Father Enters Big Business

by Florence Richardson Street

Father’s furniture store was a very important factor in our family life, quite apart from the income it produced. When I walked down Main Street in our southern Minnesota town, I felt a sense of ownership, of belonging, which I’ve never had since.

Richardson furniture store in Northfield, Minnesota

The store had three floors. On the first floor were rugs, carpets, mirrors, framed pictures and dining room furniture; on the second, bedroom suites, mattresses, and chairs. The top floor was used for storage and repair shop, resided over by a Norwegian cabinet-maker who had learned the trade in the old country. A huge glue kettle and a battered coffee pot always simmered on his small gasoline stove. A freight elevator transported furniture from one floor to another, and oh! what a thrill to ride up and down on it! Ole, the delivery boy, would warn us good-naturedly, “stay back from de edge, du barne!”

Father prided himself upon his attractive store windows. To advertise porch swings, he once hastily screwed some large hooks into the plaster ceiling of the display window and hung up the swing. For the benefit of an interested customer, he jauntily plumped his 200 pounds down on the swing – the ceiling hooks gave way – and father and the swing made a hasty descent, one corner of the swing going through the plate-glass window. Somehow this didn’t strike my practical English mother at all funny when he recounted the incident at the table. “Sort of an expensive joke,” she commented dryly, mentally calculating how many household necessities the price of the window would have bought.

Sometimes father was absent from the noon meal because he was taking to dinner a young couple about to be married. They would come in shyly, hand-in-hand, to choose their furniture, and he wasn’t taking any chances of their falling into the clutches of his competitor, whom he cordially hated.

Father would let them choose a lot of shiny oak stuff which he carried for purpose of comparison. Then he would convince them skillfully that, while this might do for the present, it wouldn’t always satisfy them. “You want to think of what you’ll be proud to own 20 years from now,” father would counsel. “Good furniture lasts a lifetime.” Step-by-step he would suggest substitutions – a simpler, better-made bureau with beveled mirror, a more comfortable mattress, sagless springs, a planar but more beautiful dining table, sideboard and chairs. After the sale was completed, father would add a large train etching as his wedding gift. Long before installment buying became general, he would arrange for regular payments of the difference between what the young folks and plan to spend in the cost of better furniture. Payments often consisted of butter and eggs. These couples became his firm friends, returning through the years for other needs. He could also speak a bit of Norwegian, which never failed to amuse his Scandinavian customers.

Father demonstrating a new mattress
The young woman is Clara Watson, his niece and bookkeeper

Buying in larger quantities than a store in a town of four thousand could sell easily was father’s weakness. When he could have sold readily six or seven newfangled “sweeper-vacs” he ordered a dozen. The last five or six proved almost impossible to move. This was a source of considerable friction between him and his partner, Mr.Ferg, (Ferguson) for father was the buyer; the store was only one of Mr. Ferg’s extensive business interests.

Once father got really into BIG BUSINESS. It happened that the college on the hill above town had built a large dormitory for men which, strange to relate, provided no clothes closets. To offset this defect, the college had ordered, direct from a little factory to the south, something over 100 large wardrobes. These were to be “of oak, seven feet high, four and one-half feet in width, 20 inches deep, smoothly finished outside and inside.” Although satisfactory in every other way, the cabinets have been poorly finished inside, so the college authorities refused to accept them. This blow caused the factory to go bankrupt. Four months these wardrobes cluttered up the Milwaukee freight depot until father bought the lot, to the consternation of mother, his partner, and everybody at the store.

“It will take 10 years to get rid of them!” Mr. Ferg snorted.

“Dave, you’ll send us to the poor house yet!” Mother declared.

“Betcher my bottom dollar we can sell every last one within a year!” Father countered.

Knute, the cabinet-maker recently arrived from Norway, was pressed into service to help Ole. Day after day the two men hauled wardrobes from depot to store in the high wagon. They grew tired and glum. Even the black team lost its customary spirit and didn’t run away once.

