Ron Behar was born February 28, 1934 at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital on Goldhawk Road, to Jacob Behar (b. 1895) and Allegra, née Cohen Benardout (last name henceforth abbreviated to “Benardout”).[1] Both parents, according to the memoirs of their son Ron, written in 2019, lacked a formal education. Jacob was born in the Galata district of Istanbul and had worked as an acrobat there. He fled Turkey to avoid serving in “extremely hostile environments without adequate training” and out of “fear of conversion to Islam.” During a considerable sojourn in Marseilles, friends suggested he try out England, “where more opportunity existed.” After securing permission from the British government, Jacob relocated to England. Using his knowledge of Turkish tobacco cigarette-making, Jacob settled in London, where most of the rolled cigarette manufactories operated. He was hired by the Abdullah Cigarette factory in Shoreditch, East London, where his future wife Allegra and many of their peers were also employed, some of them working out of their homes. Allegra would later tell her son Ron “of the many famous people in the early Roaring Twenties that ordered custom-made oval Turkish cigarettes.”
Ron’s mother Allegra Benardout was born in Salonika in 1896 and immigrated with her parents to England when she was about six years of age. She was totally deaf since early childhood and communicated through lip-reading. Allegra’s father Aaron, owner of the Anglo-Persian Carpet Company, offered his future son-in-law Allegra’s hand in marriage in exchange for a post at the firm. That company had been launched by Allegra’s father Aaron Cohen Benardout (last name henceforth abbreviated to “Benardout”) and his partner Jack Pontremoli in 1912. The awning of the original building at the South Kensington Railway Station Arcade still bears the store’s name. At this establishment, Jack learned how to restore and repair antique Persian carpets and rugs. The couple married at the Bevis Marks synagogue, although the family’s synagogue was Holland Park, and moved to Pennard Road in the Shepherds Bush neighborhood of West London, on the same street as Allegra’s parents. Aaron Benardout named three of his seven children, Louis, Sam and Allegra, as partners in the business. However, due to a family quarrel after Aaron’s death, Allegra was not included in the estate. Aaron died of a stroke during World War II and his wife followed him six months later out of grief. Jacob was subsequently forced to leave the business and launch his own firm on Percy Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Directly above his new shop lived a writer, not yet famous, whom Jacob befriended. That writer, George Orwell, later won acclaim for his book Animal Farm.
Ron’s maternal grandparents, the Benardouts, were wealthy. However, aside from the house they purchased as a wedding gift for Allegra on Pennard Road, they left their daughter very little. As a result, Ron’s was the poorest branch of the very large extended Behar family, who enjoyed “richly appointed homes, nice cars,” maids, and housekeepers. It members were worldly. Three of Ron’s brothers were trilingual in French, Spanish, and English and wintered in Cannes, Monte Carlo, and Biarritz.
Ron was the youngest of five children, the others being Samuel (a.k.a. Sammy, born 11/13/1920), Queenie (5/31/1923), Ann (a.k.a. Annie or Enny, born 11/18/1924), and Marlene (probably born after 1931). The Behar family lived at 59 Pennard Road, in the house Allegra’s father had purchased for her. Ron’s earliest memories related to World War II and the rise of Jew-hatred as a public norm. His older brother Samuel got in the way of the British Union of Fascists in London’s East End in 1938 and was beaten by some Black Shirts who recognized him as a Jew. Local police intervened before the boy could be seriously harmed. Ron attended kindergarten at the Coverdale Road Nursery School in Shepherds Bush and continued on to the Solomon Wolfson Jewish Primary Day School, a short train ride away. Its headmaster Daniel Mendoza was “sweet, genial,” and “soft-spoken.” In 1945, at the age of 11, Ron began secondary school in North Kensington, graduating at age sixteen.
Family vacations, Ron recalls in his memoirs, “took place in Worthing, a small working-class resort on the southern coast of Sussex on the English Channel.” Saturday afternoons was a joyous time of social gatherings at the kitchen table and parlor with family and friends. His older brother played jazz, swing, blues, and boogie woogie from the 1940s and ‘50s and family members danced or sang together. The family’s drawing room contained a dining table, chairs, and an upright piano, all purchased by Jack Behar at auction. Ron notes that every single item he could remember, including his mother’s jewelry and all the family’s furniture, originated from auctions. To make ends meet, Mrs. Behar made most of Ron’s clothes and Ron fabricated most of his toys.
