Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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Sometime this summer, the Roanoke City Market will lose another historic business, having already lost one of its most memorable figures.

Ira Katz, the president and owner of Southern Pawn Co. on the City Market, died Saturday morning at the Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem.

His death resulted from pneumonia related to his leukemia. He was 58.

Katz had the disease for years, but only in the past several weeks did it begin to keep him from his early morning exercise at the Roanoke Athletic Club and his frequent tours of the valley aboard his recumbent bicycle.

Only when his hospitalizations became longer and more frequent did his friends begin to realize that the end was coming.

Like the building it occupies, Southern Pawn is about 102 years old. Sidney Katz, Ira's father, and Sidney's brothers Ralph, Bernie and Sol bought it in 1959 from the Schlossberg family.

Morris Schlossberg founded it as the Southern Loan Office, because that's what a pawn shop is -- a source of small, short-term loans, as well as a merchandise store.

Wealth of memories

Katz reluctantly intended to close the store this summer, his sons Eric, Scott and Jonathan said Monday. Eric and Scott have careers in Atlanta, and Jonathan will begin studies at the Medical College of Virginia in August.

The summer closing will occur, and the family will sell the building. Meanwhile, the staff is purchasing some items but granting no loans. The shop is open for payments and redemptions as well as retail sales.

All in their 20s, the brothers speak of their father -- and their mother, Helene, who has early onset Alzheimer's disease -- with humor and affection.

Their dad embarrassed them at soccer games and on vacations with his omnipresent camera and insatiable thirst for one more family photo, they said, laughing.

Last Wednesday, when doctors told them and him that his death was imminent, their mother asked all the right questions -- about medications, other hospitals and treatments.

Satisfied that nothing could be done, "She asked if she could go down to the store and pick out a few things," something she always loved to do, Scott said, igniting more laughter.

Born extrovert

Ira Katz knew everybody downtown and somebody everywhere, said longtime friend Marc Platt, a podiatrist.

He knew more people at their grandmother's winter home in a condo complex in Florida than she did, the brothers said.

He loved exotic saltwater fish and at home kept tanks, including a large aquarium in the family kitchen.

He loved talking politics and sports with Alphonso "Poochie" Preston, a sales rep at nearby Milan Tobacconists for 32 years.

Many mornings, Preston and Katz drank coffee and read the newspapers in the shop before it opened.

Katz rarely spoke of his leukemia, but he traveled to out-of-town medical centers and tried a variety of treatments.

"Once he got onto something, he learned everything there was to know about it and would buy top of the line," said Cathy Greenberg, a family friend. That included a tandem bicycle so Helene could ride with him.

Scott and his wife, Mandy, used to wonder what Ira would mention first when he and Helene came to visit them -- his desire for a grandchild or his Kerry blue terrier, Monty.

Monty visited Katz in his hospital room late on one of his final days, when the medical staff somehow failed to notice. Katz was fast friends with them by then.

Tuesday morning, store manager Johnny Hill, 37, dabbed his eyes with tissue and said he recently had received a call at home from Katz, who was in the hospital.

"I said, 'Please tell me somebody broke a window.' "

But the news was not so benign.

Hill has worked in the pawn shop for 15 years.

"He was there for my wedding," he said. "He gave me a lot of fatherly advice.

"He taught me to be a man."