« August 2000 | Main | November 2000 »
October 04, 2000
LOSS OF HARDWARE STORE CASTS SHADOW OVER TOWN
Empire fondly remembers a staple business
by Jacob Wheeler
Sun Editor
In the heart of Empire, a sleepy village where residents stand intent on preserving an historical aura, the old hardware store sits, abandoned, yet in full view of everyone on the main street. The store was closed down late last March by Wolohan Lumber Co., which bought the business from Empire local Fred Salisbury, Sr., in 1995.
Sales were down, and a shift in focus away from smaller hardware sales towards major building projects prompted Wolohan, a Saginaw-based company with shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange, to close the store started late in the 19th century by Lou Collins.
But local business owners worry that Empire’s downtown, the western base of M-72 -- one of Northern Michigan’s major east-west highways, is dying. Only four year-round businesses remain: Deering’s Market, the Friendly Tavern, Tiffany’s Ice Cream & Cookies and the Empire National Bank. The village recently lost its doctor and pharmacy as well.
“There’s only four of us left,” said Phil Deering, owner of the grocery store run by his father Jack before him. “If one more goes, we’re in trouble. Everything will move out to the highway.”
Deering has resisted pressure to move his business onto M-22, the north-south highway which intersects M-72 at the village’s only stoplight. He favors preserving the downtown over added business exposure from cars traveling between Crystal Lake and the Glen Lakes.
Now Deering expects his sales to drop, deprived of the runoff business he picked up from customers who frequented the adjacent hardware store to buy a hammer, a pouch of nails or wood.
For simple tools or accessories, Northwood Home Center in nearby Glen Arbor saves customers a trip to Wolohan’s closest franchise, Home Builders Warehouse in Grawn, a 45-minute drive from Empire.
But as long as Empire looks at the uninhabited building in the heart of its downtown, the village will wallow in agony -- because for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the building was much more than a hardware store; it was a community center.
When Chet Salisbury bought the then-36x50 foot store in 1940, half was devoted to selling horse hardware and agricultural products. The other half stocked groceries and dry goods. The business also included an ice house, which provided ice for the town’s residents in the summer. As a boy, Chet’s son Fred, who bought the store from his father in 1967, inherited the task of delivering ice.
“Only two houses in town had refrigerators at that time,” Fred recalled. “We would cut 150-pound ice sheets from South Bar Lake and haul them up to town with sleighs. In the summer we delivered to people’s homes.”
Fred also remembers his father’s store selling feed and bailed hay for chickens and cows. As the local farming industry subsided, the Salisbury business sold clothing, especially to Mexicans and Jamaicans who came to Leelanau County as migrant workers to pick cherries.
“Whole families of them would come in trucks, and live in big tents,” Fred recollected. “I learned enough Spanish to sell our products to them because many didn’t speak any English.”
The business’ focus shifted towards lumber after Fred and his wife Beatrice purchased it and acquired an Ace Hardware franchise.
“Fred turned it into a ‘super’ hardware store,” said Dave Taghon, owner of the gas station at the corner of M-72 and M-22. “He sold log homes complete with refrigerators.”
Taghon visited the community center often as a child to buy ice cream and play in the old saloon which had been converted into a toy room, offering puzzles, baseball bats and model airplanes to kids while their parents shopped for 2x4’s. Taghon admits he was moved to tears when he returned from Florida?? last spring to learn that the store which held so many childhood memories for him had been shut down.
The Salisburys also built Home Builders Warehouse in Grawn in 1994, before selling both stores to the Wolohan chain the following year.
And now the family’s shining achievement sits empty, locked up and collecting cobwebs.
“I feel terrible about the closing of the store,” Fred said. “I put work into it my whole life and it’s sad to see it closed down.”
Wolohan also closed down stores in Petoskey and Charlevoix -- two other Northern Michigan towns which feed off the summer tourist boom -- as corporations across the country move to consolidate their business into larger, all-purpose stores.
“Consolidation has taken place within our industry all over,” said Dave Honaman, chief financial officer at Wolohan. “We remain committed to looking for ways to cut costs. Ten years ago 60 percent of our business was retail, now 70 percent comes from builders and only 30 percent is retail.”
