Ben Silver…the man

That was in 1963. The coat business closed up, and Silver went into the button business whole-hog. He started with 40 colleges. Now he stocks the crested buttons of over 400 colleges and prep schools. He also makes up buttons for business concerns.

In his three years in the business, Silver has discovered a few facts of academic life. “The size of the school isn’t an accurate indication of the number of buttons that can be sold,” he reports; spirited Princeton is No. 1, then come Harvard and Yale.

“Take the City University of New York, with something over 30,000 students. Last year I sold only a dozen sets of City U buttons. Or NYU with 42,000. It’s only fair. But Columbia is good. Dartmouth is a small school, but it’s excellent. “Prep schools are good.”

Alumni buy more buttons than students. It’s the guy who’s out of school five or seven years who’s most likely to buy them. By that time he gets nostalgic about Alma Mater.

Silver’s buttons have also circulated in top-crust political quarters. He made up 75 sets with the Presidential seal for President Johnson. “As I understand it,” says Silver, “he gave them out as presents.”

For the man who didn’t go to college, Silver has buttons too, with a pick and shovel on them, “The College of Hard Knocks,” says Silver wryly.’

The headline of this news story was “Button Man” and that was the essence of the clothing related business that Ben grew in the next 15 years. He had other ideas for other businesses, not related to apparel, and these were successful and intellectually stimulating to him as well. But he loved the college connection, and he valued serving his old customers at fine shops throughout the country. And those people he worked with respected and liked him. His reputation was impeccable. He was smart, well read, witty and kind, and he was an honest and hard-working businessman.

And then he died too young, too suddenly, of a major heart attack, in 1978. He was one of the first patients to receive a stent, and true to his interest in medicine, he was hopeful that his experience would pave the way for others.

He was a remarkable man, and deeply loved by his family, which is why his daughter and son-in-law decided to continue a business in his name, so his memory would be a blessing. In 1978, the business was a wholesale jewelry quality blazer button business. It would grow and change.

— Sue Prenner