Nuts & Bolts & Savvy

Say you need a door latch with an 18-inch backset.

Well, actually, you don’t know that you need a door latch with an 18-inch backset. All you know is that you have one of those doors with the knob in the middle instead of at the side, which was a popular design concept 20 or 30 years ago--when your house was built--and now the latch won’t work.

You decide to fix the door yourself.

So you find a screwdriver and wrestle this long metal thing--it’s the latch with the 18-inch backset--out of the door. Then you drive down to what you call “the hardware store,” but which actually is one of those giant home-improvement chain stores, and you walk inside and show the long metal thing to a guy in a brightly colored vest, who looks at it as if it’s a piece of abstract art.

Sorry, the guy in the vest says. Not my department. Try aisle so-and-so.

So you go to aisle so-and-so and find another guy in a vest and show him the metal thing.

Sorry, he says. We don’t carry that. Haven’t seen one of those things in years.

So what do you do? Give up? Tie your door shut with twine? Call in a door specialist, pay him an arm and a leg and then get disappointed-in-you spousal looks over dinner?

No. If you really want to fix that door, you’ll go to Economy Hardware in Sepulveda or Tustin Hardware in Tustin or Busy Bee Hardware in Santa Monica or B&B; Hardware in Culver City or La Canada Hardware in La Canada Flintridge or Balk’s Hardware & Garden Supply in South Pasadena or Rudy’s Hardware in Woodland Hills or Torrance Hardware in Torrance or Callahan Hardware on Western Avenue in Los Angeles or any of dozens of similar establishments in Southern California.

In other words, you go to a real hardware store. An old-time hardware store. A place where they know an offset nipple from a shutter dog, a flare coupler from a ball cock. A place where they’ll instantly recognize that long metal thing you’re holding in your hand, and know exactly what do so about it.

Just about every Southland community still has at least one old-time hardware store. Usually they’re situated on a main street in the part of the community that was called “downtown” in the years before commercial strip development and urban sprawl.

Some, like Tustin Hardware, date back almost to the turn of the century; others, like Economy Hardware, only go back to the 1950s.

Some are a mixture of the old and the new. For example, the “La Canada Hardware” sign in front of that store goes back to the mid-’40s, but the rest of the store has been remodeled. And yet it’s still an old-time hardware store.

What makes a hardware store an old-time hardware store is not so much a matter of age as it is a matter of style.

An old-time hardware store will be small, usually a few thousand square feet or less, as opposed to the 100,000-plus-square-foot home-improvement centers. An exception is B&B; Hardware--”The Pride of Culver City”--which at 13,000 square feet is a huge old-time hardware store.

Not one cubic inch of space will be wasted in an old-time hardware store. Its wares will be stacked on shelves that reach from floor to ceiling, and even the ceiling will be put to use to hold automobile fan belts suspended from hooks.

And an old-time hardware store will almost always have an “out back,” which is a separate room or an attic or a basement guarded by an “Employees Only” sign--ignored by regular customers--where plastic pipe and rolls of chain and uncut glass and countless old dusty hardware items are stored in riotous clutter.

In a really old old-time hardware store, like the Busy Bee, the floors will be wood planks with grooves worn into the narrow aisles by millions of feet; newer old-time hardware stores will also have aisle grooves, but they’ll be worn into linoleum.

An old-time hardware store will stock thousands of hardware items that most people would not recognize, much less ever need, because the hardware men who run the store know that someday somebody will need that item.

In most cases, an old-time hardware store will have nails loose in a metal bin, and it will sell them by weight rather than by the box, like a lot of the big home-improvement chains do. Most old-time hardware stores will have a large section of one aisle or wall filled with scores of little drawers, each drawer containing a specific-size bolt, nut or screw.

A classic old-time hardware store will never make you buy eight bolts in a sealed plastic bag if you really only need one.

An old-time hardware store will have customers the owner knows by name, and vice versa, customers who’ve been coming there for so long that they can’t remember how long it’s been.

