Abigail “Gail” Seidman, proprietor of University Stationery Co. for more than 50 years, died Jan. 22 from pancreatic cancer. She was 80.
Phil Franca, who has worked at the shop for 35 years, said she had been in hospice care for only a few days before she died. “It’s still a shock,” Franca said on Saturday. “Gail was like family to me.”
Seidman was known for her quirky sense of humor and the store’s playful inventory. “She was the fun one in the family,” said her nephew, Brian Seidman. Some of that was evident in offbeat inventory like “Handerpants” and T-shirts with math puns. In a 2017 interview with Cambridge Community Television, Seidman stands in front of a T-shirt that reads: “Dear Algebra, stop telling me to find your X. She’s not coming back.”
There is also the store’s emblematic giant pencil, which may be eight feet long, and a giant slide rule that hangs on one of its walls. Brian Seidman said the family plans to keep the pencil. He is talking with the MIT Museum about donating the slide rule.
Gus Rancatore, co-founder of Toscanini’s ice cream, said via email that “Gail was always incredibly kind, full of local knowledge and sharp comments about life near MIT. She delighted in listening patiently when I described something I wasn’t sure they had. She would think for a minute and then reach up to a high shelf and ask, ‘Would this solve the problem?’ Always it did.”
Gail Seidman’s father and mother opened University Stationery in 1929, operating at first out of the basement of the building where they lived. Despite its launch in the face of the Great Depression, the business was able to move to a Cambridge shopfront in 1931.
Seidman did not start out in the family business. She worked at Honeywell, a technology and manufacturing company, where she became one of the first female managers. But when her father died in 1974, she left Honeywell to join the family business.
“She didn’t want her mother running the store alone, and so she left a phenomenal job at Honeywell,” said Betsy Spitzer, Gail Seidman’s friend for more than 50 years. “And grew the business to what it was. It was a real successful business until COVID.”
In 1982, her brother Barry joined them after retiring from a decorated career in the U.S. Air Force. Their mother died in 1998, and her brother in 2020.
Spitzer went to work part-time at the store in 2000 after retiring from her work as a teacher. During the last few years, as Seidman battled first lymphoma and then pancreatic cancer, Spitzer helped care for her.
From 1941 until 2016, the store was located at 311 Massachusetts Ave. Brian Seidman recalled working there during summers when he was growing up. The store, he said, “was small and cramped and super overflowing with merchandise, with very little organization. But whatever you might need, they probably had somewhere.”
Her nephew called the current shop, across the street at 296 Massachusetts Ave., “a different thing altogether. It’s more organized, it’s thinner, not that overflowing merchandise everywhere.”
One thing that never changed was Gail Seidman’s belief in forming personal relationships with her customers. Even as the store added orders by fax and adopted e-commerce, “we prefer people call us and talk to us,” she said in the interview with Cambridge Community Television in 2016, as the shop prepared to move to its current location.
In that interview, Seidman noted that the business had changed as Cambridge’s employer base shifted from manufacturing to biotech, and that the biotech companies were less loyal to small businesses like hers. But she still worked to develop connections. “Most of our customers became our friends,” Spitzer said, and when Seidman became ill and started missing work, “we had a group of commercial customers that would call at least once a week to find out how she was doing.”
Raised in Belmont, Seidman lived in a Cambridge apartment for the last four decades. She had a group of friends who formed “the Cemetery Club,” meeting every couple of weeks over a period of decades to talk over drinks (Seidman preferred Crown Royal whisky). The name came because “we were dead by Friday night,” said Spitzer, who was also a member.
Brian Seidman, who lives in Portland, Ore., said he felt some guilt about closing down a 96-year-old business, but said he didn’t see a way to operate it profitably. There had been a plan to sell the business, but he said the buyer walked away from the deal a week or two before Gail Seidman died.
Franca said the store is working to sell off its inventory and then will close. He said “going out of business” signs would probably be posted this week. The store will likely be open for only a few more weeks.
An obituary noted that a funeral was held Jan. 28 at Ashkenaz of Cambridge Cemetery in Everett. Seidman never married or had children. Besides her nephew, his wife and their two children, she is survived by her sister-in-law Valerie Seidman.
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