You can call them rebels—of a sort—the small neighborhood stores that compete with big-box stores and shopping centers. They rebel against a new faster paced and more remote way of life. They call them mom and pop shops although it’s a term I shy away from. After all any small entrepreneur could own one. If you frequent one, the next time you’re there take a long look, for it may fade away in the not too distant future and become just a memory.
Sometimes it's good to take a little trip down memory lane to get a good perspective on things. It was on Saturday morning a number of months ago that I drove the short distance to the small shopping center near my condo to pick up a furnace filter for my heat pump at a hardware store. Located in a pristine neighborhood, the small hardware store sat on an end spot of the shopping center.
When I entered, one of the clerks asked me if I needed any help but I politely said 'no thanks' and headed for the shelves with all the filters. It's funny how an image of something can trigger a memory. As I looked for the appropriate size filter, I suddenly remembered Al and Frank, from a time that seemed so long ago.
I had lost track of Al and Frank in 1986 when I left home. They had been around since at least 1949. I grew up across the street from them, got through grade school, graduated from high school and then college, and yet they remained, seemingly unchanged. No nothing ever seemed to change with them, but by 1986 the neighborhood, once neatly kept, whose houses with their white marble steps were scrubbed daily, had deteriorated into a crime area infested with drug dealers.
Al and Frank were the two guys who ran the corner hardware store across the street from our row house. It was a long way from today's modern shopping centers. There it sat on the corner of a blue-collar neighborhood in the middle of Baltimore. My father had bought our first fan there in 1949, a stand up Hunter model that never stopped working right through the time someone broke into the house and stole it.
Two glass windows, one on each side, showcased the various items that could be purchased inside including goodies like roller skates or the latest in irons for the housewife. Al and Frank made sure the windows were kept squeaky clean. Eventually though, the glorious glass windows were replaced with bricks and mortar after the neighborhood started to deteriorate and the bad guys broke the windows to get some free samples.
Time moved on yet Al and Frank remained. They were fixtures I could depend upon as icons of stability--Al, Frank and their hardware store. They really didn't own it. They ran it for someone else, but you would have thought they did. They would arrive each morning separately and park their cars on the street in front of the row houses as close to the store as possible, then walk to the store to open it for business. Each had a wad of keys on his belt, which opened the store, storage areas and cabinets inside the store, and the separate garage storage area up the street.
Unpretentious men, they carried lunch pails, although on some occasions their wives would stop by to leave them homemade lunches.
They made keys, cut glass, repaired screen doors; and sold nails, paint, hinges, plungers, piping, plaster, roller skates, clocks, small appliances and just about anything else a homeowner would need--year after year after year after year.
Countless customers had gone up the two steps in front of the entrance and stepped onto the old hardwood floors to be met by Al or Frank surrounded by shelves and cabinets filled with hardware. Incandescent light fixtures hung down and an old crank cash register on a counter awaited the customers after they had selected their purchases.
Of course most customers just asked Al or Frank for what they wanted or what they thought they wanted and Frank or Al would help them find it—and give advice on how to use the particular product or make a repair. Each man was a storehouse of knowledge. Near the counter was an old key maker and by it stood a paint mixer. Just behind the counter a wooden door led to a storage area in back.
From the window of my row house across the street where I grew up, I watched neighbors walk down to the store and emerge with paint, hardware, ironing boards, rejuvenated screen doors, piping, and whatever else they needed. Customers also drove in from outside the neighborhood. There was no such thing as anonymity with Al and Frank--they knew who you were and you knew who they were.
I never understood how Al and Frank kept going for all those years, never changing, and never seeming to mind about what they were doing, and most importantly, never getting tired of each other. Al was slightly outgoing but Frank was more reserved, yet they complemented each other. They were both always amiable, helpful and patient.
I stayed in the house across the street from the old store until everyone I lived with had passed. Then the dank smell of the alleys and their underbellies seeped into the walls until the warmth and safety of the house has faded and became something of the past. The neighbors moved out one by one and the boarded up windows served as testimony to their departure and the declining neighborhood. So the time came for me to also step across the entrance I had crossed so many times, lock the front door and descend down the white marble steps, and move on.
I returned some time later for one last look and to turn the house over to a real estate development firm, which had bought it. The house had been emptied of its contents by then, mostly by thieves who had broken in and helped themselves to almost everything including the stained glass windows in front. They had no use for the books though which they left scattered all over the floor.
It had been a hard sell, for the neighborhood was now virtually full of boarded up houses and the street corners had turned into business establishments for drug dealers.
It was home no longer; I got into my car and looked across the street to the once lively hardware store, which was now surrounded by iron grating tightly secured with a chain and lock. Al and Frank were finally gone and I knew an era had come to an end. I could only wonder where they were or even if they were still alive. What I felt would not never come to an end, had ended. The hardware men were gone.
With that thought, back in the present time, my hand moved forward and pulled out the air filter I had been looking for. As I walked up to the counter I pulled out my apartment key to get a spare made. The clerk found the blank from a hanging panel behind him and I watched him cut the new key on an old style key maker similar to the one Frank and Al had used so long ago. Then I realized that Al and Frank would always be around. They had a certain memorable permanence that would not vanish, physical iron grating and padlocks notwithstanding.
The clerk finished cutting the key and filed off the rough edges, then manually rang up my purchases on a semi-modern register without a scanner. The drawer opened and he gave me my change and receipt and I walked out and down the two steps that led to the entrance.For some reason I liked coming to this store, choosing to stay away from places like Home Depot. Now I knew why.
Sadly, weeks later I got a notice in the mail stating the store was having a going out of business sale. It had become a victim of the economy and our times. It too would soon pass from existence but remain in my memory along with Al and Frank. It would become another nostalgic place to visit, reached only occasionally on that linear time road that takes us back somewhere when things were a little different and perhaps a little better.
The store is empty now—locked up—void of shelves, merchandise and people. Another rebel had lost a battle with the times.
