Community Reflection Naples Sees Itself In General Store Where Family Has Invested As Much Heart As Money

Sometimes, Oma Sanders buys a candy bar at the Naples General Store just for an excuse to gab for a while.

She’s not interested in Randy Weaver and the deadly siege at nearby Ruby Ridge in 1992. That infamous event brings tourists - a flood for a few years but lately just a trickle.

Locals roll their eyes over the town’s notoriety and change the subject. The general store with its laid-back friendliness is more typical of the tiny logging community, they say.

“When I was growing up, there was a store like this across the street,” Sanders says, taking a moment to appreciate the boot-worn wood floor and Earl and Linda Berwick’s welcoming faces.

“Earl knows everyone, and everyone comes in here. I fell in love with this store the first time I stopped here.”

And why not? Sanders can buy groceries, guitars, picture frames, balloons, bright orange buttons, booster cables, paperbacks, hickoryhandled axes, furnace filters, drill bits, maracas and gloves.

There’s gas for her car and nachos for her stomach, Norwegian socks and hats with fur flaps, camouflage pants and hunting licenses, even showers, a laundromat, overnight accommodations and post office boxes.

But the real draw is the Berwicks, a big-city couple with friendly smalltown souls. They know their customers by name and directions to their houses.

They point out Ruby Ridge for tourists who ask and dispel largerthan-life myths about separatist Randy Weaver.

“He shopped here, so I knew him pretty well,” Earl Berwick says, affably choosing to remember Weaver first as his neighbor. “He was very friendly.”

The Berwicks’ persistence restored heart to the Naples General Store and character to the town.

“This has been the best thing we could ever have done as a family,” Linda Berwick says as she rings up a sale. “I thank the Lord daily for the beauty of it all.”

The Naples store was neglected and nearly empty when Earl Berwick found it in 1979. The post office inside was the main attraction.

The store, along with the town roller rink and motel, was built in the 1930s. For 30 years, it was the nerve center of this tiny logging town 70 miles north of Coeur d’Alene.

“I grew up in that store,” says Don Swanstrom, a 1st District magistrate whose parents and aunt and uncle bought the store and adjoining buildings in 1945. “I pumped gas at 8, learned to change tires in the lube room.”

The sprawling store sat beside the main north-south highway then. Part of it was a bar. The roller rink was a dance hall. Both kept motel guests and locals happy.

“Before the highway changed, the store was real busy,” Swanstrom says. “We had everything - a post office, appliances, TVs. My uncle even made house calls for repairs.”

Then the highway moved a quarter mile east. Store traffic plummeted. The Swanstroms sold in 1969.

The property went through several owners before the Berwicks read a for-sale ad for it in the Los Angeles Times. Earl was an accountant. Linda was a librarian. They ached to leave fast-paced Southern California for a simpler life with their two children.

“We were tired of chasing other people’s dreams,” says Earl, whose easygoing smile spreads right into his voice.

The dance hall’s windows were broken. The motel was uninhabitable. The store did a bare bones business.

The Berwicks rolled up their sleeves and went to work. The store was top priority. They moved walls and painted, studied local shopping needs, added inventory hesitantly.

“We’d get so excited when a can of soup would sell,” Earl says.

The floor had irreplaceable character, so they kept it and two turn-of-the-century display cases from the town’s first store, built next door in 1893.

They fired up the woodstove in the store’s center, plastered notices on the windows for lost dogs and hay for sale, and scrambled to find whatever their customers wanted.

The first few years, they survived on savings. As townspeople gravitated back to the general store in growing numbers, the Berwicks remodeled the motel into apartments and the dance hall into a rustic youth hostel that sleeps 25.

“It’s a way to have the world come to us,” Earl says.

The hostel brings about 400 people to Naples every year to ski, hunt, fish or hike in the breathtaking Cabinet and Selkirk mountains.

By 1992, the Berwicks had thoroughly resurrected the general store as Naples’ hub, and were living out their dream.

Then, the area went crazy.

When law enforcement closed Ruby Creek during the Weaver siege, the Berwicks sheltered 12 displaced families in their hostel.

The store became a different type of nerve center that August, playing host to national media, law enforcement and spectators.

“It was such a horrible time,” Earl says. “But it didn’t change the town from the inside.”

That fact didn’t interest outsiders. For years after the standoff, they flocked to town with one objective - to see Ruby Ridge, an unnamed spot before August 1992.

“Larger-than-life figures dramatically portrayed through events like Ruby Ridge remind everyone of their own life and death,” says clinical psychologist Roger Ehlert.

“There’s an actual physiological reaction being at the scene where `it’ happened, and an existential feeling that things can happen in only an instant.”

Outsider fascination with Naples is weakening with time. The town’s attitude about itself is the best antidote for public misconception, Ehlert says.

Which works for the Berwicks. Their store says it all.

“We know all our neighbors. We even know their dogs,” Linda says. “We go from pumping propane to doctoring the kid who fell off his bike. People bring us bags, egg cartons. This is a good life.”

Last year, the Berwicks’ son, Steve, moved back to town from Coeur d’Alene to help in the store.

He’s 32 and wants his children raised the way he was - with protective neighbors, horses in his field, hunting at his back door and parents satisfied with life.

“A family business is something you can put your heart into,” he says. “When you shut the doors at night, it’s still so much a part of you.”

Neighborly service is what this place is all about.

“We’re not being paid to shake people’s hands and say welcome,” Earl says. “People come in and we know what their husband smokes, boyfriend drinks, kids play with. Where do you find that anymore?”