The sign at Deck’s Hardware remains on the Ambler storefront years after closing. (Credit: Rachel Ravina – MediaNews Group)
On a typical Saturday morning by 10 a.m., upwards of a dozen customers milled about in the center aisle, each waiting for their number to show up on a box overhead. Between them and us, stood a broad Masonite-topped counter. Beneath it, dozens of sheet metal bins opened to the crowd, each with nails in all the standard sizes (in galvanized or plain, common or finish), sold by the pound. Behind us, the customers saw a wall of DuPont paints stacked on shelves that reached up 14 feet or so. We were the floor staff, the owners and clerks, of Deck’s Hardware, a family-owned and run business in Ambler for over a century.
We were a crowd, too. It was the late-1970s, an era before Home Depot or Lowes, those cavernous warehouses whose customers wander like lost sheep in search of stuff or help. No self-service at Deck’s. When I worked there the four Deck brothers were all on-deck for the Saturday crowd. Tuck was the oldest, a wiry Navy veteran of World War II. Then came Nels, Cliff, and Tiny. On most days, that big bear of a man worked in the basement below, perpetually crouched beneath the joists bearing the main floor, ordering new stock out of vast printed catalogues — all to feed the always-hungry shelves, racks, displays, and bins overhead.
Three of the Decks’ sons were then on the payroll, as well as a shifting posse of four or five clerks, ranging in age from 17 to 60-plus. I was 19; this was a six-month break from college. (I would return for a summer job a year later). For the working Decks, this was a family tradition. For many in the milling Saturday crowd, a trip to this store was essential preparation for weekend projects and a ritual visit to an important institution.
In a sea of good-natured babble, the customers waited for a clerk or a brother to bellow out their number. Really, they had to wait. For most customers, Deck’s was an impenetrable warren spread across three large, multi-story buildings. The main showroom stretched 80 feet or more, with much of its stock displayed on 3- by 6-foot hinged doors. Each C clamp or Nicholson file or Master lock on the face of a door bore a number. Open the door to reveal hundreds of sliding bins, containing just what you wanted — if your clerk knew which door had the goods. Even now, nearly fifty years later, I remember that the clamps were just down from the big working counter, the files on the opposite side of the room, and the locks in a ramped passage that connected two buildings. Wire fencing meant a trip to a faraway land, a vast space in the third building, first built as a stable.
The buildings, the displays, and the business itself were all the work of a strong-willed figure, the father of those four brothers and the title character of G.M. Deck and Sons. When I showed up in 1977, the old man was long-gone and seldom mentioned. But his influence touched everything. To my mind, he was a riddle that demanded questions. Why did the man (and his wife?) choose rhyming names for the sons? Tuck was really Truxton, Nels stood for Nelson, Cliff was Gordon, and Tiny Dawson. Their dad, Garnett M. Deck, had built a business and a dynasty. At 19, the question that really pulled at me, but one I had sense enough not to ask aloud: Why did the four brothers choose to devote their entire working lives to this, their father’s creation? For myself, born lucky with a pile of advantages, just 19 with college and life’s opportunities ahead, I really didn’t get it. With time, that would change.
In the first place, the job taught you a lot about people. Tuck was semi-retired by then. When he did come in to share the load, he made little effort to hide his scorn for the college boy passing through. Although he also worked on the floor, Nels had charge of billing and receipts. If a clerk made an error on a customer’s invoice, he landed hard on you. Managing the clerks was Cliff’s job, well suited to his easy and open disposition. Our days were long: 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. Junior clerks like me began each day by sweeping every aisle after sprinkling the floors with dust-catching “sweeping compound.” After the busy lunch-time crowd, it was tempting to ease off a bit, slouched on a counter. With good-natured guff, Cliff drove us to the overstock. In the upper floors and down in the basements, we searched out the back-up inventories of flapper valves and picture hangers, alarm clocks and batteries. One clerk, Charlie, always knew where these things and a hundred more lay in wait. I never did so well.
