#small business

Noah Harrison

I run my own small framing crew now, three guys and steady work most of the year, and I come by the store most weekends just to help out and catch up -- no hard feelings left over, mostly just easy conversation over coffee before Dad opens up. We've actually started talking about what happens to the store down the line, and for the first time it doesn't feel like an argument -- more like two people figuring something out together. This photo's from a Sunday a few weeks back, Dad and I fixing a shelf in the back room, both of us laughing about something I said wrong the first time around. I didn't expect to end up here, but I'm glad I did.

Mark Harrison

I'm Mark Harrison, born in 1962, and I was twenty-one when my whole plan for my life changed in about a week. I'd had a welding scholarship lined up at trade school -- I'd spent half my teenage years building small metal projects in my dad's shed and figured I'd open my own fabrication shop someday. Then Dad got laid off from the plant in '82 and the family was struggling to keep up with the bills, and the elderly man who owned the downtown hardware store offered to hand it over to me if I'd take on the debt and run it full time. I said yes without really thinking it through, because I couldn't stand watching my parents worry about the house. I was restocking lumber and pipe fittings from open to close within a month, and to my own surprise, I found I actually liked it -- there was something steady about a store people genuinely needed. This photo is from that first year -- a customer snapped it while I was bent over the shelves, still a little out of focus, but I remember feeling, even then, like I'd landed somewhere solid.