ROSH HASHANAH EDITION 5781 L’CHAIM® MAGAZINE PAGE 13
There is a park in the West Denver neighborhood of Sun Valley, an urban oasis with sweeping lawns, a little stream and a popular recreation center with a swimming pool, weight room and childcare center. The kids, who love to play here, and adults, who ride their bikes or relax here, absolutely love the place.
Though most of them probably know the name — Rude Park — and even know to pronounce it as “Rudy” Park — they probably don’t know in whose honor this pleasant piece of ground is named.
They, like virtually everyone else in Denver today, have no idea who Isadore Rude was, despite the fact that in his day he was quite well-known, not only as a generous philanthropist but as an astute and successful businessman.
Most within the Denver Jewish community, of which Rude was a visionary leader, probably know very little about the man whose hard work and generosity built much of the infrastructure benefitting that community today — even less about the personal mistakes that shadowed the latter stage of his life.
Although he became a wealthy and influential man, he seems to have never been one to seek the spotlight or lionize himself to any significant degree, which is probably why today, nearly eight decades after his death, it remains a challenge to find very much information about him.
But Rude’s is a fascinating tale nonetheless, very much a story of his time, and very much a Jewish — and ultimately human — story to tell.
Born into a Russian-Jewish family, Rude came into the world on Nov. 14, 1875, probably in Belgium, although some accounts say he was a native of Austria.
His mother died when he was two years old and his father emigrated to New York around 1890, reportedly to avoid military service in Europe. He brought his several children to the US gradually, with Isadore arriving somewhere in the mid-1890s — again, accounts vary.
Little is known about his family’s Jewishness but poverty seems to have been part of the picture. In later years, Rude would tell friends that until the age of 14, “only twice in his life had he had enough to eat.”
In New York, he worked briefly at a sweatshop where it was believed that he contracted tuberculosis. Like many others who caught the dreaded disease, he moved to Denver for treatment.
While it’s unknown where he received such treatment, Rude apparently was cured, for he was soon working a series of odd jobs in the Mile High City — at a regional farm, waiting tables and washing dishes at a restaurant, all for low wages.
Before long, he went to work for a Denver tailor, a trade in which he was apparently apprenticed as a child in Europe.
Somehow, he managed to save $110 from such labor, which became the seed money for his own tailor shop here.
In his books The Ghosts of Denver and North Side Story, both of which include information on the history of the Jewish community in Denver’s West Side, historian Phil Goodstein describes how Rude came to acquire a nickname that accompanied him for life.
In Goodstein’s words, Rude, who was a “short, stocky fellow about five feet tall,” once encountered a customer of considerably greater height.
“’You’ll have to get on a ladder to measure me,’” his customer reportedly said. Rude took him literally, fetching a stepladder. His patron so appreciated this that he broadcast the news to the world. Rude printed up business cards showing himself fitting a customer while standing on a ladder, billing himself ‘The Little Tailor.’”
The advertising moniker, Goodstein writes, was “a gold mine” for Rude, whose tailor shop soon became wildly successful. He marketed himself through print advertising, door-to-door solicitations and mail, touting “truth first, last, and all of the time” as his business motto.
In amazingly short order, Rude was flourishing, expanding his tailor shop into a cloth mercantile and mail-order suit business. He opened outlets in Texas and California and got into banking and real estate investment. Within a few years, he was named president of Denver’s Union State Bank.
Rude saw and took full advantage of the unprecedented entrepreneurial opportunities of early 20th century America, especially in a young and growing city like Denver. Although he still billed himself as the “Little Tailor,” he had in truth become a big businessman.
Rude also became a big philanthropist.
It’s unknown why charity became such an important part of his life, whether for reasons of the Jewish ethic of tzedakah or as a means of thanking America for all of the bounties it had bestowed upon him, but giving became a central part of his life.
According to Goodstein, Rude determined early on that he would take no more than $3,500 per year of his own profits as personal income. Everything else he earned would go to charity.
In its obituary for Rude, the Intermountain Jewish News reported that Rude first began hosting Christmas parties for Denver’s poor — gatherings at which great amounts of food and clothing were given away — in 1904, only a few years after he arrived here.