One summer afternoon, Tiny came up from his basement warren to teach serious lessons about teamwork and hard work. A flat-bed truck had arrived from Corson’s, the cement quarry in nearby Plymouth Meeting. The driver backed his load up the steep driveway and into a covered garage/unloading area. Tiny marshalled three clerks to the task of unloading 80-pound bags of asphalt paver. Perhaps 200 bags. I lost count. Tiny didn’t. He led us into the work, setting the pace and never slowing. Drenched in sweat, our human chain had the truck unloaded and gone faster than I could have imagined.
My fellow clerks were also lessons in character and characters. The oldest must have been past 60 (at age 19, most people struck me as old). He was a kindly veteran. Andy might have been 40, with years into the job. Like Charlie, he knew where anything could be found. Unlike Charlie (but like me and many other clerks), Andy smoked a lot. On the job. We mostly put our butts out while tending to customers. A lovely woman, Louisa, might have been 40. Soon after I started working at Deck’s, she shared a story of her first day. To get the customer’s chosen shade at that wall of paint, the clerks literally climbed up the shelving. Four feet up, Louisa lost her grip on a gallon can of Eggshell White which tumbled to the wooden floor below, bursting open and flooding paint down the aisle and through the floor’s cracks into Tiny’s burrow. Down there, Sue worked alongside Tiny, handling ordering and inventory tasks. Beyond her given job, she was a thoughtful den-mother to younger clerks. In its way, Deck’s Hardware amounted to a family for many on its payroll.
At any time of day, a clerk or a Deck manned the big counter and called out the numbers. Customers’ needs were wild cards, which always kept the job interesting. How to stop a running toilet, how to hang a moose head on the living room wall? (Nobody ever did ask me how to reliably affix a mirror to a ceiling.) The customers were often old friends of the Decks. Each was genuinely glad to see the other. On weekdays tradesmen dominated. Saturday brought out weekend warriors, often with kids in tow. Many had charge accounts with the store; their names and addresses on 3 by 5 cards in two drawers behind the counter. My own parents and grandparents were there filed away, with addresses back a half-century, crossed out and updated.
Many of our customers were veterans of World War II, trim men in their fifties and sixties. Of course you did not know this for a fact, but you came to recognize them. At that time, no one called them “the Greatest Generation.” I am sure that few of them would have chosen such verbal plumage. These plumbers and homeowners, electricians and roofers simply were men who had done some difficult things during the war. Whether glad for that adventure or thankful to have survived it, they just wanted to get on with the challenges and rewards of living normal lives.
We had our own basic challenges to master. Unloading trucks was mostly fun: get outside to the (un)loading dock, gab with the drivers from A. Duie Pyle or Servistar, check off the cartons, and slide them down the ramp to Sue in the basement. I liked cutting window glass per a customer’s given dimensions, but I hated mixing paint. It never looked quite right in the can. Cutting and threading black iron pipe for the plumbers had its rewards as did cutting keys in the little anteroom by the back stairs. You learned a little about a lot, knowledge still useful in daily life.
It seemed that Deck’s had been there forever. On one island of drawers and shelves near the garden tools, a revolving varnished wooden cabinet, octagonal in shape, had dozens of small drawers marked for the standard sizes of wood screws. It must have dated back to old man Deck who opened the store in 1908. Every few weeks someone wanted to buy it from the store. No deal. A drawer in that same island contained a leather dog collar with a name plate engraved for a once-beloved pet. The dog had died decades earlier; his remembered collar stuck around.
But nothing is forever. The four brothers retired or died in harness. Tiny kept on going until 2020; his last sale at age 93. Long before then, his sons, Tyler and Tim, were the Deck brothers at the helm. Cruelly, cancer took Tyler at 63 in 2023. Tim and his extended family chose to close up the place in December of that year.
Well before it closed, I came to understand that Deck’s Hardware shared a lot with the Bailey Brothers Savings and Loan from “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Here were honest and hard-working people doing the unheralded things — day in and day out, year after year — that touched lives and sustained a community. There is a real nobility in that, worth remembering and celebrating.
During his clerking days at Deck’s, John K. Brown lived in Lafayette Hill. He retired from the University of Virginia after a thirty-year career, and is the author of three books.
