In the summer of 1956, 19-year-old Richard Fritz was between his freshman and sophomore years of college and looking for a summer job. He saw an ad in the New York Times for a position typing orders for a company called Jofa. Though he knew nothing about the company, he went in to interview with the sales manager.
“I said, ‘When can I start?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t say you had the job yet. But when do you want to start?’ I said, ‘I could start now, I’ll just have to call my mother and tell her I won’t be home,’” he remembers with a laugh. “I called her, and 56 years later I retired.”
Fritz never went back to school. And for more than half a century, he never left Jofa, apart from a short stint in 1964 when he went to work at Arthur H. Lee and Sons, which promptly bought Jofa. (The combined company was renamed Lee Jofa, which it remains today.) Through subsequent buyouts and management changes and cross-country moves, he toiled faithfully for the fabric house, working his way from the order department to bookkeeping to purchasing and eventually to the showroom floor. Though textiles weren’t something he had a natural inclination or even a particular fondness for, he still loved the work.
“I had to have a passion while I was there, and when I left for the night, I didn’t want to see another piece of fabric,” he says. “But I had a passion for working with the customer.”
In 1969, he moved from his native New York to Dallas after visiting a friend here and falling in love with the city. “What I liked was the swimming pools in every apartment building,” he says. “And the dishwashers—you don’t get a dishwasher in New York City. And you don’t get the sun. You don’t get a tan like I used to get. People would ask me if I’d been to Florida. I used to love when they asked that—I worked so hard to get that tan.”
Even beyond the creature comforts, Dallas suited him. Having been promoted to showroom manager, he was on the floor for the first time, where he got to work with characters from the heady days of the Dallas design industry like Earl Hart Miller, John Astin Perkins, and Russell O’Neill. The twice-yearly markets were especially exciting times, as every showroom would host a party to entertain designers and visiting buyers. “The parties were fabulous,” he remembers. “Everybody would talk: ‘They’re going to have caviar this year.’ Then another showroom would try to outdo them with Champagne. One year we got 80 pounds of shrimp. There wasn’t a designer in Dallas you couldn’t bribe with a shrimp.”
In 1995, when Kravet bought Lee Jofa, many employees left because they didn’t like the new arrangement. Not Fritz. “I stayed, ’cause I stay,” he says. “That’s my thing: I stay.”
Fritz retired in 2012 at the age of 75, and the thing he remembers most about his 56 years at Jofa is the people. He cites designers Marsha Moore, Charlotte Comer, and Faye Neel as people who made his job more pleasant, and designer Doniphan Moore and Robert Allen showroom manager James Campbell as friends. He sings the praises of Christopher Adlington, who’s been in Lee Jofa’s design department since 1965, joking, “I think he’s trying to beat my record.” Sure, he developed a knack for color and a winning sales strategy, but it’s the people he’s taken away.
“I was very introverted in high school and junior high school. It was only when I got to Jofa that I met people like me and made friends like crazy. That’s the reason I never went back,” he says. “I met so many interesting characters. That’s what the design industry is. It’s working with crazy people and learning from crazy people and teaching crazy people. I was happy. There were times I wasn’t. But all in all, it’s the people that did it.”
