By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2007
Louis "Mr. Macco" Rubin, founder of Macco of Bethesda, a family-owned and operated art supply and custom framing business, died March 27 of cardiovascular disease at his Chevy Chase home. He was 89.
In 1949, Mr. Rubin went to work for Mac's Paint Co. in Mount Pleasant and eventually bought the company when the owner retired. He moved the business, with its new name, Macco, to Bethesda in 1954. Accommodating the needs of his artist wife, he expanded the paint store to include fine art supplies.
Mr. Rubin, a merchant with old-fashioned values, insisted that every customer be given undivided personalized attention. Involved in every aspect of the business, he learned everything he could about the products he sold and often gave instructions on their proper application. He trained hundreds of high school students who worked there part time during more than 52 years of business. His three children worked there, too.
For many years, Macco remained the sole retail art supply business in Bethesda. Several area galleries came to Macco for custom canvases made of Belgian linen and hand-stretched by Mr. Rubin, said his wife and business partner, Barbara Baron Rubin.
"He was an expert in hand-stretching canvas," she said. "He could make it square within one-thirty-second of an inch."
What he never learned to do, however, was to master the computer. "He had an antique, old-fashioned, cast-iron cash register that he got out of an old gas station," Barbara Rubin said. "It only went up to $49.95."
Even as the business grew, he would tally receipts at night on a calculator.
A native of Mount Clemens, Mich., Mr. Rubin was the fifth child of Russian-Polish immigrants. His family moved to Washington when he was in his teens, and he graduated from McKinley Technical High School.
The outbreak of World War II short-circuited his college plans. He had been married by the time he was drafted into the Army in 1945. He served in the Corps of Engineers in Belgium, France and Germany, where he assisted in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the burial of the dead.
In 1965, Mr. Rubin purchased a 129-acre farm in Clarksburg, where he and his family spent weekends swimming, gardening and caring for horses. He sold the farm in 1985 to finance a new Macco store on Wisconsin Avenue.
Besides his store, his other passion was the Brandeis Club, founded with teenage friends as a tribute to then-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. For 60 years, Mr. Rubin regularly attended Tuesday meetings and played penny poker.
His first wife, Gwylfa Pearl Rubin, died in 1980.
Failing health took him out of the business in the late 1990s, and the store closed in 2001 while his second wife, whom he married in 1986, ran the framing business from their home.
Besides his wife, of Chevy Chase, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Mary Lynn Michaelis of Cleveland, Robert Rubin of Arlington and Ardis Lawrence of Russellville, Ark.; two stepchildren, Matt Baron of Chevy Chase and Rachel Baron of Annandale; and two granddaughters.