Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
After 28 years, Fred’s Hardware is closing.
Owners Fred and Trudy Spina are retiring and, since they’ve been unable to sell the business at 2331 Main St. as a whole, they’ve decided to sell off their merchandise and call it quits.
“We’ll stay open till everything’s gone,” Fred Spina said.
Then they’re going to hit the road ? temporarily at least. Spina said they plan to go see his 86-year-old mother in Philadelphia and visit some other relatives to start.
“We’re going to travel a little bit,” Spina said. “I want to see more of this country that I haven’t seen. After that, who knows? We’ll go where the wind blows.”
Spina, 64, said that after running the store seven days a week for some 25 years (they began closing on Sundays a few years ago), he wants to do something else.
“There’s no life there,” he said. “I don’t want to die behind the counter.”
Plus, he’s still got work to do on their North River Road home.
“That stuff never ends,” he said.
The Spinas moved to Southern California in 1965 in search of warmer weather, Frank said. They stayed 12 years, living in Whittier, where he worked as superintendent of a small company.
In 1977, they moved to Sweet Home with their twin sons, Fred and Frank, now 38, and started their hardware business, which initially included a lumber yard. He said his own background was as a machine mechanic and as an electrician.
“We learned (the business) as we went along,” he said.
In the 1980s, when the local economy ? and the demand for lumber ? declined, they they converted to a hardware store and stayed that way.
“When you get banged up, you do something different,” said Spina.
He said they’ve felt some impact from big-box stores such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart, but “you just keep on going.
“We’ve got customers and we don’t want to disappoint them,” he said. “We’ve made quite a few friends in this business and we don’t want to leave them in the lurch.”
So now the building is up for sale and the Spinas are ringing up the final sales, with everything in the store marked down 20 to 25 percent.
“We’ve got to do things before our health goes to pot,” Spina said. “There are no guarantees in this world.”