LITTLE ROCK — Mae Horn’s signature line in her Horn’s Men Store television commercials came naturally, not from any written script, for someone known for her feisty personality and blunt talk, her daughter said Wednesday.
Horn, who founded the longtime men’s clothing store near Seventh and Center streets in Little Rock with her husband, L.A. Horn, in 1961, died Monday of system failure.
She was 94.
When her husband died just eight years after starting their business, Mae Horn not only kept the men’s clothing store going, she expanded it and started making commercials to advertise it.
In her raspy-voiced delivery, Horn’s best-known line became “I dress all the best-dressed men,” a catchphrase born when she blurted it out during an early commercial rehearsal with Dave Woodman, a Little Rock television sports anchorman, daughter Nancy Horn Roy recalled.
“Dave was making a commercial, and she would not read anything or memorize anything,” Roy said. “They were just ad-libbing. And Dave said, ‘Mae, I guess you have just about dressed most of the best dressed men in Little Rock.’That’s when Mother said, ‘I dress all the best-dressed men.’
“It’s amazing how many people know about that,” Roy said. “She was kind of a legend with that. And she had that very raspy voice.”
Horn had a savvy business mind and the energy to run a business specializing in men’s suits that’s “now out of vogue,” Roy said.
“My mother and dad kind of fell into that,” Roy remembered about how the business started. “People wore suits in those days,and businessmen all had to wear suits to work. Their business did very well.
“My mother had such vitality and vigor, and she was a gambler,” Roy said of her mother continuing with the store after L.A. Horn died in 1969. “She enlarged the business, doubled the size and started doing her own commercials. Her personality was so engaging. She’d say ‘I’m making you look half-decent, baby.’ She connected with men. She was the business.”
Lindsay Mae Wyatt later appeared with her greatgrandmother and Roy, her grandmother, in several commercials for the store when she was a child.
“She was a spitfire,” Wyatt, 21, said of her greatgrandmother. “She loved me. She loved her family. We were her babies. And she loved her dogs [two Shih Tzus]. She wanted you to come out and pay attention to her dogs first and foremost, and then she just wanted to sit and talk. And she always had a cigarette in her hand.”
Horn of Maumelle was a native of Cisco, Texas. She and her husband moved to Little Rock in 1951 and introduced to Arkansans the Necchi zig-zag sewing machine made in Italy, Roy said.
“That was a big deal,” Roy recalled. “People sewed at that time, so it was huge. Mother went to Italy, and studied and learned how to demonstrate it. She and my dad opened dealerships around the state for that. It was very innovative.”
By the 1960s, though, people began buying their clothes more from stores, Roy said. The societal change led the Horns into the retail clothing business, a business Mae Horn turned into a familiar name.
Horn turned the business over to Roy in the 1980s, Roy said. She sold the business almost six years ago, she said.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 10/21/2010