Wolohan’s stock share prices began falling in January and reached annual lows in June, but Honaman denies any connection between the stocks and the store closings.
“The profit in Empire was marginal,” he said. “Our key customer base is geared to people who are building homes or decks or remodeling kitchens. So the tourist boom doesn’t have much of an effect for us.”
Taghon believes that Wolohan’s store could have survived in Empire and made a profit if it only geared its business towards smaller projects.
“It went down by its own doing,” he said. “They didn’t have power tools and I needed a sand driver. They said ‘we can’t compete with Traverse City’. But they just needed one of every item on the shelf. People would have supported that store, and paid a few more dollars for the products, to avoid driving all the way to Traverse City.
“As a business person, you’re providing a service,” added Taghon, who keeps his gas station open until the evening, in the dead of winter. “You should feel obligated to provide services even in the off-season. If a guy comes in with a five-gallon gas tank, you serve him.”
Empire desperately needs a business occupying the old hardware store to preserve its downtown. Customers may dwindle, Deering fears, if the sight remains empty for long.
As for the existing owner’s role, Honaman said that Wolohan feels no sense of urgency to make a hasty move. The company announced a net income of $1.5 million in the second quarter of this year, and a few profits lost in Empire won’t turn any heads in Saginaw.
Tim Stein, the general manager of Home Builders Warehouse in Grawn and who is in charge of overseeing the Empire project, suggested that Wolohan might sell the building and property in lieu of ever reopening it.
“We are prone to sell it to another type of venture other than a hardware business,” he said. “Until then I will continue to maintain grounds. I won’t let it become an eye soar.”
The property in question is enormous, encompassing the hardware store itself, a wood barn behind it and parking lots on either side. If no venture were interested in purchasing all of it, a real estate agent would suggest dividing the property into smaller, cheaper lots.
But the Empire Village Council is a major roadblock to any major alterations downtown. Unlike Glen Arbor, which boasts a more business-friendly, development-oriented Township Board, the Empire Village Council grasps zoning ordinances written to the minute detail.
Regarding design requirements, section 4.4.5 of the Zoning ordinance, adopted on March 7, 1996 and amended six months later, states: “In order to protect and enhance the character of the village as largely established by the older buildings in the (Commercial-Residential district) it is hereby declared that retention and enhancement of the late 1800’s character of the structures on Front Street west of M-22 be perpetuated.”
The ordinance on Lot Division, section 3.4, could pose problems for any realtor intent on splicing Wolohan’s property into numerous different lots. Item 2 (c) states: “A lot in a recorded plat is not being divided into more than four parcels as a result of the proposed division.”
Furthermore, the zoning ordinances prevent numerous types of ventures, such as public assembly halls, funeral homes, pet shops, bus terminals or party stores, among others, from moving in on Front Street west of M-22.
These stringent regulations reflect the desire of Empire’s townsfolk to preserve the town which was once a major logging supplier on the Great Lakes.
********************
Wolohan was gracious enough to let Empire hold a farmers market on Saturdays last summer, in the parking lot south of the hardware building. But the idea was virtually a bust, said Chris Neiswonger, the township clerk, deputy clerk and treasurer for the Village of Empire.
“We could have done a better job of promoting it,” she said. “No public ever parked there and the market didn’t get much attention.”
Vendors estimated an average of only 50 customers per Saturday between 8-12 a.m., three dates of which were rained out. One woman bought $50 worth of produce in Traverse City and sold it in Empire at the same price, just so the market would have produce.
Overall, the farmers market was an act of wishful thinking, organized by concerned people trying to salvage an integral business in their town, but to no avail.