Two father this venture was a challenge. He developed strategy. Only one wardrobe was displayed at a time, thus giving customers the impression there was scant stock on hand. From the doctor’s wife down to the little girl who came for carpet tacks, nobody left the store without being shown a wardrobe. He sold many to farm wives, who invariably had an upstairs bedroom minus a close closet.

“Ya! Virst ve baere dem from freight house store,” grumbled Ole. “Then ve loefte every damn von back into de high wagon og loefte dem oopstair soomevere.”

Knute nodded agreement: “Ya, ya, alvay oopstair!”

Father became quite resourceful in thinking abuses for wardrobes never imagined by the manufacturer. About this time our church women purchased their first dishes and silverware. They needed storage space. Father prevailed upon them to buy two wardrobes to stand side-by-side. Knute built nice selves into them, and they were used satisfactorily in the kitchen church for years.

I always suspected that mother has helped that transaction along. It was now her turn to absorb some of the surplus.

She had been asking to have a linen cupboard built into a recess in the upper Hall. Father sent up a wardrobe, neatly fitted with shelves. One slight drawback was that it was deeper than the niche, so we were continually bumping into it in the dark.

It proved so useful, however, that mother said the boys might as well have one in their bedroom, which had no close closet. Father complied with alacrity. The wardrobe worked very well for the two boys, divided as it was into two parts, with a deep drawer underneath and the shelf above. Fay and Russell each had his own side for his clothing and treasures, thus eliminating much squabbling.

The boys invented a new game called “sleeping car.” Each high shelf became an upper berth into which they climbed like monkeys. Even father hadn’t visualized this use!

One evening the little boys were excused from the table before the rest of us had finished. They scampered up to their room which is above the dining room, to resume a game of “sleeping car.” Suddenly we heard a crash which jarred the whole house, the dining-room chandelier swayed drunkenly, and then – silence. In consternation the family rushed upstairs; too scared little boys were crawling out from under an avalanche of clothing. The heavy wardrobe had tipped over as they had shinned up to their “births” at the same time. Its fall had been broken by the foot rail of their iron bed, which is been bent into a deep V; probably only this had saved the youngsters from serious injury.

When the year was almost up, one wardrobe still remained. The men at the store had begun to razz father. He did his level best interest customers. “Why, Mr. Richardson, don’t you remember? You sold me one last April!” The town and countryside seem to have reached the saturation point.

With this matter uppermost in his mind, father went up to Mr. Oleson’s tailor shop over McGuire’s jewelry store to have his new suit fitted. He happened to notice that the garments upon which Mr. Oleson was currently working on exposed to the dust. Before the fitting was completed, father had sold the last wardrobe!

Delivering this one was something else, however. For one thing, it was another upstairs job. “Schust von more oopstair vardrobe og I qveet,” Knute had threatened. And this was no ordinary flight – the iron stairway leading from the sidewalk between two brick buildings must’ve been twice the height of the usual residential stairs. There was no landing anywhere, not even at the top where door opened abruptly into the tailor shop. No spot to pause for breath.

Knute and Ole studied the situation without enthusiasm. They decided they might as well carry the wardrobe from the store, as the stairway was but a few doors up Main Street. The piece was awkward to get a grip on, and very heavy to negotiate up the long flight. Knute, the stronger of the two, lifted from the bottom while Ole tugged at the top.

Father stood watching proceedings from the sidewalk in front of the furniture store. He was vaguely uneasy. Suddenly he beheld Knute leap like a skier into space from the stairway opening, fleeing for his life! At his heels, end over end, came the mammoth wardrobe, careening to the middle of Main Street, where it crumpled into kindling. Knute had not paused until he had reached safety on the far side of the street, where he stood quaking.

“Dat ting, it loike to kill me! He gasped.

The two men had gotten the thing safely up the stairway to the tailor’s door. Only had to take one hand from his and a moment in order to open the door; Knute felt the wardrobe slipping, but couldn’t hold it. He let go and leapt downstairs ahead of it. Usually passers-by were numerous, and teams were hitched all along the street, but by some strange miracle the path was clear and nobody was hurt. 

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