Storing Up History : Fulkerson Hardware, Serving Farmers Since 1912, Symbolizes Rural Past of Somis
The farmer was walking slowly down an aisle of Fulkerson Hardware with that perplexed look customers get, so Jack Fulkerson stepped up to help.
“You guys have a 3-by-2 1/2 bushing?” the farmer asked.
“Yes we do,” Fulkerson replied instantly.
The aisle was lined with several dozen bins full of fittings for copper pipes, brass pipes, galvanized iron pipes and plastic pipes in sizes ranging from half an inch to six inches.
But Fulkerson didn’t hesitate. He stepped up to a spot and moved a few boxes that had been stacked on the floor to reveal a bin of bushings marked “3 X 2 1/2.”
“One of them?” he asked.
“Just one,” the farmer replied.
“It doesn’t take too much to make you happy,” Fulkerson said.
Fading paint on the outside wall of the Fulkerson Hardware store reads:
“Tools”
“Paint”
“Pipe”
“Plumbing”
To the list could be added, “History.” The town of Somis this year is celebrating its centennial, and there is no better symbol of its past than Fulkerson Hardware.
It was 1892, the year Somis became a township, when Jonathan F. Fulkerson joined his brother’s blacksmith shop in Las Posas Valley. Twenty years later he founded what is now Ventura County’s oldest hardware store. It is also one of the most complete.
“We have the reputation that if you can’t find it anywhere else in Ventura County you can always find it here,” Jack Fulkerson said.
Three generations of Fulkersons have tended to Fulkerson Hardware. The founder, who abbreviated his name Jno., ran it until 1947. His son Jack Fulkerson, now a spry 78, had the store for 30 years until he retired in 1977.
The Fulkerson now behind the counter of Fulkerson Hardware is Jack’s youngest son, Bob, 38. Like his father and grandfather, Bob Fulkerson works six days a week to serve the community’s ranchers and farmers.
Development is hard on the heels of Somis. Camarillo housing tracts and strip centers have crept to within blocks of the town. But Somis still holds tight to its rural roots.
“We’re still plunked down in the middle of agriculture, so we still sell what they consider agricultural-type stuff,” Bob Fulkerson said.
Neither father nor son will even guess how many items the rambling store carries. But ask them where any one thing is and they will take you to it immediately, whether you want a Brazilian machete with a sheath, a can of ether, a washboard, a gopher trap, a grape knife, a snake catcher or what the label identifies as a “bell, cow,” in your choice of lengths from 1 5/8 to 7 inches.
Need a shovel? The store offers nine varieties of round-point shovels, six kinds of square-point and five sizes of trenching spades.
The variety sets Fulkerson Hardware apart from the chain department stores in suburbia.
“Instead of getting one choice of splitting wedge, he gives you six different varieties to choose from,” said Lynette Buchanan, an avocado farmer who came in one afternoon for tools to put up a chain-link fence. “All of the tools for the farm I can buy here.”
She thought for a moment when asked whether she’s ever wanted something the store didn’t carry.
“Dishes,” she said. “I think I asked for dishes once.”
Bob Fulkerson grinned.
“No dishes,” he said.
The two of them discussed the merits of fence tools--he had two for her to choose between--and she decided on one. Bob wrote out her bill on one of a dozen receipt books he keeps lined up on a counter.
Like nearly all of his customers, Buchanan has an account, so she signs the receipts and gets a statement at the end of the month. Hardly anyone pays cash or uses a credit card at Fulkerson Hardware.
“I don’t think I ever lost $500, all told, in 30 years from bad credit,” Jack Fulkerson said. The one exception was a fellow whose tomato crop spoiled just before he took it to market, at the same time his dad took ill. “I never bothered him for it.”
People haven’t been quite as honest in Bob Fulkerson’s days as owner, but his problems have been minimal.
What little cash changes hands during the business day is kept in a 1913 National cash register that the founding Fulkerson bought new. Its brass housing is stamped with rows of small fleurs-de-lis. The largest sale the machine will ring up is $1.
“We’ve used it every day of the year since 1913 and never spent a penny on it for repairs,” Jack Fulkerson said. “That’s the way they used to make things.”
Jack Fulkerson is the kind of old-timer who will cross his arms, rock back on his heels and tell stories all afternoon: about how lima bean thrashers used to work and why farmers never built windmills in Las Posas Valley. He pronounces Los Angeles “Los An-gul-eese.”
But Bob Fulkerson is not one for chitchat. He fidgets if he sits for more than a minute, but never gets a chance to anyway. He runs the store by himself Monday through Saturday, and it’s rarely empty.
He stalks the store with a tape measure clipped to his belt and a pair of scissors stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, point down.
Unlike his father, who grew up in the store, Bob doesn’t remember spending a lot of time there. He spent his summers driving a tractor on a neighbor’s farm or working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Camarillo.
It wasn’t until he graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in city planning that he decided to take over the store.
But he reverted back to his family history so much that he bought his grandfather’s house. The house, which is across the alley from the hardware store, had passed out of the family’s hands until he bought it back.
The store has now become a kind of extra home for Bob Fulkerson’s family. While he and his father are talking, his three sons come clattering through the front door, say hi, and leave with more noise. The family’s St. Bernard, named Number 4, ambles through aisles that are not much wider than it is.
Jack Fulkerson said it wouldn’t have bothered him if none of his children--he has three sons and a daughter--had gone into the business. But Bob, he said, always was the best candidate.
“He was always busy with his hands,” Jack Fulkerson said.
Fulkerson Hardware last year was named a California Heritage Landmark along with the Somis school and the Thursday Club.
Historic preservation wasn’t a concern of Jno. Fulkerson when he built Fulkerson Hardware in 1912, the year electricity came to Somis. Blacksmithing was hard work, Jack Fulkerson said, and the elder Fulkerson knew the advent of electricity was going to change the smithing business.
The original Fulkerson Hardware lasted only 13 months before it burned to the ground. The fire was probably caused by a farmer who came in one night to use the telephone, the only one in Somis, and forgot to shut off the oil lamp.
“My father suffered a $15,000 loss but he only had $5,000 worth of insurance,” Jack Fulkerson said.
The elder Fulkerson built a new store, next to the site of the old one, as cheaply as he could. That building still is part of the store. The ceiling is sheets of flat galvanized iron suspended beneath a roof of corrugated metal.
“That’s what they called insulation back then,” Jack Fulkerson said.
In 1925, Jno. Fulkerson built on the foundation of the original store. When he was done, he threw a party and invited everyone in the valley. Jack was 11 years old.
“The first thing he did, he had a rancher friend truck in baled hay that we threw all over the floor.”
A five-piece orchestra played in one corner, but the crowd was small because only a few people lived in the area at the time.
“After we got the hay out and the floor swept, I remember looking out the door and saying, ‘What are we going to fill this room with?’ ” Jack Fulkerson said.
But filling the store hasn’t been a problem. And customers still marvel at the speed with which the Fulkersons can locate any item.
Once, Jack Fulkerson recalled, a ranch foreman asked him how he could possibly remember where all those things were.
“I told him, ‘If you’re at home and you want a cold beer, you go to the refrigerator, right? If you want a clean shirt you go to the drawer, right?’ Well, I order every piece of merchandise here. I unpack it and I stock it and I know where it is.”
