Sidney Jacobson

Origins and early life

Sidney Jacobson was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, studied chemistry at Brooklyn College and, at the age of sixteen, in 1934, went to work in a machine tool shop.

Work and career

In 1941 he opened the Sid Tool Company in a small storefront at 177 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, with $1,100 of his own savings and $3,000 borrowed from his mother, to sell cutting tools to the city's machine shops. Drafted during the Second World War, he served in the Air Force loading bombs onto aircraft, while his brother, and then his sister, ran the business until his return in 1945. The aircraft makers Grumman and Republic became his main customers, and in 1955 he moved the company to Plainview, on Long Island, closer to his home in Great Neck.

To widen his clientele he mailed his first catalog in 1964, a plain booklet of about 150 pages that offered imported cutting tools at discount prices and became the company's “Big Book”. In 1969, in the era of punch cards, he took the step, then unprecedented in his trade, of installing a computerized system for inventory control and order processing, and in 1970 he bought the Manhattan Supply Company, whose initials gave the business its name, MSC.

His son Mitchell joined the firm in 1976 and became its president in 1982, Sidney Jacobson retired from the company in 1983, and MSC Industrial Direct went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1995. He and his wife Bernice were, in the words of the Jewish community center that bears his name, leaders of the greater Jewish community: they served the UJA-Federation of New York, he was a founder of Long Island Jewish Hospital, and he helped found and expand the JCC in East Hills, which his family named the Sid Jacobson JCC in 1988.

Sidney and Bernice Jacobson died together at their home in Great Neck Estates on 21 June 2005, and hundreds of mourners attended their funeral at Temple Beth-El in Great Neck.