Everyone knew Emil

CEDAR RAPIDS - Just before he died, Emil Allick thought about something that would make him sad - “If I didn't have five dollars in my billfold to give to someone who needed it.”

That pretty much summed up his dad, Dave Allick of Cedar Rapids said recently.

“Someone said at the funeral that when you said ‘Emil,' everyone knew who you were talking about,” he said. “He was like Oprah.”

“He treated everyone the same,” Allick said. “He was friends with everyone.”

Emil Allick was 87 when he died in Cedar Rapids on Dec. 19.

An Army veteran, he ran the family grocery store in Cedar Rapids from 1945 until 1964, when he traded a duplex and some cash for a small restaurant at 310 Third St. SE that he remodeled and named Emil's Deli. Two delis bearing his name still operate in Cedar Rapids today.

Dave Allick, now 64, took over running the deli in 1976, and Emil went to work for the state-owned liquor store until 1986, when he retired. Dave moved the namesake deli to the former Downtown YMCA at 100 Fifth St. NE in 1979 and then to the basement of the U.S. Bank building, 115 Third St. SE, in 2003.

Emil still helped out at the deli, and 25 years ago he helped his daughter Deb Allick, 54, set up Deb's Deli in downtown Cedar Rapids.

Her father, she said, was a “very easygoing man who cared a lot about people, whether you were a street person, a common person or the former governor of Iowa.”

Emil met his wife, Christiane “Tina” Rouquet, in Paris during World War II, where he was an Army medic and ambulance driver. His Lebanese parents were opposed to him marrying “that French girl,” so he stayed in Paris until he turned 21 and married Tina on Nov. 12, 1945, their son said.

“They looked like rock stars,” Dave Allick said when looking at a picture of his parents in Paris in 1945.

Tina arrived in the United States without knowing any English. The newlyweds lived with Emil's sister in Toledo until his parents relented and asked him to come home to Cedar Rapids, Dave Allick said.

Emil and Tina had three children - Dave; Dianne O'Brien of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Deb Allick - and five grandchildren. Tina died on Feb. 5 at age 89.

The family requested “no carnations” at Emil's funeral - a nod to one of their mother's superstitions that someone in the family would die if someone received carnations, Dave Allick said.

“We know it's coincidence,” he said, but he noted that a beloved cousin died at age 18, and the 2008 flood wiped out Emil's Deli in the basement of the U.S. Bank building - both right after someone received carnations. (The deli was rehabbed and reopened a little over a year later.)

Phil Saunders, 71, of Cedar Rapids, a former Cedar Rapids fire marshal and a longtime friend and customer of Emil's, said Emil brought a personal touch to his businesses.

“When you went in, you were greeted,” he said. “You always felt welcome. They tried to get to know you so you became more than a customer. You became a friend. That happened to everyone who went there.”

Saunders lived with the Allicks at Blair House in recent years. Saunders, a deacon and fire and police department chaplain, said Emil, a Muslim, taught him to use the traditional Muslim greeting, “salaam alaikum,” or “peace be to you,” whenever they would meet.

“He made me a better friend by teaching me that,” Saunders said. “It was, he said, the greatest greeting you could give a person.”