By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — Even just a few days after a total hip replacement operation, Jay Stein looks like he’s ready to pounce.
Sitting out back of his Italian villa-like home on a patio chair, several steps above a kidney-shaped swimming pool, he’s all concentration, reading a paperback biography of Babe Ruth.
A soft breeze blows off a curled finger of Rehoboth Bay, only a stone’s throw from where he’s sitting, rustling his thinning, brown hair.
Looking tanned and fit, and dressed in a wrinkle-free buttoned-down white shirt, tan slacks and dark leather slippers, you just can’t help but get the feeling that Stein, 67, knows how to live.
Stein’s gaze, however, is something altogether different.
It’s a lined and tough face. And wide open, with sparkling blue eyes and a toothy smile.
You wouldn’t be surprised if this product of a Russian-Jewish father and Italian-Catholic mother — and the owner of this beach town’s venerable jewelry and antique store, Stuart Kingston — was hanging on a South Philadelphia street corner talking trash about the Phillies or the new neighbor’s wife.
But Joseph Jeffrey Stein isn’t talking trash. At least not anymore.
“They called me J.J. when I was a kid,” he says. “But that didn’t work as I got older. So they called me Jay.”
A pugnacious athlete and lifeguard as a teenager, Stein grew into the heir-apparent of a business his father, Maurice Stein, co-founded nearly eight decades ago as a seasonal auction house.
Stuart Kingston: It’s a very English name. Unlike, say, Stein, or even his mom’s maiden name, Galli.
But they did those sorts of things 75 years ago. Change Mediterranean-centered, vowel-rich names into more acceptable Anglo-Saxon ones. Actors. Politicians. Businesses in segregated resort towns.
Today, Maurice’s son lives near the country club that wouldn’t even let him in as a member until the 1960s.
Like the town in which he grew up, a lot of things have flourished and changed during Jay Stein’s life.
Even the decade-ago loss of his son, to whom he wanted to give his business, has woven itself into what has become a more balanced life, mellowing what once had been a rambunctious lifestyle.
“I always admired guys who may have had a privileged life, but who are tough,” says his best friend, Judson Bennett. “Jay Stein has so many different sides that make him interesting. I’ve never been bored around him.”
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“I’m ashamed of how little I know about my dad’s past,” Stein says.
But when you’re growing up buff and tough in a beach town, you tend not to be all that interested in the older folks.
Stein has memories of his mother’s father, Charles Galli, who spoke broken English, showing him the grapes he used in the basement to make his wine.
Stein’s tanned face colors further when he confesses that as a child he had been ashamed of his grandparents’ accents.
He knows his mom’s parents divorced, and that his mom grew up in a convent.
He knows that both his mom and dad grew up in Portland, Me., and that his father’s father, Joseph Stein, was a jeweler and a real estate investor there. He lost most of his investments during the Great Depression.
And Stein knows that his father, Maurice, became a jeweler, too, but also made money running auctions, hooking up with a partner named Sidney Cohan of Canada.
His parents married in 1939, but the seasonal business in Rehoboth began in 1930.
His father and his partner traveled from Maine to St. Petersburg, Fla., throughout the 1930s to hold auctions, Stein said. They stopped at Rehoboth Beach for the summer, then a town of 400 who traveled on dirt roads with no stop lights.
The town only was alive between end of May and early September, but there were enough summer-long vacationers to make running an auction house for 10 weeks viable.
When Stein’s parents married, they traded a silver tea service for the down payment on two building lots and a house on St. Lawrence Street, all of which cost less than $8,000. (When the same house was sold recently, it went for $1 million).
Maurice Stein leased a building on the beach and named his auction house Stuart Kingston, altering the WASPy name of a former employer named Stuart Kingsley.
Jay Stein was born in April 1940 in St. Petersburg, while his father was working for another man’s auction business.
“I was born premature,” he says. He should have been born in Rehoboth, where he has spent most of the nearly seven decades of his life.
“I’m just a hick from Rehoboth,” Stein says repeatedly. “And look at me now.”
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So, look.
The home he shares with his wife, Dian, 61, with whom he’s been married for more than 40 years, is eclectically cultured.
He met Dian, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Texas native in 1965 on a blind date while visiting his brother James who attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.
Stein was 25 and Dian, a student who had been elected “Miss Rollins,” was 19. They met in April and married in November.
He recalls his father’s mother telling him that she’d cut her own throat if he dared marry Dian.
“You better cut your throat then,” Stein says he told her.
With an architect, Dian helped design their home on the bay. The outside is a deceiving drab gray, but inside it holds an understated collection of antiques, art and a well-stocked wine cellar, mostly French.
Their collection reflects their tastes and their travels all around the world, especially in Asia, their favorite continent to visit, as well as to buy the stones, carpets and art they sell at the store and at auction.
That tradition of traveling began with Stein’s father, who bought sapphires, rubies and diamonds from the father of the man Stein buys them from now in Bangkok.
From Thailand, China is a just a train ride away, and they’ve visited Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Iran, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Katmandu.
The couple also has been to Europe and Latin America, and even stayed in a hotel overlooking the Amazon jungle in South America.
“He is probably the most well-traveled person I know,” says Bennett.
Travel has broadened his tastes and helped Stein achieve a sense of balance that helped calm him down and accept the greatest tragedy in his life.
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About 15 years ago, traveling back from an Atlantic City jaunt with Bennett in his own private airplane, Jay Stein looked over to his best friend and smiled.
