Every piece of silver in Beverly Bremer’s silver shop had a story. And Bremer could tell you the story behind each piece.
The moment people came into her store was often one of the happiest or saddest moments they experienced. “We saw them at their most happy moments, when they were getting married and having babies, and at some of the more trying moments in their lives,” her youngest daughter, Margaret “Mimi” Woodruff, recalls about working in her mother’s shop. “And (my mother) could relate to all of those things because she had, in fact, sold her own wedding silver to start her business. It made her a very honest and compassionate buyer. She would listen to people’s stories.”
Beverly Bremer died Jan. 22 after a brief illness. Over 35 years, she had become one of the premier dealers of new and used sterling silver in the United States.
Her business began when her marriage ended, and she was motivated to support her three children. “To start the flea market with two sets of silver and to grow it to what she’s grown it to was nothing short of remarkable,” her son, Hank Bremer, said.
Bremer grew up in the Depression era and lost both of her parents before she was 30. “She knew she had very little help,” Hank said, but she still found a way to make her mark. He added that he was “in awe” just thinking about it. “I don’t know how she did it. I really don’t. It speaks of her total personality and her resolve to make it work. She always said she had three mouths to feed. She just put her head down and kept going.”
Daughter Beverly remembers her mother’s incredible resourcefulness and “impeccable eye” for catching a trend. As a supplement to her silver business, Bremer would turn clear-glass ginger jars upside-down and put “well-placed” sea shells in them to sell at the market. “And they were wildly successful.”
It was common to receive silver as a young bride in Bremer’s generation. However, if you lost a piece from your set and went to a retailer, “They wouldn’t sell you one piece of silver,” Hank said. But his mother would.
Bremer “was the ultimate marketer and salesperson,” Mimi said. Her opening line, “ ‘What is your silver pattern?’ opened the door for her to get a window into their world, and for them to get a window into her world immediately,” she said. “People remembered her for it.”
When starry-eyed brides would ask Bremer what engravings they should put on their silver. Mimi recalls her mother saying, “ ‘Don’t engrave that silver until you’re sure the marriage will last.’ ” Not exactly what every bride wants to hear, but a lot of them actually came back to say thanks for the advice.
Beverly, Bremer’s oldest daughter, was hospitalized 90 days with appendicitis at 14. While running a business, taking care of two kids at home and making round trips to the hospital to visit her sick child, Bremer always found a way to make it work.
“She really did overcome adversity,” Mimi said. The only time she ever saw her mother cry was one night when Mimi burst into her bathroom and caught her in the bathtub. “She just started crying,” and when Mimi apologized and asked why, “She said, ‘I just want to take a bath alone.’ ” She just wanted five uninterrupted minutes alone to take a bath.
Beverly said her mother’s can-do attitude inspired a self-resilience in all her children.
Most parents wouldn’t be too keen on sending their kid halfway around the world, Hank he said, but his mother encouraged him to live in Hong Kong for a school exchange program when he was 17. “She made sure that her children saw the world.” Bremer even sent her children to a diving camp in the Caymen Islands, which she discovered in an issue of National Geographic, for a month.
“Her thought on teaching people how to swim was to throw them in the deep end,” he said. “She wasn’t going to hand you a lay-up and make you feel good about it. You were going to earn it, and you were going to learn, and you were going to take away a lot of experiences.”
From conversing with the local garbage man to speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs, Bremer “treated everyone like they were the most important person in the world.” She was down to earth, and made sure everyone in the room was taken care before she took care of herself. “Everyone had a drink, everyone had their food, everyone had everything. She was a consummate hostess,” Hank said.
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