Moorpark’s Oldest Business Helps to Bond the City
Moorpark is a place where citizens’ stubborn independence has helped to maintain a small-town flavor in the face of growing pressures to become another bedroom suburb.
So it seemed perfectly natural Saturday when residents of the tiny town 15 miles west of the San Fernando Valley gathered next to chain saws, pickaxes, wooden washboards and nail bins to honor their city’s oldest business.
Whitaker Hardware was marking 60 years at its stucco-sided High Street storefront. And the Whitaker family was celebrating hanging on through the Depression, uncounted recessions, a war and a fire.
Since 1926, the family enterprise has been as much a community meeting place and general store as it has been a place to buy hinges, bolts and hand tools. The fourth generation of Whitakers now runs it.
Held Together Homes
Their merchandise has helped fill--and hold together--the homes of just as many generations of Moorpark residents.
“I’ve bought refrigerators, ranges, weed-eaters, kitchen ware, you name it, right here,” 62-year-old Moorpark native Ethel Flory Watts said as she nibbled on a cookie from a reception table set up near a display of gardeners’ gloves.
F. O. Brewer, 86, said he has been shopping regularly at the store since 1941. “I bought my first television here back in ’48. It was the best one I’ve ever owned, too,” he said.
“It was 1949,” corrected James Whitaker, head of the family that runs the store. “The pool hall down the street got its TV in ‘48--we started selling them after that.”
Whitaker, who has been blind for 20 years, had recognized Brewer’s voice and adroitly hurried out from behind the store’s counter to welcome his old friend.
‘I Was Raised Here’
“I was raised here,” the 62-year-old Whitaker said when someone complimented him on how well he maneuvered around the store’s displays of paints, cookware and plumbing supplies.
“But my brother and I never considered these things as playthings. You might fool around with pipe fittings for a while and then the bolts. But our parents taught us never to become too attached to the merchandise. If you did, all you’d have is a museum.”
The Whitakers have that, too. Old photos, an antique desk, an operational 100-year-old telephone and other souvenirs of 60 years in Moorpark are tucked out of the way in an office behind the store.
Whitaker said that the store sold orchard supplies, agricultural products and horse whips during the 1920s and ‘30s, including the Depression years, when sales of $5 a day were coveted transactions. It also sold coffins, and its garage was used as a temporary morgue after the St. Francis Dam disaster, which killed more than 400 people in March of 1928.
A 1942 fire seriously damaged the store, however. After that, the family restocked with more domestic goods, such as tools and housewares, although the goods were hard to come by during World War II.
Saturday’s well-wishers ranged from Phil Phillips, a retired tool salesman from Ojai who filled supply orders for the Whitakers for 30 years, to Dick Muldoon, a Moorpark outdoors enthusiast who has been buying hunting supplies at the store for a mere five months.
“Whitaker’s has to be one of the first places every newcomer to this town walks into,” said Leta Yancy-Sutton, a Moorpark city councilwoman. “There aren’t chain stores here, so it’s important to have a place you can get nearly anything you need without leaving town.”
Said 76-year-old orange grower George Merriken, a Whitaker’s customer since 1936: “Moorpark is a little provincial. But I’m satisfied.”
