The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in advance as the store's annual Spring Millinery Opening--a vernal festival of more than passing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population. The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night, being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his way to the store through the very teeth of the gale. That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again, both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And what it gave to the store in _esprit-de-corps_--in the thing which we have very recently come to know as morale--cannot easily be estimated. In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents, which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased many at a time--never more than two or three. He was a financier and did not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.