You feel the worn board floor underfoot, catch a whiff of woodsmoke. “Good morning,” someone says. Your eyes adjust to the shadowy light, among old shelves lined with marine supplies and other wares. It could be 1953 instead of 2003, even if the Flexible Flyer sleds and P.F. Flyer sneakers are long gone This is Friendship Village Hardware. It belongs to a time when Main Street was a busy place, with stores, gas stations, a downtown post office. The hardware store was a gathering place, and you knew everybody.
Friendship harbor is still crowded with lobster boats, the wharves piled high with traps. It’s still a town of fishermen and boatbuilders, but the downtown has that half-deserted feel. It’s not a ghost town but it’s not the bustling business district it once was, either.
The lone hardware store, next door to the former Friendship Market, is owned and operated by Susan Simmons.
She smiles and laughs easily, and that puts her customers at ease. At 44, she enjoys her work, but isn’t too sure of the future. “Winters are tough. We don’t count on what I make.” But she feels obliged to keep going if she can, for the townspeople. “All we have is the grocery and this. If I were working on a project at home I’d hate to have to drive 10 miles for a paintbrush or sandpaper or a pound of nails.”
“And a lot of times the guys are in a pinch at the shore, working on their boat, they need a bolt or a lag or something in a hurry. They’re fighting the tide and they need something to work on their boat with.”
“You don’t really know everybody any more,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that have moved in.” But Simmons probably knows all the fishermen by name, and they know her. She carries brass and stainless fittings, screws and bolts singly and not in plastic packets.
What it she likes about the business? “The people. Talking to the people.”
Along with Wallace’s Market, the last grocery store in town, the hardware store continues to meet the needs of fishermen, carpenters, plumbers, boat builders and other mostly local people, some just stopping by to be sociable. Friendship Village Hardware is a far cry from Home Depot, the generic big-box chain store approved for Rockland, across from Wal-Mart.
Simmons’s store dates from an era when traveling the dozen or so miles to Rockland was a major trip. You wouldn’t go there if you could shop at home in Friendship. Back then, you could get a haircut at the hardware store in proprietor Sid Prior’s barber chair. You could dash over for penny candy from the nearby Friendship Village School, when it let out for the day. You could buy P.F. Flyers and work clothes, even appliances, and if you didn’t have the cash, why, everyone knew where to find you. You could charge it on the honor system.
You can still do that.
The store has a toy section, free candy in a bowl on the counter, free apples in a basket. There is a shelf of oilskins and rubber gloves, souvenir T-shirts, bait bags, a brass bilge pump, cotter pins, boat batteries, spark plugs, lobster gauges, rope, shackles, marine paints and more. In the colder months, the drafty store with its sagging ceiling is heated with a woodstove, as it has been for generations. These are the slow months, when Simmons says customers slow to a trickle. The regulars include her father, wharf owner Roger Bramhall, who used to own the store and lives across the street.
Fay Bragan, for 27 years a village school aide and now clerking part-time for Simmons, also lives close by.
July and August are the busiest months. Fishermen have more money, the summer people are around. “I need two Julys,” she said.
Phyllis Dubois remembers as a young woman doing the bookkeeping for her father, Sid Prior, when he owned the business. Prior, born in1901 to a Bremen Long Island family, started out as a barber, operating from a small building on Cook’s Hill in Friendship. A band played in the room upstairs, where there was a square piano, and where Prior played along on the alto saxophone.
In the 1920s, Prior married Clara Bradford of Friendship and moved his shop to the Main Street location, where he added a few hardware items and over the years, enlarged the building. After a fire destroyed most of the business, he gave up cutting hair, but rebuilt his Meduncook Paint and Hardware Company, expanded to include lumber. Dubois remembers her father making deliveries in his truck, one leg on the running board as he drove. He always had a stiff leg after breaking a hip.
“He knew everyone. He had a quiet sense of humor,” said Dubois, now 75. She herself was shy, she said.
She will never forget the fire at the store because it occurred on her birthday, Dec. 5, 1946. The fire may have started in some oilskins, near an oil barrel. Guns and ammunition displayed nearby “sort of popped around,” she said, yet among volunteer firefighters, “one man got a finger burned and that was the only casualty.”
Dubois remembers the chair-lift on the stairs, installed for her mother. Her mother would put her groceries on it and walk up the stairs.
Prior sold the store to Doug Lash, after some years Lash sold to Tony Compagna, who operated the business five or six years before selling to Harold Bartlett. He only owned it a few months before Roger Bramhall bought it, and Simmons eventually took over.
She has worked in the store for 18 years. As a girl, she enjoyed riding on the chair-lift when she could get away with it. The upstairs apartment is now a rental.
A customer in boots and visor cap comes in and jokes that he would like one of everything, and charge it. “I’ll be OK till the bill comes in.” He finds the hose he wants and says he will take it home, cut a couple inches off it and bring it back.
“I’ll never know,” Simmons tells him.
A telemarketer calls the store; she politely declines whatever he’s offering.
Life-long customer Gary Thibodeau ambles in, and recalls buying candy there as a kid. It’s still the place for “nuts and bolts,” he said, adding that he needed a cotter pin.
This day, in the store, the talk turned to frozen Hatchet Cove, and recently frozen Rockland Harbor. None of the boats were hurt.
Simmons said if her husband, Virgil, didn’t go lobstering, she couldn’t afford to run the hardware store. But she likes the independence, and with Fay to help, her job is less than full time.
Will a Home Depot in Rockland put Friendship Village Hardware out of business?
“I don’t really think so,” said Simmons. “I do remember that Doug Lash used to sell a lot of school supplies, and he stocked up on them the year the first big department store that came in I think it was Mammoth Mart, and he had school supplies for years and years because people bought them in Rockland.”
The owner of Friendship’s other store, Wallace’s Market, popped in. Karl Pitcher was installing an old toilet because the newer one he first put in wasn’t up to the job.
“A lot of our sales are things you need in a hurry. You come up and get a belt for your boat. Antifreeze and oil. We cater more to the fishermen than anything. And this time of year to the boatbuilders. There’s a couple of guys that fish in the summer and build boats in the winter.”
Simmons has two grown children and four grandchildren One of the grandkids was coming over that day to hang around the store. “I never knew what I want to be when I grew up. I still don’t,” she said. “My husband keeps saying, oh why don’t you go get a real job. But this is so flexible. I’m not rich but I’m happy.”