Izzy Young, Founder NYC’S Folklore Center, Dead at 90

Here is an extended excerpt from my college job report written more than 50 years ago:

“….I was literally down to my last 25 cents when I wandered into the Folklore Center (hub of the American Folk Movement on MacDougal Street) and convinced the boss Israel G. Young that I was truly the person he was seeking to set his chaotic world in order. I had worked in a bookstore before. I knew bookstores like the palm of my hand. Name a facet of the business and I’d been doing it since before I learned to walk.

So he hired me: For $40 a week I worked 50+ hours. Izzy, my boss, had his own ideas about business procedure. When we got an order with a check, why he’d cash the check. Sometimes he’d send the books, you had a 50-50 chance, but if you sent the check you had a 100% chance he’d cash it. It was our most basic and consistent policy; we always cashed the checks.

I spent the first week making files. There were two files: one for bills and one for irate letters. Everything was either a bill or a letter from someone in Omaha who’d sent a check for $5 and two books about nine months ago and still hadn’t gotten his books and this was his sixth letter.

I would arrange the letters in order (We never threw anything away so all the letters were still there in chronological order). Letter #1 one would start off a little puzzled…. perhaps the books had gone astray? But by letter #6 they’d read… ‘You are a cheap crook. Don’t send the books. Send me back my money.’

In my desire to square accounts I wasn’t too particular about what went out. I remember the one from a buyer in Kalamazoo who had written us a record number of fourteen letters.

Letter fifteen was anguish itself: He now had four copies of Pete Seeger’s Banjo Method, three copies of Ewan MacColl and two of Lead Belly, when what he really wanted was one Seeger Guitar Methods, one Irish Songs of Resistance, and one Old English Ballads. He would, however, be willing to trade.

As part of my duties I was assigned the telephone. There was a long list of people for whom Izzy was NOT IN. He was most particularly NOT IN to the bank, the telephone company, the rent collector or the city marshal. If a check bounced it was a ‘horrible mistake’ and the word was ‘persecuting’ him. There was one week we did not bounce a single check; it was a real occasion for celebration.