Posted by editor at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
Carl Oleson Jr. A man for all seasons of life and nature
By Bob Berning
Sun contributor
A tribute from a friend ... (first anniversary of his death approaching)
Carl Oleson Jr. and his wife Ruth, who still lives on Glen Lake, ran the tackle/bait shop in Glen Arbor for many years before they retired. He loved to fish -- doing so about 360 days a year after retirement. He caught the unofficial (he was never much for dealing with the DNR if he didn’t need to) record splake, lake trout and possible rainbow trout out of Gle Lake, as well as numerous sizeable small mouth out of Little Glen. He may have the record there, as well. He had a small, aluminum boat (with oars, no motor) he hauled on the bed of his small pickup truck, and always was one of the first to drag his little shanty out on the ice -- and one of the last to take it off. I helped his son, Carl III, take the shanty off Big Glen several years ago when the ice was “ripe”, not an unusual occurrence. Carl Jr. loved to tell his tales of fishing, the big ones he caught, and the ones that go away. He was a live bait fisherman exclusively, and sneered at my artificial lures more than once the several times I went fishing with him. I think the Olsons ate fish at least once a day. He loved the perch he’d catch.
Carl Oleson Jr.
A man for all seasons of life and nature
What defines a life?
How is a legacy made?
What makes a man unique?
Why are some answers vague?
It’s clearer when there’s a partner
Someone who’s shared his time
A Ruth perhaps, a rock herself
Who claimed the man as mine
It’s clearer when there’s children
Three daughters and a son will do
A Shari, Sandy and Candace
And one with the same name too
It’s clearer when there’s more
Grand and great they’re called
Lineage who remember
The man who began it all
It’s clearer when it can’t be said
In just an inch of obit
All Leelanau/Glen Arbor mourns
The loss of its Moby Dick
It’s clearer when the absence
Of the man of North and South
Makes the water seem empty
Though full of trout and small mouth
It’s clearer with the memories
Of bait and ice and fish
Of the little boat and shanty
Fulfilling his every wish
It’s clearer when there’s tales
Of denizens of the deep
Of the tide under the bridge
Solar-lunar high and neap
What makes a man a legend?
The answer is not forgiving
It’s clear now that he’s gone
It’s the time he spent on living
Posted by editor at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)
Youth hostel at Burfiend Farm coming soon
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
The American Youth Hostel organization’s wait at Port Oneida has nearly drawn to a close.
After years of grueling debate, the Secretary of the Interior in Washington D.C. pealed away the red tape and ruled that hostels are acceptable concessions in the National Park.
And after days of nerve-racking drizzle, the clouds receded over the Burfiend Farm houses north of Glen Arbor on Port Oneida Rd. Saturday, September 16th turned out to be a perfect work day at the future youth hostel sight.
Nearly thirty AYH members of varying ages and various nationalities sweat and toiled over three buildings and an outhouse which, some day soon, will comprise Michigan’s only current youth hostel.
The American Youth Hostel organization is a nonprofit group comprised of volunteers with a passion for traveling in their blood and the will to extend that opportunity to younger generations.
Michael and Wendy Willihnganz, for instance, are a couple from the Detroit area who serve on the AYH Michigan branch’s board of directors. They spent this particular day hours from home, patching up the stepway down to Burfiend Farm’s Lake Michigan waterfront, rebuilding porches on the farm houses and replacing the support structure under the outhouse, which was leaning to the right and rotting.
“We were told the deal is all done but the signing,” said Michael, a hostel conoissour who was gearing up for a European hostel tour weeks after the work day at Burfiend Farm. “There’s no other alternative cheap housing in this area, but what a glorious place to come visit.”
Youth hostels were introduced early in the century in Germany by a group of people which believed that the industrialization of Europe deprived young people of discovering the nature around them. He began with a hostel in the Black Forest and then expanded.
Monroe and Isabel Smith opened the first youth hostel in the United States, in 1936 in Northfield, Massachusets. The school teachers had visited hostels in Germany and decided that America also needed to encourage the goodwill of those willing to welcome travelers into their homes -- in the heart of the Great Depression, when many didn’t have enough money to eat.
Hank Joerger, a native New Yorker who now resides in Suttons Bay, met Monroe Smith on a biking trip in Vermont. Joerger had no idea what a hostel was at the time, but Smith pointed out that the young man looked weary and needed air in his tires. He filled Joerger’s tires and gave him free room and board for three days, provided that Joerger help him with a building project.
