A men’s clothing store and breaking a color barrier

Rod Doss and his job at Freeman’s Men’s Wear

He’d delivered newspapers and sold hunting and fishing licenses at a sporting goods store in East Hills, but Freeman’s Men’s Wear on Fifth Avenue is the job Rod Doss remembers best at a time when he was still finding his way in the world.

He was 19 years old, and it was the early 1960s — the decade of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Freeman’s was part of what was then a thriving community of Jewish-owned businesses in the city’s Uptown section.

The store offered big and tall sizes — portly Allegheny County Commissioner Tom Foerster was a regular — and also had a nice line of hats. Men’s hats sold well until President Kennedy removed his hat before addressing the crowd at his inauguration in 1961, Mr. Doss said. Hat sales at Freeman’s never recovered.

Mr. Doss — the second oldest of eight children born to a millworker father, Eli, and stay-athome mom, Earlene — was raised in East Liberty where he would check out the maximum allowable number of books from the neighborhood Carnegie Library and enjoy swimming at the local YMCA.

He remembered his father as a determined man who taught him what it meant to be a father.

“Nothing stopped him,” Mr. Doss said about his father, who died when Mr. Doss was just 13. “He always found a way to take care of his family.”

From each job, starting with delivering newspapers, Mr. Doss said he learned about people and the importance of customer service.

At the sporting goods store, for example, he came to understand