My contribution to this website comes from my father’s memoir. The excerpt below describes the start of his business in what was to my mother and him a new town, Marion. Both of them were born and reared in Saline County. My mother’s family had farmed their land since shortly after statehood. My father lived in Harrisburg, where his father worked as an electrician for one of the coal companies. In his years after high school, my father attended college briefly, worked in a grocery store, an automobile dealership, and a paint store. He valued greatly the experience he had in all those settings, but it would be the experience with the paint store that defined his future career. The following words are his:
Sometime in September [1937] we asked the Smith-Alsop Paint Company in Terre Haute, Indiana to find us a location. They surveyed several towns and came up with Marion or Carbondale. …Marion…had several available places for rent at very reasonable prices.
We were able to rent our first location at 410 North Market Street for $25.00 per month. I opened the paint store on February 19, 1938. [Miriam and I] were married on Sunday February 20, 1938. We spent our first night together at the Williams Hotel across the street from the store. Monday morning we both went to work in the store. We had one employee, Hubert Eugene Ramsey.
[We] had our formal opening on March 19. As was the usual custom of Smith-Alsop stores, we gave away long-stemmed roses to every lady who came into the store…. It was rather a cold, snowy day, but by afternoon it had cleared up a little. When business was slow, [a man sent by Smith-Alsop] and I went out front and handed roses to passers-by. Then in the evening we took lots of roses to churches for them to use on Sunday morning.
We had wallpaper for 10 cents a double roll. It wasn’t much, but it was a lot better than newspaper. We sold a lot of wallpaper. I had shopped the competitor stores here and the highest priced wallpaper until we got here was thirty-five cents per double roll. We started with patterns up to one dollar. The advantage we had was Smith-Alsop know how, their warehouse, and their policy of selling in less than case lots.
We tried to help people with their paint and decorating problems, both do-it-yourselfers and professional painters. The store supervisor for the Smith-Alsop Paint Company suggested we use the slogan, “Bring Your Paint Problems to Paint People.” This we did religiously. Our people were taught never to guess about something, but were always to say, “If I don’t know, I’ll find out for you.” …The paint chemist at Smith-Alsop…could always tell us what to do about almost any paint. People who followed our advice invariably got good results. Painters relied on us, and even our competitors came to us for advice. It was quite gratifying for this to happen.
Sometime about 1942, a barber shop moved out of the building next door south of us, and we rented it as a warehouse. Later the building [at 400 North Market] came up for sale and we bought it. A large grocery store was on the corner, and we moved into the one room, floored the attic for storage space and put in a freight elevator. We also changed the look of the store by throwing the whole store open with no formal show windows. We used super market gondola island shelves and low shelving on the side. This was quite different from the high ten foot shelves of the old store. The new store was much lighter and brighter, and it was easier to see everything. The idea proved to be good, as business increased, and people felt free to shop around and look at our displays.
Operating a paint store was really a wonderful experience. Our success was due largely to our people’s friendly attitude and our ability to have the material they wanted. We were able to expand our business until we were Smith-Alsop’s third largest customer out of 150 stores, many of which were in cities much larger than Marion.
My father liked to tell a story about how his past experience working behind the meat counter at a grocery store in his home town of Harrisburg came to be useful. It was during World War II (he had been deferred because of foot problems). Fluck’s Market was an old-fashioned grocery store with a meat counter reputed to be the best in town. It was next door to the paint store, and was operated by Mrs. Fluck and her sons after her husband Louie died. One son, Delmar or “Red,” and their butcher, Parmley Weinacht, went to service in the war. The other son, Alfred (better known to most as “Mutt”) filled the role as butcher, but was out making deliveries one day when a customer insisted she could not wait for his return to cut the meat she wished to buy. My father was in the store and offered to help. A doubtful Mrs. Fluck gave him a reluctant go-ahead. Convinced of his ability after that experience, however, she would signal her occasional need for help by knocking on the front window of his store. He would then come through the back door of the market to help with meat cutting when Mutt was making home deliveries to customers.
On one day a man had come into the paint store and bought quite a bit of paint, which my father helped him load into his truck. A short time later, Mrs. Fluck knocked on the paint store’s front window. He slipped through the back door, and after washing up and donning an apron and cap, he came from behind the meat counter to stand face to face with the same man who had purchased paint just moments before. The man kept looking at him with a rather odd expression, and after being served finally asked, “Do you have a brother that works next door?” My father quickly answered, “Yes,” and moved quickly to wait on another one of Mrs. Fluck’s customers.
After I submitted the first draft of this piece, Sam Lattuca, the Webmaster, suggested that some additional information be included about where my parents lived. Shortly after they had opened the store and married, they rented a house on North Madison Street from a Mr. Spiller with whom they worked an arrangement for their rent to be in goods sold to him for his rental properties. Sometime later they built their first house several blocks north of the paint store. That experience also is documented in my father’s memoir:
We found a lot at 1015 North Market Street that was for sale for $550. …A Dr. Norris of Marion was building a Cape Cod cottage that we liked. I measured it and we discussed building it with Herman Boatright. The plan started on a napkin at Cliff Pulley’s restaurant on the east side of Marion.
While they were living in that house, my brother John was born in 1944 and my sister Marilyn Sue or “Susie” followed in 1947 (she died in January 2012). In 1951 they built their second house at 504 Bainbridge Road. I arrived in 1955. A trip to the West sparked their interest in new design trends and led to the construction of the modern style home at 1811 Dorothy Lane (since renamed Suzanne Drive) that was finished in January 1958. I recall my father telling about his decision to decline an advertising event suggested by the builder that would have had a helicopter landing on the relatively flat roof of the house to demonstrate its strength. When we moved there, George Dodds’ old radio station building was still standing just across the street at the back corner of the house. Its open door and deteriorated condition created far too much temptation not to explore it.
In 1968 there was a move to 102 Westernaire Drive, where they built a more traditional style home that included a carport for their RV. Finally they returned to the modern style in 1978 with their last home at 205 Sunset Terrace, which provided interior garage space for the RV, as well as a low maintenance gravel lawn.
My father sold his store around 1968. After that he devoted more time to some other business interests, including the Bank of Egypt, which he and several other local businessmen had organized in 1955. Retirement also afforded him time to travel the country with my mother in their RV. He died in 1993 after a lengthy illness. My mother, his soul mate in life and partner in business, lived on until 2008. While in her late 70’s and living at that last house on Sunset Terrace, my mother was given a basketball by my sister who had received it as a promotional gift. Mother called an old family friend, Herman Bearden, to see if his general contracting firm could install a basketball goal by her driveway. After the job was finished, she tested it and swished the ball through the hoop on the first try, probably to the astonishment of the still present workers who were collecting their tools to leave.
(Family photos and story by Heyward Green; Memory Kit ads )