Where does the time go?

By ALEX COSTELLO

As Barry Athletics celebrates its 75th anniversary, its owner, Joan Hoffman, remembers how the store came to be where it is in Rockville Centre.

Barry Athletics has not always been in Rockville Centre, but moved to a location on Merrick Road in the 1950s. In the nearly 60 years since, the store moved to North Village Avenue, and later to a different location on the same street, where it expanded to occupy two storefronts and stayed for 30 years. About four years ago, the store moved once again, to 216 Merrick Road just a few doors down from where it started in the village decades ago.

“So we’ve come full-circle,” Hoffman said.

Going into its 75th year, Barry Athletics has long been Rockville Centre's go-to place for custom-printed shirts. The store caters mostly to sports teams needing jerseys, but they'll also take orders from anyone.

While the products that Barry Athletics carries have not changed too much over the years, the work and the process that goes into creating them has.

“We did the first multicolor T-shirt, which was Davy Crockett,” said Hoffman. “That was the biggest fad. And many, many years ago, we did white T-shirts with the big Davy Crockett logo on it.

“Now we have dryers and conveyor belts and whatnot,” Hoffman continued. “But years ago they had these big bulbs and they would stick the shirts on things like bakers’ racks and they would cook them. And we used to do thousands of these T-shirts, and it was just unheard of at the time.”

The store was founded in 1934 by Hoffman’s father, Harry Feingold. Feingold had a partner named David Baraban, and combining their names gave them Barry.

At the time, Feingold was the captain of the Brooklyn College basketball team, and he had a mail-order business making jerseys. He graduated from Brooklyn College, got his masters degree, and went into the business of selling athletic supplies.

In 1979, Feingold stepped back from running the company and let Hoffman take over, although he would still watch over things and make sure everything was running smoothly.

“Then he became a snow bird, going back and forth from Florida. He was always involved when he would come back,” said Hoffman. “He always oversaw what was going on, making sure I was doing a good job.”