Winston Purdy hung the red-and-gold Liberty House flag outside the bar and arranged some of his souvenirs on a table just inside the door: Zooper Sale buttons, a menu from Hackfeld’s restaurant, a sign from the employee cafeteria.
“When you work in housekeeping, you take out the trash, and you get to see if there’s anything in there,” Purdy joked.
Of his collection, the piece that drew the strongest reaction was the Liberty House employee handbook. Everyone remembered those strict rules and, somehow, thought of them fondly.
On Saturday night Purdy hosted a reunion of former Liberty House employees. He worked at the flagship Ala Moana store for 46 years, starting as a 17-year-old Farrington High School graduate too young to operate the freight elevator, going through the transition to Macy’s in 2001 and retiring this past February.
A few months into retirement, he decided to get in touch with a few friends to arrange a small, manageable get-together.
“There are hundreds of former Liberty House employees out there,” he said. He wasn’t ready to take on a crowd that size. Purdy reserved space at his favorite spot, Anyplace Cocktail Lounge in McCully, where he hoped the party would be big enough to get the stories rolling but small enough so that people could spend time together sharing memories.
Purdy’s son Jonah came by to sing a few karaoke songs. When Jonah was 5, he was a model in a Zooper Sale ad, and he gamely posed for photos with the vintage catalog.
“Those were the days,” said Sue Mueller, a store manager at Waikiki from 1978 to 1996. “It’s always been a family. That’s one thing we always had.”
Noelle Dagil spent 32 years at Liberty House and then Macy’s working in the visual department, creating the stores’ stunning window displays and in-store tableaux.
“Nothing can compare to the drama and theater we had for LH visual,” Dagil said. “We had such pride.”
Dagil worked in Liberty House stores on three islands. She remembers the rush of emotions during the early morning ceremony when the Liberty House banner dropped to reveal the new Macy’s logo.
She and the ladies at her table laughed about wardrobe inspections, where female employees were sent home if they weren’t perfectly groomed and wearing hosiery.
“The point was to be able to tell a Liberty House employee from a customer just by looking,” she said. “If you worked at Liberty House, you felt like you were part of something special.”
About half of the 50 or so people at the reunion stayed through the store’s transition to Macy’s. Deborah Leong-Yap, human resources manager for Macy’s who worked for Liberty House for two decades, got the crowd laughing when she joked she was there to recruit.
“Pick your hours!” she said. “If you worked at Liberty House, you’re hired. Nobody works harder.”
Purdy looked at the happy crowd he had squeezed into his favorite bar. He shook his head thinking about what he might have started. “Next year we’ll invite more people and have this at the convention center!” someone joked. “Oh, no,” Purdy moaned, but he did it in a good-natured way. It’s hard to keep this kind of camaraderie small.
