Letter Shop Friends to Ride as Parade Marshals

The Palisades Letter Shop commands the best view of the Fourth of July parade, located on Via de la Paz in the thick of the parade hubbub. Letter Shop founder Phyllis Genovese and current owner Sylvia Grieb will graduate from a sidewalk view to the backseat of an open-topped convertible this year as they share honors as parade marshals, saluting the Letter Shop’s 60th anniversary. Although this will be a repeat for Genovese, who rode in the parade as 1952 Citizen of the Year, she remains as excited as a majorette. She even plans to return from an out-of-town visit with her sister on July 2 to guarantee that she’ll be rested and ready for the big day. ‘I’ve been involved with the parade committee since its inception and even though I haven’t done much for the past 15 to 20 years, I wouldn’t miss it,’ Genovese says, adding ‘when you get to be 92, it’s a little difficult.’ While she has slowed down from the early days running her shop, which she started modestly with a typewriter, a hectograph copying machine and an addressograph in 1947, she remains active in the Woman’s Club and plays bridge three days a week. Genovese sold her shop to Sylvia and the late Bill Grieb in May 1998, thinking that she would slow down. ‘Now I go over there every day to make sure they’re working hard,’ she says with a laugh. ‘They’ is really a euphemism for a crew of Genovese’s friends and longtime colleagues, including Sylvia, Alcie Wilbur (whom Genovese hired 20 years ago), Sandy Salkow and Julie Martin. When Genovese decided to sell her shop, prompted by the illness of her late husband Sherman Keely, she offered it to her friends, the Griebs. Sylvia remembers the day. ‘Bill and I were putting together a program for a one-woman show that our daughter Sybil was performing for Theatre Palisades. Phyllis had a saddle-stitcher, so we asked her if we could use it. She said, of course, and ‘what are you doing for dinner?’ We sat around her dining room table collating the program when she said, ‘You kids ought to buy the Letter Shop.’ We thought about it and thought, why not?’ Well aware of her status as the ‘silent partner’ in her 34-year marriage (Bill died of cancer in November 2006), Sylvia says she enjoyed ‘trying to keep up with him.’ Bill, who was slated to be this year’s Palisades Americanism Parade Association (PAPA) president, was a huge town booster. He spearheaded the 75th anniversary celebration of Pacific Palisades by getting each of the service groups and volunteer associations to stage an event, which they did, filling the entire year. He was also a big supporter of the parade, videotaping the festivities and posting the footage on the 90272 Web site by the following morning. While Bill was good at overview, Sylvia is good at the details, which proved to be a winning formula. And their backgrounds were congruent. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Sylvia graduated with a master’s degree in biology and went off to Washington, D.C. to work in cancer research at the National Institutes of Health. She later moved into grants management and finally into systems management for the Cancer Institute. Bill was a chemist by training, worked in Santa Monica at Systems Development Corporation and later founded Systems Interface Consultants in Maryland in 1969. The two met in an assembly language class at the computer center in D.C., she as a student, he as an observer, and the rest is history. In 1975, Sylvia and Bill returned to the Palisades, where Bill had purchased a house years before. He continued his work with Systems Interface, while Sylvia helped raise Bill’s two teenage sons, and the couple’s own daughter, Sybil, who was born in 1977. Following in her parents’ footsteps, Sybil, a 1995 PaliHi graduate, now works here in Los Angeles for the gaming company World of Warcraft in ad sales and business development. After Bill passed away last year, friends wondered if Sylvia would sell The Letter Shop, but she shakes her head vehemently. ‘This has really been a godsend,’ she says. ‘I love being in the heart of the village, where you see most everybody at some point during the day.’ After 60 years, The Letter Shop is filled with up-to-date equipment and has outlived competitors like Pips, Tops and Kinko’s, but Sylvia and Phyllis know he real secret. ‘Success is plugging and serving and doing things for customers that nobody else does, letting them think they’re the best we’ve had,’ Genovese says. ‘And kissing all the men,’ another privilege of age.