Nadine Beck, who built and ran Beck Book Stores with her husband, died December 23. She was 94. The Chicago Tribune reported that "six years after opening their first college bookstore in 1955 near Loyola University's Water Tower Campus, Bob and Nadine Beck were busy with their young family when she came up with an idea to expand the business.... The couple opened their second store, and then another and another and another. The couple had 10 stores running before deciding to scale back and consolidate. Today, Beck Book Store, Inc. has six locations throughout the city and suburbs, half servicing colleges and half servicing high schools."
"Business was doing great with dad running the store and mom handling the bookkeeping from out of our basement," said daughter Linda Beck Olson, who has been running the business for the past 15 years. "Then one day mom had this great idea of opening a second store. It wasn't hard for her to convince dad, because he trusted her opinion.... Mom was the one behind the initial expansion that set everything into motion. When it came to the business, she was the brains money-wise."
Olson also noted that during the 1980s, Beck traveled with a group of friends to India to learn meditation from a maharishi: "I don't know how she did it while raising two kids, but she did. She was very open-minded and one of those moms that did things way ahead of her time. She was a free spirit."
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Madeline ("Mel") Bolen, "who built one of Canada's largest independent bookstores," died December 21, CBC News reported. She was 72. "From its beginnings as a tiny shop in the Hillside Shopping Mall in 1975, Bolen Books became a favored Victoria destination for more than four decades of book hunters, from UVic students scouting for hard-to-find computer books in the 1970s to youngsters lined up for the midnight release of the latest Harry Potter offshoot," CBC News wrote.
In 1996, Bolen Books opened its current 20,000-square-foot store, and when she retired in 2010, Bolen sold the store to her daughter, Samantha. She also sponsored the Bolen Books Children Book Prize, which awards $5,000 (about US$3,780) to a local author every year.
"Mel made a real community book store and I think that paved the way for keeping people here when the big chain stuff was happening," said store manager Colin Holt.