The Hardware Store

Located at 49 Lee Avenue in the heart of the less than chic Williamsburg of the 50s and 60s, the store was at the street level with three apartments above it. We lived on the first floor and the other two were rented out - although my paternal grandmother lived on the second floor for about the last ten years of her life. Our immediate neighbors were a paint store owned by my best friend's uncle and a barber shop which my grandfather (who I never met and who I am named after) opened decades earlier as the first barber shop in Brooklyn that would close for the Jewish Sabbath from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning.

I could never understand the array of products that the store contained. While it was referred to as a "hardware store" it was more of a 7-11 convenience store without food. Its products ranged from dishes and silverware to Beacon floor wax. At some point even my father realized this and, perhaps with the marketing help of my sister Ruth started promoting the store as "M. Welfeld's Cut Rate Store. " He began distributing ink blotters (for those who don't know - small pieces of cardboard that dried the wet ink from fountain pens) that had this name on it and promoted the availability of stationery and school supplies. The blotters even had a final tag line - "For Mothers, we carry a full line of housewares." So much for being a hardware store.

As a kid, I found the store to be a fun place to explore in and with no iPads, iPods, and only Howdy Doody and The Lone Ranger on TV, it often was my source of recreation. The store’s dark shelves and corners always revealed something for me to play with including aerosol toothpaste cans which looked like cans of shaving cream (and sprayed almost the same way) and various toys that I got a chance to test. I remember going to the “Toy Show” on the lower east side with my dad as he explored the new options to sell. As I got a bit older, I began doing some actual work in the store, including learning how to make keys on the key machine. Knowing that my dad had the confidence in me to make those keys for customers on my own, was one the first strong doses of self-confidence I received in my life. Other opportunities for me would come when he expanded his sheet metal business.

The store was its busiest around Passover time when members of the Jewish community in Williamsburg purchased new pots pans and dishes (again, not “hardware”). During the final week before Passover the store remained open until 10:00 or 11:00 PM and my parents were on their feet virtually all day. While there were larger competitors in the community, the store had a unique marketing advantage - a “built-in” Mikveh (ritual bath) that was used to purify dishes that had been manufactured by non-Jews. The process was fairly straightforward - unwrap the paper packaging, dip each item completely into the water (the act is referred to as “toiveling” in Yiddish) and then re-wrap if at all feasible - making sure to put paper between the stacked glasses to keep them from sticking together and cracking. One learned the process quickly after a few cracked glasses drew an angry stare from my mother who was calculating the financial loss in her head. This packing experience served me well in my future years of packing dishes for multiple long- distance moves. Never broke a glass or dish!

Obviously, this was a pretty easy task for a kid and became my core function during the three busy weeks before Passover. Although it was an easy task, it was a boring and repetitive one, requiring me to go into the back yard where the mikveh was located. For those three weeks, it became one of the most important things I did in my life while awake and even took a toll on me as I tried to sleep. One night as my parents slept in the room next door, I clearly remember sleep-walking to the window in my bedroom and making a racket as I tried to remove the venetian blind from my window. When my father raced into the bedroom to find out what was happening, I clearly remember saying – “What’s the matter? I’m just toiveling the venetian blind.” The only other time I walked in my sleep was 30 years later when I fell down a short flight of step in our house while suffering with the flu and 104 degree temperature.

What always fascinated me about the toiveling process though was the ritual “cleanliness” of the whole procedure. The Mikveh was a very large square concrete tub - somewhat the size of a standard outdoor hot tub. It sat out uncovered in my grassless backyard all year long and had all kinds of small creatures swimming around in it. As a young kid I occasionally was concerned that something was lurking at the bottom of the black pool of water and would come up and bite my finger off as I dipped my hand in. In general, this was a very simple task and I had very few mishaps, although I was always concerned that I may have left one of the Mikveh creatures in a glass or on a plate as I wrapped it up for the customer.

