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Another mom-and-pop memory

Patrons (and dogs) will miss Clearwater Beach True Value Hardware and Marine and the family that ran it for 43 years in what has become a developer's paradise.

By CHRISTINA K. COSDON
Published January 3, 2006

	[Times photo: Ted McLaren]
	Gregg Schutzendorf looks out the front door Thursday of his now vacant store, True Value Hardware and Marine, in Clearwater Beach. The store, which was founded by his parents and opened in June 1962, closed recently after having been in business for 43 years. Schutzendorf had worked in the store for three decades.

CLEARWATER - After more than four decades as the place for everything from light bulbs to boat accessories and dog collars, Clearwater Beach True Value Hardware and Marine has closed its doors.

The building that housed the store, owned and operated for 43 years by the Schutzendorf family, will be sold for development, along with five other buildings the family owns in the same block.

During the last weeks of December, the store took on a desolate air as tools, housewares, plumbing supplies and fertilizer disappeared from the shelves.

Some 300 photographs of customers posing in the store with their dogs filled a wall; those photos were among the last items to leave the building.

Gregg Schutzendorf, whose parents, Alice and Gilbert, established the business in 1962, worked there for 29 years and took over the operation 11 years ago when his brother Dudley died from cancer. It was Gregg Schutzendorf who started the tradition of allowing customers to bring their dogs while they shopped. Then he and his wife, Darcy, who also worked at the business, began snapping their pictures and displaying them.

Although Schutzendorf's Labrador retrievers were often by his side in the store, a bird was the first critter to become a regular.

The family's chatty mynah bird, Freddie, greeted customers for a decade.

"His favorite saying when people came in was "How 'bout a beer?"' Alice Schutzendorf said. "That broke up the customers, and they would stand there and talk to him."

Alice was the last one out the door when the business officially closed Dec. 26.

"I was the first one in," she said. "I wanted to be the last one to turn the key in the lock. It was a little sentimental. It was a family affair, and it provided a lot of good memories."

In its 43 years, the business grew from $14.54 in sales on opening day to total sales of about $700,000 in 2004. .

Now that the store has closed, shopping at a hardware store will require a trip of at least 6 miles to the mainland.

"It's a terrible inconvenience," said restaurateur Larry Edger. "I own three restaurants (Cooter's, Backwaters on Sand Key and Maggie Mae's) and we were up there almost daily."

John Conti, who owns the Sandman Motel on Clearwater Beach, was a customer for 19 years, ever since he moved to Florida from Canada.

"I've never seen a hardware store where they had everything you could think of," Conti said. "We could have walked in there with a washer or a faucet, 1922 model, and they would have one."

The Schutzendorf family also took an active interest in the beach community.

"The hardware store was not just a business in the community; the Schutzendorfs were part of the community," said Anne Garris, a longtime Clearwater Beach resident and civic activist. Gilbert Schutzendorf, who died in 2004, was a member of the Memorial Civic Center Association and a past president of the Clearwater Beach Rotary Club and the Clearwater Beach Association.

"They contributed to every public project that I know of that happened on the beach," Garris said.

Jane Yearout, who has lived on the beach for 42 years, said she will miss the convenience as well as the Schutzendorf family. "We're used to it and the people, and you like everybody and you don't want to see it disappear," she said.

Yearout and her children own rental office and apartment properties on the beach and regularly stocked up on door locks and light bulbs at True Value, she said. Her son Jimmy also shopped at the store for boat supplies.

The hardware store follows other beach businesses that have disappeared in recent years as developers have moved in.

"The character of the beach has changed drastically," Gregg Schutzendorf said. "For many years, a lot of our business was with the small mom-and-pop motels on the beach. Then developers came in, bought up the motels and began building condominiums. As construction expanded, we gained business from the construction workers. The inventory changed and that was good."

But more recently, he said, many of the condos have been used merely as weekend retreats. "And they don't buy anything here," he said. "It's been great, but it's time to move on."

Garris said the beach would lose more than a store.

"Everything like this that happens leaves us less of a community," she said.

[Last modified January 3, 2006, 01:57:16]