Update 11-8-11

Hi,

The all-Central Hardware edition, unfortunately to commemorate the sad occasion of its closing.

First, from Debbie Oppenheimer:  From the Holocaust to Hardware to Hollywood
    I like to say I grew up on a cul de sac in Green Acres, a planned community where many of the streets are named after bushes and shrubs. I walked to Forest Road Elementary School and South High School and spent thirteen years with some of my classmates, a great many of whom I saw at our reunion last month. I was a junior counselor at Creative Day Camp on Central Avenue, a confidential files clerk at the Dime Savings Bank in the Green Acres mall, and a hostess at the International House of Pancakes on Sunrise Highway. Saturdays, my sister Wendy and I did filing in the family business, Central Hardware, on Central Avenue, where my grandfather, father, and brother knew everything there was to know about hardware, and my grandmother and mother worked the cash register. 
    Everything about who and where I came from enabled me to make my way to Hollywood, where I won an Academy Award for a documentary entitled, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.
The film was inspired by my late mother, Sylva Avramovici Oppenheimer, whose parents put her on a train in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1939, a week after her eleventh birthday, and sent her to safety with strangers in Great Britain. Like ninety percent of the ten thousand children rescued by the Kindertransport, my mother never saw her parents again. 
    The paternal Oppenheimer side of my family has a story of equal but different interest, about whom I never made a film.
    My grandfather David had a wholesale hardware business in the tiny Bavarian town of Aub, Germany. A veteran of the German army, he was awarded an Iron Cross in the First World War, but by the 1930s, he was no longer able to conduct business. My then-young father Eric was driven out of the local school and sent away to boarding school, and my aunt Liz was photographed in front of a friend’s home that had a Jewish star spray painted on their front post. It was time to get out, which thankfully they did with the aid of some resourceful relatives.
    Traveling by boat into New York harbor in March 1938, my father’s family settled in Washington Heights, where David persuaded a local hardware merchant to allow him to work for free so he could learn the language. In short time, he worked his way up to $7 per week. In 1939, searching for a business where he could start over, he saw an advertisement for a small storefront near “Rockefeller Center.” Upon arrival, he examined its prospects, asked around among neighbors, and decided to plant his stake in Valley Stream, near Rockville Center, a slight difference in pronunciation and real estate value.
    My father completed high school at Valley Stream Central, enlisted in the American military in World War II, and returned to Germany with the 35th Signal Battalion. At the age of nineteen, upon liberation, he accompanied his Colonel to the concentration camp Nordhausen after hearing reports impossible to fathom. It’s difficult to grasp how he must have felt seeing emaciated prisoners and mass graves, knowing that could have been his fate.
    In the 1940s, Central Hardware was expanding with the opportunity to serve the burgeoning local community. Its slogan was, “You name it, we have it,” and it was a classic Mom-and-Pop-store with impressively knowledgeable and helpful salespeople. My grandparents lived across the street and went home each day for lunch. On weekends my grandfather purchased merchandise in bulk on the Lower East Side, and the extensive store basement was crammed with every hardware item imaginable from there and from auctions, plus then some.
    My father returned to Valley Stream and was studying architecture at Pratt and then Columbia but couldn’t withstand the pull of my grandfather and the family business. For my brother Alan, a mechanical genius who disassembled and reconstructed engines from a very young age, the store became inevitable when he was still in school. My mother greeted everyone from the cash register and knew everyone’s business. My grandmother toddled around the narrow aisles. There was no hardware question my grandfather and father couldn’t answer, and customers sought out their friendly expertise. The local men came on Fridays, sat around and talked, and purchased supplies for their weekend home building projects. Everyone knew my family. Everyone loved to shop in “the store,“ as it was widely called. 
    My family worked together six days a week. We had dinner together every night, after which my father would retire to his desk to work on bills and paperwork. On Sundays, my grandparents visited. The hardware store enabled my parents to put Wendy, Alan, and me through college, the first generation in our family to complete our college degrees. 
    My grandfather passed away in 1975, and my father assumed the running of the store. By then my brother had graduated from college and was working there full-time. Some years later, he married, and his wife Laura came to work. Generations of customers began frequenting the business. Very few other changes were visible. If you took a snapshot, you might tell the passage of time only by the changing models of cars driving by.
    In the late 1970s, my father installed a music system to subvert the growing number of radio ads trumpeting a new phenomenon that competed with his business, the big box store. Yet when fierce snowstorms unexpectedly arose and rock salt was at a premium, you could be sure my father and brother were painstakingly measuring out small portions so no one business could purchase in bulk, and everyone could get a bag to melt their sidewalks and driveways. 
    After the death of my mother in 1993, my father finally retired, handing over the reins to my brother, although he still went to the store regularly to help out. He’s 87 now, happily remarried for seventeen years to our neighbor Gloria from across the street in Green Acres, which is now called Mill Brook. His tool bench is a thing of beauty.
    Sadly, the store that shaped our values, instilled a fierce work ethic, defined loyalty and honesty, and wired us into the entire community, could no longer withstand changes in the retail world.  It is going the way of the diminishing bookstore, pharmacy, and stationary store.  On November 5th after 72 years, Central Hardware will close, a poignant end to an era. When I came home for my high school reunion, all my old classmates asked about Eric, Alan, Wendy, and the hardware store. I hope they and a lifetime of customers will stop by to say one final farewell.

