When it came to merchandising and promotion, Noel Goldblatt was a natural, family members said.
The son of a co-founder of Goldblatt Brothers Inc., he worked about eight years as a menswear buyer for the Chicago-area department store chain before leaving in the late 1950s to open a string of automatic carwashes.
“He was very creative,” a showman who reveled in creating a circuslike atmosphere for every grand opening with clowns and plenty of food, said his daughter, Marcia Regan.
Mr. Goldblatt, 77, died of heart failure Saturday, Jan. 18, in his Chicago home.
Goldblatt Auto World, which had several sites that could handle 1,500 vehicles a day, failed, and Mr. Goldblatt filed for bankruptcy in 1969.
He then started a real estate firm that catered to the nascent corporate relocation business.
A son of Maurice Goldblatt, a co-founder of the department store chain, Mr. Goldblatt was born in Chicago and graduated from Culver Military Academy in Culver, Ind., in 1943.
During World War II he served in the Army in Europe, put poor eyesight kept him from the front lines, his family said.
In 1969 he started Presidential Villas Co., a Lombard real estate marketing and management company that owns and sublets apartments. He and his wife, Lea, sold the business in 1997. He had a stroke in 2000 after triple-bypass heart surgery the previous year. In recent years Mr. Goldblatt and his wife invested in Goldblatt’s stores, which now have six locations.
“He was a promoter and a big idea guy,” said his son. After business failure, “He picked himself up and on he went.”
“There was an innocence about him, a child within him, always,” his wife said. “He never grew up.”
The type of person who hosted his own birthday bashes, Mr. Goldblatt celebrated one year by busing about 50 people to his Lake Delavan, Wis., home for a Halloween-theme party, his daughter said.
“They got really involved in a contest because he offered a prize to Paris,” which turned out to be an expense-paid trip to Paris, Ill., she said
A power of gentle persuasion helped Mr. Goldblatt obtain hundreds of signatures of dignitaries from the worlds of politics, sports and entertainment, his wife said.
“He had a wonderful stamp collection, where he would collect signatures from people,” Lea Goldblatt said.
Mr. Goldblatt added those autographs to a collection of historical documents, including signatures from every U.S. president, that he had begun amassing when he was 18, his wife said.
In 2000 Mr. Goldblatt and his wife presented the signatures of about 380 individuals, from Abraham Lincoln to Madonna, to his alma mater, now called Culver Academies.
“It’s a wonderful learning tool for us at Culver because it’s living history,” said John Buxton, head of schools.
Mr. Goldblatt is also survived by a son, Ron; a brother, Stanford; two sisters, Gloria Joss and Merle Cohen; and five grandchildren.
Services will be held at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday in Piser Chapel, 5206 N. Broadway.
