A Salute To The Veterans And My Dad.

November 12, 2015 § Leave a comment

Repost from last year.

Here’s a salute to all the Veterans today and my cool dad who covered 4 presidential conferences as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes during WWII – Casablanca, Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Bitter Lakes. The photo below was taken sometime in the 1980’s. See more of his photos and read about him from an earlier post here.

The V Throat Pump By Ben Benjamin.

November 26, 2014 § Leave a comment

I invented a lot of things. I started the first pump with a V throat. It’s a Pump, but instead of a round throat…this came in a v shape. See?… We did well with that. That Patent stood for quite a while, cause the red cross people…they wanted me to come to Cincinnnati where their factory was to show them how to make it, and I did. I went down there, stayed a few days… – Ben Benjamin

Mr. Delman Has Announced That He Will Take Action Against Anyone Copying His Ideas And Styles…Retail News Of The Week, Saturday, January 19th, 1929.

November 25, 2014 § Leave a comment

Design by Henry Dreyfuss for Delman Shoe Company, 1929 (Cooper-Hewitt) Courtesy:Smithsonian Institution.

Shoe Patent

Now I had patented that design, but first thing I knew everyone started to copy it. All Manufacturers. But we did a lot with it. You had to sue them and we didn’t have that much money. We were a small company, see? Cost you and dragged on for 2 or 3 years. By the time the trial comes up the style is all gone, over. Wasn’t worth it. After a while I stopped patenting styles. It didn’t pay. – Ben Benjamin

Veterans Day

November 11, 2014 § 2 Comments

The Historialist of Shoes and Shoemakers/Ben Benjamin – Crik-etts

August 31, 2014 § Leave a comment

The Historialist of Shoes and Shoemakers – Designer and Shoemaker | Ben Benjamin Part 3

This summer I found a few more missing pieces to the Crik-etts puzzle. The Historialist is correct that the company continued making shoes past 1954 after my grandfather joined I. Miller. Below is part of a Licensing contract between The Irving Drew Corporation and my grandfather from August 15th, 1958 and a New York Times Ad from 1962.