NEW YORK -- At the start of World War I, a 23-year-old drygoods clerk from Minsk made her way to the Russian border and past the soldier guarding against unauthorized departures.
'I said: 'I'm buying leather for the Army. When I come back I'll bring you a big bottle of slivovitz.' He's waiting yet,' said Rose Blumkin triumphantly. 'I learned all the tricks.'
Mrs. Blumkin, a multimillionaire at 90 who still works seven days a week at her monster Omaha furniture store, relishes her triumphs over the 'big boys' -- all the soldiers and rich department store owners and carpet dealers who have tried, over the years, to get in her way.
'I didn't have an easy time. When you're a poor immigrant they don't loan you money. People with big department stores think you're nobody. I showed them different,' she said.
Her empire, Nebraska Furniture Store, was founded in a basement with a $500 stake. Now, it is the furniture store in the country. Although still run by 'Mrs. B.' and assorted Blumkin offspring, it was sold last year for $60 million to Berkshire Hathaway.
'Our store is three blocks long,' she said, in fractured but rapid-fire English. 'Three square blocks. Our warehouse is 500,000 square feet with 25 acre parking lot. In New York you don't have that. We are the only ones in the United States that have such a store.'
Perched on a chair in an elegant Manhattan hotel room, Mrs. Blumkin was enjoying her latest day in the sun, as recipient of an honorary degree from New York University. A tiny woman with carefully set dark hair, she gives not the least impression of fragility.
Pleased but not awed at being named NYU's 'exemplar of the American dream,' Mrs. Blumkin told her story, brooking few corrections from the offspring who clustered around her, and giving particular emphasis to her triumphs over the big boys.
Her husband, Isidore, had emigrated three years before Mrs. Blumkin decided to escape.
'We only had enough money for one,' she said. Making her way past the border guard in Siberia, she reached Japan, and sailed to Seattle via a peanut cargo boat.
Isidore had started a dry cleaning store in a small town in Iowa, but Mrs. Blumkin yearned for a bigger place, where she could find other people who spoke Russian or Yiddish.
The family settled in Omaha. Francis, the oldest daughter, started school, and mother and child learned English together from the first grade vocabulary lists.
'In Omaha we bought a clothing store,' she said. 'Then came the Depression. My husband said: 'What are we going to do? We'll starve. Nobody walks in.''
Mrs. Blumkin gave up the housewife's life to help out with the business, and switched from selling clothing to furniture.
'I decided furniture was a happy business,' she said. 'I bought $500 worth of furniture. I started in a basement.'
Enter the 'big shots' who, Mrs. Blumkin said, 'didn't want to sell to me' because she was a small fry who sold cheap.
'For 22 years nobody sold me anything good, only off brands. I said: 'Some day you'll come to me and I'll kick you out.' Today, all the leading lines are dying to sell to us.'
But all her old enemies did not get the chance to come crawling back, she added with satisfaction. 'Some never got there. I outlived them.'
In the early years the big boys seemed to have nothing to worry about. Mrs. Blumkin's fortunes once ebbed so low she was reduced to selling her wares out of her home. At one point she sold the family furniture to keep above water.
But as her business and skill at obtaining good merchandise grew, the competition became irritated by her cut-rate prices. Her sins landed her in front of a local judge, charged with violating the Fair Trade laws.
'I took my bills to the judge. I said: 'I usually work 10 percent above costs. What wrong did I do when I try to give customers the best deal?
'He was sitting there. He said: 'I need carpet myself.' The next day he came in and bought $1,400 worth of carpet.'
Needless to say, Mrs. Blumkin was not convicted. 'Every trial they sued us, I didn't use no lawyer. I did it myself. In 1948, I broke Fair Trade,' she said.
'Well, not exactly,' said daughter Frances, trying to differentiate between a dent in the old minimum markup laws and outright repeal, which came much later.
'In 1948 it was the end. No more,' Mrs. Blumkin said defiantly.
If the cases were a harassment, they were also invaluable publicity. 'I took out ads saying: 'Here is the proof I sell cheap.''
Nebraska Furniture got bigger and bigger, swallowing the local competition. Last year Mrs. Blumkin, ready to start getting her estate in order, sold 90 percent of the stock to Berkshire Hathaway.
'Who was it that bought it?' she asked her daughter, feigning ignorance.
Mrs. Blumkin claims Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett tricked her into selling by begging her to name a price and then agreeing to it immediately.
But she has fond and detailed recollections of the sale. 'He bought for cash and never took inventory. He told me he trusted me with his life -- more than the Bank of England.
'He's plenty smart,' she added. 'He bought a bargain.'
Isidore Blumkin died of a heart attack in 1950, and Mrs. Blumkinnow lives alone -- sort of. Her four children and most of her 12 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren have settled within four blocks of the family matriarch.
Louis Blumkin, Mrs. B's only son, is president of Nebraska Furniture.
'I'm still chairman of the board,' Mrs. B. interjected. Two of her sons-in-law also work at the store, along with Louis' three sons and several other grandchildren.
'All smart ones. We don't have no dummies,' said Mrs. Blumkin.
If the store is her obsession, the family is her pride and joy. 'Well, I'll tell you, we are close to each other. All my kids they call me up, they buy me clothes. I got good kids. They gave me pleasure since they were born. Never gave me any trouble.'
Mrs. Blumkin has strong opinions about almost everything, including awards, which she believes are mainly given in return for big donations and 'all baloney.' But the NYU citation, she said, appeared to be for her success as a businesswoman, and that is a different thing altogether.
'I'm the only woman in the United States that ever succeeded in the furniture business,' she said. 'Mostly women have cosmetics, dresses, shops. Nobody ever undertook to be in the furniture business. Now we do $105 million in business a year.'
New York University will not, however, overshadow Mrs. Blumkin's fondness for Creighton, a Jesuit university in Omaha which, she noted, has not only given her an honorary doctor of law degree, but buys a lot of carpet as well.
'Very high class people,' she said. 'In business, they're such good customers.'
When the NYU officials called Mrs. Blumkin to tell her about the degree, they had to track her down at the furniture store, and then wait till she finished making a sale.
'I work seven days a week. I never had a vacation. I think I work more than the young lazy ones,' she said.
Despite her honorary doctorates, Mrs. Blumkin is not all that enamored with higher education. Her daughter Cynthia recalled: 'When I got my second degree she said: 'Now you're going to be a double dummy.''
'Sometimes we hire college graduates -- big shots. Stupid as posts,' said Mrs. Blumkin.
The people she really likes to hire are newcomers that remind her of herself. 'Many immigrants came from the concentration camps. Some needed jobs. We hired them,' she said. One of those, whom Mrs. Blumkin found loading potatoes, is still with the store 39 years later. 'What a friend. What class. Those are the people we appreciated.'
Some of the more recent Russian immigrants have also joined the firm. 'I got one girl -- I put her in furniture sales and she beats any American college graduate. So friendly. When she makes a sale she's in seventh heaven.'
The supply of refugees in Omaha is not, however, limitless. Thinking out loud, Mrs. Blumkin wondered whether she should take this opportunity to invite the New York City immigrants to come to Nebraska and work for her.
'They'd miss the big city too much,' interjected one of her daughters quickly, possibly envisioning a six-mile-long caravan arriving from Brooklyn ready to learn the carpet trade.
Despite the fact that she has just sold her business for $60 million, Mrs. Blumkin definitely does not regard herself as rich. The rich, she explained, only 'know how to chase women and break up homes.' The Blumkins know how to work hard.
'To be in business is a pleasure. If you don't be a flop it makes it better yet,' she said.