“How long I been coming here?” asked Ralph Reynolds as he stood in the aisle and chewed the fat with Tustin Hardware co-owner David Vandaveer.

He takes off a baseball cap and scratches his head. “I guess I’ve been coming here since . . . you know, I can’t even remember--15, 16? Long time, anyway. Reason I come here is ‘cause if I need it, they got it.”

There are some things an old-time hardware store will not have. An old-time hardware store will not have beach umbrellas. It will not stock potted plants or imitation Christmas trees, or other large space-eating items.

But the most important thing that a true old-time hardware store will not have is an employee who listens to your question about an arcane piece of metal or plastic and then says, “I dunno.”

“Service, that’s what you’re going to get here,” said Economy Hardware co-owner Dave Hammer-Swedlove. (“That’s right, Hammer, just like a hammer. Great name for a hardware-store man, right? Yeah, I’ve heard that a million times.”) “We always have somebody here who can tell you how to do it. And we carry hardware that the big guys don’t.”

Echoed Tustin Hardware’s Vandaveer, “The main difference between us and them (big home-improvement stores) is service, and selection. We probably have it, and if we don’t have it, we’ll get for you.”

“What people get when they come in here is service,” agreed John Hastings, owner of La Canada Hardware. “This store supplied a lot of the homes around here when they were built. We’ve still got a lot of that hardware out back.”

Service and selection. That’s what any old-time hardware store man will tell you keeps him in business even though there’s a home-improvement center just down the street.

Twenty years ago, when the “home-improvement center” started opening up in almost every community, a lot of people assumed that small hardware stores were an endangered species.

The big centers offered not only hardware but lumber and other non-hardware household items as well. They stayed open until 9 p.m., and there was the perception, at least, that their prices were much lower than the old-time hardware stores.

But the big guys did not drive the little guys to extinction.

According to Ellen Hackney, communications director for the National Retail Hardware Assn. in Indianapolis, “The smaller hardware stores were a little traumatized initially, but they’ve found they’ve been able to establish a niche in their markets.”

Today, there are about 25,000 small hardware stores nationwide, Hackney said, a number that has remained stable for several years. Although independently owned, most belong to “cooperatives” like True Value or Ace, which gives them wholesale buying power--and thus the ability to stay competitive in price--and an opportunity to participate in chain store-style regional and even national advertising.

Now, Hackney said, it is the medium-size home-improvement centers that are facing trouble because of the newer, giant “warehouse” chains like HomeClub. Old-time hardware stores, in most cases, are doing just fine.

In fact, even if the economy goes south, old-time hardware store owners expect to do all right. True, they may lose some business from building contractors in a period of low new-housing starts--most old-time hardware stores report that contractors make up about half their business--but they gain on the other end from homeowners who decide to fix it themselves.

“In times of recession people are less likely to call a plumber,” said John Hastings of La Canada Hardware. “A plumber’s going to cost you $45 just to knock on the door, and half the time the problem is a 10-cent washer. I’ll sell you the washer and show you how to put it in if you don’t know how, and your wife will be proud of you for fixing it yourself.

“And the next time you need something, you’ll come back to my store.”

One thing to remember about old-time hardware stores is that just because you don’t see it, it doesn’t mean they don’t have it. If it’s not up front, it’s probably in the back room.

“We got stuff back here even we don’t know about,” Dave Hammer-Swedlove said as he gives a visitor a tour of Economy Hardware’s back room, a warren of open metal shelves piled high with boxes of hinges, drawer pulls, escutcheons, Art Deco toilet seats from the 1950s, brass couplers, beveled-glass doorknobs, elbow joints--perhaps 100,000 pieces of hardware, by Hammer-Swedlove’s estimation.

Some of the boxes have address labels that were printed before the invention of ZIP codes.

How do you keep track of it all? a visitor asked. Computers?

Hammer-Swedlove shakes his head no, then points to his right temple.

“Up here,” he said. “I keep it all up here. Computers hurt the hardware business. If you got everything on a computer, and a computer tells you you haven’t sold a certain item for four months, then you won’t stock it. And if you don’t stock it, you can bet somebody will come in and want it.

