Dr. Snow
(As always, this "true fiction" is not presented as fact. Names, places and incidents might be familiar to many readers but that's on them. The author is only half the equation of any shared story.)
The clustered spires of Frederick, Maryland, immortalized in the Civil War era poem “Barbara Fritchie” by John Greenleaf Whittier are a collection of steeples of Catholic, Lutheran, Christ Reformed and Episcopal churches. The oldest dates from 1790 and the tallest is 180 ft. They were built by English and German colonialists with such names as Dulany, Carroll, Johnson, Schley, Engelbrecht and Taney. These names, found on numerous monuments and brass plaques all over the town, leave no doubt to current day visitors about the dominance of Frederick’s original families. They were partisans of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, who envisioned an American colony where Catholics and Protestants could prosper and live in freedom together. And there also were German farmers who first landed in Pennsylvania and migrated south to the fertile piedmont region of mid-Maryland. The oldest standing house in Frederick is named Schifferstadt.
There also were names not on the plaques, people who did not worship under the clustered spires. These were the Jews who arrived later through the port of Baltimore and put their names elsewhere — over the entrances to their many mercantile, crafts and other shops up and down Market Street, the core section of Frederick’s commercial district. The names on the storefronts and plate glass windows read Rosencrantz, Hurwitz, Kemp, Sclar, Gordon, Lebowitz, Weinberg, and Snyder, among others.
Of the town’s total population, the Jews were not many, numbering just a few hundred households among almost 20,000 residents by the time the town had entered post-World War II. They were excellent business proprietors and bore an outsized influence on the commerce, prosperity and civic discourse of the town. The various Jewish-owned establishments provided clothes, dry goods, housewares, jewelry, salvage and hardware, imported meats, books, stationary, school uniforms, haberdashery and seasonal novelties. Some of Frederick’s Jews were professional men with law practices, medical licenses and land agents. The town’s only optometrist was Jewish, Dr. Walter S. Snow. The Memorial Hospital had a small staff of eight doctors and two were Jewish. Frederick’s Jews held a high prestige in the community, one which they preferred to remark upon only among themselves. It wasn’t until 50 years after WWII that one of them ventured into elective politics and became a mayor.
Frederick’s Jewish merchants were direct descendants of Baltimore relatives and earlier European Jews who had immigrated to the United States just after the Great Depression. They were called “money changers” in a derogatory way but that didn’t stop anyone from doing business with them, including the German farmers and any of Lord Baltimore’s distant heirs. At the Kemp’s Department Store, Rosencrantz’ Men’s Store and all the other Jewish shops, one could purchase anything on “layaway” and Frederick’s finest families all had “book accounts” where they would make monthly payments on whatever balances they had. While a store clerk was wrapping a recent purchase, the transaction would be recorded on a ledger card that was ferried upstairs to the business mezzanine. Some stores had an elaborate pulley and basket rigging to relay the sales slips up or down to the sales floor.