Peters Hardware: Where Snaths Are Found

While charging through downtown Opportunity recently, head down and arms swinging, closing on Dave’s Bar and Grill for their $3.99 meat loaf and mashed potato special, I chanced to pass an old friend who had been standing on the sidewalk for 61 years.

Difficult to believe that Peters Hardware has been serving Valley folk since FDR’s second term. Harder yet to believe that I haven’t visited this faithful old friend since Firestorm.

I like the prices at home supply mega-warehouses, where you can push an ore car down wide aisles while the wife loads it with a half ton of paving blocks, a kitchen sink, a palm tree, and a genuine oriental rug manufactured in Cleveland of shredded milk jugs.

I like the big parking lots and the neat stuff there, but I really don’t like those cold impersonal citadels of mass marketing.

What I really like is hardware stores - real hardware stores - and there aren’t many of them left.

Had my profession not chosen me, I’d have picked hardware man - well, anyway, right after wrecking ball operator.

A hardware man knows everything. He knows a plumb from a plum, and an adz from a mattock, and he knows more than just what aisle they’re located in.

He can tell you how and when to use them, and he doesn’t act as if he had a patient waiting in surgery when he tells you.

And he knows what a snath is.

Some years ago, the Valley had three hardware stores. There may have been more, but I only remember Peters in Opportunity, West Valley Hardware in Millwood, and Trent Hardware on Trent near Parkwater.

They were the stores you discovered about the time you outgrew the dime store and stopped reading Captain Marvel.

They sold the stuff that really mattered: tents, sleeping bags, Coleman stoves, compasses and jackknives; slingshots, BB guns, and bows and arrows! They even sold DYNAMITE!

This meant that, after one easy stop, you could be putting your eye out while your uncle ruptured all the septic tanks in the neighborhood blowing up tree stumps.

Don’t tell me life wasn’t better then.

It was only after you started shaving that you noticed hardware stores sold things like paint, and nails, and power tools.

When a marvelous old toy fire truck at West Valley Hardware had lain on a shelf long enough to reduce it to a price I could afford, the hardware man said he knew my son would enjoy such a treasure. He had despaired that anyone would ever buy it.

It was red-painted metal, with wooden ladders, and nickel-plated fixtures. It was two feet long with hand cranks to operate the ladders, and a steering wheel that worked. When attached to a garden hose it put out fires with water spraying from its own little hose.

In my son’s hands it survived a thousand high-speed runs and put out a million fires before giving way to a bicycle.

Like most well-loved toys, it was not so much played out, as lovingly used up.

Some time after the Six-Day War and the 30-Second Peace, Arab oil embargoes forced a lot of perfectly innocent capitalists to reenter the wood stove era. For this reason I found myself spending fruitless hours trying to explain my stovepipe needs to teenage clerks at a number of home supply outlets some years ago.

After 15 minutes with an old hardware man at Trent Hardware, I had everything I needed, along with invaluable instructions for a permanent and safe installation. It would be some time before warehouse stores learned what that old fellow had known for 30 years.

When I found a patch of thistle among the beggar lice and Russian knapweed of the upper pasture I thought: What could be easier than cutting it out with the scythe my Grandpa used to use mowing the alfalfa?

One cut and the 50-year-old handle snapped like a mummy’s finger. The teenagers and lighting specialists just gave me blank looks.

“It’s wood and shaped like a belly dancer’s spine!” I explained.

“We got sickles,” they replied.

“What you need is a snath,” said the man at Peters Hardware, pulling one down from the shelf.

The snath fit perfectly, and still works fine more than 15 years later.

Thank you Peters Hardware - and happy anniversary.