Bobson
Hardware
We’ve all watched with sadness and nostalgia
as Bobson’s Hardware closed. Recently, the hardware
store and the beautiful home behind it were demolished. The
home and store have a very interesting history dating back
to 1910. The Stranahan home was located just behind Bobson’s
at 1384 Nicholson Avenue. The Stranahan family lived in the
home from 1910, the year it was built, until 1922. Agnes Jeannette
Stranahan, a graduate of Lakewood High School (Class of ‘22),
kept a wonderful diary of her experiences as a teenager in
Lakewood. The following information on Jeannette and her diary
has been adapted from a series of articles by Dan Chabek,
which appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post.
Jeannette started keeping her Lakewood diary
in 1918, when she was 14, and continued it till she left the
city with her parents in 1922. The early entries of the diary
include news about World War I. Jeannette volunteered at the
Red Cross House (old Wallace Home), which was located on present-day
St. Edward High School property on I)etroit, and where she
knitted socks and made bandages for the soldiers.
She watched the troop trains, sometimes as many
as six a day, pass through Lakewood along the Nickel Plate
on their way to shipping-out posts on the eastern seaboard.
“All the boys were leaning out the windows and waving,”
she penned. She picked up a slip of paper that one of the
doughboys threw out. It had a name and address and said “Please
answer.” After a few days she retrieved three more addresses.
She wrote to the first writer.
Later, Jeannette went to see a German tank on
Public Square. “It was the first one we captured,”
she chronicled. Then came the armistice. Her entry for Monday,
Nov. 11, 1918 told how the newspapers were “out in dark
of morning and newsmen were yelling, ‘The war is over.’
Everyone was up and shouting at 4 a.m. We tied tin cans on
our new car and drove all over Lakewood. There were people
pounding on the back of dishpans and yelling all day long.”
Though the war had gone its way, a new calamitous
upheaval -- the influenza epidemic -- swept in during the
fall of 1918. On Oct. 18 of that year, Jeannette recorded
that 101 people died of the flu in Cleveland during a 24-hour
period. Then, during the next eight days, she noted 470 more
deaths.
Lakewood schools and churches were closed. “Children
under 6 have to stay at home,” she scribbled. They are
not allowed on the street or in picture shows.
Jeannette chronicled her many activities, which
included playing Parcheesi with friends, crocheting, playing
ragtime music on the piano, telling ghost stories, eating
sundaes at the local ice cream parlor or dancing at Gilberts,
a public ballroom on Detroit and Marlowe. Jeannette and her
friends also played along “the creek,” a babbling
brook that ran from Madison to the lake in the area of Waterbury
Drive. When the city planned to cover the stream, Jeannette
was saddened. “Our beautiful ravine and the creek are
to be filled. It is breaking my heart as well as Mama’s.”
Jeannette’s Lakewood diary concludes in
1922, when the family moved out of town. Her father Frank
ran Stranahan Bros. Co., caterers, bakers and confectioners,
in a six-story building at 421 Superior Ave., N.W. The building
was soon to be demolished because the city of Cleveland needed
the space for “new tracks and buildings for a new depot.
Papa says he is too old to rebuild,” Jeannette chronicled
in her diary. “It wouldn’t be easy. The bakery
ovens are built into the walls. We are going to rent our house
and go on a long trip this summer so that he won’t have
to see all his work torn down to rubble.” The family
piled into their new car, a Willys Knight, which had a folding,
camp-version trailer attached. That trip became a permanent
move. The lovely 2 story brick, frame and stucco home that
Frank Stranahan built in 1910 was rented to a Dr. Arthur Fath.
Eventually a Canfield Oil filling station was
built at the intersection on what was once the Stranahans’
front yard. Later this frontal property was sold to Standard
Oil Company. Robert C. Schoch came on the scene in 1950, first
buying the Haefele Hardware Store building on Detroit adjacent
to the filling station, and later changing the store name
to “Bobson’s,” a word he coined by combining
his nickname of “Bob” with “son,”
for his son Robert Jr. Schoch bought the corner filling-station
property in 1966. Two years later, he tore down the station
and put up the present Bobson’s hardware store -- a
one story brick and concrete block building at the intersection
of Detroit and Nicholson.
Seventeen family-owned hardware stores were
in town when Schoch opened his shop. In its prime, Bobson’s
made its reputation on the staffs old-home renovation expertise.
You could get lawnmower blades sharpened, pipe cut or window
screens repaired.
The Stranahan home was purchased in 1979 by
Robert Schoch Jr. Some years before this acquisition, the
large residence had been converted into five efficiency apartments,
with all original natural hardwood retained. The former basement
was renovated into an office at the same time an addition
was added to the store, about 1981.
Three generations of Bobson’s owned and
operated the store. Bobson’s was the last of the family-owned
hardware stores in Lakewood to fold under the pressure of
“big-box” retailers like
Home Depot. They closed in December 2001.
St. Edward High purchased the Stranahan house
and Bobson Hardware in 2004 for $400,000, and has subsequently
demolished them to create a larger parking lot. St. Edward’s
allowed the Lakewood Historical Society to salvage architectural
items from the home. On May 7, 2005 we will be having a Salvage
Sale during the annual Sale on the Grounds. You’ll find
a wide array of architectural elements including numerous
doors with inlaid wood designs, mahogany woodwork, a large
pocket door, window and door hardware, railings and banisters.
This is a wonderful way to re-use and preserve a bit of our
community’s history.
Mazie Adams
Lakewood Historical Society Newsletter
11/2004
Lakewood Lore
Articles:
Newly
published diary shows city in its early years
Diary
provides key to mystery for Lakewood woman
Diary
of early resident tells of babbling brook in city
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