Fred Rosen ran Sam’s Wines and Spirits, the warehouse-style liquor store founded by his father Sam in the 1940s. The shop put a focus on wine that made it a destination stop for oenophiles from far and wide who sought out rare finds with the help of a savvy staff.
“In a day of impersonal business, we’re a very personal store. We’re a family-run business, not a conglomerate. We want to help,” he told the Tribune in 1984. “People are tired of dealing with nobody. They want to deal with somebody. We’re geared for service; that’s our business.”
Rosen, 88, died of natural causes on Feb. 4, said his son, Darryl. He was a resident of Highland Park.
Born in Chicago, Rosen grew up on West Division Street in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and attended Roosevelt High School, where he played basketball. Rosen’s love affair with basketball would last the rest of his life — he told the Tribune in 1996 that at age 60, he still played basketball five days a week — and he even installed a hoop in his store.
After a hitch in the Army, he went to work in the store his Ukrainian immigrant father, Sam Rosen, had founded as a rough-edged bar during World War II. After starting the tavern, his father added carryout business and in 1960 moved the store to a large building in Old Town at 756 W. North Ave.
As a nod to the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the surrounding Old Town neighborhood, Rosen and his father chose in the early 1970s to put a major focus on selling wine, developing a reputation that became nationally known both with consumers and with wholesalers. The store’s size and scale allowed it to offer a broad selection at prices that were less than those at smaller stores.
In the 1980s, the store’s no-frills appearance both inside and out belied the tremendous selection that wine connoisseurs would find inside.
“No one visits this Old Town landmark for its glitz,” the Tribune wrote in 1984. “Beyond a somewhat seedy exterior is a wine cellar that culls oenophiles from all over the Chicago area. This is definitely not the place to wear your Sunday best. Customers must maneuver their way through a room stocked with the usual assortment of liquor and a maze of cases, most filled with wine bottles, to reach the cellar. Boxes of wine also are stacked along a wooden staircase leading downstairs.”
Rosen acknowledged that the store wasn’t known for its beauty, but for its selection, which made it either the city’s biggest or best wine retailer — or both.
“All the new people who move into the area come into Sam’s,” he told the Tribune in 1984. “They look around and say, ‘This can’t be the place I heard about. It’s a dump.’ They walk around incredulous.”
Rosen remained loyal to the store’s neighborhood, which in the 1970s and 1980s had yet to be fully gentrified.
“I was a tenant in the first Sandburg (Village) building when I was a bachelor. Old Town is me. I’ve grown up with Old Town. Everyone on my staff lives four or five blocks from here,” he told the Tribune in 1984. “The local residents have supported us for years. We’ve stayed because I wasn’t going to be pushed out. I wasn’t running from inner-city problems.”
Sam Rosen died in 1979, and many customers would address Fred Rosen by his father’s name. As sales grew, Rosen moved the store several blocks west in 1984 at 1000 W. North Ave. In 1996, Sam’s moved to an even larger, 33,000-square-foot location just a bit farther north, at 1720 N. Marcey St. Rosen broadened the store’s product line, adding a selection of cigars, along with a deli counter with imported cheese and desserts.
By 1998, the Tribune reported that the store was generating $40 million in sales a year, making it what was believed to be the largest single liquor store in the country. Rosen that year struck a deal to sell Sam’s to a California-based firm. The following year, the deal fell apart when the buyer couldn’t secure financing. So Rosen, by that point assisted by two sons, continued to operate the store.
“We can do it ourselves,” Rosen told the Tribune in 1999.
Amid further area gentrification in the early 2000s, the store continued to thrive.
“I knew about Sam’s even before I moved to Chicago,” said restaurateur and master sommelier Alpana Singh, who arrived in Chicago in 2000. “It was one of the first stops when I moved here. I had never seen a Costco-sized warehouse filled with wine. It was like going to Disneyland for wine.”
Singh recalled Rosen’s energy and dynamism.
“Anytime I had been at Sam’s, (Rosen) was always working, either at the cash register or in the aisles, interacting with customers and clients,” she said. “He seemed from afar very boisterous, very dynamic and engaged.”
Rosen’s son, Brian, said his father “changed an industry.”
In 2004, Sam’s opened a second store, in Downers Grove. Additional stores soon followed, in Highland Park and in the South Loop.
In 2007, the Rosen family sold 80% of Sam’s to a private equity firm. Two years later, the firm sold Sam’s to Binny’s Beverage Depot, which continues to operate in the Marcey Street location.
Rosen’s wife, Brenda, died in 1985. In addition to his sons, Rosen is survived by a daughter, Dana Pinsel; and seven grandchildren.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
