By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Abe and Harriet Rolnick stand next to his beloved 1997 Corvette. Appropriately, its license plate reads “KY Maid.” (Photo by Andrew Adler)
If there’s one word that may apply best to Abraham Rolnick, it’s “irrepressible.”
At age 93, he tools around in a 1997 Corvette (red, naturally) and delights in recounting enough entrepreneurial projects to occupy two or three normal lifetimes. Steeped in Jewish lore and tradition, he and his wife, Harriet – married for 65 years – are stalwart Federation supporters, literally answering the calls to keep local Judaism vibrant and responsive.
For more than five decades, Rolnick owned the Louisville firm of F. Wolkow & Sons, which manufactured a broad range of women’s hair products under the brand name “Kentucky Maid” from its headquarters at 2001 Magazine Street. He bought the company in 1972, exchanging a thriving engineering career at General Electric’s Appliance Park for the chance to reinvigorate an enterprise that made its first comb in 1894.
Was Rolnick’s business acumen an intergenerational trait, passed on during his Brooklyn childhood? “The opposite, really,” he recalled during a recent chat alongside Harriet at the Trager Family JCC. “My father’s only concern was for me to be a good Jew – that I wouldn’t
bring disgrace to the house. He never had a dime.”
The younger Rolnick kept kosher until, just out of his teens, he enlisted in the Air Force and trained as an aircraft navigator, guiding aircraft that included B-29 “Superfortress” bombers and C-119 “Flying Boxcars.” By then, his culinary observance had waned. “I never could see,” he says now, “why my father and mother had to pay three times as much for a chicken.”
After completing his military service, Rolnick enrolled at the University of Alabama’s flagship campus in Tuscaloosa. There, emerging as a reasonably dashing undergraduate driving a British-made Morris Minor convertible, one day he noticed “a pretty girl walking right in front of me. So I said, ‘Hey Miss, hop in and I’ll give you a ride to class.’”
Harriet Jacobs did just that.
“In those days it was okay,” the present-day Harriet Rolnick said with a laugh. “You knew who all the Jewish guys were.”
Not long afterward they had their first date. “I picked her up and we went to the movies. I had no idea what the movie was. Then we got back in the car, and we’re talking – and I stick my hand out and just like that I say, ‘Harriet, I’m going to marry you.’ And that girl recoiled. She knew I was serious. It wasn’t a line or anything – there was no hugging, no nothing – it was just a matter of fact. They say ‘love at first sight’ – it was. She was everything a guy could hope for.”
They married in 1959. Harriet Jacobs had been an art major at Alabama, and later earned a teaching certificate that proved highly useful when G.E. hired her husband and the couple moved to Louisville.
“His parents were in New York and mine were in Alabama, so it was kind of in between,” she said. Boeing had also offered Abe Rolnick a job, but Seattle was unacceptably far from their families.
Newly arrived in Louisville, the Rolnicks’ first order of business was figuring out where to live. “We said, ‘Let’s find out where the Jewish areas are,’ Harriet Rolnick remembers saying, ‘and we’ll find a place there.’ I think our first apartment was on Taylorsville Road. This nice Jewish guy, Irving, showed us the apartment. And they became best friends.”
Eventually Abe Rolnick became president of the Jewish Day School, while ascending the ranks at Appliance Park. Harriet taught junior high at Southern. In 1966, their son Jack was born; another son, Jonathan, came along two years later.
“This is the story of New York Jewish guy meets perfect woman from Alabama and falls in love,” says David Gould, who attended the Day School alongside Jonathan Rolnick and has known the family for 57 years.
Successful as he was at G.E. – at one juncture he supervised more than 300 employees – Rolnick had the itch to strike out on his own. “I’d always wanted to be a manufacturer,” he said. “That’s why I’d decided to go to engineering school and do an industrial engineering program.”
When he discovered F. Wolkow & Sons was on the market, Rolnick jumped. “It was a legitimate manufacturing business,” he told himself. “I don’t want to manufacture ties, sweaters or shoes. I want hard goods like plastic parts.”
The company ticked the necessary boxes: local, established, a steady product line. The firm made hair goods aimed principally at Black women: in particular, combs.
“I went down to look at it and have the owner show me around,” he recalled. “The owner said, ‘I’m thinking of selling. I’m getting older; I have no heirs,’ and he said he wanted a Jewish engineer to buy the business.”
Still, the existing proprietor was reluctant to come to terms. Undeterred, Rolnick swung into action. “I used to call them every other week,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Are you busy? Have you decided to sell yet?’ I always called on Friday afternoon because I figured by then he was exhausted.”
Finally, a deal was struck. The firm was successful, but Rolnick saw opportunities for growth. “Instead of making just a comb, you make a brush,” he explained. “And then instead of making just a brush or a comb, you go make oil for the hair.”
That first year he made about $40,000 – compared with the $15,000 he was earning annually at G.E. Far from rescuing a business in trouble – “they rescued me.”
Year after year, decade after decade, F. Wolkow & Sons endured. Along the way Rolnick became one of the first American company owners to outsource manufacturing to factories in China. He brought his son Jack into the business. Life was full, and life was good. Even the pandemic and related supply-chain issues couldn’t derail the fundamentals.
But when a fire severely damaged the Magazine Street structure earlier this year, the company was forced to pause operations indefinitely. Authorities still aren’t sure what caused the blaze, and Rolnick isn’t quite certain what’s coming next. It’s strange, he acknowledges, to have his routine suddenly interrupted.
“I know that before, I felt I had some place to go and some things to contribute,” he said. Now, “besides driving my poor wife crazy every day, I have nothing to do.”
Rolnick has come to terms with circumstances beyond his control. With the fire, “that’s the end of Wolkow & Sons. But that’s natural in our economy,” where numerous “manufacturing businesses of Americans are being shut down.”
“We don’t have customers like we did,” he said, “because they are buying direct. They don’t need me anymore. I remember when Jack went to a trade show in Las Vegas – he came back and told me certain things, and I said what that means is the end of F. Wolkow & Sons. I could see the handwriting on the wall. We were showing China how to make a product and we’re happy because we’re making tremendous profits. But at the same time, we’re giving them rope to choke us.”
No matter what, Abe Rolnick’s legacy is secure. Asked to define him in one or two phrases, Gould replied: “Mensch, entrepreneur, husband, father.”
“It’s funny,” Gould said, “because when you’re a kid you don’t focus on that. You see the lifestyle changes and the conversations at dinner, but you know, kids are kind of removed from that. And then later in life you say, ‘Oh, this is where that entrepreneurial drive came from.’ But he’s a very humble and modest person. I don’t think I ever heard him toot his own horn.”
Ceasing business operations has given Rolnick time for extended leisure, and extended leisure doesn’t come easily to a man accustomed to the hustle of daily commerce. “I don’t play golf. I don’t gamble. I don’t play around,” he said. At least there are grandchildren to visit in Atlanta.
And of course, that 1997 ‘Vette – 345 horsepower, 0-60 in 5.1 seconds, color: Torch Red.
“There’s a book, ‘All Corvettes Are Red,’ Rolnick said, flashing an impish smile. “My son’s getting it for me.”
