Ira Brownold ‘Bill’ Fader Jr., proprietor of Baltimore tobacco shop Fader’s, dies
Ira Brownold “Bill” Fader Jr., who recognized his customers by the custom mixtures they smoked as they shopped at his landmark tobacco shop, died of heart failure Dec. 27 at the Roland Park Place retirement community. The longtime Stevenson resident was 93.
“There was no store in Baltimore quite like Fader’s,” said Rob Ross Hendrickson, a customer. “There was a camaraderie among smokers and it did not matter if you were a street person or the president of the Maryland National Bank, you were treated the same at Fader’s.”
Born in Baltimore and raised on Crest Road in Mount Washington, he was the son of Ira Brownold Fader Sr., who was also a tobacconist, and Beulah, who also worked in the family business and blended tobaccos for pipe smokers.
As a child, he biked to Pimlico Race Course and watched races through a fence.
Mr. Fader earned the nickname Bill from his childhood medical expenses.
A 1948 graduate of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, he earned an electrical engineering degree at the Johns Hopkins University and belonged to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He later served in Osaka, Japan, and Korea.
He met his future wife, Doris Turesky, when she was a Goucher College student. They courted and married within three months.
Mr. Fader initially took a job at RCA in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, making television picture tubes. After several years, he told his father he wanted to go into the family business that had been founded by his grandfather in 1891.
He joined that business, formally known as A. Fader & Son, at 210 E. Baltimore St. After six months his father died and he began running the operation alongside his mother.
Mr. Fader grew the business from one to eight retail locations — two in downtown Baltimore, Towson, Eastpoint Mall, Westview Mall, Annapolis, Owings Mills and Catonsville. He briefly had stores in Prince George’s County and Bel Air.
His daughter Julie Fader Gilbert said the family business was at the time one of the nation’s largest independent smoke store chains.
Mr. Fader’s downtown shop was a lunchtime gathering spot for smokers. The dark interior, redolent of heady and rich tobacco mixtures, had its own quirks. For decades there was a lighted gas jet so customers could ignite their cigarettes and cigars.
His shelves were stacked with Gauloises, Dunhill’s and Nat Sherman cigarette packages.
There were glass jars of loose tobacco and an inventory of better brands of pipes, including those from British and French makers.
“Bill also had a pipe repairer who sat in the front window years ago,” said Mr. Hendrickson, who is an attorney. “Bill built the company from one store to all its branches. He was affable and an old-time merchant. He was a pioneer in the mail order business.”
Mr. Fader, who habitually wore a bow tie, maintained files of index cards with personal blends for 70,000 customers from all 50 states. One of his customers was an inmate from the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York.
In 1975 his Chief Iraba, a 7-foot, 175-pound wooden likeness of a Native American, was stolen from the entrance of the Baltimore Street store. Police located the statue at a Canton bus stop a few days later.
Mr. Fader also branched out and hosted black-tie cigar dinners at restaurants, the Center Club and the Engineering Society of Baltimore.
For the shop’s 100th anniversary in 1991, he re-created and sold the “La Flor de Iraba” private label cigar originally manufactured by his grandfather.
He was a past executive director of the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America.
At the height of a cigar revival, in 1998, Mr. Fader sold the business.
He volunteered at the Cockeysville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library and Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore.
Mr. Fader sat on the boards of Har Sinai Congregation and the Stevenson Improvement Association. He was a past president of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association’s Baltimore chapter.
Mr. Fader lived at Roland Park Place.
“I walked up to his dinner table when he first came here,” said a fellow resident, Stanley Heuisler. “Bill didn’t recognize me by name, but without hesitating said, ‘Latakia Blend,’ the pipe tobacco I stopped smoking 40 years ago.”
Survivors include his three daughters Julie Fader Gilbert and Eileen Fader, of Baltimore, and Elizabeth “Betsy” Fader, of New York City; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. His wife died in 2016.