Sam Goody

Sam Goody, Who Started Chain Of Record Stores, Is Dead at 87

By JAMES BARRON

Published: August 9, 1991

Sam Goody, a toy-store owner who turned a hugely profitable sideline -- selling scratchy, breakable 78-r.p.m. records -- into one of the world's largest record stores, died yesterday at St. John's Hospital in Far Rockaway, Queens. He was 87 years old and lived in Woodmere, L.I. He died of heart failure, said his son, Howard.

Mr. Goody's record business boomed in the years after World War II, when long-playing records were just catching on and audiophiles were switching from shellac 10-inch disks to nonbreakable 12-inch ones.

The Sam Goody chain today includes 320 stores across the country. Many of them were not opened until after Mr. Goody sold the business and his name in the 1970's. That was long after his flagship store on West 49th Street had become known as a New York phenomenon. Four thousand customers a day were said to jam the aisles, browsing through bins crammed with38,000 LP's -- a large inventory in the days before chains had hundreds of record stores from coast to coast. In 1955, Mr. Goody's cash registers rang up 7 percent of the total national sales of 33 1/3-r.p.m. disks and a gross income of nearly $4 million. One of First to Cut Prices

Even though he had a comfortable slice of the market, Mr. Goody was one of the first record sellers to cut prices. In the 1950's, when the average long-playing record had a list price of $3.98, Mr. Goody sold it for $3.25.

Mr. Goody played the role of the number-crunching businessman in his store; he hired people who knew music to advise customers on which was more electrifying, a Eugene Ormandy recording of a symphony or a Leopold Stokowski. "I can't stand listening to anything more highbrow than a Strauss waltz," he said in 1954.

That may have been why Mr. Goody -- born Samuel Gutowitz on Feb. 25, 1904, but nicknamed "Goody" as a child -- did not get into the record business in the first place. It happened almost by accident one day in 1938, when a customer at his toy-and-novelty store in lower Manhattan asked if he had any records.

"I said, 'Why records?' " Mr. Goody recalled later. "I thought they went out with the dodo birds. This fellow said he was looking for old records by people like Caruso and Alma Gluck and Paul Reimers and Tomagno and people like that, and that he'd be willing to pay from 50 cents to a dollar for certain records. I told this fellow I knew where there was a stack of old records and that I'd bring them down to the store for him in a day or two." Resold Records for $25

A few days earlier, Mr. Goody had stepped on a pile of old 78-r.p.m. records in the basement of his apartment building in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. He went home and bought the records from the superintendent for either three cigars or a can of beer -- the exact price varied as Mr. Goody told and retold the story over the years.

Mr. Goody cleaned the records and resold them for $25. "I said to myself, this is a beautiful business. What am I doing wasting time with toys and novelties?"

Soon he was hunting down out-of-print vocal recordings and jazz records. It was a lucrative search: he bought 300 opera records from a family in Brooklyn for $60 and turned a profit of $1,100. After closing his toy store and moving uptown, he gambled on the future of the long-playing record, giving customers who spent $25 a record player that would handle the new, larger, slower-speed disks.

Giving away 40,000 record players was a money-loser, but Mr. Goody was not worried. "That meant 40,000 new customers," he said.

Besides his son Howard, of Far Rockaway, Mr. Goody is survived by his wife, Sadie; another son, Barry, of Kew Gardens, Queens, and two daughters, Mildred Menashe of Far Rockaway, and Frances.

From New York Times, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDE133AF93AA357...

• Residence: 1920 - New York, New York, USA
• Race: White
• Ethnicity: American
  • Reference: 1920 United States Federal Census - SmartCopy: Nov 25 2019, 22:49:39 UTC