Ron’s father Jacob Behar was an Oriental rug merchant with a “little office and showroom” on the second floor of 6 Percy Street, London, near Tottenham Court Road. He often attended auction rooms around the city, particularly Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Pelham, occasionally bringing Ron along. When Ron’s father was hospitalized with a prostrate problem, Ron manned the shop. On one occasion, “sitting there, surrounded by exotic rugs, artifacts, and Turkish hookah pipe,” the phone rang and the caller asking for Ron’s father. The caller turned out to be Lord Macmillan, the former British Prime Minister. At the time, Ron had “no idea that my dad knew such people, and my respect for him soared!”
After a few unsatisfactory jobs in journalism and hairdressing, Ron decided to enter the family business, “the art of Oriental rug and tapestry restoration.” He began his training under his uncle, co-owner of the Anglo-Persian Carpet Co., which had earned the title “By Appointment to the Royal Family.” Ron found that he ”quite enjoyed the challenge of restoring and repairing these exotic and beautiful works of art, which had passed through history for the last one hundred-fifty years or so.” He loved to work with his hands and to create, a love that never died. He recalled in 2019: “I learned how to help create a mini loom on which rows of weft and warp were crisscrossed to form the ground over which the wool yarns were knotted in intricate patterns to match whatever was missing, and slowly watch the original design restored.” Ron became adept at “creating fringes and edges where none existed, or were beyond repair.” He was paid modestly: £3.10 weekly, or the equivalent of $15 a week in 2019.
With his uncle Samuel (whom he called “Uncle Sam”), Ron would take “long overnight business trips into the countryside of England to view the antique rugs and tapestries of far-flung clients. He enjoyed “visiting the huge stately homes and castles of England, and meeting the titled upper crust nobility.” Samuel would point out damage and wear to the clients and Ron would roll up the items, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and “run them out to the car.” According to the unspoken etiquette of the aristocracy Samuel never quoted prices and the two never spoken unless spoken to. Ron noted in 2019 that the price Samuel charged was based only on coast and labor, as well as “trust built over fifty years of service to the Royals.” Unlike the sale of carpets, the ancillary trade of repair and restoration was apparently not as lucrative. Even though some may have considered this work “slave labor,” Ron affirms that it taught him skills he used his entire life and he “wouldn’t have changed it if I had to do it over.”
Each trip to the countryside meant that the workshop’s six weavers would be occupied for several months. One of their assignments in 1951 brought them to Buckingham Palace to view a 200-year-old carpet, a rare hand woven Wilton from the seventeenth century. Queen Victoria had instructed her servants to cut off four feet of it so that it would fit in another room at the palace. It was the workshop’s task to reconstruct the missing part. Occasionally, the Royals would visit the workshop to check up on the weavers’ progress and show appreciation of the laborers’ efforts. On one such occasion, the Queen and her mother visited as Ron and his uncle were reweaving the 4 x 25 foot section of the carpet, which had once laid on the ballroom floor of the Buckingham Palace. The weavers had to construct a makeshift loom, research old drawing from trade publications, and search for wool yarns, which they hand dyed themselves to match the carpet. Other trips brought them to the London residences of political leaders, famous writers, playwrights, actors, and officers of the Guard. Sometimes, Ron was required to work on site, as he did for the Lord Mayor of London.
The shop end of the family’s Oriental carpet business also ensured ongoing association with the Royal family. At the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, after the death of King George VI, the Anglo-Persian Carpet Store lent the family a rare antique carpet upon which the Queen was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Such loans were a reminder that the Oriental carpet store had been accorded the royal license.
