Dick Bruhn, the dapper, iconic clothier who built a small
Salinas menswear shop into a chain of Northern California clothing
stores, died Tuesday at the age of 85.
Julia Reynolds
Dick Bruhn, the dapper, iconic clothier who built a small Salinas menswear shop into a chain of Northern California clothing stores, died Tuesday at the age of 85.
Generations of Salinas men and boys bought their first business suits and rented prom tuxedos from him, while police officers bought uniforms upstairs in the Main Street shop whose signage read simply: “Dick Bruhn, A Man’s Store.”
The shop marked “the big moments in peoples’ lives,” said his daughter Bonnie Bruhn. And her father “gave a big crop of young people their first jobs,” she said.
Mr. Bruhn died in Salinas of congestive heart failure, relatives said, adding that 10 years ago a doctor had given him five years to live.
He was born Feb. 19, 1925, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he worked in his father’s printing plant as a youth. After attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Virginia Military Institute and Columbia University, he became an aeronautical engineer, designing aircraft wing structures. He served in the Navy during World War II and worked at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
It was there he met his future wife, Bobby, then a student at Stanford University. At the time, the Navy men at Moffett Field were brought in to attend “socials” with the female students at Stanford because most of the male students were away in the military.
Mr. Bruhn left engineering after the war, and to support his young family he sold men’s BVD underwear.
“He was a traveling salesman,” his daughter Donna Bruhn said, and he ended up buying a small shop in Salinas from one of his customers.
“I got bored,” he told The Monterey Herald in 1998. “I liked playing store better.”
He said he wanted to find a small town “as far away from big cities as I could, but that was still big enough.”
On April Fools’ Day in 1950 he opened his first store in Oldtown and eventually settled at 300 Main St. He stayed in business in Salinas for 57 years.
Besides his Dick Bruhn men’s stores, he opened several M’Lady Bruhn women’s wear stores and acquired more than two dozen Selix formal wear and Butler’s uniform shops. Over the years, his businesses included more than 40 clothing stores in Salinas, Monterey, Carmel, Hollister, the San Francisco Bay Area and Reno, Nev.
But Salinas remained his home and his base.
“He was from New York … and he loved Salinas,” Donna Bruhn said. “He loved the rodeo, he loved his cowboy boots. He embraced the town and they embraced him back.”
Mr. Bruhn was heavily involved in the city’s civic life, supporting activities such as downtown parades, the California International Airshow, the Rotary Club and local high schools and hospitals. He became active in politics and in 1970 was chosen to chair the Republican Congressional Committee for Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo and Kern counties.
Three years later, he received the California Vocations Associations Award for outstanding contributions in the field of business education, one of many business and community awards he received over the years. He was known for hiring retirees who needed the work, and was noted for developing a program to train Salinas high school students in retail merchandising.
“It’s almost like every young man in Salinas worked at Dick Bruhn’s at one point,” Beverley Meamber, former CEO of the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce, said in 2007. “There’s a lot of history in that store.”
Many in Salinas were surprised when Mr. Bruhn abruptly declared bankruptcy and closed his remaining stores in May 2007.
Customers mourned the loss of the classic clothier as a long-standing landmark in Oldtown and a sign of more elegant times gone by. The store was known for its attentive service.
Old-time clients may remember the store’s famous “green frog cards.” Long before it was fashionable for retailers to accept no-questions-asked returns, Mr. Bruhn’s storekeepers would include a small, bright green card with a picture of a frog on it with every purchase. “If by chance this doesn’t fit or the color makes you look green like a little frog,” the cards read, “please bring it back to Dick Bruhn.”
Mr. Bruhn is survived by his former wife, Bobby Bruhn of Carmel Valley; daughters, Susie Shirokow and Leslie Bruhn, both of Monterey, Bonnie Bruhn of Salinas and Donna Bruhn of Carmel; sister, Norma Bruhn of Salinas; and numerous nieces, nephews and grandchildren.
Services are scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday at Struve and Laporte Funeral Home in Salinas, with a reception following the service at Corral de Tierra Country Club.
