MPR: Berger Hardware

Berger Hardware
By Bob Kelleher
March 26, 1999

In Superior, Wisconsin, a hardware fanatic's Aladdin's-cave is on the auction block, and drawing visitors from around the country. Berger Hardware Store opened in 1915 and closed 70 years later, crammed to the ceiling with stock that often dates back to the 1920s and 30s. The store was known to locals as the one place that stocked everything, even if it was decades out of date.

A CROWD MILLS UNDER a badly-faded storefront sign on Tower Avenue in Superior that humbly declares this place to be Berger Hardware.

On this bright but chilly late winter day, auctioneer Bob Paffell is hawking shiny, double-loop belt buckles. There are thousands of them - hundreds to a box - some snapped up by a middle-age couple from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Shopper:We're going to use them for decorations and stuff. We're building at home. We build furniture and knicknacks and stuff, so we decorate with this.

Next up are buggy whip holders; dozens of them, brand new glossy black-iron whip holders still in original boxes. Not far behind are two-man hand saws, fencing, and used pick handles once owned by the Works Progress Administration.

Prominent in the crowd are darkly-dressed men with long chin-beards and flat-brimmed round hats. Amish people have come hundred of miles to stock up on hand tools, kerosene lamps and buggy parts still used in their rustic, agrarian lifestyle.

Berger Hardware was a store in disarray to everyone except its owners. It was never intended to be an antique store or a tourist attraction, but time and human curiosity caused those evolutions. Determined to have the best-stocked general goods store in the region, founder Morris Berger used to buy huge amounts of stock, often from stores and factories going out of business.

For more than 60 years, he crammed nuts and bolts, ropes and tools, hinges and household goods higher and higher on shelves barely a foot and a half apart. Store goods hang from the ceiling and spill seemingly at random across three floors, a basement and an adjoining storage building.

Berger ran the store until his death in the late 1970s. His son Sam kept the business another dozen years until he died at his desk. Jim Kremer bought the store in 1994.

As he soon discovered, only Morris and Sam Berger really knew where anything was - or even what was there. Jim Kremer found himself lost in a menagerie of merchandise, leaving him wondering at times just why he had bought the place.

Kremer: Because dumb's forever I guess. No, I just, I don't know. I just kind of fell in love with the place, I can't tell you why, it was just one of those things. It was overwhelming. In fact, the first three, three weeks or a month that I had it, I wondered what I did.

Berger Hardware had become something of a museum; a tribute to trash, but also a repository of the rare. Visitors came just to see the mayhem. It wasn't unusual for summer visitors to call ahead and ask for a group tour. Kremer is still amazed at the collection and the haphazard way it's stored in the building's upper floors.

Kremer: There's a lot of it here that has a lot of value, you know, like these old chrome; the people that are restoring houses, there's the old chrome you know, bathroom, towel bars, and stuff like this, that are still brand new. These electric, no, these are more of the towel bars. There's cases here of soldering irons, somewhere. Oh! Here they are. These are brand new soldering irons. But right in with the soldering irons, you've got dust pans, and electrical recepticals. And then you've got old brass lamps here - cases of lamp parts here - and brand new milk bottles.

That's brand new milk bottles, in two sizes, with caps. Or if you prefer, thousands of corks to stop any sized bottle.

MPR: I'll bet you've had some fun wandering through here.
Kremer: We've had a lot of fun with the store, we really have, I'm going to miss it.
MPR: Just discovering things could be fun, and figuring out what it is.
Kremer: Yeah, well that was the other neat thing when we first opened it up. We'd had a lot of the old timers coming in, and they'd know what a lot of this stuff was, and of course the tourist would come in, and everybody would be talking and they'd be showing how it worked and what it did, and it was just like being in one of the old-time general stores. It was really neat, and we had just an awful lot of fun.

The basement is a damp, dingy, and very dim catacomb of shelves buried under metal piping, bolts and square nuts. There are brand new blacksmith tongs in two sizes. And a couple of used automatic oilers to lubricate steam engines. A factory closeout long ago provided hundreds of brand new ice box hinges.

Auctioneer Bob Paffel was shocked when he saw the collection Kremer expected him to sell.

Paffel: Stunned, absolutely stunned. Never seen so much items in one place. Some things I've never seen being in the business 35 years.

Vivian Plunket came to the auction to reminisce, and just maybe pick up a bargain. She knew the store well when she ran an antique shop across the street.

Plunket: He's the only one that had the things that would fix an antique. If you wanted the right nails, you wanted the nice glass or anything, he had it. We wouldn't find it, but he knew where it was. Something I'd run all over and looked for, and then he'd lean down and pick it out from behind his desk.

The sale is so big that it's being stretched out over several weeks. The first weekend cleared much of the adjoining warehouse, but Kremer expects it to take a third, fourth, maybe a fifth weekend to empty the store building.

After this weekend's sale, Kremer and the auctioneers will take time off to reorganize before the auction starts up again in April.

Bob Kelleher covers northeast Minnesota/northwest Wisconsin for Minnesota Public Radio. You can reach him at bkelleher@mpr.org.

	Sign up to receive e-mail newsletters

	Audio help

	Text: Sm : Md : Lg