On my road trip to our new home in Tennessee, I had a lot of windshield time. It's about 2,400 miles there and another 2,400 back. After a rather foolish 29-hour drive straight through from Flagstaff Arizona to Centerville Tennessee, (don't ask) I started running around the small town of Centerville trying to get the power, water and natural gas turned on at the new house. It took me a few trips to different places, filling out forms, and writing checks to get all the utilities turned on. I don't know my new town, not really.
Thankfully my phone gives me fairly good directions. Well, except when it sends you off the main highway, down some winding dirt road, to then get back on the main highway, saving you 13 seconds of trip time..... But I digress.
After unpacking my 20 foot horse trailer filled with about 40 Costco storage bins, I would sit in my reclining camping chair in my empty living room and look at my phone until it was time to sleep. I would be a bit bored at night watching Instagram reel and Youtube videos. I was waiting for AT&T to send me a replacement fiber router. The first one they sent was last owned by some deadbeat who didn't pay his bill, so they sent a do-not-go-to-the-internet code to the router. AT&T is supposed to wipe the config off these 'refurbished' routers before they go back out to new customers, but they didn't. In AT&T world, what is supposed to happen, and what actually happens, exist on two seperate planes of reality.
Eventually, after three days, I did get my internet set up.
Pretty cool to have fiber to your house out in the middle-of-nowhere Tennessee when it's not even available where I live in Tech-Centric California. But I had no TV at the house. Well, there was a 1990 television on the wall, but it had a coax port, and the Red, Yellow, and White RCA jacks as inputs, so basically it was a wall-mounted boat anchor.
On one of my many trips to Walmart, I did walk by the electronics isle and found a sale rack of TVs. I figured we would buy a nice new one (or two) when we move for good, but I could not pass up a 43" Smart TV, with all the apps on it, for $118. It will go down in my basement cigar lounge when I get it finished.
I now had a real life TV. After logging into all my subscription services, I noticed Hulu started a new season of The Bear. I liked that show, so I started watching the new season.
It started with a flashback to the main character talking to his older brother. They were talking about how restaurants are special places. You go there all the time, you know the people, they know you. If the place is good, you can't wait to get there on a really good day, or a special day, to celebrate. If you have a really crappy day, you can't wait to get there either, just to relax and unwind from your crappy day. It was a nice scene. I watched three episodes of season four, and when I got back home after another three days of windshield time, my wife was a bit grumpy that I had started a new season without her. So we watched the first few episodes together.
That first scene rang true to me again. But it really hit me that night as I slept. I was dreaming about certain places, and by places I mean stores, restaurants and even bars that I used to 'know' here in Yolo County. The Capay Junction, Hennigan and Shull sporting goods, Morrisons, the original El Charro on East Street. Places that are gone, or have changed owners, or are just sitting there shut down. That night I dreamed about walking through the front door of a place I loved, on the corner of Main and First Street in Woodland. Diamond E Western.
I drifted back to the Woodland of the 80's, when there were small little stores that catered to specific customers. Back before Walmart, back before Amazon, the internet, and cell-phones. Yes, these times existed not that long ago. We aren't talking about lost times from some ancient history class where people thought the earth was flat. This was just a few decades ago when I was a young man who just moved to Yolo County and needed to buy some Wrangler jeans.
This might seem illogical to you younger people out there, but when I was your age, there was no Yelp, or Google, or computers, or anything. You had the Yellow Pages. Yes, it was an actual printed phone book with very thin pages that had people's home phone numbers listed alphabetically, in the front part, the white pages. In the back, the yellow pages had businesses pay money to have their business listed. It could be just your business name, address, and phone number, or be complete with your logo, slogan, and photo. You could have your Yellow Page ad in various sizes depending on how much money you spent. The bigger the ad, the bigger, and more successful the company, or at least that is what the Yellow Pages sales people would tell business owners. There was no 'search bar' or help in that book. If you didn't know the name of the company, or didn't know exactly what you were looking for, you were in for a long, frustrating time.
One good thing if your business was on a busy street, you could have your name on your building. That is where I found Diamond E Western. At the corner of Main Street and First in Woodland. I went in to grab a pair of Wrangler jeans. Now, this was the still the 80's, so the Wranglers I wore were the original 13MWZ Cowboy Cut blue jeans made in North Carolina. I still have a pair in my closet to this day. (although that high waist doesn't fit so well around my gut these days)
When you walked in the door, there by the window display was the epicenter of the business, the front register. Nestled beside the glass top display cases, with belt buckles, western jewelry, and silver mounted Copenhagen can lids, was the register. Behind that front counter is where I first met Fran Schmauderer. She was wonderful.
Fran ran Diamond E, along with her son Dave. It didn't take long to become friends with both of them. I would be in there often, looking for a curb-chain for a bridle, or a new latigo for a ranch saddle or some other kind of horse tack. Within a year, I would just stop by if I was in town just to say hi. Fran had a cast of characters over the years who worked at Diamond E, and I got to know most of them.
When a new one would show up, she would give them the run down, and see how they did. You could see Fran's firm hand sometime come down if a customer walked in, and the new person would not engage with them directly. These are our customers, she would say, do they need help? Do they know what they are looking for? Can you help them find it? Can we order it if we don't have it? She was old school, and she was great.
I'm sure I gave her some trouble at times. If is was summer, and we didn't have cattle in the hills, I would come by and just chat with Dave for an hour. This was about 50 minutes too long in Fran's world if it was inventory time, or Dave had orders to get out.
When we left Yolo County for Sacramento in the mid 90's we lost touch with a lot of people. Fran and Dave were some of those folks. If I came through town, I would stop by Diamond E and say hello. It was always nice to take our son Steven into the shop, he was pretty small at the time, and probably doesn't remember the crew at Diamond E, but they were always great with him.
I think Fran passed in the early 2000's just about the time we moved back to Esparto. I was quite sad to hear about her passing. I knew how much she cared for Dave and how much he loved her back. Working with someone for all those years, I'm sure they had it out more than once, but I can't really think of one, without thinking of the other.
I haven't seen Dave in years. I hear he's going through some medical issues right now, and I'll be praying for him. Dave's a good one.
I think back to that scene in The Bear, and places where you like to be.
Diamond E was one of those places where you liked to be. I miss it.
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