Business & Finance: Matriarch Magnin

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Old Isaac Magnin gave up carving at an early date, took a hand in the store's finances, but by the century's turn he had lost interest in the business. A linguist and amateur philosopher who quoted continually from Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), he used to pedal his bicycle around & around Golden Gate Park, pockets crammed with Marxian tracts and pamphlets. Before he died in 1907 Mary

Ann Magnin had, on the advice of a palmist, picked her third son to head the prospering store.

Emanuel Magnin had been nicknamed "Johnnie" by an aunt, but after he learned storekeeping under his mother's stern tutelage, he adopted John as a formal middle name. He personally supervises Magnin's staff of buyers in Manhattan. A friendly, dignified little man, President Magnin lives with his wife at the Hotel Savoy-Plaza, always spends three months a year in Europe. The active San Francisco Magnin is his youngest brother, Vice President & General Manager Grover Arnold Magnin, 50, short and ruddy. He has just taken a duplex suite in the St. Francis Hotel near his matriarchal mother.