Photo, Family Daniel Mougel, seen here in 1996

By Colleen Reynolds / Reporter

RUTHERFORD (Oct. 15, 2009) — Mom ‘n pop businesses have come and gone on Rutherford’s Park Avenue over the years, but Mougel Tailors, the family establishment once run by Daniel Mougel and his father, Morris, before him, has remained as enduring as an original coat button that remains firmly and reliably fastened. In a town with an ever-changing retail landscape, Mougel Tailors has attained an uncanny, and mostly unparalleled, permanence in the local area.

Daniel, a lifelong Rutherford resident who died this summer at age 89, received an early introduction to the tailoring trade by running errands for his father, often traveling to New York as a teenager to pick up needed supplies for the business, which started in 1933.

Daniel’s father, Morris, a tailor and salesman, started out at a clothing store near the former Rivoli Theater, but, with entrepreneurial zeal, he realized he wanted to own his own store and enter the newly-forming business of dry cleaning. “It was the American Dream,” explained Daniel’s daughter and Morris’s granddaughter, Tara, the establishment’s present owner.

Morris’s dream led to the materialization of the Park Avenue location of Mougel Tailors, one of Rutherford’s oldest businesses, at which Daniel would later follow suit.

Remembering Daniel

Shortly after graduating from Rutherford High School in the late 1930s, Daniel joined the United States Army, in which he would serve for four years, following Gen. George S. Patton, landing at Normandy Beach on D-Day and fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Tara said. Upon his return to Rutherford after his distinguished service, he married his high school sweetheart, the late Jean Harrington, and exchanged his combat boots and Army fatigues for a much more diverse wardrobe — one comprised of the suits, slacks, skirts and jackets of the South Bergen region that needed shortening, lengthening, cleaning and repairing.

Upon Morris’s retirement in the 1960s, Daniel took over ownership of the business seamlessly.

“When he started, it was in its infancy,” Tara said of her father’s start in the industry. “The procedure was different, although the chemical was the same. Machines were not as advanced as they are now, so a lot of things — instead of being programmed and automated — back then were done manually.”

Fortunately, Daniel possessed the dexterity of a woodworker.

The same hands that meticulously stitched seams and hemmed pant legs also crafted a miniature model of the USS Constitution with a steering wheel the size of a thimble and details of sails and rigging so tiny and fine that the project took five years to complete. With surgical precision, the World War II veteran built a model stagecoach, which also took him years to construct, according to Tara. “It was perfection,” she said. “All the seats were lined with feather and tufted just the way it would have been. He was an incredibly talented woodworker.”

The quality that patrons came to associate with Mougel Tailors may have been honed in part in Daniel’s workshop basement at his Rutherford home, where he would devote hours to making furniture and ships in bottles and whittling intricate toys and Christmas ornaments. “If you pulled the string, the arms went up and down,” Tara said, describing a figurine ornament and demonstrating the jumping-jack motion with her hands as she stood behind a vintage cash register. “He made things that worked.”

Bill Gerity, who knew Daniel for more than 70 years, reminisced, “He was a great, great friend.”

On a recent weekday afternoon, a cross-section of modern society entered Mougel Tailors, including one of the many police officers who trust Mougel Tailors to clean their uniforms. Often greeted by name, customers dropped off and picked up an assortment of garments as varied as they were.

Raymond Aisner of Jackson Avenue, a retired dentist who used to treat Tara, remembered Morris and Daniel fondly when he came in bearing a black suit jacket in need of a button replacement. “They were always very cordial and helpful with what would be the best way to proceed in tailoring or whatever, very honest, very modest people.”

When Daniel, the soft-spoken family man, first started providing sartorial service to locals, dry cleaning may have been a nascent business, but now Mougel Tailors is a part of the fabric of downtown Rutherford — and that is certainly a feather in his cap.