My teaching day ended at the junior high, called Mont Harmon Junior High, as did my friend Lou’s. He, too, taught at both the high school and the junior high in order to have a full schedule. Very often we would meet after school and walk the short distance to town for coffee. We went to a very popular cafe called the “Hi Spot,” owned by a member of the Greek community whose name was Sampinos. The family had two children, both of whom would have in class at some point, so we got to know both Mr. and Mrs. Sampinos quite well. The cafe was always full of people we knew so besides our cup of coffee there was always plenty of news and gossip to share. And, interestingly, right next to the cafe was a bar, also owned by a Sampinos, a relative, but not particularly close, of the cafe owner. The bar owner’s sister was one of our colleagues at the junior high and a very well liked teacher. Later, when Lou and I were both through teaching, the bar became our meeting place after work and there the sharing of gossip and news became more important and we actually transacted a lot of business there as almost every service you ever needed was represented among the clientele.
Our path to the cafe took us down 100 West to Main Street. Like most towns in Utah Price was laid out according to Brigham Young’s grid system so 100 West was one block west of the main north-south street. The street, as it approached Main Street, was a mix of apartment buildings, some very old, and businesses, most prominently the Sears Catalog store and NAPA auto parts, both very busy. First Security Bank, where I had received my warm welcome to Price, stood on the corner with Main Street with it’s parking lot and drive in facility on 100 West, adjacent to the bank on the north side. All this became very familiar to Lou and I as we walked the route so many times.
Right between the bank parking lot and the NAPA store was the only single family house on the block, but even it had a business connection as it had an old retail shop building next to the house on the same property. And for the whole time we walked down this street, the house had a for sale sign in the yard. I finally became very curious. As I mentioned earlier, Maun and I ended up in grandma’s house because there was virtually no housing available in Price. And all the time we lived in California we had been diligently saving money for the down payment on a house and I began to wonder if the old house at 50 North 100 West might have some potential.
I showed the house to Maun and she was interested enough to take a look so we called the real out of town owner whose name was on the for sale sign and made arrangements to see the property. What we saw was kind of amazing. The house and shop sat on a large lot that had fifty feet of frontage on the street and was two hundred and fourteen feet deep. That meant it was half a block deep. Half of a Utah block is big and it was, ending at a mid-block alley, on the other side of which was the parking lot of the largest and most popular department store in town. The house was very old and had been built with only one bedroom but had been added onto so that it had a large bedroom in the rear and a new kitchen and bathroom. In addition to the house and the retail shop there was a double garage and right behind the shop a row of sheds that were in rough condition but would provide an immense amount of storage. While the shop building was right on the street, the house had been set back, perhaps twenty-five feet or so, providing a minimal front yard that was planted in grass and graced by a thirty feet tall fir tree. The rear lot, had been entirely asphalted, making it usable in the winter. A small area adjacent to the back door had been roofed as part of the addition and made kind of a nice patio. Curiously there were two peach trees growing out of the asphalt. Even though that wasn’t on our minds at the time, one of these trees, we discovered later, produced the best peaches in the county leading us to decide, gardeners that we were, that asphalt must be the perfect mulch.
Even though we were well ensconced in grandma’s house and had done a lot of work to make it nicer, much nicer than the house on 100 West, we were intrigued with the property. We knew we could easily rent the house and the idea of starting a combination antique and furniture repair and restoration business had been with us for some time. So we talked to the owner and offered her just what she asked which we thought was very little, sent her the required earnest money and went to the bank with her signed agreement to get a loan.
It must have been a good deal because the minute we had the earnest money agreement everyone wanted to buy our option from us. The woman’s husband, who had no financial interest in the property, insisted it was worth twice as much and even our banker encouraged us to make a quick couple of thousand buy selling our option back to the owner. All they did, however, was convince us that we had made a good deal.
