OF A GOLDEN AGE

Ruth Ades-Laurent’s father Joe Ades, a New York legend for his street pitch of his $5 vegetable peelers, recently died and had a gracious obituary in the New York Times:

The Greenmarket was not his only open-air stage; he had places near Radio City Music Hall and in Brooklyn that he liked, Ms. Laurent said.

She said that he had learned the tricks of salesmanship as a teenager in Manchester, England. “He’d sold all kinds of things from when he was 15 and saw the old-time English grafters, I guess here you’d call them pitchmen,” Ms. Laurent said.

He sold linens, textiles, jewelry and toys, and broadened his inventory when he went to Australia in the 1970s. “We had a huge truck that we sold off the back of,” recalled Ms. Laurent, who worked with him, selling clock radios, cassette players and electrical appliances along with other household goods.

Now Ades-Laurent has taken over the family business:

Reached by phone, she told us she had “a fabulous reception; people seemed really comforted to see me instead of a gap where my father used to be. And it was helpful for me as well to deal with the loss of my dad.”

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