The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When Wally and Edna Burkholtzin first conceived the idea of a 50 cent store, they were convinced competition would make them, if not rich, at least profitable. Sure, they said, Dollar Tree was a national conglomerate, but hey, someone had to open that first store somewhere. Why not them, why not here?

Here, unfortunately, was near the long forgotten Happy Kennels, a dog and cat boarding house that lasted a shorter time than a Trump advisor and ended on a sour note when Marta’s husband Jerry left the pens open after feeding time (some say alcohol played a small role) and next day the place looked like a prison riot in Angola, victims dead or bleeding, beloved pets clawed, chewed and bitten. Thus are dreams deferred … and lawsuits submitted. Not so sanguine, Happy Kennels, now the stuff of South End lore.

The Burkholtzins shared Marta and Jeremy’s entrepreneurial zeal right down to their under-capitalization. Rent was low and goods sold under 50 cents obviously were dirt cheap and definitely low grade even by Chinese standards. “If a Dollar Store could make millions,” Wally loved to tell his many detractors and doubters, “ a fifty cent store could make six figures.” Good math, most of us thought, poor economics. At the Grand Opening we all wished Wally and Edna the best of luck, but we went home shaking our collective heads, probably the same for Jobs and Gates, Musk and Bezos, Zuckerberg and Joe Swisherman , the guy who invented and marketed X-ray glasses sold in the back of comic books to see through walls and women’s clothes. Millionaires don’t hear laughs, they hear cash registers.

When, after two months of pretty near zero sales, Wally grumbled to Edna, Location Location Location, he said they needed a new one. So they relocated lock stock and plastic cutlery to the office/store under Windy Rear Realty’s South End office, I guess figuring the potential buyers of high end properties might avail themselves of an opportunity to save nickels, even dimes. When they vacated the building three months hence, they took nothing but themselves. If they’ve found the Right Location, it’s nowhere near here, but their two bit legend definitely lives on.

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If you were to wander into half the South End’s garages or tool sheds or the artists’ studios, you’d find what a good entrepreneur would need to start a Second Hand Shop. Course most of that stuff came from the 2nd hand shops that flowered and wilted down here where capitalism came to die. Half of us layabouts and slackers were searching for a livelihood that required little or, preferably, no work. After all, we didn’t migrate here looking for jobs or careers. Telecommuting came a little late for us.

No doubt there are other backwashes, box canyons, dark sides of mountains and swamp country where dreams go to mutate, but hope springs eternal on the South End, nourished by the compost of failures lost and forgotten. If you know where to look, buried behind a nettle jungle or peeking through a blackberry barrier, you can still see a sign for DONNA’S KLASSY ANTIQUES, one for SOUTH END COLLECTIBLES, paint mostly gone and posts rotted, JERRY’S JUNQUE over a building gone to powder post beetles, collapsed into weeds and a twenty foot cedar growing through a hole in the roof.

Dirty Dan’s Trash Emporium opened last winter. Recently emigrated from the wilds of Tacoma, Dirty Dan is really Dan Vandiver, newly divorced from wife and job, a refugee from a past life same as the rest of us, figuring he can parlay his IRA’s against his alimony payments, maybe make a Go of things here in the outback of the island. Covid put a stake in the heart of that fantasy.

Timing, the philosophers will tell you, is everything. Location location, the realtors will argue, is everything. Luck, I will counter, is the joker in the deck of the best laid plans. Dan … well, Dan had three strikes against him from the start. A kindred spirit is what Dan is, no shame down here in failure. The graveyard here is filled with Dirty Dans. Welcome to the club.

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