Next, from the November 5th Newsday, an article by Keiko Morris:  Central Hardware Closing After 72 Years
    For 72 years, generations of customers came to Central Hardware for the proper wing nut, a bag of fertilizer, or advice on how to fix a leaky toilet. The store also was a social hub, where they chatted and traded news amid aisles packed with cardboard boxes of drill bits, electrical wiring and lightbulbs.
Now the Valley Stream shop -- a treasure trove of memories and gadgets spanning the vintage electric broom to power drills -- is closing its doors.
    Tomorrow, Alan Oppenheimer, 60, the third generation in his family to run the business, will begin a new job managing the facility at a Baldwin medical technology and device firm called elliquence. He plans to open Central Hardware on Saturdays only long enough to clear out inventory.
    Customers like Jonathan Lehrer said it was more than a store closing.  "You went there for a purpose, but at the same time you saw people you knew, so it was also a social call," said Lehrer, 35, a professor of horticulture at Farmingdale State College. A customer since childhood, he recently stopped by the store to buy a red Lowell Duster, an insecticide dispenser from the 1950s.
    The store is a vault of memories for the Oppenheimer family, too."It's really the passing of an era," said Debbie Oppenheimer, Alan's sister and executive vice president of NBC Universal International TV Production in Los Angeles. "The hardware store is a metaphor to me of a time that is very sadly going by." 
    As self-service big box stores, with their advertising power, volume and variety, proliferated, Central Hardware was getting squeezed. Sales had fallen by at least 40 percent in a decade to about $600,000 a year, said Laura Oppenheimer, Alan's wife and the store's bookkeeper, while costs continued to rise.
    Business got to the point that "a big day for me would be making 100 keys," Alan said. "You couldn't just wait for the next snowstorm to sell a snowblower, and we have high payroll costs because our business was built on personal service." He insisted on paying for health insurance for his full-time employees, a rarity among small businesses.
    The family business got its start when David Oppenheimer fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Oppenheimer, a veteran of the German army awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War, had run a successful hardware wholesale business in Aub, Germany, in Bavaria. As Nazi persecution of Jews intensified, he planned his family's escape, taking pleasure cruises to England and depositing his money -- which he carried in Nivea tins sewn into his coat lining -- into an English bank, his grandson, Alan Oppenheimer, said. He later immigrated to New York City with his family in 1938. 
    David Oppenheimer first settled his family in Manhattan's Washington Heights. His move to Valley Stream was an accident of sorts: He saw an ad for a small storefront for sale "near Rockefeller Center." As it turned out, the store was near Rockville Centre, on Central Avenue in Valley Stream, then quite a rural area.
    His son, Eric Oppenheimer, fought in World War II and returned to study architecture at the Pratt Institute, but ultimately he was drawn to the store, where his father needed help, he said. Central Hardware benefited from the building boom taking place in Valley Stream at the time, and moved to a larger location next door.
    At one point there were 15 hardware stores in Valley Stream, Eric Oppenheimer said. Even with the competition, the store had large industrial customers, school districts and municipalities, and homeowners.
    When Alan joined the business, he and his father continued to guide customers on home improvement projects, a courtesy many loyal patrons said they don't find in the big box chain stores. "Customers could walk out without buying anything and [with] an answer and we'd be satisfied because we helped somebody," said Laura Oppenheimer.
    With signs posted in the windows advertising 70 percent discounts, customers trickled in Saturday. Some came for bargains, others to wish the employees and owners well.
    "I can't believe it. This place is an icon," said Buccola, 60, an electrical engineer who stopped in to lament the closing. Shaking his head, he recalled scores of trips to the store since he bought his Valley Stream house in 1977.  "Nearly everything in my home -- the pipes, the wiring -- all from this place," he said. 
    Laurie Loquercio, 47, of Valley Stream recalled strolling the aisles as a little girl with her grandfather, a contractor.  "I would pick up something and he would explain to me what it was used for," she said. "As a child, it seemed like they had everything."
    Employee Wayne Russell, 61, of Valley Stream, said he would miss "all the people we worked with." He then pointed to Alan Oppenheimer, who was walking down an aisle to help a customer. "And I'm going to miss that guy right there."

There are other notes, but they'll wait till next week.  But there is an Alumni Association meeting this Thursday, November 10th, at 7:15 in the library at South.  Association president Emily Kleinman Schreiber says, "It would be so nice to meet more of you!"

The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com

The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65

As usual, please delete the spaces.


Rich