Scott Swanson
Jack Legg Jr. has spent nearly his entire professional life inside the walls of the building at 610 Main St. – Dan-Dee Sales.
He started as a “12- or 13-” year-old, helping his dad, Jack Legg.
“He mopped floors and waxed,” said his wife Lisa, who has been active in the store since they got married in 1990, after Jack got out of the service.
After 47 years of doing business in Sweet Home, Dan-Dee is shutting down. Or, at least, the Leggs are.
“We are going to call it quits by the end of the year,” they said in a letter to business partners and customers announcing their retirement.
There are lots of reasons, Jack said.
“It would be foolish not to think that COVID, supply chain issues, inflation, our governor and the president had nothing to do with this, but in reality, it has helped make the decision easier,” they wrote in their letter.
It will indeed be a major life change for them.
Jack grew up in the world of retail. His father owned Jack’s IGA in Sweet Home (now Thriftway) and in Lebanon in the late 1960s, but fell ill and had to sell them to Scott and Mary McDonald, whose family still operates that store.
“He had bought this building and I assume he got bored and decided to open up a sporting good store.
“That was in the spring of 1974,” Jack said of his father.
“He was young and he just wanted to be in business.”
Initially, he said, Dan-Dee sold “a substantial amount of surplus,” along with wood and pellet stoves, “sundries – you know, shampoos and so on.
“And lots of rain gear and gear for the loggers.”
“Stuff was hanging off the ceiling,” Lisa recalled. “There were boxes of shoes in the aisle all the way down. There was so much stuff. I have had people come in and tell me in the last years, they remember back then how it was so packed. It was too packed. You could hardly walk through it.
“We had wool pants from all over the country, from different countries. It was really cool.”
“All our pants were from World War II,” Jack said. “They were pretty old. But they were good pants.”
He’s selling off the knife collection, many from the mid-1970s and early ’80s, that has adorned the east wall of the store for decades – vintage Brownings, Taylors (made in Japan), old Camillus military knives, the sword that crowned the display.
The latter, he said, will actually go to one of the winning bidders for the knives, who will be put in a drawing.
“They get the sword that’s been up there since ’84 for free,” he said. “They’re all pretty excited about that.”
“I even had guys who wanted pictures of the pool board (which has displayed the knives) so they can reminisce on it,” Jack said,
They’ve had their challenges over the years.
“We experienced the first Wal-Mart in Oregon. We’ve experienced every chain store in the United States. We’ve experienced the internet, Amazon, eBay, cell phones. There are now millions of ways to purchase products. Facebook. It’s helped us and hurt us.”
Back in the day, Jack said, “Sweet Home in the wintertime was solid snow skiers and snowboarders. Most of that traffic has disappeared. The amount of fishing that we have in our rivers has really diminished. There’s less fish.”
Sweet Home, he recalled, was significantly different than it is now.
“Sweet Home had shoe stores, clothing stores, furniture stores, car lots. It was its own town. Logging was huge. It has definitely changed.
They’ve had personal challenges too, which have played into their decision to retire from Dan-Dee.
Lisa recalls the year of the “big tornado” in the 1990s, when parents on both sides had serious health problems.
“His mother got sick with brain cancer and, oh, my mom had a stroke.
“We’ve seen them both go through different kinds of things. You want to do something while you have your health.”
With both their sons living out of state, in South Dakota and Colorado, that’s an option, Jack said.
“We’re five hours from one child and eight hours from another child,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”
Meanwhile, they plan to either sell the business – it’s listed with Sherrie Gregory, or liquidate the store’s inventory by the end of the year and sell the property.
Jack said a buyer could continue or modify what Dan-Dee has been doing,
The store has “great customers,” he said. “It’s going to hurt to leave.”
A lot of them are former employees, Lisa said.
“All of our former employees still come in. They bring their friends. They’re still customers.”
And, added Lisa, there are a continual stream of new ones.
“I would say every single day we have somebody come in that says – I mean, I don’t know how this happens, but they say, ‘I’ve never been here before.’ A lot of them are from here. This last month, I’ve had tons of people come in and say they’ll shop here. ‘We just moved here. We just love the store.'”
Jack said a buyer with substantial retail experience might be able to hit the ground running with the store, including taking advantage of purchasing arrangements set up by his father that have enabled the store to offer competitive pricing over the years.
Now, though, he’s just waiting to see what happens and is trying to plan for the day when he and Lisa don’t have to staff the store seven days a week.
“We’re excited,” Jack said.