#truevaluehardware

I remember the first apartment I ever set foot in. It was above the western half of Morrison True Value Hardware on Main Street.1  Mom took me there one evening to visit what I assumed at the time was just a family friend. His name was Don Jevne, and he had been a friend to both Jackie and Jack Duffy for quite a while. I had met him a few times when he had come over to drink cocktails and play Trivial Pursuit and my parents were busy trying to get me into bed. Mom told me that he had gone to college like her, and had been a music teacher for a while before he had started working at True Value, which his parents owned.

The apartment was a pretty unreal place for a curious little kid to play around in. While Mom and this tall, lanky bearded man in a collared shirt, a beige sweater, khakis, and thick, wire-framed glasses chatted quietly over coffee and watched me lovingly, I toured the place. I spun a globe in the corner, looked at all the covers of the hundreds of classical records on the shelves—so many men in silver wigs, so many oil paintings of pastoral scenes. I ran my hands over leather-bound books, and watched the needle on the record player read the little grooves in the album it was playing. I walked out of that front room, with its thick carpet and faux-wood paneling on the walls, and into a short, brown-tiled front hallway, off of which was a dark little bedroom painted all blue. The blue walls contrasted with the bricks outside the window. Pigeons cooed in the alley.

I walked back into the kitchen, so different from any kitchen I had ever seen. So minimal. So few dishes in the sink, so little food in the refrigerator. I wandered back to the big storage space in the back, with higher ceilings than I had ever seen, a skylight caked with pigeon shit, piles of sheet music and a couple of music stands and a few chairs in the corner, and a bunch of cardboard boxes full of whatever this strange new man cared about enough to carry around with him. The back door of the apartment led from that big storage space out onto a roof that looked down on Saint Mary’s Catholic Church—with its big stained glass window and its tiny, neatly manicured lawn—directly across the street from the rear entrance and loading dock of True Value Hardware.2 

Years later, my older brother Jim would tell me that he and our sister Jeni and I made frequent trips up to that apartment above the hardware store with Mom back when I was too young to know what the hell was going on. The trips usually happened on Sundays after church. While Jack Duffy sat at home in his tweed chair, smoked cigarettes, drank cans of Budweiser, and watched the Green Bay Packers play football, Jackie Duffy took her kids to mass at Saint Mary’s, then we all went up to visit Don Jevne’s apartment on Main Street. That all makes sense to me now, but I still only remember that one visit, that one day.

 The western half of Morrison Hardware was in a short building, only two floors, whereas the eastern half of the store was in an old hotel, four stories high. In that way, the store, when looked at from across the street, formed a backwards “L.” The western building housed the plumbing and automotive sections of the hardware store on the bottom floor, and then the apartment and a few other dark and creepy rooms on the second floor. The bottom floor of the taller eastern building was once the lobby of the hotel, but later looked like any other hardware store, with fluorescent lights and tile floors and big aluminum shelves full of merchandise. But the top three floors were the old hotel rooms—dark, narrow hallways with early-twentieth century tiles and gross carpeting on the floors and peeling wallpaper on the walls—and all those little rooms that used to house people passing through town—people that were long dead and gone—were stuffed with junk that didn’t have anywhere else to go. ↩︎