Rogers & Morris Perlis

Until 1921, David Perlis, a junk dealer, and his wife, the former Sarah Baum, lived in Memphis, Tennessee with their six children. That year, David died and Sarah placed her two youngest children, Isidore Rogers (6) and Morris (3) in the Home in New Orleans.

While in the Home, Rogers, as the older brother became known, was a member of Isidore Newman School’s sixth grade club known as “Manual’s Goodfellows,” whose weekly meetings and community service activities reflected their motto: “We learn; we serve; we play.” At his Newman High School graduation in 1934, Rogers performed with a male chorus that also included Home peers Harris and Maurice Garb, Eugene Fruchtgarten, and Sam and Lee Hartman. In his extracurricular activities, Rogers was a member of Newman’s varsity football squad and also earned a spot as a forward for Touro Synagogue on the all-star team of the city’s Junior Synagogue Basketball League. 

Following his Newman graduation and his discharge from the Home, Rogers attended Ohio State University. According to a profile published by the New Orleans States-Item, 24-year-old Rogers went into the clothing business in 1939, using money borrowed from the owner of a clothes cleaning business to open a men’s formal attire rental business on Magazine Street. For fifty-four years, encouraged by his wife, the former Dorothy Koehl, Rogers successfully operated the fashionably conservative clothing business that bore his surname and earning the title “the Uptown clothier.” Designed by Rogers’s son David George, the business launched the crawfish shirt, which became one of the store’s trademarks and spawned additional retail outlets. In 1990, Rogers was inducted into Junior Achievement’s Business Hall of Fame, which cited his strong sense of ethics in business and entrepreneurship.

Over the years, Rogers maintained ties with the Home, attending a reunion in 1954, where alumni happily reconnected with former Home nurse Anna Levine Kamin (known to them as “Veenie”) and her husband Sam, both of whom had served as surrogate parents. Rogers also attended the annual meeting of the Jewish Children’s Regional Service in 1991.

Rogers died in 1993 at age 77.

Like other Home children who demonstrated neither the interest nor academic prowess in preparing for college, Morris left Isidore Newman School before high school. Instead, he attended Samuel J. Peters Commercial High School for Boys, where he wrote an essay for the Times-Picayune’s contest and served as salutatorian at his graduation in 1936.  Following graduation, Morris returned to Memphis where he worked as a clerk for Marx & Bensdorf realtors.

During World War II, Morris joined the Merchant Marine, in which he served as fireman watertender aboard Merchant Ship William C. Gorgas. In early 1943, Morris’s name appeared on Merchant Marine casualty list number 8, in which he was among 18 Louisianians reported missing in action or lost at sea.