Store’s Buy-Bye

VENTURA —  The problem Thursday was that people kept dropping by. They saw the sign and figured maybe Dan would unlock the door just for them, maybe give them an early shot at the big sale.

But Dan McKenzie wasn’t around. At 82, he has been in the hospital for more than a month, recovering from cancer surgery. Instead, passersby found only his harried pals--well-meaning men who know next to nothing about the hardware business or the half-century’s worth of merchandise crammed into drawers and boxes and dark shelves in the musty stockroom of the soon-to-be-defunct Hess Hardware.

“You got one of those triple-action plungers back there?” asked a regular customer who was granted a sneak peek.

“Don’t think so. Just the old kind.”

That’s not surprising. “The old kind” of gizmos and geegaws beyond reckoning have enjoyed a long run here. If you hurry, you can pick up a Maid-Rite washboard, a cast-iron skillet, a potato brush (“Saves nutrients!”), an Avo-Carvo (“Loosens seeds--slices and peels without bruising the fruit!”), a radish slicer, a strawberry huller, a nut-butter cutter and a set of coasters nestled in a black-lacquered pagoda. You can get a key blank for your 1952 Ford. If your monkey wrench is acting up, you can rummage through an old box to find it some new teeth.

The one thing you won’t find--for much longer, at any rate--is Hess Hardware itself.

One of the oldest shops in Ventura, it opened in 1944. But for five weeks, a “Closed for illness” sign has hung on the door at 377 E. Main St., and Hess could shut for good by the end of the weekend. McKenzie’s friends volunteered to hold a 50%-off-everything liquidation sale for him--today through Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. He accepted, with regrets.

“Sure, it’s hard to turn it loose,” he said from his hospital bed. “But when you get thinking about it, time is closing in on you. Maybe there’s some other little things you want to do in your lifetime.”

Fresh from the Army, McKenzie signed on at Hess on Jan. 19, 1946. He had worked at another local hardware store before the war, and Walter Hess liked both the young, even-keeled McKenzie and his wife, Imogene.

“Most people thought he was my father,” McKenzie said. “We became very close-knit.”

That is why the store is still called Hess Hardware, even though McKenzie bought it in 1957.

“If I did it over again, I’d change the name,” he said. “If you’re buying a business from someone, you’re the one the customer has to deal with.”

Even so, loyal customers upset by news of McKenzie’s illness have managed to track him down in the hospital. They just asked for Mr. Hess.

Big-box customers wouldn’t think of tracking down a Mr. Costco, nor would they necessarily recognize Hess as a hardware store. No intercom blares here. No forklifts glide by, relentlessly beeping. There is no computer; McKenzie kept his books and jotted down his orders by hand--a fitting extremity for a hardware man.

He sold the basics of keeping a home, from floor wax to frying pans. As downtown faded, he also sold homeless people nails for their sheds and machetes to hack the bamboo from their makeshift yards in the river bottom. One time, an old man wanted a rubber tip for his cane. McKenzie happened to have one--and guaranteed it for life.

“We never tried to compete with the great big boys,” he said. “We’re just a drop-in place. If we have it, you can find it here, and if we don’t--well, you can’t.”

For the last couple of weeks, the friends preparing the sale have found more than they expected: Boxes of stovepipe dampers. Dozens of ceramic inserts for old gas heaters. Rusted gopher traps and old tin creamers and pecan shellers and escargot tongs, and on and on.

“We don’t even know what a lot of these things are,” said Bill Scott as he hefted a drill bit the size of a bread loaf.

Fellow members of the Poinsettia Masonic Lodge No. 633, Scott and McKenzie have known each other for more than 40 years. Scott, a retired Camarillo postmaster, often dropped by the store for a chat.

“This is sad,” he said, gazing around at the jumble of stuff he hauled down from the stockroom upstairs. “It’s like the end of a dynasty.”

Ed Lee, owner of Lindsay Insurance on California Street, agreed. For years, Lee brought his lunch to the store a day or two a week. He and Scott would tinker away on faulty smoke detectors or bad heaters set before them by McKenzie. They never managed to actually fix anything, so McKenzie dubbed them “Tech One” and “Tech Two.”

“I found a drawer filled with corks--all sizes of corks,” Lee said. “Up in the hospital I asked Dan why he kept them around. He said, ‘Well, where’s a guy going to buy a cork?’ ”

McKenzie’s buddies admit that they are nervous about the sale. Their friend’s final bit of income hinges on it, and none of them has ever run a store. They aren’t sure what they will do if most of the stuff doesn’t move this weekend.

For his part, McKenzie knows just how he will spend his time after the hospital, store or not.

“There are all those ‘honey-do’ things that have been building up,” he said. “Over the years, I’ve made a lot of promises about the garage.”