The hardware man’s daughter remembers what was

My parents owned and ran a small-town hardware store in tiny Hospers, Iowa, from the late 1940s to 2000. My grandfather, J.P. “Jake” Zwagerman, whose photo appears in this space, took over the store from its previous owner in the late 1930s. He’d been a farmer, but he sold the farm and moved to town in hopes of easing my grandmother’s asthma.

My dad enlisted in the Army Air Corps and trained to be a bombardier. He returned home and took over when Grandpa Jake fell ill and died. When the Hardware Hank franchises began in small towns in Minnesota and Iowa, my dad became a charter member.

The world was changing. America was emerging from dark and hard times into what must have felt like unbelievably good times.

My dad was able to employ other men in town, and in the late 1950s, my mom entered the store as clerk and bookkeeper and eventually she joined my dad as one of two full-time employees. She became the face of the store. It was a “hard wear” life, if you want to get cute about it. They worked 60-hour weeks, took too few vacations, and treated themselves not nearly often enough.

Along with a couple of handfuls of other businesses, they served their community as befitting the post-Depression, post-WWII era in this little Dutch and German town. Times were good through the 1960s and into the mid-1970s.

Around 1980, my brother, Jeff, wrote a long poem, “The Last of the Hardware Men,” as an homage to my parents’ business in the face of mercantile change. The Pamida chain of stores was already on the scene, and my parents were hearing comments from customers about how they could save a few cents if they drove up the road to Sheldon.

My parents went to investigate and discovered “a modern, blister pack, wholesale, superstore” with wide aisles and smooth, hard floors and fancy check-outs. It was the blister packs that particularly irked my mother, not for the consumer waste so much, but because someone, somewhere, disconnected from the real life and real needs of rural people, decided how many lag screws Mr. Van Dyke was going to need.

My folks stocked loose screws, nails, nuts and bolts in bins and sold them by increments of a pound. If someone wanted three U-bolts at Zwagerman Hardware, they got exactly three in a simple paper bag marked “Hardware Hank.” It was, as my brother noted, a place where you could “still get a smile for free.”

Some of the defecting customers realized that there was still value in this “weathered building with a leaky roof” where you could “buy a haying rope or a length of black stove pipe.” Over time, though, the defections grew, as they did with other mom-and-pop stores in small towns everywhere.

Even though my dad would have liked it, neither my brother nor I wanted to carry on the family business and it’s a good thing we declined. It would have been a livelihood’s death sentence, and that’s what my brother’s poem realizes. It’s an elegy for a way of life that’s gone and won’t be coming back.

In our time, mission, vision, and values statements declare a business’s intentions or clarify intent in the face of change. I’m not saying my parents would have looked down on that, it’s just that the times were such that the mission didn’t need to be stated. My parents needed to earn a living, and the people of Hospers needed paint and fishing equipment and housewares and refrigerators and toys for their kids.

The way of life in rural Iowa was one of mutual need and mutual benefit. The mission was straightforward, and their values were, too: The customer was always right.

My brother’s poem recalls the store’s motto, “If we don’t have it, you can’t get it,” which was the closest my parents would come to making pronouncements, and if you knew them, it would have seemed uncharacteristically boastful, but it was almost always true.

I think of that store more and more often and how it fed and clothed us and how my parents did the same by buying groceries and getting haircuts and filling prescriptions. That world was of a piece in a way that seems cribbed straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, and there’s gratitude and sadness in the remembering.

We left home and entered a world that was changing yet again; my parents could see it, and they knew their years of bounty were behind them. They never did properly retire. Illness forced both of them to step aside separately. If old soldiers just fade away, I suppose people like my folks just wore away. The business was their life, even when the life went out of the business.

Joan Zwagerman named her dog “Hardware Hank” in honor of her parents’ store.