Longtime owner of Jeffrey’s, the ‘oldest toy store in S.F.’
Emanuel “Manny” Luhn, who owned Jeffrey’s Toys, a chain of Bay Area stores known to generations of children for the assortment of hard-to-find toys before the business was whittled to one location, has died. He was 93.
Luhn died of heart failure Oct. 23 at his Danville home, said son Jeffrey Luhn, for whom the store was named.
Emanuel Luhn earned a reputation as the big kid at the store chain’s center, and was remembered by his children for setting off water rockets at a Berkeley traffic intersection outside one of his shops and building towers of toys just to see how high he could stack them.
Jeffrey’s Toys, located in San Francisco’s Financial District since 2017, is still humming amid a difficult time for toy stores. It’s outlasted Toys R Us and survived the arrival of e-commerce. Mark Luhn, his eldest son, took over Jeffrey’s Toys nearly three decades ago and remains its owner.
“He just was not a get-rich, build-an-empire kind of guy,” said Jeffrey Luhn, a photographer. “He just worked really, really hard. He never criticized anybody. But people wanted to please him because he was a
nice man.”
Born on April 18, 1925, Emanuel Luhn grew up in Oakland with his mother and father, Birdie and Morton, and older brother Joel. The family owned a general store, Birdie’s Variety Store, that sold everything from housewares to hardware in the 1930s.
After World War II, more Americans had young children, and demand for toys boomed with the population. Birdie and Morton Luhn opened Birdie’s Toy House in San Leandro in 1948 and steered their son into the toy business when he returned from his service in the Marine Corps. He left behind his engineering studies at San Jose State University.
The store chain grew, with new locations in San Francisco, Daly City, Berkeley, Walnut Creek and Hayward. Emanuel Luhn married his teenage sweetheart, Mildred, and they had three children, twins Mark and Stevie, and Jeffrey.
The children were, of course, drafted into the toy business. Mark Luhn said he was the buyer for the hobby department by the time he was 12.
When the children were young, the Luhns lived in the bedroom community of San Lorenzo, where people decked their front yards with elaborate decorations at Christmastime. The spectacle drew so many sightseers, it required police to direct traffic, Jeffrey Luhn said. The men in the neighborhood would take turns dressing as Santa Claus and handing out candy canes to children.
Emanuel Luhn would take his turn, “but he also gave a gift to every kid,” Jeffrey Luhn said. His dad would put on the red suit and load his delivery van with wrapped gifts — Madame Alexander dolls for the girls and baseball mitts for the boys. He knocked on every door in the neighborhood.
“We’re Jewish,” Jeffrey Luhn said. But as a family in the toy business, “Christmas was a major event for us.”
Emanuel Luhn retired in 1989 to spend more time with family and handed the business to Mark Luhn. The business had shrunk to one location on Market Street in San Francisco, which moved to Berkeley in 2015 and then back to San Francisco at 45 Kearny St.
A sign billing Jeffrey’s Toys as the oldest toy store in San Francisco draws tourists into the aisles, which are stuffed with jigsaw puzzles, baby dolls and Lego sets.
Services for Emanuel Luhn were held at the Chapel of the Chimes in Hayward. In his eulogy, Jeffrey Luhn said his father’s legacy lives on in the hundreds of people the Luhns employed over the years.
Emanuel Luhn is preceded in death by his wife Mildred and daughter Stevie.
In addition to his two sons, Luhn’s survivors include his longtime companion Peggy Brodie, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and a rare collection of Madame Alexander dolls.