华尔街日报刊发Nine West前总裁Noel Hord讣告，未形成上市公司交易催化

Noel Hord, a former president and chief operating officer of Nine West, died on May 26 at 79.

Hord began his career as a salesperson in Terre Haute, Ind., and was named Footwear News Man of the Year.

He created the Hord Foundation to fund scholarships for minority students and led Concerned Black Men.

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Noel Hord, a former president and chief operating officer of Nine West, died on May 26 at 79.View more

Much was expected of Noel Hord. He shared a first name with his father, a Baptist minister and a leader of the Black community in Terre Haute, Ind. His older siblings were A students.

At Indiana State University, however, Hord showed little interest in studying and preferred playing cards with friends. After dropping out of college, he went to work at a shoe store in his hometown, starting as a stock assistant before moving into sales.

Though it looked like a defeat, that career decision paid off handsomely for Hord.

His charm and social skills made him a star salesman and put him on track for management jobs at major retailers. Footwear News called him Man of the Year in 1994. His steady rise led to the job of president and chief operating officer of the shoe retailer Nine West Group in the late 1990s. He called himself the Jackie Robinson of retailing.

Hord created the Hord Foundation to fund scholarships for minority students and was a leader of Concerned Black Men, a nonprofit providing scholarships and mentoring.

Hord died on May 26 in Hacienda Heights, Calif. He was 79 and had Parkinson’s disease.

Selling in Terre Haute

As a young man, he attended a newly desegregated high school in Terre Haute and was friendly with students of all colors. His father served on a local hospital board with Herman Becker, who ran his family’s Ben Becker shoe store.

“Herman was progressive,” Hord told Footwear News in 2018. “In 1967, he wanted to hire a Black person.” Hord believed he was the first Black salesperson in downtown Terre Haute. “When I started there, they placed me in men’s shoes because they were more comfortable with me there than in the women’s and children’s departments.” Soon, however, young white women who knew Hord from high school were asking why he couldn’t sell shoes to them.

He liked the job. “There was the people side of it, and you were also able to measure your own success,” Hord said. “It was commission-driven, and you could impact your own paycheck.” In his early days, he hoped that someday he might be able to run a shoe store. He ended up overseeing thousands of them.

Son of a carpenter

Noel Edward Hord, the fourth of five children, was born on July 10, 1946, and grew up in a church parsonage. His father, Noel Ernest Hord, was a carpenter as well as a pastor. His mother, Jessie Mae (Tyler) Hord, returned to college in her 40s and became a librarian.

Hord met Cora Ritchie at his father’s church when she was studying at Indiana State. They married in 1966. She became an elementary-school teacher.

In the late 1960s, Hord was promoted to a management-training position in Brown Shoe’s Wohl division. Over the next 15 years, he went on to other retail-management jobs in Gary, Ind., St. Louis and Detroit. He oversaw shoe sales at the palatial J.L. Hudson department store in downtown Detroit and other Hudson stores. After his career prospered, he bought his wife a fur coat one Christmas and, to make the gift more of a surprise, wrapped it in a microwave box.

In 1984, Hord joined Fisher Camuto Group, which later became Nine West. As a divisional president, he made trips to Brazil, where much of the merchandise was made. “He was horrified by the squalor in Brazil near factories,” recalled Katherine Utley, one of his sisters.

Eager for more responsibility, he left Nine West in 1993 to become president and chief executive officer of U.S. Shoe’s footwear operations, whose brands included Easy Spirit. He gave up his designated parking space near the entrance to the executive offices and said it should be available to the first arrival.

Nine West acquired U.S. Shoe in 1995 and appointed Hord as president and chief operating officer of the combined business. It was a turbulent period in the shoe industry as competition intensified and production shifted to China. Nine West earnings fell short of forecasts in 1997, and the company eliminated about 6% of its workforce. In January 1998, Hord resigned from the company, citing “a highly personal decision to seek new professional goals elsewhere.”

He later worked as a consultant and held executive posts at several smaller shoe companies. In the early 2000s, he overcame an alcohol problem through a rehabilitation program, said his daughter, Michelle Hord.

In 2017, Michelle Hord’s 7-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, was murdered. The girl’s father, Neil White, was convicted of murdering her. Michelle Hord wrote a memoir about her grief, “The Other Side of Yet.”

Noel Hord’s first wife, Cora, died in 1994. He is survived by his second wife, Tamar Hord; his daughter; a son, Noel Daniel Hord; a brother, two sisters, and three grandchildren.

“Even though I was a person of color, at a time segregation was going on, I never put barriers or lines around what I wanted to do,” Hord told Footwear News. “I knew, in terms of performance, that I had to stand out.”

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