Michael Leannah - Something for Everyone: Memories of Lauerman Brothers Department Store

About the Author

Willa Leannah

Michael Leannah has had a long career in the public schools of Milwaukee and Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His stories for children have been published in magazines in the United States and in Australia. His radio plays have won national awards and have been performed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In 2007, he edited Well! Reflections on the Life and Career of Jack Benny. Leannah grew up in Marinette, Wisconsin, within walking distance of Lauermans Department Store. He now lives with his family in Sheboygan.

Something for Everyone is an eloquent love letter to a vanished Wisconsin institutionand a vanishing piece of Americana. For nearly a century, department stores were the anti-Walmarts of their day: bastions of personalism whose owners lived on the same streets as their customers. Michael Leannahs specific subject is Lauermans of Marinette, but his larger story is the golden age of American retailing, when delivery was free, candy was sold in bulk, and Christmas trees actually talked.historian John Gurda, author of Cream City Chronicles and The Making of Milwaukee

Something

for

Everyone

MEMORIES OF

Lauerman Brothers Department Store

MICHAEL LEANNAH

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Wide view of Dunlap Square, with Lauermans on the left| Bob and Eva Kiefer

I think about tomorrow
and wonder why it is
we give up all the things
we love the most.

Utah Phillips

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855

2013 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
E-book edition 2013

For permission to reuse material from Something for Everyone: Memories of Lauerman Brothers Department Store, (ISBN 978-0-87020-581-1, e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-588-0), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

wisconsin history .org

Photographs identified with WHi or WHS are from the Societys collections; address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.

Designed by Shawn Biner, Biner Design

17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Leannah, Michael, 1957

Something for everyone : memories of Lauerman Brothers Department Store / Michael Leannah.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-87020-581-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Lauerman Brothers

Department Store. 2. Department storesWisconsinHistory. I. Title.

HF5465.U6L385 2013

381.1410977533dc23

2012026938

This book is dedicated to my father,
Francis X. Leannah,
and to all who ever worked
at Lauermans Department Store.

| Frank Lauerman III

Contents

WHEN MY FATHER SPOKE of the store, no one misunderstood. He meant Lauermans. When Mom said, Your father is at the store, we knew he wasnt out buying groceries. Around our house, when someone spoke of the store, we saw the words in capital letters: The Store.

But the word store cant begin to capture the essence of Lauermans Department Store. The usual image of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century general store is hardly a match for the magnificent building in the heart of Marinette, Wisconsin. On the stores fiftieth anniversary, in 1940, the Marinette Eagle-Star newspaper stated: It is difficult to find in cities twice the size of Marinette, a store [that] has four floors and blankets an entire city block. Lauermans was by far the largest retail building north of Green Bay. To the people of northern Wisconsin and Michigans Upper Peninsula, it was a virtual palace, a sight to behold. Drawing near made ones heart skip a beat.

More than a mere history of the store, this book is a salute to the people who were there behind the counters, on the delivery trucks, walking the aisles. Over the years, Lauermans sold a tremendous amount of merchandise, but those interviewed had little to say about the goods that were sold or the sales that were made (malt cones excepted). Invariably, the preferred topic was the people who worked and shopped there and how the store affected their lives. While a fortunate few were able to recall the 1930s and 40s, most people focused their memories on the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Those contributing information from the 1980s did so mainly for the record; the store by then had lost its sparkle.

My father, Francis X. Leannah, worked at Lauermans for nearly fifty years. He began on August 18, 1933, as a teenaged stock boy and clerk and worked his way up to be the manager of several departments. His wife and all six of his children were employed there for varying lengths of time as well.

Lauermans was doing well at the time of my fathers death, less than a year after his retirement in 1980. That he didnt have to witness the hard decline and closing of the store that meant so much to him is a blessing. It is for him, mostly, that I have written this book.

No monument was ever built for your father in Marinette, says Frank Lauerman III. But there are a million little ones. He shaped an awful lot of what Lauermans became. To many people, he was Lauermans Store.

Let this book be his monument.

I interviewed close to a hundred people for this book and asked many questions of each of them. Many of them asked me a single question in return: Why do you want to write a book about Lauermans?

My answer was always the same: Lauermans was a special place. Its story demands documentation, and the people who worked there deserve recognition and commemoration.

If there are errors on these pages, I hope they are few. Puzzle pieces contributed by individuals with firsthand knowledge didnt always fit with those of others who also were there. Even newspaper accounts and other historic documents contained discrepancies. Back when the memories were being made, no one expected a book to be written about them. (Though if you had a 1910 nickels worth for every time a Lauermans clerk uttered the phrase, Someone oughta write a book about this place, youd have enough to buyand fillevery piggy bank that ever graced a shelf at the store.)

No one kept accurate notes, so the story of Lauermans as presented here can hardly be considered complete. But the hundred-odd people I interviewed for this project provided a cumulative account of this place called Lauerman Brothers Department Store. Their memories tell the story.