I’ve driven down Highway 75 through Lyndon thousands of times on my way to see the old man, cover games, research my book, and for dozens of other reasons. For years, every time I drove through the small Osage County town, I looked to the right and took in my father’s old shop, memories running through my head.
I didn’t notice, however, that the shop was gone until a recent trip to cover a Burlingame-Lyndon football game. I texted my brother immediately that the building wasn’t there anymore. “Been gone awhile,” he replied.
Sadness came with the realization that the old blue building housing WebbCraft during my high school years is no more. Dad sold the shop in the mid-1990s when he’d had enough of pushy customers demanding same-day repair (the sign on the counter clearly stated that he didn’t do same-day repair). The facility later became an evidence warehouse for the Sheriff’s Department. Today, the property is a construction site.
The shop was the first physical building housing WebbCraft. Dad knew that a leather goods store wasn’t going to pay the bills, so, as he always did, he improvised. First, he bought all the shoe repair equipment from the store in Hypermart in Topeka at a steep discount, agreeing to purchase it with the stipulation that they train him to be a cobbler.
With the shop came an old-school, two-port car wash in the back. When I say old school, it truly was old school. The only way to pay was with quarters, and the bays included large mud pits that had to be cleaned all the time. My brother and I learned quickly about manual labor when the old man tasked us with cleaning them.
There’s no better way to learn about hard work than digging mud pits in Kansas. Half of the folks using the car wash were farmers, so the bays and pits usually weren’t full of just mud. In the summer, we scooped up giant cow patties with shovels and plopped them into a wheel barrow. Then, we pushed it up a hill to a giant pile of dirt to dump. In the winter, we pulled the approximately 1,700-pound lid off the mud pits, then hammered away at frozen dirt and shit until it cracked enough to shovel.
As much as maintaining the car wash sucked, it had its moments. The old man cackled until the day he died about walking out to one bay to find a man taking a dump on the concrete before kindly washing it into the pit. “I guess he couldn’t wait,” Dad always said while laughing.
Ultimately, the car wash made enough in five years to cover the cost my father paid for the property. The old man had a knack for finding the perfect deal financially.
Always looking for a way to make a little extra money, Dad also obtained the license for and opened a pawnshop in the building. For two years, the little shop that could had a shoe repair, leathercrafting, pawn and car wash business.
The old man procured several cool items while working as a pawnbroker. One day he called and asked if I knew what a Sega Genesis was and if it was worth $30. I asked if it included any games, and he said, “Quite a few, including this Tecmo Bowl.” It was a no-brainer, of course. He bought the system and games. I had them until I was nearly 30.
The pawnshop didn’t last long. Dad made a profit, but he tired of the sad stories that came with loaning people money. “Son, there’s a segment of society that most people don’t even know about,” he said.
Dad would have turned 78 today. I still think about him often. There were millions of lessons learned working at the shop. I learned that I never wanted to be a shoe repairman after doing it for a summer. I learned that the customer isn’t always right. And I learned that I really hated cleaning mud pits.
Happy birthday, old man.