A primary focus of Rude’s philanthropy was the Denver Jewish community.
When Denver Mayor Robert Speer in 1916 called for a “community-minded donor” to purchase a large parcel of land near Federal Blvd. and 13th Ave. to serve as a gathering place and community center for the Jewish community, Rude stepped up. He ponied up most of the $22,525 purchase price from fish merchant Sam Bloomfield.
Buildings on the property became a nursey and a community center, which provided recreational and educational activities for West Side Jews and non-Jews alike.
One of those buildings, a large house, was converted into the Louise Guldman Center, named in honor of the daughter of Leopold Guldman who, like Rude, was a Jewish immigrant who achieved commercial success in Denver. (Guldman’s story was told last summer in the IJN’s Generations magazine, June, 2020.)
Eventually, the Junior League took over the property, which by then had been named in Rude’s honor, and that organization eventually turned it over to the city. Under Denver’s ownership and management, it remains known as Rude Park to this day.
While the Guldman Center was the West Side ancestor of today’s Jewish Community Center, its East Side counterpart was the Bessie Rude Community Center, named for Rude’s wife, the former Bessie Mandel, which was dedicated in 1919 in a house Rude owned at 1567 York St.
A decade later, that community center was relocated to the former Progress Club building at Colfax Ave. and Williams St., which Rude purchased for B’nai B’rith; it opened as the B’nai B’rith I. Rude Community Building. It served for decades as a community mainstay for East Side Jews as well as many non-Jewish organizations like Big Brothers and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Those two centers — the Guldman on the West Side and the Rude on the East — came together as the modern JCC, which left both locales to open its new facility on South Dahlia St. in 1962.
Long before that, however, Rude was also using his position as a philanthropic powerbroker to further the cause of Congregation BMH, with whose spiritual leader, Rabbi C.E.H. Kauvar, he was a close friend.
He gave his building on 1567 York Street to BMH, which at the time was constructing a spacious new synagogue just across the alley, on Gaylord St., also with Rude’s considerable assistance. That property would become the Denver Hebrew School, BMH’s religious school, remembered to this day by many youths who traversed a dark, underground tunnel between the school and the synagogue.
Not only did he do a great deal to set up BMH in its new digs, Rude also took care of those BMH members who were unhappy with the congregation’s decision to move and wanted to stay in its original building in Curtis Park.
“Not all members of the BMH supported the move,” historian Goodstein writes in Curtis Park, Five Points and Beyond.
“Some thought there was nothing wrong with the 2400 Curtis St. synagogue.
“Others argued that the leadership of the BMH had become much too bourgeois, ignoring the everyday workers who were the backbone of the congregation. Seeing this sentiment, Rude arranged for the 2400 Curtis St. building to go to those who wanted to retain it as their house of worship. This led to the formation of Beth Joseph on May 2, 1922.
“Rude saw that it was named for his father-in-law, Joseph Mandel.”
The list of Rude’s gifts to the Jewish community and Denver in general runs long.
Probably recalling his own battle with tuberculosis, he paid for the construction of the I. Rude Medical Building on the campus of the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society, a structure which still stands, now part of the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Along with his contemporaries Leopold Guldman and Adolph Kiesler, Rude financed the original Beth Israel Home for the Aged, an institution succeeded by today’s Shalom Park.
He established a dairy for the National Home for Jewish Children on the West Side.
He even got involved in an infamous dispute between two factions of the old West Side Jewish community, the Ostrovers (immigrants from Poland) and the Litvaks (immigrants from Lithuania).
The confrontation eventually led to fisticuffs between the factions, to considerable embarrassment among East Side Jews and to an acrimonious congregational split.
In her book Pioneers, Peddlers & Tsadkim, the late historian Ida Uchill details how Rude provided “a large sum” to help the Litvaks form their own synagogue, originally named Zere Isrel Nusach Ashkenaz. In later years it would be known, more simply, as Zera Israel.
He also came through when his friend, Rabbi Kauvar, suggested that a chair in Jewish studies be established at the University of Denver. Rude provided the endowment for the chair in rabbinic literature at DU to commemorate his son’s Bar Mitzvah. Rabbi Kauvar “was named a full professor teaching the course he had suggested,” Uchill wrote. That chair eventually evolved into today’s Center for Judaic Studies at DU.
