convene at Levine’s, in the shoe department.
Arnon and her sisters drew lots of attention, she said, when the store was in its hey-day.

“It was a little annoying to never be anonymous,” Arnon said. “But when you move away, you realize how wonderful it was and how secure our lives were growing up there. We were safe anywhere.”

Arnon recalled a weekend at home, when she was a college freshman. She was with friends at a Waterville night spot, frequented by Colby students. Arnon was not of drinking age.

“Someone came in and they were raiding it, and a state representative saw me and they walked right out,” she said. “He canceled the raid because he didn’t want me to be in trouble.”

Arnon said that she and her sisters faced “the daunting task” of organizing family material in their parents’ home, following the closing of the store and the sale of their Ticonic Street home.

She expressed pride in the women of her family, including her mother, Gisele Baroukel Miller, and grandmother, Frieda Levine Miller.

“She divorced at a time when there was no support for single women,” the sisters wrote of Frieda. “She moved back to Waterville from Boston, bringing her two young children home to her family.”

She worked, when many women did not. She became a women’s clothing buyer for Levine’s, but when her Sarah Levine died in 1934, she found that she had a household to care for — her father, two bachelor brothers, her two children and her young sister, Bibby.

In her “spare time,” Frieda Miller bought more real estate, and most of her tenants lived nearby in the North End.

“She walked the neighborhood visiting tenants and collecting rents,” the sisters wrote in a short history of their family. “As the years went by she came to realize that she had a great many single mothers living in her apartments, and she became a bit of an unofficial social worker as she helped them and their children.”

When Frieda Miller began running the household, however, she had to stop purchasing women’s clothes for the store. From then on, except for a brief time in its last decade, Levine’s was “the store for men and boys.”

Larry Grard - 861-9239
lgrard@centralmaine.com

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