The kindness of strangers fueled the hostel movement in the early days.
“I also remember couple who built a shed onto their house and welcomed in travelers almost every day for forty years,” said Joerger, a passionate biker to this day. “They each held jobs, yet the woman served milk and cookies to every guest. That’s some kind of heart.”
Hostels today are more defined than they were decades ago, though travelers still swap tales of places they can stay for free, provided they help the host with a chore or project. The proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore next to the Notre Dame in Paris, lets backpack-toters bring in food and crash on the floor if they help sweep the floor or restock shelves for an hour.
Posted by editor at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)
Elegy for a hardware store
By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun contributor
This piece was originally published in the September-October 2000 issue of Northern Home magazine.
The poet Nancy Willard claims that hardware stores prove the existence of God. I believe it. For me, hardware stores have always been where the broken things of this world -- the unfinished, undone dreams -- were given a future. Hardware stores existed to give humans the factual existence of gardens, fences, bird feeders and whole houses where we could at last rest. They also gave me a vocabulary I loved for its quirkiness. How does one know the world without having said “spanner flange”? In a hardware store, learning names was a treat for the mouth, the future was tangible, the world was a place that could get better.
So can you blame me if I’ve met the closing of our local hardware store in Empire with grief? The store stood solidly, broadly at the end of Main Street with its trim white clapboarding and wide porch. It closed suddenly, with little notice. Its closing is the end of an era in my life. Because the Empire hardware store was my own personal hardware store. Or rather, it felt like it. When David and I returned to Leelanau County to build first a rough storage space for camping, later a garage, and finally a house, the hardware store saved our lives every day.
I was given my first tool belt -- a tough canvas apron -- as a freebie from that hardware store. Several times a week, I refilled orders, learning the difference between galvanized and ardox nails, between treated and white wood. As our buildings progressed, David suggested I was ready for a heavier hammer, and it was at the hardware store they let me try out an Estwing, its glimmering steel more beautiful than silver. I bought utility knives, tape measures, levels. Sue, the woman who worked the counter, automatically handed over new carpenter’s pencils because I constantly lost mine. She showed me how to reload the roof stapler, the caulking gun.
When David and I shingled the cabin, the hardware folks sold us asphalt shingles at a discount because they were having as much fun as we were. They wanted things to work, too. And always there was lumber, a small but effective yard that kept us going through miscounts, mismeasures and miscuts. They let us sort through the 2-by-4s and cut iron rods for me when we were building landscape terracing. It was from that hardware store that David purchased my second tool belt, a powder blue leather belt. He bought it as both warning and honor badge just before we started the work on the main house. I couldn’t have been prouder.
By then, that hardware store was stamped on my soul. I could walk to the garden section and pick up a trowel that fit my hand. I knew where they stored screen doors, crown trim, a small but essential display of greeting cards and mousetraps. They ordered the birdseed my birds liked (or so I believed) and they had the special glue we needed for the subfloor. We could even pull our township permits there in the hardware store, sketching dimensions at the counter while Sue and Leo rang up anchor bolts and sill seal.
More than anything, I wish I could have said good-bye to my hardware store, could have waled through the aisles under terrible fluorescence, run my hands over the rows of caulking and rummaged once again through a bin of copper fittings. I wanted to traipse out with a dozen bags of manure or treated 4-by-4s, or emergency candles, roasting tins, hoses, hooks, tape -- all on a closeout sale. I wanted to offer farewells to the kind people who watched me learn to say the word bituthane -- pronounced bitch-a-thane -- without blushing.
I stand before the empty store at the end of Main Street in Empire. Our house is nearly finished. The hardware store stayed open and vitally important through three different ownerships before finally being lost to us. I am sad. Where am I going to rediscover that the world, though not perfect, is not mad, either? Where but in a hardware store will I be able to trust that my universe is a place to be sorted and ordered, a place to be given the forecast of hope and the stuff to make it happen?
Anne Marie Oomen, chair of the Creative Writing Department at Interlochen Arts Academy, lives in Empire. The house which she and husband David Early have built, is almost complete.
Posted by editor at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)