Robert Kramer, of East Norwich, VP of Pergament Home Centers, dies at 88

An organization man, Robert Kramer served for decades as vice president of personnel for Pergament Home Centers, the Long Island-based regional home-improvement chain that closed in 2001. But the East Norwich resident still manned a table with his family on weekends at Century’s 110 Drive-In Theatre Flea Market in Melville.

"He worked in corporate most of his life, but his heart really wasn’t in corporate," said his son, Mitchell Kramer, of East Norwich. "He was at heart an entrepreneur. We had this little family woodworking side business in our basement, and he taught my sister and me how to make things and how to use power tools from the time we were kids. And we would make these stilts for kids and sell them at flea markets."

Not just stilts, said his older sister, Lynn Kramer, also of East Norwich, but chess sets and other games as well as toy cars and trucks.

"He was the greatest, most involved dad," she said. After he took her to a New York Islanders game in 1972, she determined she would play ice hockey. Her father encouraged her — provided she earn her own money to pay for equipment. "With the woodworking and other jobs, I did that" — and in 1981, she became, as Newsday reported, the first woman to play in the collegiate Metropolitan Hockey League, as a freshman at C.W. Post College, now LIU Post.

"A lot of fathers might not have said their little girl could go play [ice] hockey if she wanted to," Lynn Kramer said. "But he believed you could do whatever you set your mind to."

Robert Kramer, who died July 11 of complications from kidney cancer at age 88 at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, was "my best friend," said his wife, Joan Bernstein Kramer. "We were married [nearly] 65 years but together about 69 years," having met when she was a child and he a friend of her older sister, and kindling a romance a few years later when she was a teen and he a returning veteran.

Robert Louis Kramer was born in Evansville, Indiana, on Dec. 18, 1936, the son of auto mechanic Herrmann Lewis Kramer and Lillian Sigety Kramer, a homemaker. He had an older half brother, Benjamin. The family moved to Fort Myers, Florida, when Robert was 4. Following his parents’ divorce when he was about 12, he and his mother and brother moved to her native Brooklyn, where she married Mortimer Weichman in 1949.

Following high school, Kramer served from 1954-56 with the U.S. Army’s ceremonial unit, the Third Infantry Regiment, known as the Old Guard. Afterward he joined the medical-equipment maker Propper Manufacturing in Long Island City, Queens, where his mother was an office manager. He took night classes at college, but detoured after their neighborhood dry cleaner offered to teach him that business. Robert and Benjamin later opened their own store in Great Neck.

The brothers, who became estranged, sold that store, and Robert became an owner or part-owner in three others. Selling his stake, he then was a partner for a time in a Staten Island fiberglass factory. Kramer joined Pergament in 1968 as a personnel director, his family said, and later became that department’s vice president.

While there, he spearheaded progressive programs, such as a joint venture with the Suffolk County Labor Department in 1979 in which 10 troubled students at a BOCES school received paid warehouse training that included forklift operation. The following year he experimented with a government-sponsored 18-week program training 10 people in every aspect of Pergament work. Only two chose to complete this "boot camp," and were rewarded with supervisor positions.

Under Kramer, Pergament sought out minority workers, and by 1991, reported Newsday, 25% of the chain’s employees were minority.

After Pergament’s end, Kramer took retirement jobs as a warehouse safety manager for the Bay Shore medical-products company Lumex, now part of Atlanta’s Graham-Field, and after that worked for Oyster Bay Marine Supply.

"That shows you the kind of guy he was," said his former son-in-law, Ralph Novotny, of Plainview, with whom both Robert and Lynn Kramer remained friends for decades. "Here was this big executive for a big chain, and he could have just retired and relaxed. But he wanted to stay busy, and he was such a humble guy, he didn’t consider these [retirement] jobs beneath him."

His wife and two children are his sole survivors. Following a graveside service and burial at Locust Valley Cemetery on July 14, a private celebration of life was held at his son’s home.