2513 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
USA
Join author Jen Rubin as she discusses her book, We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood, a small business story about a shop owner that keeps on going despite the odds. It is an immigrant story, a grandfather-father-daughter story and a story of the unique character a family business brings to a neighborhood.
About the Book
For eighty years, a store named Radio Clinic stood on the 98th Street block of Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Jen Rubin’s immigrant grandfather opened it in 1934 during the depths of the Depression as a radio repair shop. To distinguish his shop from his many nearby competitors in those early days of radio, he sat fixing radios in the storefront window – visible to the public in his “clinic” — wearing a white doctor’s lab coat. The business grew over the decades to sell radios, televisions, appliances big and small, electronics, and air conditioners, lots and lots of air conditioners.
Her book, We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood, tells about the rise , struggles, and fall, and the family that owned it across those decades. It is a small business story and a story about a shop owner that keeps on going despite the odds. It is an immigrant story, a grandfather-father-daughter story, a story of the unique character a family business brings to a neighborhood, and a reflection on what has been lost as stores like these disappear.
About the Author
Jen Rubin is a former New Yorker living in Madison, WI. (Her first midwestern home was Ann Arbor from 1988 – 1996.) Jen leads storytelling workshops around Madison, co-produces the Moth StorySlam in Madison, and co-hosts ‘Inside Stories’ podcast. She also teaches the occasional social policy class at the University of Wisconsin School of Social Work and works at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
