A Fixture of a Hardware Store Closes
It’s one of those old-time hardware stores that carries virtually everything including a motto: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Or, as the employees prefer to phrase it, “It’s here somewhere.”
It’s a place where a night light promotion once featured the owner’s son sleeping in the window every night for a month, back lit with dozens of night lights.
Later, to reduce a surplus of irons, the store window starred a bikini-clad dummy ironing her panty hose beneath the sign, “Let’s Bring Back Ironing.” The irons not only sold out--customers placed orders for irons not in stock.
One of the most recent signs is a basic model in neon that reads simply “Open.” Or “Shut,” as the case may be.
But this is not a story about innovative merchandising or window dressing bordering on performance art. It’s not even about hardware, though to many nuts-and-bolts pilgrims the place is one of the few remaining, genuine hardware store meccas.
No, this is a love story. It’s a tale of service and devotion to a community through a small business and its owner, 73-year-old Mike Sweeney.
Best known as the owner of Sweeney’s Hardware in Manhattan Beach, he’s also a former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, former mayor of Manhattan Beach, former city councilman, former PTA president and, as his customers will tell you, a merchant who’s still willing to change light bulbs for the mechanically inept and hang onto spare keys for nearby residents who frequently find themselves locked out of their houses.
For some locals, this is a sad story, too, because at the end of this month, Sweeney will become the former owner of Sweeney’s Hardware, which in its 22 years has become an institution of sorts in Manhattan Beach. A recent rent increase on the store property, situated at the corner of Highland and Rosecrans avenues, about two blocks from the ocean, hastened Sweeney’s retirement.
“It’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to the whole town,” says architect David Martin, a Manhattan Beach resident who views Sweeney’s as a sort of combination hardware store and political forum.
“You used to be able to go in the store and if you didn’t like the way the city was being run, you could bitch to Mike about it,” he adds, referring particularly to the 16-year period when Sweeney served on the City Council (the council members rotate the mayoral post among them, thus Sweeney has spent a total of three years as mayor).
An Amazing Place
“The place has always amazed me,” Martin says. “I brought in a light fixture from Northern Italy once and asked Mike how to put an American light bulb into it. He pulled out a little 25-cent adapter. I had figured I would have to get a machine shop to make a part for it. He would carry all kinds of things nobody else had. You could get whippy washers (a popular Volkswagen part) and all the little metric screws.
“One of the things I always liked about Sweeney’s was that virtually nothing came wrapped in a plastic bag. If you wanted one bolt, you could buy one bolt. Who knows what I’m going to do when they close?”
It’s never been a brightly lit, carefully organized, antiseptically clean organization. It’s folksy, some say even comforting to the shoppers who appear in slow, usually steady streams, frequently splotched with paint, grease or whatever material they’ve been using.
The plain spoken Sweeney doesn’t hesitate to admit that the store has moved way beyond dusty. He readily admits, “It’s dirty.”
Merchandise is hung, stacked, stored, displayed from virtually every inch of the place, including the ceilings. A playpen has been a permanent fixture in the office, along with a 2-year-old baby who’s come to work almost every day since birth with his mother, an employee of 10 years.
Sweeney’s cocker spaniel Casey is also a semi-permanent resident who often greets customers, some of whom have decidedly sad looks in their eyes of late.
“It’s a family-run business. Not one of those impersonal corporate stores where people just know the merchandise but not how to use it,” explains son Gary Sweeney, an artist/baggage handler who worked at the store off and on for 17 years, attending to window displays among other duties, before he moved to Denver five years ago.
Gary Sweeney points out that his father didn’t merely change light bulbs for little old ladies, “he’d rewire their whole chandeliers, and charge them maybe $5.” And for all customers, the store provided a workshop in the back where people could come in and use the shop’s tools for free.
“Or you could rent an extension ladder for $2 a day . . . a pipe wrench for 50 cents. It was like nothing, like a deposit,” Gary recalls. “And dad was so patient with some of these people who’d come in with these idiotic projects. He’d tell them how to do the projects, write it all down for them and inevitably they’d come back in three hours with this big mess--that he’d help them fix.
“Plus he had all this bizarre stuff. I remember one guy coming in with airplane engine parts and dad looked at it and said, ‘Oh yeah, that takes a 10/32-inch fine thread screw.’ He could spot stuff like that right away.
“People would bring in ancient toasters and he’d have the coil they needed for it. And pressure cooker parts. Nobody uses a pressure cooker anymore, but there would always be somebody bringing in a pressure cooker that exploded in 1952 and he’d have all the parts for it.”
For a few weeks now, customers have been coming in by the droves to see the shopkeeper, to shake his hand and perhaps take advantage of his close-out specials.
Poignant Goodbys
“Watching the reactions on people’s faces, wishing him well, thanking him. It’s really been touching,” says daughter Gail Sweeney, a bookkeeper who worked at the store for seven years and was there on a recent Saturday morning. “I wish I had a dime for every person who’s said, ‘If I would’ve known sooner, maybe we could have done something about this.’ ”
Sweeney himself appears to be taking it in stride. “I’m underwhelmed,” he contends, in what many say is his characteristically modest way.
“I guess I’ll miss talking with the people more than anything else,” he says. “But I don’t think I’m going to really miss it. I’ll still be here in town. I’m not going anywhere.”
‘A Little Monthly Job’
Sweeney maintains that his only plan for his first year of retirement is to clean out his garage at his nearby home (where he expects to stock a few things for customers such as key-making equipment and pressure cooker parts). He’ll continue to serve as a board member of the Manhattan Beach Chamber of Commerce and as an elected director of the West Basin Municipal Water District, “a little monthly job that keeps me in touch.”
“I’m going to take it easy. If I can do a little fix-it work, I’ll do that.”
But according to his wife Anita, Sweeney has some other notions he’s exploring, ideas he’s just not willing to share publicly yet.
“Mike is truly a person who believes in giving back more than he takes out,” emphasizes his old friend and customer Dave Wachtfogel, a retired junior high school business ed teacher who’s now a handyman. “I think the store’s going to be grievously missed by the community. It’s a hometown remnant. . . .”
Wachtfogel first met Sweeney when the two were both volunteers on a citizen project to build Sand Dune Park in Manhattan Beach. Like most everyone who’s been in and out of Sweeney’s Hardware over the years, Wachtfogel has plenty of tales to tell. One of his favorites is how Sweeney once served as master of ceremonies for a memorial service on the sidewalk outside his store after the death of a local alcoholic, a guy who went by the name of Blackie.
Blackie, Wachtfogel recalls, typically perched atop the block’s fire hydrant, just liked to sit there watching people go by. Occasionally he’d move--to put coins in expired parking meters just before meter maids approached.
After Blackie’s death, his friends decided to honor him with a headstone of sorts: a bronze plaque designed to fit the top of Blackie’s beloved fire hydrant. Sweeney managed to get an OK from the fire department and city officials and he organized the memorial service.
Now that the memorial rites for Sweeney’s Hardware are in progress, Wachtfogel suggests that the city would be well served if it bought a little store nearby and rented it out to Sweeney. At least, he says, “They ought to put in another fire hydrant next to Blackie’s for Mike.”