“Boy, it’s great to be rich,” Bennett says Stein told him. “Everything is so good for me. I hope nothing goes wrong.”
It certainly hadn’t very much up until then.
Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, Stein led a self-absorbed life as a young man. Except, instead of hanging out with Falstaff in taverns, Stein lived the life of a beach bum.
“I thought I was everything,” he says.
That included one incident when he was pulled over by a summer-time police officer while driving around with two girls in his 1955 white Corvette.
He had flipped the bird to the officer, whom he despised.
Stein was arrested and his father came to get him.
“He kicked me right in the butt, hard,” Stein recalls. “The girls were there and I was so embarrassed. I had to stay in the house for a week.”
Stein was an athlete and lifeguard, and during the summer he was a day camp counselor for younger kids.
That’s where he met an 11-year-old Judson Bennett, whom the 15-year-old Stein mercilessly teased because Bennett was overweight.
“I hated him,” Bennett says. “I went home and told my dad I didn’t want to go back because of Jay. He went to his dad and told him.”
At the beginning of the following year’s camp, Stein chose Bennett first when the counselors picked players for the baseball team.
“He knocked himself out to be nice to me,” Bennett says. “I started responding and became a really great athlete.”
Even so, Stein’s raucous behavior didn’t stop.
“When I was a kid, to spend a night at the Stein house, as I did later on, was cool,” Bennett says. “The whole family atmosphere was fun. They always had beautiful girls around, so it was always cool to be there.”
Both Bennett and Stein loved going out with women, and it got them in trouble enough times for that part of their lives to become a lesson as they aged.
“We recognized eventually that we have good women in our lives,” Bennett says. “We recognized the fact that you can only push the envelop so far without it falling apart. We’ve both been right to the edge.”
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Although he excelled in athletics, Stein never did all that well in school.
He attended the University of Delaware beginning in 1959, but received “weak” grades, contracted mononucleosis while a sophomore and dropped out.
But he already knew what he wanted to do. “I always knew I’d go into my dad’s business,” he says.
The year after he dropped out of college, 1962, proved to be decisive for both himself and for the future of Stuart Kingston.
It was the year the Steins decided to move to Pompano Beach, Fla., for the winter, and run a business with another partner.
But a devastating March nor’easter smashed the coast of Delaware in 1962, destroying the old building where Stuart Kingston had set up shop.
“It was the best thing that could have happened to us,” Stein says, if only because most of their merchandise was in Florida. More importantly, they were able to have a larger building built, which they bought outright in 1966. And it vitalized the whole community, as it rebuilt itself.
But his father remained shaken by the storm, and then devastated after his Florida partner died from a heart attack shortly after.
At 56, Maurice soon left most of the daily business to his 22-year-old son.
By the time his father died of a heart attack in 1973, Stein knew the ins and outs of the business, and began pushing it in new directions, including more on-the-road auctions in the surrounding region and making one-on-one visits to big clients.
Stein also began investing in real estate and in banking. He became very successful.
Unlike his father who came of age during the Great Depression, Stein did not fear he might go bankrupt after each summer season, as his grandfather did.
As the business continued to thrive, Jay Stein and Dian had three children, including Elizabeth Mauria, his only son Joseph Jeffrey, called J.J., and Anita.
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J.J. was the heir-apparent, says Dennis Meyers, 58, a New York real estate investor who has know the Steins most of his life. He was a natural-born merchant and collector, and excelled at his dad’s business because he fell in love with antiques and furniture and art.
Meyers first starting hanging out with the Steins during the mid-1970s. His father had done business with Stein’s father for decades.
“I grew very close to his kids, especially with his son,” says Meyers, who continues to do business with the Steins. “J.J. and I had a lot in common. He was a collector, and was clever at finding things.”
At one point, J.J. had spent months in Italy, learning the language, even dreaming in Italian, and fell in love with a girl there.
“He was a natural at the job,” Stein says.
Five years after Stein declared to Bennett his happiness, his son, who had been drinking one evening, gave his car keys to a friend and started to walk home.
While leaping the span of a bridge on Del. 1, 30-year-old J.J. jumped short and hit his head. He died shortly afterward.
“We were more like brothers than father and son,” Stein says.
Stein found himself “jumping into his business again with two feet,” a business he had begun to hand over to his son. “We’ve worked harder in his memory.”
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A walk through Stuart Kingston is a charming saunter through an eclectic artistic past and into a frenzied present, embodied in the slim form of Stein’s daughter Mauria, 41.
A natural-born salesperson, Mauria has spent most of the past 17 years at the store. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was 5,” she says.
The store is chockfull of porcelain vases, commissioned and authentic Americana paintings, sculpted wooden Buddhas and bronze elephants from Bangkok, a series of over-sized wooden toys, and enough sentimental sculptures of children to clutter a good-sized city park.
“I want to phase out all this crap and go straight to Oriental carpets and jewelry,” Stein says, standing before a room stacked with carpets.
Carpets and jewelry constitute most of their business, he and Mauria say, and they plan to hold a big sale this summer to unload much of the merchandise.
As Stein slowly releases the daily business of the store to his daughter — Anita is married with two sons and living in Rye, N.Y. — he and Dian will travel even more, and perhaps buy a little less.
But things will not be all that different.
“We’ve worked hard and been successful and we’ve traveled a lot,” Stein says. “But what you find out after a long time is how important those things are that my father taught me. It’s always been about the family and its well-being. That will never change.”