Ron left the carpet trade in 1952 to complete his mandatory military service. When he was released from the Air Force in 1954, he returned to the Anglo-Persian Carpet Company as a weaver, but became bored. He tried out some odd jobs, including selling trinkets in the street markets around London, and then returned to the carpet trade, where he divided his time between weaving and work at a carpet cleaning factory. In the summer of 1954, he resolved to go on a trip to the United States, where he had relative and family contacts. After saving up, he purchased a one-way ticket to New York on the S. S. United States.
Ron’s father Jacob had referred him to Leon Medina’s antique gallery in Greenwich Village. Ron was hired to repair antique carpets and for extra money brought some additional work home to his rented apartment. He then worked for the antique dealer Couri Rug Company, whose owner was of Christian Syrian origin and who had his shop in the Lever Brothers Building in midtown Manhattan. Ron’s clientele there was much more exclusive, the work more difficult, and his weekly pay higher (he went from earning $50 a week in the previous firm to $75 per week). Before long, Ron and two other friends from England who had joined him had saved enough money to explore the country by automobile. He held numerous part-time jobs, including as a bellboy in a Miami Beach hotel. In Los Angeles, he joined the firm of his uncle Albert, who had just opened the Prince Albert Cleaners on Las Tijeras Blvd. Ron delivered clothes to lovely homes for $50/week. After 3 weeks or so he found a better paying job at India Rug Cleaning Company on La Brea Avenue, where wash old and new carpets and hauled them onto the building rooftop to dry;
Ron then traveled to Seattle, where Barney Benardout, the youngest brother of his mother Allegra, lived with his wife Betty. In Seattle, Ron worked as a mover in the Funes and Oziel Furniture Company. After 18 months in the U.S., boarded a plane to New York and then took the S.S. United States back to England. Upon his return, he accompanied his father to the auction houses of Christies, Sotheby’s, Pelham’s, among others. Before long, he decided that his business prospects in England, as a non-partner in a rug firm, were not auspicious, and returned to the United States, this time with an old girlfriend, Corinne Behar (no relation), whom he married just before departing in 1956.
In Seattle, Ron began to work at his uncle Barney’s store, Benardout Carpet Company, on corner of 85th and Aurora. It was a tiny store with “neatly displayed…rolls of broadloom carpet and ample rack, as well as a small back room with padding and supplies.” Barney taught him “the fine points of measuring, computing and estimating the installation of wall-to-wall carpeting.” He learned how to make precision measurements on graph paper and to maneuver huge 12-foot wide rolls of broadloom in and out of a small space with a minimum of effort. Soon, Ron was going to customers’ homes to measure, provide estimates, and sell the job. He became so competent that his aunt and uncle were able to take a 5-week vacation to England, leaving him in charge. While they were gone, Ron learned to fill out state and federal forms.
Ron and Corinne had two children. Their marriage did not survive. Corinne returned to England and they divorced in 1960. Ron began to feel restless at the Benardout Carpet Company and decided to open his own carpet store with the entrepreneur Isaac Gamel, a friend of his of Yemeni Jewish origin. They erected a neon sign, stretching 16 feet x 8 feet and reading “BEHAR’S CARPETS.” They enjoyed two strong years of business, which included winning a bid to provide hundreds of yards of carpet for the French exhibit of the World’s Fair. A highway construction project forced the store to shut down, but Behar and Gamel moved it onto the Gamel’s Furniture City premises in Everett, opening there a carpet department. When Gamel decided to sell Furniture City, Ron opened up his own business solo. He also became an entrepreneur, purchasing a lot and building a 24-unit apartment building.
In 1967, Aunt Betty Benardout introduced Ron to Gail Calderon, who then worked in an advertising agency and who became his life partner and mother of their children, Michael and Jay. By the time Ron finished writing his memoir in 2019, his eldest son had become an independent writer and Jay had assumed the family business. At the time of this writing (2026), Jay is Executive Director of Pacific Furniture Dealers, a purchasing cooperative of 49 independent family-owned stores, founded in 1969.[2] When Gail died unexpectedly at the age of 74 in 2017, she and Ron had been married for 50 years.
[1] Jacob was also known as both Jack and Jacques.
[2] http://www.pacificfurnituredealers.com/current-member-info.html (accessed January 13, 2026).