One of the greatest gifts I received from my childhood sweetheart, Ellen Lending, was being adopted by her entire family. Her parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins on both her mother’s and father’s sides took me in almost immediately. Kind of surprising since I was 15 years old, smitten with Ellie, who was 14, and probably a pretty scraggly-looking, under-performing student in school.
The first time I saw Ellen was when I was in the 8th grade and she was in the 7th. I told my best friend that I would marry her someday. When I finally got the opportunity to hoof my way over to her house in Creve Coeur, Missouri, walking through the Hiram cemetery, today the resting place of both Ellen and our son Bradley, I could not have imagined the amount of love, connection, mentorship, and so forth, that was about to be bestowed on me.
As I approached the house from the backyard, Mr. Lending was barbecuing. He strongly resembled Walter Matthau and did the part of grumpy flawlessly. I'm sure I looked quite stupid as he ignored my presence, and I didn't know whether to knock on the back door or just go in. Soon, I would learn the answer with his always great sense of humor. I'm glad I didn't flee. By the time Ellen and I had our third date/visit, Raydine and David welcomed me into their home as if I were a son. I had dinner there almost every night and even joined them for the family’s traditional Jewish ceremonial meals. David and I developed a strong bond, and the family reminded me of what I couldn't get at home. After dinner, we would watch TV together in the family room and we took in Nadia Comaneci scoring seven perfect tens for three gold medals in the 1976 Olympics and loved watching the saga “Roots” together.
The Lending family was as close to a TV series as you can find, with aunts, uncles, and cousins who all loved each other and stayed engaged in each other's lives through all kinds of oddities, twists, and turns. The opposite of my dysfunctional, loose band of a family. The Lending extended family included (Raydine’s side) my Aunt Judy and Uncle Mickey, who frequently bought us beer and wine, and Aunt Linda “Laya” and Uncle Kenny, who were fashionable, up-and-coming, friendly, and smart. They were just beginning their family and had a retail store called Kenlynn that sold higher-end and custom fashion brands to women.
We were all very fond of each other and had a close-knit relationship. I particularly liked Kenny's entrepreneurial experience, and we had lots of detailed discussions about everything under the sun. We also had fun rolling our eyes at the rest of the family from time to time. I also got to spend some time with his brother, Don, who was an airline pilot for TWA but was based out of San Francisco. It was Don who encouraged Kenny to visit “Boulangerie” in South Bay, which was having a phenomenal run in baking at the time.
In 1984, I started Clayco, which was my second business. While I was much younger than Kenny, we were both entrepreneurs and had mutual respect for one another, so it was no surprise in 1987 when he came to my office to tell me about a crazy idea he had about starting a bakery. He had seen the bakery visiting his brother Don in San Fran which was hopping with sourdough and other amazing bakery items. I thought it was crazy and told him so right away. I told him 99% of all restaurants go out of business, and that includes or is inclusive of the super successful franchisees like McDonald's, which make up the majority of survival-type restaurants. Kenny was showing me a rough set of plans for this bakery and trying to get me to give him an idea of what it was going to cost to build out. I'm not even sure I told him the price because I thought this was going to go nowhere. How wrong I was.
A couple of months later, for no reason at all, I called just to catch up with Uncle Kenny. Aunt Linda answered the phone and told me he wasn't home. I quizzed her, “Where is he?” and she said in a way that piqued my curiosity, “I'm not allowed to tell you.” Finding this very strange, I said, “You better tell me where he is!” She kind of laughed and said, “He's in San Francisco.” “San Francisco? What's he doing in San Francisco?” I asked. She said, “He's baking.” “Baking? He has a job baking?” Aunt Linda says, “No, he actually paid this baker to let him work there. He's getting up at one or two in the morning and baking until mid-morning.” I thought, oh my gosh, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard.
Kenny was digging in and risking his and Linda’s fashion retail operation, so at this point, I had no choice but to dig in and do my fair part.
St. Louis Bread Company was founded in 1987. The first store was at Woodlawn and Manchester Road in Kirkwood. Kenny and I worked through every single detail, and he had an absolute, clear vision for what would become one of the largest retail restaurants/stores in North America. That was the furthest thing from our minds at the time. All I was trying to do was get the store open on budget as Kenny scrambled around getting pots and pans and mixers and setting up an attic office with a mattress in true startup fashion. Just as he did in San Francisco, he was getting up at midnight to make the sourdough bread—something the bigger stores would never do, and he didn’t even mind it, he told an interviewer in a video that now appears on Reddit (Ken Rosenthal St. Louis Bread Panera Bread Founder : r/StLouis).
Clayco lost about $14K on the first project in Kirkwood and maybe another $15K on the next few stores. At one time, I think Kenny offered me some shares, etc., which I unwisely turned down, thinking they wouldn’t be worth anything... I didn't even give Kenny a change order because I thought it was only going to be a matter of time before the place crashed.
The day Uncle Kenny opened the first St. Louis Bread Company was October 19th, 1987, which was “Black Monday” when the stock market crashed, losing 25% of its value on that day. In response, Kenny mailed 10,000 postcards with a photo of his French baguette, offering recipients a free baguette that had no expiration date to build traffic in the bakery/cafe. It worked, and Ken was still receiving and honoring those postcards and giving away free baguettes three years after the mailing. (I still have mine.)
I was more than a little shocked by the immediate positive reaction to the bakery. Lines of people…crowds…enthusiasm…buzz…all of the things you would want to have happen, which led to multiple stores being opened in short order. I remember Kenny fibbing to me that his plan was to open only four or five stores when it turned out that he had much more ambitious plans. Thank God he did not take any advice from me about anything other than construction.
An unbelievable entrepreneurial success story, the founder Ken Rosenthal invested $150,000 and took out an SBA loan for another $150,000 to open that first bakery. He went on to build about 24 more stores and then sold the company to the public company Au Bon Pain, which had done an IPO and then was struggling and scrambling to find a new way to make their business model work until they discovered the magic of the St. Louis Bread Company. Some of the key people from that organization claim they founded Panera, but the truth is they found the St. Louis Bread Company, and if they hadn’t, they would have been in big trouble.
Instead, the combination made Panera the best-performing stock in the USA in the decade leading up to 2009. Along the way, Panera led the evolution of what has become known as the fast-casual restaurant category. It was a phenomenal success story and yet you would have always found the founder humble and with a great sense of awe and humor.
After Uncle Kenny sold to the publicly traded company, he stayed on for two years to help with the transition, and once again, although he could have walked away with a stockpile of cash in the bank, he started yet another company that became one of the major franchisees of Panera Bread Company. In 1997, he and [a partner and family] formed Breads of the World LLC, a Brentwood-headquartered Panera franchisee and opened almost 100 stores.
Our stories were different, connected, and had many common threads. We both quit good businesses to do something we were more passionate about. We both had families that gave us the encouragement to risk everything, and we cared deeply about our values and the people who would come to make us successful, and we both knew when the businesses needed new partners and key people to join to do things we couldn’t do ourselves. Kenny had Doron Berger, Myron Klevens, and David Hutkin in the go-go days.
Kenny enjoyed the support and deep relationship with his family. Our Aunt Linda “Laya” was his best friend and wife of 55 years, and he was close to his children Eric, Carlye and Craig Flom, Scott and Angie and Kari “Sara” and thirteen grandchildren Zachary, Estee, Ari, Yonah, Azariah, Ariel, Yehuda, Livia, Zohara, Avi, Aden, Shayna and Kalev.
Ken Rosenthal, friend and mentor to me and many others. Born on 4-11-1943 and passed peacefully on 2-14-2025, he will be remembered fondly.
