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Growing up in the Bookstore
Birthdays and anniversaries always trigger in me nostalgia for times past. I just passed my seventy fifth birthday and my business, Otto Book Store, is about to celebrate its 168th anniversary. What memories are begging to be shared?
When I look at the picture of my dad and one of my aunts in front of the “H. L. Otto Book Store” circa 1905, I feel the warm breeze flowing through the store whenever the back door was open “to cool things off.” I wasn’t a gleam in my father’s eye at that point because he had not even met my mother. But the very same building that he’s standing in front of in the picture was the same building he moved the store back to in 1936 and it is the store I remember growing up in.
During the slower part of the year, my aunt Annie and sometimes a part time high school girl were all the staff my dad needed. But on Fridays and Saturdays when most of the town’s shopping was done, my mother had to bring at least two of her four children with her when she came in to help.
My mother and my aunt must have rubbed each other the wrong way because my dad went to great lengths to keep them apart. He would give Annie chores to do that would keep her toward the back of the store. She would write on the back of each check, in her elaborate penmanship, “Pay to the order of the West Branch Bank and Trust Company, The H. Y. Otto Book Store, 232 West Fourth St.” Then she would write in pencil on the stamp corner of every envelope the price of the greeting card it accompanied, even though the price was printed on the back of the card—“Many people can’t read the small print on the card,” she said. She was also dispatched to the next door Kelchner’s where she was allowed to take us for an afternoon snack.
My younger brother and I were always looking for the forgotten pencils and tablets and in a closet at the back we made our own desk and seat out of packing boxes. When our mother asked where we got all our “office supplies,” my brother answered, “They don’t give you these things, you have to find them.” Packing boxes made excellent houses for when I wanted to set up housekeeping for myself and my doll, Betty. Luckily there was extra space at the rear of the store when there weren’t any wallpaper customers in that area.
Behind the card racks was another space that was especially desirable when we were waiting for our parents to close up on late nights. The card racks had been made by my father by nailing strips of wood to large pieces of plywood which were then put at an angle on a long table, leaving behind them a wrapping desk or sleeping space if we pushed the boxes out of the way. There were many evenings when my dad carried me to the bus so my mother could take me home while he rode my younger brother on the bike.
When my dad had a book to deliver, he would put me on the crossbar and put the package in the bicycle basket and we would ride off to the housebound customer. As soon as we were old enough to make change we were drafted to work after school as part time clerks. One of our first lessons was wrapping books in white paper and red string because every book we sold was wrapped—it would seem disrespectful to put a book in a bag! I never remember getting paid.
Our parents would read the children’s books to us to see how we reacted to them but we brought home very few. For the booksellers’ family, books were to sell not to keep. People and events at the store were used as teaching examples by my dad. One of his favorite lessons in money management was the customer he quoted, “I don’t know why we’re always behind in our accounts. My husband makes enough money—he just doesn’t make it soon enough!”
Mom and dad did without many of the things families today consider essential. They just didn’t spend money unless they absolutely had to. We never even had a salt shaker at home—we didn’t absolutely need it! Dad bought the store in the middle of the Depression when he had to turn all the books face out to make the shelves look full. He bought it by assuming the debts of the previous owner, including a bank note for a thousand dollars. Every time he came home and there was a circus poster on the telephone pole next to our house, he caught his breath until he got close enough to see it wasn’t a sign for a sheriff’s sale of our house. The month he died was the first month he had all his debts paid up. (He had managed to pay for three of his children to attend college by borrowing more.)
My mother continued running the store after my father died. My father had taught me his own method of bookkeeping and I worked with her full time after college. She used the exchange with customers to make social contacts for me—even encouraging a young college student to help her take her lip-reading students to a local beach. She didn’t tell him her daughter was going too. I married him—which is what she had in mind all along.
And so, here I am, still running “the store,” after my husband, who had been running it after my mother died, also died. And our ten children who have had their own experiences “growing up in a bookstore” are now off in their own professions, each of them helping me in some way as needed, lending me their children as occasions require. “The store” is still helping us all “grow up.”