1 Store, 1 Owner, 26 Years of Memories : Business: The Cottage Market closed when Mary Perkins’ retired last fall. The interior is being upgraded in hopes of finding a new tenant, but it will never again be the store everyone simply called ‘Mary’s.’
A crude, hand-lettered sign on the door of the only market in Sierra Madre canyon announced the news one day last fall.
“Mary’s Retiring,” it said. And another added: “To all her friends, young and old, she says, ‘Thanks for the memories, I love you all.’ Mary and Family”
The sign stayed up until recently, a fading reminder of what Mary Perkins meant to this sleepy canyon of narrow roads, Bohemian houses and eclectic residents.
One store, one owner, 26 years. Tucked under the Kozy Korner apartments, it was called the Cottage Market, but people knew it simply as “Mary’s.” When it closed last October, a small canyon resident locked himself away in his room for a day, telling his mother, “My life will never be the same.” He was 5 years old, and Mary’s was where he walked every day for a treat. Mary had that sort of effect on people, say canyon residents.
“She was really cool people,” says Mark Rebolla, an urban lumberjack who trims trees for a living. “She was kind of, sort of, like everybody’s mother.”
Today, the interior of the store is being upgraded and remodeled in hopes of attracting a new tenant.
On an afternoon not long ago, however, the only construction sounds were those of a woodpecker at work on a distant tree. On an old bulletin board on the floor, “Lost Cat” and “House Wanted” signs still attested to the real reasons people came to Mary’s--more for information and goodwill than cigarettes and sundries.
Perkins, now 81, lives in the town of Somerset, near Placerville, with her daughter, Eileen. She is philosophical about retiring. “There was no particular reason,” she said with a trace of a brogue that gives away her birthplace, County Tipperary, Ireland. “I just came to the end of the road. I loved the store, and I still do. It’s a part of my life, don’t you know.”
Perkins didn’t set out to become a local legend. She immigrated to New York at age 19 and began her working life as a waitress in 1929. Two years later she married Maurice Perkins, moving with him first to Omaha, Neb., and eventually to California in 1936. Years later, they fell in love with Sierra Madre.
“It’s such a beautiful spot,” she said. “You wouldn’t even know it was here (in the city.)”
Perkins and her husband leased the store the day after Christmas in 1966.
Her store became the canyon’s timepiece, open at 9:15 a.m., closed at 6 p.m., seven days a week. She was only sick once, she says, with the flu back in 1972.
And she became part of the lives of several generations of customers.
The school bus used to let kids off in front of Mary’s. If parents were late, Mary would watch the kids, said Connie Hastings, the oldest of Perkins’ four daughters. Mothers would have Perkins make sure their kids didn’t buy junk.
“People stopped for directions, mail, conversation,” Hastings said. “It really wasn’t a store.” Mary’s was also the rendezvous place for weekend hikers and canyon youths who roamed the tree-lined ravines and swimming holes.
“She was a real sweet lady,” said Robert Watts, 21, who grew up nearby. “She knew everything.”
He recalled that she once told a man not to buy beer for the underage Watts and his buddies, who were hovering outside.
“And she liked to listen to the ‘Green Hornet,’ ” he said. “She was pretty with it.”
It got so Perkins had to prepare her customers weeks in advance for her annual August vacation, the only time the store would close.
“If she hadn’t been there, people would have had to go all the way downtown,” Watts said. Downtown Sierra Madre is only a mile away, but as far as residents are concerned, it’s another world.
Eclectic, jerry-built, the canyon has been gentrified some over the years, but it still has a kind of haphazard, kinetic charm. Narrow streets veer off at odd angles. Houses perch in unlikely locations. Tarot card readers live next to college professors. Vines tangle along stone walls.
The Perkins family loved it so much, most of them are still there. Today, four generations of Perkinses and their in-laws live in seven houses on the crooked Brookside Lane behind the market.
“I don’t know as I can tell you what the magic is,” says Clifford Daniels, a New Englander who came here 10 years ago and whose son is married to Perkins’ daughter. “Lots of people want to live here. It used to be hippie-land. Today, it’s more family-oriented.”
There were once three tiny stores in the canyon. Mary’s was the only one that survived the introduction of supermarkets.
But business was slowing in the few months before Mary retired. “We know a lot of mom-and-pops can’t stand up to the competition,” Perkins says. “In come the big boys and out go the little guys.”
Ted DeVries, who has owned the building for 21 years, said he rented to Mary on favorable terms because “she was a hard-working Irishman,” and “if I ever threw her out, I’d probably be shot by Sierra Madre.”
He would like to lease to someone who would keep the store the way it was but said, “I don’t know who will come in with the best offer.”
Since Mary left, he’s been inundated with calls from potential tenants.
“Everybody wants that market,” he said.
Tom Johnson, whose Heritage Development Co. was hired earlier this year to refurbish the building, said the construction work, delayed by this year’s rain, will be done in about a month.
In the meantime, people in the canyon are apprehensive about who will take Mary’s place.
“After all these years, it’s like, kind of weird that she’s gone,” says Watts. “I hope they don’t make it a 7-Eleven.”
