Junior Achievement honours Zatzman

By Lindsay Jones - The Weekly News
Growing up dirt poor on Gottingen Street in the 1920s, Joseph Zatzman had to stay home from school to run his family's kosher butcher shop.
Now he joins the ranks of the province's greatest business leaders. The businessman, property developer and a former mayor of Dartmouth will be posthumously inducted into the Junior Achievement Nova Scotia Business Hall of Fame in June.
Zatzman died at age 95 in December 2007.
"I think he would have been very, very proud of this," said his son Michael Zatzman, who will accept the award on his behalf at the June 16 event.
Unlike other Junior Achievement hall of fame inductees, Michael Zatzman said his dad had no desire to build an empire.
"My father didn't really have any aspirations of going national or international. He just wanted to stay in his own marketplace in Dartmouth, which he understood the most. To a great extent my dad was a socialist who really wanted to see everybody do well."
Zatzman's career began in the 1930s with a small grocery store, the Community Groceteria, at the corner of Portland Street and Victoria Road.
Michael Zatzman recalled how his father cared about people's welfare more than anything else.
When a fire completely gutted the store of a competitor across the street, Zatzman was on his doorstep. It was at a time when most people called in their grocery orders to be delivered.
"He said, 'You make sure your customers keep on calling you. Answer your phone, take their orders and we'll fill them in my store. Bring your employees over, don't let them go. You just operate your store out of my store until you can rebuild yours," Michael Zatzman said.
"And he did."
In the 1940s, Zatzman branched out into real estate with the establishment of Maplehurst Properties Ltd., which he and his son ran together until they sold it in 2005.
By the mid-1950s, the company had more than 200 apartments and had become one of the largest property-management companies in the prov-ince.
The Royal Bank building in Dartmouth and the Dartmouth Professional Centre were both managed and built by Zatzman.
In the 1960s, Zatzman delved into municipal politics, winning the mayoralty of Dartmouth for two terms, and most significantly overseeing the development of the Burnside Industrial Park and the $20-million A. Murray MacKay Bridge.
"Even when he rose to the highest level of civic government, when he was in these processions and the lieutenant-governor came, my father had much more interest in talking to the aid than the lieutenant-governor," Michael Zatzman said.
"He really had nothing growing up, and really identified with the less fortunate his whole life."
In the 1980s, Zatzman chaired the Nova Scotia Resources Development Board and headed up the Business Development Corporation.
He received the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal, and was named to the Order of Canada in the 1990s.
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