We rented the house in no time and with the demand we were even able to rent it without the use of the garage which I soon made into a workshop, complete with it’s own furnace and a spray booth for finishing furniture. By now I had met so many people in the coffee shop that I knew right where to go for the help I needed, mainly someone to wire the garage and someone to install the furnace. I didn’t want the furnace in the garage itself because of the fire danger so built a little shed for it. A tiny little shed but it was the first thing I had ever built, complete with a shingled roof and a functioning door. It turned out fine and it was good experience as we would later be building a house. At least now I had framed the walls, hung the door and shingled the roof. The sheet metal man who did the furnace also made me a big, four by six feet, metal pan that I could set on saw horses and use for stripping the old finish off furniture that was to be refinished. Later on, when we had ended up with probably fifty quite nice victorian sewing machine drawers with no machines attached to them, we ha the brilliant idea of having Kit, the furnace man, make little tin liners for them so we could turn them into planters. We thought it was such a brilliant idea that it would make us rich. It didn’t and we hardly sold any of them but every one of our relatives and friends received one planted with ivy, just perfect for the top of one’s toilet tank.
The workshop
I lined the shop walls with cedar one by twelves and painted the window frames and we had a rag rug made to size at Deseret Industries, the LDS church thrift shop and we were in business. It wasn’t long before we found a very nice oak showcase that fit perfectly and made a nice counter at the back of the shop. And we splurged on an antique cash register that was both useful and completed the decor. It was expensive but we knew we could get our money back easily so we bought it. An inexpensive rag rug and a couple of antique fixtures and we were in business.
Maun with her mother’s husband in front of the shop
But what about things to sell? We had somehow become acquainted with an established wholesale dealer located over the mountain in the little town of Santaquin so we took the old blue truck to his place and loaded it up with mainly larger pieces that would make the shop look full. Santaquin is close enough to be part of the Salt Lake village and this man’s brother had been one of my childhood doctors and that led us to trust him. The trust was well placed, we always sold the items we bought from him and always made a profit on them. And as soon as we opened the doors people started bringing us things so keeping the shop full was never really a problem. Some of the same kids who gave me so much trouble at the junior high now brought us stuff in a steady stream. A couple of these kids from the same family became very familiar to us. Their big brother put a new clutch in the Falcon for us and when we built our house we hired the younger brothers to help me with the dirty, dusty demolition work we had to do. I even ended up painting the interior of their house as part of a low income housing rehabilitation program, another Republican program that would never happen now. Sometimes people would offer us the entire contents of a home. We bought the contents of a home a couple of times, both times with interesting results. The first time we did it I just took what we wanted and left the rest and then we found ourselves threatened with a lawsuit so I had to thoroughly clean out both the lady’s house and yard. It was very unpleasant work to say the least but it taught me a lesson and netted us a very nice round oak table that we ended up keeping for ourselves. The next time I knew I had to take everything and we ended up with a couple of dozen bottles of homemade red wine that had completely oxidized into vinegar so it went to the dump except for one bottle that we kept and even used on the occasional salad.
We called the shop “Castle Valley Antiques and Crafts” because intended to take craft work on consignment in order to extend the scope of the shop. It was a good idea, there was a lot quilting and crafting going on in the area and we were happy to display and sell the handiwork. Some of it was beautiful and we still have a couple of Afghans that we bought for ourselves. Macrame was also big at the time and Maun could make planters out of lots of different objects by making a macrame hanger for them. We soon met a young man who was an excellent potter and his bowls in a macrame hanger made very nice planters. And people brought us insulators off of old wooden power poles. People were somehow interested in these. They came in all sizes and colors and looked nice in a jute hanger with just a sprig of ivy in them. In addition to all this I refinished furniture for customers. We didn’t advertise this service because we were both working full time, after all, but enough of it came our way to keep us busy.
The interior of the shop. You can see the cash register and the showcase.
