BHIF: Finally, free stuff!
Free! Free! Free! The Knishes Melt. First five to respond get a free shirt! Jeff Garlin. 92Y. Fashion Corner! The New Yorker. GOOD SHABBOS.
Welcome to BHIF for Friday May 24th, 2024. Baruch Hashem (Thank God) It’s Friday is The Old Jewish Men weekly roundup where we get to all the crap that actually matters in the world. Obituary winners. Matchmaking. Market watch. Marketplace finds. Complaint of the week. Joke of the week. You get the picture.
Knishes Giveaway!
Finally, a reason to read BHIF. A FREE Knishes or ‘1973 t-shirt for the first five PAID BHIF Subscribers to send their name, address, shirt size and an effusive explanation about their most beloved part of BHIF.
Fashion Corner
Obit Desk
Monroe Milstein, Discount Coat King and Snowbird kicks the can down to Burlington at 98.
Monroe Gary Milstein, who turned one dusty coat factory into the national retail giant Burlington Coat Factory, died May 9 at his home in Bal Harbour, Florida. He was 98, though he told people he felt youthful and fresh, like a 92 year old.
Born Jan. 14, 1927, in New York City to Abe and Ann Milstein, Monroe sold outerwear wholesale and could spot a decent parka at fifty paces. “Not warm? Then why am I sweating just looking at it?” he once asked a skeptical buyer.
In 1972, with encouragement (and no small amount of stink eye) from his wife Henrietta, Monroe bought an old coat factory in Burlington, New Jersey, for $675,000. “It was either that or invest in disco,” he reportedly said. Burlington Coat Factory was born, and with it, a kingdom of discount.
He expanded the store’s offerings beyond coats, though he never stopped reminding people that coats were the foundation. “It’s called Burlington Coat Factory, not Burlington Fancy Pants,” he once muttered after they added baby cribs.
By 1983, the company went public. By 2006, it had over 360 stores, at which point the Milstein family sold it to Bain Capital for $2.06 billion which, according to family legend, Monroe tried to haggle up to 3 b’s.
Henrietta, his business partner and co-founder, died in 2001. She is now reunited with Monroe, who always said she was the brains behind the business and the reason he wore clean socks.
Sports Desk
The Knishes Blow It Like It’s ’95
by OJM beat report Saul “the haul” Lipman
NEW YORK — I’ve seen some collapses in my day. My fourth marriage. Sears. But what the Knishes did the other night at the Garden? That wasn’t a collapse, that was a full-body fourth quarter coronary.
The final score reads Pacers 138, Knishes 135 in overtime. But you don’t need numbers to know pain. You just need eyes, a bottle of scotch, and a memory of 1995.
We all remember Reggie Time.
Reggie can go to hell.
Let me chalk it for you…we were 14 big ones with under three minutes to go. The Garden rocking like a Billy Joel concert. I was halfway through a celebratory knish, spooning mustard, and then, like Reggie Miller rising from the crypt in his black Pacers jersey, it all went to hell.
Tyrese Haliburton hit a jumper at the end of regulation that tied the game and might’ve simultaneously reopened every Knicks fan’s Reggie-inflicted wound.
Coach Thibodeau stood there, jaw clenched like a man trying to hold in a scream after walking in on his wife with the pool boy. . The Knishes have blown leads before, but this one? This one’s got history’s greasy fingerprints all over it. I’m sweating into tonight.
God help us. Or at least guard the three-point line.
…Around Town
Events
Author Noah Rinsky talks about the Old Jewish Men’s Guide to Eating, Sleeping and Futzing Around with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin and Rabbi David Ingber. Click here for tickets.
The 2nd Annual Rotisserie Chicken Eating Competition
The date is set for July 20th. The time is TBD. The location is ROMA PIZZA in Park Slope. 85 7th Avenue. Paid subscribers can register for $15 and unpaid subs can shell out $25. Space is very limited. We’re almost capped.
→ Joke of the Week (Henny Youngman)
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. And then we met.
→ Wisdom of the Week (The Rebbe)
You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.
→ Complaint of the Week from our in-house complaint expert, Leecy Davis
I’m convinced the average driver is clinically stupid, IQ of 90 and below. I had the longest day in the car in my ENTIRE life, and I’ve lived in Atlanta, LA and Miami. Four hours PLUS of stand still traffic - a good bit of it I was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a line of cars so long I was convinced there was a ten car pile up complete with a fire bomb. Yet, each time I’d get to the point where everyone started to move, there was nothing. Nothing! No wreck, no fire, no blood, no lumpy white sheets on the road - leaving me to wonder why as I teetered on a mental breakdown. This insanity persisted from NJ to Boston, stuck for hours, no movement. What caused these massive, inexplicable delays, you ask? Hundreds of nosey people turned towards the “wreck sight" with their mouths agape like the village idiot, slowing and eventually stopping, breaking the flow of traffic for a glimpse of someone else’s demise. I’m not saying prior to me “breaking free” something didn’t happen, but from what I saw…whatever happened…didn’t require me being stuck for hours. Road rage is real people, considered yourselves warned.
→ Ask the (Eastern Standard Time) Rabbi
Fri May 23th:
8:13pm: Shabbat begins (chicken again? really?)
Sat May 24th:
9:21pm: Shabbat ends (can we cut it a little short next week?)
bought your black and white zen t shirt. cheap dreck. have bought your white ojm t shirt much better quality. that's what i was expecting.