Christmas is upon us again, and with history as our guide, an appreciable number of your neighbors are about to be grateful for the existence of a locally owned hardware store in their midst.
(Tom Jackson/Photos)
“The saddest time of the year,” says Emma Lou Harvey, “is when somebody is trying to put something together on Christmas Eve and they don’t have all the parts, or the parts don’t fit.
“And then, they come in the day after Christmas, looking for what they needed.”
Emma Lou, 86, is the grand dame of the venerable Harvey’s Hardware in the heart of Land O’ Lakes, and she has a secret: Desperate parents in the role of Santa’s elves not only have been known to seek out the Harveys after closing time Christmas Eve, they’ve also been rewarded for their efforts.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you run a hardware store as a public trust, the way a small-town doctor treats his practice.
“It’s nothing for people to come to the house,” Emma Lou says. “It’s what people did back then.” It’s sometimes what people do now. “If people had a problem…”
“… We helped them out,” continues Dee Dee Amodio, the store’s longtime clerk.
This is what Harvey’s, established — no foolin’ — April 1, 1961, does.
Guide a single mom through the intricacies of replacing the guts of a failed toilet tank? Check.
Work with a hobbyist as he spreads out a project in the middle of the electronics aisle? Check.
Readily produce the part the big box retailers didn’t have, then smile knowingly when the relieved customer gasps at the low price? Check and double-check.
I mean, proof that Harvey’s does things differently is manifest in its shop mascot, a bob-tailed Siamese cat — Oatie — that dispenses high fives.
All anyone who works at Harvey’s asks is you think before you blurt, “I’ve been all over town looking for this!” Telling the folks who just bailed you out you tend to shop elsewhere is not a compliment.
Nonetheless, much as they want to, none of them — not Dee Dee, not Emma Lou, and not even Paul, Emma Lou’s plainspoken, 60-year-old son, will reply with what’s patently obvious: You should have come to them in the first place.
Lots of Harvey’s clients figured that out a long time ago. In fact, it’s pretty much why Ted Harvey — Emma Lou’s late, lamented husband — got the family into the business in the first place.
It’s not like the Harveys weren’t constantly occupied. She taught home economics at Gulf High School. Ted worked for Sheriff Leslie Bessenger. There was young Paul to rear, of course, and they had an egg farm with 10,000 free-range chickens. “We stayed busy,” Emma Lou says.
But, Land O’ Lakes, at the turn of the 1960s, was miles from the nearest retail center — “You had to go to Sulphur Springs if you wanted anything,” Emma Lou recalls — and, unbeknownst even to his wife, Ted Harvey had an itch to change that.
So when Charles W. Johnson, the store’s founder, asked Ted to look after the place while he was on jury duty, it was as though a bolt found its ideal nut. He spun into place, and held fast until he died in February 1994.
Once in charge, Ted quickly upped the store’s offerings, adding milk, eggs, ice, live fishing bait and fuel-oil delivery … none of which the store carries today.
Indeed, Harvey’s Hardware is, in many ways, as notable for what it no longer carries as for the odd treasures it does. Guns and ammunition, for instance, are off the menu, Emma Lou says, because, “They attract bad actors. Besides, there’s all kinds of paperwork and special insurance.”
Similar reasons related to bureaucrats account for how they chucked their fuel-oil operation. There is a limit, she says, to how many visits from EPA staffers any one small business can endure.
Instead, Harvey’s found a niche in knives, especially those designed and handcrafted by Bradford, Pennsylvania-based W.R. Case. “Biggest Case dealer in the Southeastern United States,” boasts Paul.
Now we’re 55 years on, and Harvey’s has stubbornly hung on, as history has gone on around it — like the Olympic torch passing through in 1996 en route to the Olympics in Atlanta, and ball fields and the Land O’ Lakes Community Center blooming in the former swamp, where Paul used to explore.
It’s not easy. Emma Lou reports they lose more suppliers every year, and there’s that whole internet competition thing. But — to answer the question that’s always dangling — she has no plans to quit the place.
Paul endorses her fixedness. “We need her,” he says. “She jump-starts us.” As Harvey’s does her.
“Retail is interesting to me,” she says. “You never know when you open the door that day what’s going to happen.”
Someone might come in completely unaware that what he needed most in the world was a set of Allen wrenches on a ring. Someone else — on Pearl Harbor Day — might bring his father, a World War II veteran, just to say hello, and that would trigger a memory.
Emma Lou’s family, who lived then in Seminole Heights, spent that infamous 1941 weekend at their Land O’ Lakes home. But, she dropped her little plastic box radio getting out of the car Saturday morning, and it shattered. They had no idea what had happened until neighbors rushed to greet them when they returned home Sunday night.
She was only 11 at the time, but she remembers the moment like it was yesterday: “The world had changed.”
It always does, of course. Which is why it is reassuring when some worthwhile, likable institutions resist, Harvey’s Hardware not least among them.
Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .
Published December 21, 2016