There was an old motel around the bend on the lane we lived on that no longer functioned as a motel and the units were rented as apartments. Maun knew the owner, a very nice man who had been a school principal and a member of the city council. When he heard about the antique shop he told us that he had three billboards advertising the motel and he would sell them to us as he no longer needed them. They were very strategically located, one on each of the highways that entered town, so we bought them and I was able to get my fellow painter, the artist who preferred painting signs, to repaint them for us. I was surprised that he would do it because the billboards were all located in rough pastures and pretty exposed but it was a good job for him and he did them for us. The billboards generated an amazing amount of traffic as we were to discover when the state made us get rid of them and bought them from us as part of the highway beautification act. The state paid us three times what we paid for the signs so the billboards were a good deal all around.
The shop kept us busy. Too busy, in fact. We were spending every free minute there including every single weekend. It was clear that we needed help so we hired my nicest and brightest student to run the shop for us on weekends and it worked out very well. In addition to tending the shop, this delightful young lady showed us her artistic ability by making very nice dried flower arrangements that she placed in an assortment of glass globes that we had acquired. The arrangements turned the globes from junk into very salable items. And while she was doing this Maun and I had time to go fishing and camping again. It was a very nice arrangement.
Maun’s handiwork. I had refinished the chair. We would have probably made more money if we had just sold things “as is” but we both enjoyed the work and we wanted nice things in the shop.
Things went on very nicely for some time and then the state, under a new governor, reorganized the department of social services. His administration divided the state into nice districts and Maun ended up getting the job as director of the district that included Carbon, Emery and Grand counties. It was a big job and pretty well put her out of the antique business. And this happened at the same time that we had to get rid of the billboards which drastically reduced our customer traffic, so we decided that maybe it was time to get out of the antique business. It had been a lot of fun but it seemed to be time to move on.
By then we had a shop full of stuff. All of the sheds behind the shop were full as well and we had to decide what to do with it all. An auction seemed to be the answer so we found an auctioneer and literally turned the auction into a community event. Luckily in Price one could pretty well count on dry weather so we put ads everywhere, filled the rear lot with chairs borrowed from the senior citizen center and invited the organization of Head Start parents to sell refreshments as a fund raiser and turned the busy afternoon into a community event. We couldn’t believe what people were willing to buy. Stuff that had been around for the whole time we had the shop disappeared in the blink of an eye. And when it was all over the auctioneer offered the entire remaining contents of all the sheds. Some poor guy took him up on it, and now with the tables turned, it was someone else who had to clean up the whole place. Maun and I would have probably paid him to do it, but as it was every single thing was gone and we ended up with a nice little pile of money.
The Auction
Now, with the antique shop closed, we had the shop space available for rent as well as the house. By then two giant coal fired power plans were being constructed in Emery County and there was a lot of economic activity in Price so it was easy to rent the shop. We are still amazed at the variety of people who wanted it. We first rented it to a guy who wanted it for a kitchen shop show room. He was a good first tenant as in trade for some rent he leveled the horribly slanted floors in the shop. They didn’t matter in an antique shop but they would have made it difficult to use the space for anything else. Then we had a locksmith who managed to start the place on fire but with no real damage. And then, finally a lawyer who rented both the shop and the house. It was good deal for both of us and she was out best tenant.
In all of this I was able to keep the garage-workshop which I used a lot later when we were building our house. And we even traded its use to a young man who wanted to make his own furniture. He was as real craftsman and he made us a very nice bed and night stands for our new house.
Maun’s new job with the state soon led to the opportunity for a big promotion, the only catch being that the new job would be in Salt Lake. Just prior to this, as the result of a very wet winter, there had been a giant landslide in Spanish Fork Canyon, closing the road to Salt Lake. Because of this we had to take an alternate route to the city which included a scenic shortcut through Park City and it was such a nice place that we decided we would like to live there. We could easily do this if Maun got the new job so we decided to it. We put the property up for sale and shortly after there was an ad in the paper by the State of Utah in search of property for a new liquor store as the old one was too small and had not parking. Our large lot was perfect and the state bought our place for almost four times what we had paid for it. And now the 50 by 214 foot lot is graced by what we call the Dave and Maun memorial liquor store.
My bike in my life 