“I just came across some doorknobs back here that gotta be at least 25 years old. They’ve been sitting back here for a quarter of a century. But someday a guy will come in and say, ‘Hey, I bought this doorknob here 25 years ago and now it’s broken. You got another one?’ ”

Hammer-Swedlove’s disdain for computers may make him sound like a crusty old-timer, but he is only 28 years old. Before he bought Economy Hardware early last year from the three brothers who opened it in the 1950s, he was a mortgage banker, a car salesman and a video producer, and had worked at Economy as an employee.

In fact, because of a demographic quirk of the hardware business, old-time hardware stores are for the most part no longer run by old-timers. Most of the owners and managers quoted in this article are under 40.

Since most small hardware stores opened before the advent of the home-improvement chains, the hardware men who owned the stores have now mostly gone into retirement, and either sold the store, passed it on to a family member or hired younger people to manage it for them--sometimes with jarring results for hardware traditionalists.

For example, at the Busy Bee in Santa Monica, which opened for business in 1922, at least some of the store’s dozen employees report for work sporting long blond “surfer” hair and Day-Glo pink shorts. But according to manager Greg Buteyn, 32, “Those guys know their hardware.”

Despite their relative youth, most of the young old-time hardware-store owners still maintain a sense of hardware tradition.

At B&B; Hardware, which was founded in 1950 by Saul and Abe Ballonoff and taken over by family members after the Ballonoff brothers died a few years ago, the younger generation doesn’t plan to change a thing.

“We all started working here when we were about 8 years old, so we’re used to it” said Wendy Sehested, 32, laughing. She added that she and her partner-relatives subscribe to the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it philosophy.

In the case of La Canada Hardware, to cite another example, Roland (Roly) Wood bought the hardware store with his father and brother in 1950 and ran it for the next 40 years. But his father and brother had died, and the store was just getting to be too much to handle, so he sold it recently to 36-year-old Jon Hastings.

“I don’t miss the work, but I miss the people,” Wood said. “Back then, people used to stand around visiting with one another like they used to do at an old general store. The only thing we didn’t have was a pot-bellied stove.”

Hastings, who had worked in the store as an employee when he was in high school, remodeled the entire store--at least partly because of the membership standards imposed by the Ace cooperative--but he tried to retain as much of the old flavor as possible.

“I hated to tear out the old fixtures,” Hastings says. “But I kept the old nail bin and the wooden screw drawers. A lot of people like to just stand there and go through those old screw drawers. And on Saturday morning, people still stand around up front and shoot the breeze.”

At Balk’s in South Pasadena, tradition takes the form of a bowl of popcorn at the cashier’s counter on Saturdays. Customers are encouraged to grab a handful.

“That’s been a Saturday tradition for as long as anybody can remember,” said Hazel Webb, who has worked at Balk’s for almost two decades. It actually was a pet store when Les Balk bought it in 1936, but he got so attached to the pets that it upset him to sell them, so he changed it into a gardening store and then a hardware-and-gardening store. Balk’s is serving its third and even fourth generation of customers, Hazel said.

“We’re all family here, is the way we look at it--employees, customers, everybody,” she said. “We care about our customers and they care about us.”

As Hazel spoke, an elderly woman, a longtime customer, entered the store. She didn’t need to buy anything though. Instead she brought a birthday cake for Hazel and good wishes for 80-year-old Les, who’s in the hospital.

“You see what I mean,” Hazel said. “It’s like a family. That’s the tradition here.”

And at Economy Hardware, tradition is maintained in part by three old cardigan sweaters that hang from a hook on the door to the office in the store’s back room. The sweaters belonged to the Villani brothers, Tony, John and Joe, Economy’s founders. Tony and John have retired and Joe still works there part-time. But all three sweaters remain.

“Yeah, I like to keep the sweaters hanging there,” says Hammer-Swedlove. “It’s kind of a reminder of the old days.”