Rude’s philanthropy was remarkable not only for its visionary aspect — the fact that so many of the organizations he helped and founded went on to become foundations of the present-day community — but for its scale.
In its obituary for him, the IJN estimated that between 1918 and 1930, Rude gave away something in the neighborhood of $125,000 — a figure that today would be worth well over $2 million.
“Set down in cold type, his story rivals the most ambitious of the Horatio Alger ‘rags to riches’ epics,” the obituary said of Rude.
What the article made no mention of, however, was the scandal that cast considerable shade over the philanthropist in his latter years.
Things began to go south for Rude sometime in the early 1930s, when people claimed that they had been sent promotional postcards from the “Little Tailor” mail-order business on which a cloth sample was attached, along with the pitch that a suit or overcoat of such material could be had for $10.
The sample was of obviously high quality fabric but when customers showed up at Rude’s shop in downtown Denver or ordered a garment by mail, they discovered that only suits of far lower quality could be had for $10. If they wanted the better material apparel, they’d have to pay up to $25.
The US District Court for Colorado essentially called it an illegal “bait and switch” form of business and charged Rude with mail fraud. Charges were filed in Denver in 1932 and the trial was presided by Judge John Foster Symes.
As straightforward as it may seem, it was a complicated trial, involving the application of several federal laws pertaining to dishonest business practices, a number of which were alleged against Rude. The prosecution introduced evidence from some of Rude’s clerks as well as a postal inspector who had acted as something of an undercover customer.
Typical of the arguments made by the government was this passage from the indictment: “In truth and in fact, the defendants would not have on hand a large quantity of new fine woolen cloth to be used in making suits to be sold for Ten Dollars to said persons to be defrauded, and said suits so made by the defendants for the said persons to be defrauded would be made of cheap, cotton and wool shoddy material, and would not be worth twenty-five dollars, nor any more than Ten Dollars.”
Rude and a man named Michael Heller, who apparently aided him in the scheme, were convicted of mail fraud after eight hours of jury deliberation. Rude was fined $5,000 and given a sentence of up to five years imprisonment. He was reportedly so shocked at being found guilty that he dropped his pocket watch in the courtroom. During the trial, he had unwaveringly insisted on his innocence.
Like many aspects of his life story, it’s unclear where Rude was imprisoned. Goodstein cites the Rocky Mountain News which reported in February, 1934 that he was sent to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan. However, Stephen Spence, a government archivist in Kansas City, recently told the IJN that he could find no record of Rude have been incarcerated there, or at any other federal prison.
Wherever — or whether — he served his time, Rude was finally vindicated in 1935, after hiring esteemed Denver attorney Philip Hornbein to represent him in an appeal of the conviction. Hornbein was able to convince the court that while Rude’s business practices may have been unethical, they did not constitute an actual crime.
As stated in the court ruling that reversed Rude’s conviction: “Instead of proving a scheme to sell cheap, shoddy suits as those advertised, this evidence along with the other testimony, established a scheme to attract customers into the store by false advertising, with a view to selling them merchandise that had not been advertised, at whatever price they could get. Such a scheme does not fall within the provisions of section 215, supra, nor the charge in the indictment.”
In non-legalese, Rude’s sales practices did not amount to actual bait and switch, hence his promotion of the tactics did not constitute mail fraud.
After the resolution of his legal problems in 1936, Rude did not remain for long in Denver. After closing down his business and organizing his affairs, he and his wife soon relocated to Los Angeles, perhaps after having stayed for a while in Dallas. No reasons for the move were ever publicly declared.
Besides census records that established his residency there, no further news of Rude surfaced after he made California his home.
In 1941, at the age of 66, he passed away there.
His earthly remains repose in Hollywood Forever, a venerable cemetery in the heart of Tinseltown. He and his wife share the necropolis with a host of stars from the Silver Screen era — Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, Micky Rooney and Douglas Fairbanks, among many others.
It’s a glittery place to be buried, to be sure, but their shared headstone is modest and understated. The epitaph beneath Rude’s name is short, direct and accurate.
“He gave to others,” is all it says.
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News