Buff-something
I've been bedeviled about the name of what was once the Inland Valley's grandest department store. Was it spelled Buffum's, Buffums or Buffums'?
The store was mentioned in Sunday's blog, in which it was spelled Buffum's. A recent letter to me from a former employee spelled it Buffums'. I checked some books.
Charles Phoenix spelled it Buffums. Gloria Ricci Lathrop spelled it Buffum's. The Pomona Centennial Committee book spelled it Buffums'. Sigh.
I asked the kind folks in the Pomona Library's special collections room to lay this matter to rest. After some checking, the intrepid Allan Lagumbay e-mailed me back: It's Buffums'. He attached two photos of the exterior as proof. If I could put photos on these blog posts, I'd present one of them.
This matters because tomorrow's post is about the store. Which store? Why, Buffums'! Now the name will be spelled correctly. And I've gone back and fixed Sunday's post.
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A journalist for more than two decades, David Allen has been writing a column for the Daily Bulletin since 1997 and blogging since 2007.He lives in Claremont.
E-mail David here or read columns here.
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Interesting. I understood that the store was named after Buffy Chandler of the LA Times Chandlers, so I would have assumed that it was Buffum's store. Was there more than one Buffy?
A similar corporate spelling was the old Bullocks. The entire chain was Bullocks with the exception of Bullock's Wilshire.
Ah, a subject only a writer and a typesetter could love.
[Well, it was the Buffum family, of which Dorothy Buffum Chandler, nicknamed Buff, if memory serves, was a member. So there were multiple Buffums... DA]
Whoops. Got the Bullock's story backward. It was Bullock's for all stores in the chain with the exception of Bullocks Wilshire which somehow lost its apostrophe. How embarrassing.
Yes, the Buffums' Dept stores were owned by the Buffum family. The original store was in Long Beach.
I have an old box with their logo on it, and the name is simply Buffums, sans apostrophe.
[Maybe they dropped the apostrophe in later years...? -- DA]