Israel-Curley, founder of Judy's, a successful women's retailer, opens her memoir with her doctor telling her the tumor in her lymph nodes is malignant. Facing an uncertain future, Israel-Curley realized she wanted to tell the story of her 40-plus years in business. This inauspicious first chapter quickly gives way to the wonderful tale of a self-made American woman. During the Depression, when Israel-Curley was a girl, her father abandoned the family, and her enterprising mother moved her daughters from their upstate New York farm to Manhattan. While her mother worked as a janitor, Israel-Curley excelled in school, especially in business subjects. After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, lured by the help-wanted ads she saw in Women's Wear Daily, and found a job as a buyer for a small department store. When her boss went on vacation, Israel-Curley was left to figure out the intricacies of buying. She was a natural. "Our sales volume tripled in my first year," and her boss referred to her as his "little genius." When she married, she continued to work—a radical idea for 1947—and soon took one tiny storefront and opened the first Judy's (so named because the sign was only large enough for five letters). Israel-Curley captivatingly recounts how she built her business into a publicly held company with 104 stores, interspersing brief peeks at her personal life among detailed business anecdotes. In addition to offering practical advice for entrepreneurs and managers, this is an engaging first-person account of building a business from the ground up. Photos. (Oct. 7)
Forecast:Israel-Curley's book is the latest in a string of recently published and upcoming businesswomen's memoirs and biographies (after Mary Wells Lawrence's
A Big Life in Advertising [Forecasts, Apr. 8] and Eleanor Dwight's
Diana Vreeland [Forecasts, June 24]). Expect to see feature articles in women's and business media in the coming months.
