In little teaser ads that spoke cryptically of "transmogrification," the news was broken gently to San Franciscans. After 40 years of looking more like the inside of an old Moulmein pagoda than a retail store, S. & G. Gump Co., the pride of Post Street, was Westernizing itself. On its temple-quiet second floor, the famed Treasure, Ivory, Porcelain and Lotus rooms, which had ranked with the Cliff House and Chinatown as S&iA Francisco tourist attractions, were ruthlessly torn out. Gump's was spending $150,000 to streamline one of the Occident's richest treasure houses of the Orient's art.
Last week, inspecting the result, a San Francisco dowager harrumphed to a clerk: "If I had a million dollars, I'd give it all to restore Gump's as it was." Gump's would have politely turned her down; what it had lost in atmosphere it had gained in sales appeal. By regrouping its Oriental collection in informal rooms with movable display cases, Gump's hoped to sell twice as much.
Gump's sharp break with its incensescented past was decreed by Richard Benjamin Gump, 43, an artist-entrepreneur who took over as president in March 1947. This year he has boosted business 10% over 1948 (when the net profit was $160,000 on a gross of $2,600,000). To Dick Gump the change was part of a crusade against "that awful, stuffed-shirt attitude about art which scares the people and keeps the merchandise on your shelves."
His family's 85-year-old store is both an art shrine where collectors and plain shoppers may browse in peace, and a smart shop where a bride may order everything from her china, glassware and sterling to her custom-tailored furniture and kimonos. Gump's will give shelf room to a $12.50 piece of California pottery—if it is esthetically good—alongside a $1,800 piece of Ming Dynasty porcelain, and encourages its customers to do the same.
Saloon Trade. Gump's got its Oriental flavor by an act of God. The store was founded during the Civil War by Solomon Gump, son of a Heidelberg linen merchant, who found gaudy, gold-crazy San Francisco too exciting to leave. He began making mirrors for saloons, and thanks to frequent gunplay, got plenty of profitable repeat business. He branched out and began furnishing the homes of California's new millionaires with Victorian-era "art treasures" from Europe.
It was a disaster for son Abraham Livingston Gump, if no great loss to the art world, when Gump's stock was burned out in the 1906 earthquake. "A.L." decided that Western art wasn't everything: he sent buyers to Japan and China to collect Oriental art. Gump's gradually built up one of the finest collections of rugs, porcelains, silks, bronzes and jades that Western eyes had ever seen, and A.L., who was all but blind, learned to judge it all expertly by touch.
More to Tap. Young Dick Gump was already running everything but finances before his father died in 1947. An amateur composer and watercolorist, Dick Gump had sharpened his collector's eye and taste on buying trips to Mexico and Italy. He directs the business from a deskless office, likes to roam through the store's three floors wearing loud-colored sport shirts. He also keeps tabs on Gump's branches in Honolulu and Carmel.