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Phone: (248) 855-1177

8

September 15 2011

Frances and Martin Scheer, Carol Scheer Steffes and Paul Krupkin will be on
hand to celebrate the 65th anniversary of their Ace Hardware store Sept. 17.

Two Anniversaries
Worth Celebrating

The Scheers' marriage and store
hit the 65-year mark this month.

Allan Nahajewski
Special to the Jewish News

0

n the Tuesday after Labor
Day — three days after the
big Saturday storm — the
power was still out in the Oak Park
neighborhood surrounding Scheer's
Ace Hardware on Nine Mile Road. But
at the store's entrance, a small gen-
erator was humming, the doors were
open and employees equipped with
flashlights were leading customers
through dark aisles, helping them find
what they needed — flashlights, bat-
teries, oil lamps — to make it through
another day without power.
"That's our story:' said Martin
Scheer, 86, one of the store's founders.
"We're here to serve our neighbors
when they need us."
This is a month of celebrations for
the Scheer family. Martin and Frances,
85, marked their 65th wedding anni-
versary Sept. 1. And on Sept. 17, they
will celebrate the 65th anniversary of
the store they began with their wed-
ding money.
By flashlight, in the back room of
the store, Martin Scheer reminisced.
He remembered coming home Dec.
1, 1945, after serving overseas in the
Navy during World War II.
"I lost all my money gambling on
ship, so I needed to find a job:' he
recalls. He started working at Sam's
Cut Rate at Randolph and Monroe
in Detroit, a traditional employer of
young Jewish people. "I hawked sur-

prise packages at 50 cents each with 6
percent commission:' he said. "My sta-
tion was by the elevator and the stair-
way, and the stairway was at the foot
of the training room. Frances got hired
as a cashier and had to go to training.
She got off the elevator and asked me
where the training room was. I looked
at her, and said, 'I'll show you The
next day, I asked her for a date." Nine
months later, they married.
The Scheer family had a history in
hardware. Three uncles were in the
business. Martin convinced his broth-
er Philip, six years older, to pool their
money and open a store. Their first
location was just west of Woodward,
on Nine Mile in Ferndale, when Nine
Mile was still a two-lane dirt road. The
store was called Scheer's Trading Post.
"The name Trading Post derived
from a shortage of merchandise,' he
recalled. "In 1946, merchandise was
hard to obtain. Even water pails were
on an allotment. Everything was hard
to get — blue jeans, work socks, flan-
nel shirts. It took a couple of years
before civilian merchandise became
more readily available:'
After two years, the brothers moved
the store to larger quarters further
west on Nine Mile in Oak Park. In
1957, they became affiliated with Ace
Hardware. "Without the merchandis-
ing systems that Ace offered, we would
have floundered:' Scheer says. "We
had more business than we had abil-
ity to handle it. Things were pretty
chaotic until we learned their systems.

