Great article.

I’ve been to that Historical Hamilton site before and it is rather lovely. I’m a songwriter and my next record, ‘The City Fell By Silence’, will contain songs about Hamilton’s history and its connection to our city’s present sorrow and joy. It’s amazing how history impinges on everything, eh?

I know the store you mean and I, too, have to fight the impulse not ‘just to go there’ instead of taking the time to find a good, local hardware store. I haven’t the facility with tools that my father possesses, but it is something I am eager to learn.

You’re right: Lowe’s is worse. Thanks again for a splendid article; keep well.

At the time the picture was taken, the town population was less than 500. In 1980, it was 7,473. In 1990: 26,585. In 2007: 50,414.

JCW: Not to give away too much, but the store I had in mind prints their own “money”. Although, I’ve recently been to “the first Lowe’s in Canada” and man is it worse!

Incidentally, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Historical Hamilton site, but it’s a really incredible guide to the beautiful architecture that still exists in Hamilton. http://historicalhamilton.com/

Probably most alarming about all this is that there are lots and lots of people who cannot fathom WHY direct personal connections of the kind you describe are good, and why it’s damaging to eliminate them. Because automated gas pumps ARE more convenient…

Jim C.: “Its not just talk. The livelihood of many of the folks who stop and talk depend on these centers of the community.”

That’s how I remember it- as the public sphere in that town, but also how people “networked”. Another thing was that the men who hung out there also got together fairly regularly for Lions Club picnics and dinners. Whenever my grandparents needed to hire anyone for just about anything, they went with people they knew from those places. This went for everything from accountants and real estate agents to plumbers and carpenters. I’ve often wondered if the class divide in the US would be bridged a bit more if there were more civic organizations where a well-to-do real estate agent could sit down and socialize with a struggling plumber, for example; or, conversely, if the decline of that sort of civic engagement has been eating away at social mobility.

On another note, the lack of social interaction today seems to be the goal of many people. I recently had to get a new cell phone, something I held off getting in the first place for as long as I could. This new phone has a computer like keyboard on it to make text messaging easier. It is just another way for people to avoid actual real human to human contact. They actaully pay a monthly fee, just to be able to text, instead of talk. Ideally, we would still have jawboning depots where people actually talk face to face, instead of through text messages, email, or even a phone call. ACtual interaction is what reminds us to love our neigbors, and what keeps us human.

Also agree with John, “Triumph of the Drill” is brilliant.

Nathan makes a good point about competency. It occurred to me when I was in a Lowe’s this weekend that the majority of the staff there was newly-hired, and that this had been the case every time I’ve ever visited a Lowe’s. Indeed, at our family’s hardware store, they usually knew what people needed and they quite often took them in the back and showed them how to use the tools on a large bench they had set up for that purpose. If I remember correctly, they also copied keys for free for the regulars.

Incidentally, in that picture, the hardware store is to the right, the drug store is in the middle, and the town post office was to the left. When I was about five years old, my “job” in the hardware store was to bring them cups of coffee from the pot in the back. In return, I would get enough change to go to the drug store and get a milkshake.

Anecdotally, I’ll note that even on strictly economic terms, bigger ain’t always better. My parents recently had the living (read: “television-watching”) and dining rooms painted by a contractor. This spurred some d.i.y. painting elsewhere in the house. My mother went with the exclusively at-Lowe’s Valspar for trim in the kitchen, while I, painting over the atrocious Nineteen-seventies wood paneling a lovely green that complements the countertops, procured a gallon of Kurfees (now Gray Seal) from the local lumberyard, owned by my second-cousin.

(A wonderful little digression: Kurfees/Gray Seal is produced by Progress Paint, an employee-owned company that sells its product exclusively through independent lumber yards, hardware and paint stores, and building-supply centers: No big-box chains, no mega-discounters, and no company stores.)

I’m no paint expert, but I’ll happily vouch for Kurfees: One gallon cost me about twenty-nine bucks, little more than the Valspar from the allegedly cheaper Triumph of the Drill, if at all, and it both covers better and is paint-tape resistant, whereas the long-dried Valspar paint peeled right off time and again.

I’m just sayin’.