Ludwika Schein will never forget the day her husband Herbert died. It was their 54th anniversary.
“When people ask me when he died, I will know, I won’t have to think about it. This was very sad for me,” she said.
“If somebody needed something, he was there for him. He was very good, very generous, and very trusting. This was sometimes annoying to me because sometimes you cannot trust, but he was very trusting. And when he walked, if he was two blocks away from home, I knew he was coming. He had a very beautiful whistle. He whistled. The man was always happy.”
Herbert Schein, whose jaunty nature set him apart from other men, died on March 24 in Sonoma after an agonizing eight-year battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. He was 83.
Schein was born in Austria; as a teenager his family left Vienna in the dead of night to board a ship bound for Shanghai. As one of the first Jewish families to arrive in the free port, the Scheins were able to establish themselves in the paper business.
In 1947, Shein led a group of Jewish refugees from China to Ellis Island via San Francisco. He fell in love with the City by the Bay and vowed to return. After some years in nascent Israel, he met and married Ludwika in Montreal in 1951.
The couple moved to the city in 1952, and, shortly thereafter, started up the Multipearl Import Co. in the garage of their Sunset District house. That business eventually moved to the commercial building across from the Emporium, where it remained for 37 years until the 1989 earthquake. The Scheins then moved it South of Market, where their daughter, Karen, runs it to this day.
“What mattered to him was family unity. We were all working in the same business. It was an old world way of looking at things,” recalled Karen Schein.
Schein’s garrulous charm was a major factor in his business’ success. Customers came back again and again to share a laugh with the joking jeweler.
He was a healthy, vital man who loved to take long walks and swim, which made his slow demise from Alzheimer’s all the more painful for his family. He hadn’t said a word for the past for years, and was confined to a wheelchair in the final year of his life.
Herbert Schein is survived by his wife Ludwika of Sonoma and daughter Karen of Berkeley. Donations in his memory can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 225 N. Michigan Ave. No. 1700, Chicago, Ill.