Another key aspect of my job was the rolling of brown paper and cardboard (3 feet x 5 feet) for those who used the relatively inexpensive material to cover their tables, countertops, and closet shelves. This covering activity was an important aspect of the Passover holiday which required the elimination of all bread or bread products ("chametz”). The cardboards and brown paper would provide barriers to protect the Kosher-for-Passover food from any microscopic Chametz still on the surfaces. The cardboards and brown papers were stored in empty garbage cans which adjoined the front doors of the store - kind of like Roman columns or pillars. This task was a true test of manhood, requiring the lifting of the large cardboard rectangles from the garbage can and then high enough on your thighs and chest to be able to then roll them into a tube and then tie them with a rope that had been pre-cut to size. My brother - 10 years older (to be exact - nine years, 11 months and two days older) was my hero - and one who I always tried to emulate. Watching him lift 10-20 cardboards at a time with five or six brown papers inside, roll them into a neat tube and tie the tube together with a piece of cord was the ultimate, and became my immediate goal in life. As I got older and stronger, I proudly did it easily.

In my earliest years at the store, I vividly remember my grandmother - my mother's mother who we referred to as Bobbe (grandma in Yiddish) Messer so as not to confuse her with my father's mother - Bobbe Welfeld, sitting in front of the store on a wooden chair acting as official greeter to those who entered. If anyone has seen the show “Checkout” on Chai-Flick, she could have played the security guard. She was not very talkative but did converse with me in Yiddish, often asking me questions about school. As I stood in front of the store during quiet periods, I always had a “spaldeen” (the ONLY rubber ball for stickball) or tennis ball in my hand and practiced my dribbling with both my left and right hand, and often with my eyes closed - that is until the ball rolled out into the street or until my grandmother asked me to stop because I was giving her a headache.

My most interesting adventure occurred during one of these Pre-Passover days in the store when I was in the sixth grade. Because the store was so busy during the last two weeks before Passover, I was permitted to cut school to work in the store. As I stood in the store with my dad one afternoon, an elderly woman entered, and my dad greeted her like an old friend. He called me over and without introducing her, introduced me. She looked at me and asked if in my Hebrew studies classes, I had a teacher named Rabbi Drillman. When I said, yes, she asked me if I liked him. Remember, I was in the sixth grade, 11 years old, and pretty dumb. I looked her right in the eye and said, "I don't think there's anyone in the class who likes him." Simple question, simple answer I thought, as I walked away. I didn't notice both the steam coming out of the woman's ears or the smile on my father's face.

When the Passover holiday ended a few weeks later and I returned to school, I unfortunately met my fate. As you can guess, Mrs. Drillman had provided a detailed report of our conversation to her husband who was now waiting for the first opportunity to attack. It happened quickly - he caught me looking at my baseball cards and launched a profanity laced attack in Yiddish, smacked the knuckles of both of my hands with his ruler (standard operating procedure in those non-PC years), and verbally abused me the rest of the day using some Yiddish words I never heard before or after. Given that he was screaming in Yiddish, I could not clearly pick up his rationale for the attack and wondered that I had done wrong. When I got home, my father explained. He laughed out loud through the whole story – enjoying my learning experience and the trick he played on me.

The store (and all things related to it), played an important role in the early stages of my life. It taught me the value of work and the importance of contributing to our family's financial viability. That fact really hit home when during the last few days before Passover, I was given the incredible responsibility of carrying the cash from the store in a brown paper bag to the Williamsburg Savings Bank about one half mile away. Knowing how hard my mom and dad worked to fill that bag increased the pressure of my fingers on the bag and my stress level until I stepped through the bank's front doors and took a deep breath on my way to the teller. Even at a young age, I understood that the money earned during those few weeks before Passover would carry us through most of the year. I could compare it in a much more concentrated way to the tourist storefronts on the Jersey shore who earn their annual income in the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

During the week before my son Michael's bar mitzvah, I took him to Williamsburg to see where I grew up. While parked across the street from the location of our store with the aroma of Flaum's pickles floating in the air, I could not stop thinking about those simple days and the opportunities the store brought me. I also felt badly that my kids and grandkids missed the opportunity to meet and see in action, the hardest working people I knew - my mom and dad.