WESTWOOD, N.J.—Do you remember when Easter meant a spiffy new outfit? A boy would get a suit with either a necktie or a bowtie, and these sets would include shorts for little ones and full-length trousers for older kids. For a girl there would be a new pastel or floral dress, knee-length and made poofy with layers of crinoline, and perhaps a new hat, purse, or hand muff. White gloves added a touch of formality and made one feel very grown up. With everyone decked out in their Easter best, the obligatory group photograph would be snapped in front of the house.
Of course, no Easter ensemble would be complete without a new pair of shoes, and for these your mother might have taken you to Nahm Shoes in Westwood. The store was at 45 Westwood Ave. for more than 35 years.
The photograph above dates to the Easter season of 1957. Nahm’s opened in 1952 and started carrying Stride Rite the following year. This Easter advertisement, which was also made into a postcard, appeared in the Westwood News with the caption, “A new version of the classic one-strap, with cutout further accented by a pretty pearly button. Also the ever-popular saddle shoe with saddle in blue, brown, or black.”
The shop was in the Brickell building, built in 1925 and still standing on the south side of Westwood Avenue, close to Broadway. In earlier days it had been several different businesses: a hardware store, a restaurant/bar, a grocer, and then a dairy store in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Nahm brothers, Albert and Henry, opened their business there in the second half of 1952.
The siblings had already been involved in the shoe business for many years. Born in Germany in 1911 and 1920, respectively, Albert and Henry had spent their younger years there and in Switzerland before coming to America in the 1930s. The brothers operated Nahm Shoes locations in Westwood and Pearl River.
The grand opening of Nahm’s advertised Red Cross brand shoes for women (umbrella free with purchase), Florsheim and Roblee shoes for men, and Play Poise shoes for children. A purchase of children’s shoes came with a free movie ticket for the Pascack Theatre.
In the mid-1950s, the price of a pair of Stride Rite shoes was about $7.50, and that wasn’t at all cheap. In 2025 dollars, calculated for inflation, that is equivalent to nearly $90.
Nahm’s ran a contest for teenagers in 1958 that offered a chance for them to win their very own telephone line. Unlike today, when every high-schooler has his or her own cell phone, back then a personal phone line was really something to brag about. A typical Pascack Valley household of the day had a large family involved in a daily battle for access to a single phone, to say nothing of shared party lines.
“Here is a chance to win the privacy of a phone of your own,” read the announcement. “Nahm Shoes is giving a prize you all want. A phone of your own, for a full year, installed free, with local call bills paid.”
Teens aged 13–19 could enter, and the terms were amazingly easy. All they had to do was write a sentence of 25 words or less that began with, “I came into your store for shoes because…” There was no follow-up announcement of who won the contest, but if it was you, we would love to hear the story. Drop a line to the Pascack Historical Society (P.O. Box 85, Park Ridge, NJ 07656) and tell us about it.
Nahm Shoes closed its Westwood Avenue store in 1988.