by Ed Stack
Dick grew up adoring his oldest brother, my uncle Ed, who was nine years older. Ed was a dashing character—handsome, charismatic, athletic, fun loving. He was more of a father to my dad than their father had been. But the real influence on young Dick was his paternal grandfather, who introduced him to fishing for trout in the Susquehanna and Chenango, and for bass in some of the lakes outside of town. They did a lot of talking, and I understand they caught a lot of fish, but I think my dad enjoyed being outside on the water, the solitude and beauty of their setting, as much as anything. It was enormously calming.
Which did him good, because my dad was a high-strung kid with a lot on his mind. When he was in junior high, my uncle Ed joined the Army Air Corps and was away for years. My dad felt that loss. Even before then, he wasn’t doing well in school—he had trouble studying, and my siblings and I have long suspected that he had a reading disorder; he remained a poor reader throughout his life. He was deeply interested in sports, passionate about them. He landed a spot on Binghamton Central High’s junior varsity football squad in his sophomore year and played intramural basketball for a couple of years.
His greatest passion, then and throughout his life, was baseball. He was a catcher, and a good one, with a strong arm and a quick glove, and for several years played for the team at St. John the Evangelist, our parish church. The squad played other parishes, and the competition was surprisingly fierce. But while good, my dad wasn’t great. If he harbored any dreams of taking his game higher, like most kids he didn’t see them pan out.
So Dick Stack had a chip on his shoulder. He was barely getting by in his classes. He felt as if he was falling behind, that he was struggling at tasks his classmates found easy. He found just one respite: he immersed himself ever deeper into fishing.
And he worked. Dad had a paper route for a while, worked in an ice-cream parlor, then got a job with a guy named Irv Berglass, who ran an army-navy surplus shop in Binghamton. As the war ended, the surplus market was flooded with useful stuff the government no longer needed, everything from coats and boots to cook sets, sleeping bags, tents. Sportsmen loved browsing the store.
In January 1948, my dad graduated from Binghamton Central. He’d forever after say that it was “by the skin of my teeth,” which is no doubt true. He said he wouldn’t have made it without a passing grade—a flat-out gift—from an English teacher who told him, “I don’t know what will become of you, Dick, but somehow I know you’ll be a success.” At the store, the supply of surplus goods was beginning to slow, and Irv Berglass was mulling a transition into sporting goods. He knew my dad spent a lot of time fishing and was good at it. So he said, Listen, kid. I know you’re a big-time fisherman, and I want to get into the tackle business. Only I don’t know what we should stock, so I want you to go home and put together an inventory of what we’d need to get started.
My dad went home and put a list together. He stayed up into the early morning giving it thought, winnowing the list to the essentials, so that it all fit on two sheets of paper from a legal pad. The next morning, he took the list to Irv. The boss looked over the papers, took out a pen, and started crossing out items my dad knew any fisherman would need. Dumb kid, Irv said to him. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
Did I mention that my dad was a hothead? He snatched the papers away, stormed out of the store, and never went back. He walked across town, angry at the boss and himself—now he was out of high school, with no prospects for college, and suddenly jobless—and stopped in to see his father’s parents.
Martin and Mary “Mamie” Stack did not have a lot of money. Born in County Kerry, Ireland, they’d come to Binghamton during the cigar boom, and now they lived very modest lives, scrimping for every extra dime; they went so far as to erect a tiny cottage in their backyard, which they rented out. One challenge was my great-grandfather, who was a wonderful man liked by virtually everyone who met him—and was known around town as “Backy,” for the tobacco he chewed 24/7—but who was also an Irish cliché in terms of how much beer he consumed at the local pub. In other words, the dimes didn’t pile up.
My father showed Mamie the list he’d compiled, told her what had happened. She could see that he was torn up. After a while she quietly asked: “How much would it cost you to do this—to open this business for yourself?”
“Three hundred dollars,” he answered. He might not have been a great student, but he was always handy with numbers.
With that, she crossed the kitchen, went to a cookie jar in the back corner, reached in, and pulled out a wad of cash. God knows how many years of saving that represented. She counted out three hundred dollars, handed it to him, and said: “Go start this business yourself.”
* * *
As origin stories go, I think that’s pretty good. Some details have proved variable over the years: With each telling, my dad would have himself staying up later to put together the list; it was midnight when I was a kid, and by the time he told my kids the story, he was pulling an all-nighter. Occasionally, press accounts of my great-grandmother’s generosity have amplified the sum she handed over to $600, or even $1,200.
But my dad always insisted that it was with $300 that he started his business, and Mamie backed him up. That cookie jar of hers has become a lasting bit of iconography at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Today, when an associate reaches twenty-five years of service with the company, we present him or her with a cookie jar, tucked inside of which is $300.
My dad stretched that cash. He found a tiny storefront for rent at 453½ Court Street. The family used to kid him that it was so small it didn’t deserve a full number for its address. There, just months after his high school graduation, he opened Dick’s Bait and Tackle. He was nineteen.
That original store remains an important piece of the company. Walk into any Dick’s today, and you’ll find a framed picture of the place. My dad is standing to the right, just inside a front window lined with fishing rods. Uncle Ed, natty in a bow tie and dress shirt, is to the left, with an elbow propped on homemade shelves piled high with small boxes of gear. The wall behind the shelves is cinder block. They hold rods that cross between them, and at their feet is a stack of wicker fishing creels. A display of hooks and lures occupies a table in the left foreground. More than one customer on the sales floor—the little bit of open space in front of the camera—would have crowded it. You hear people talk all the time about humble beginnings. This was a humble beginning.
My dad stocked the shelves with as much fishing gear as he could afford, and hoped to do enough business to buy more. On the days he did, he’d close up shop; drive sixty miles to the Eynon Drug Store in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spend the day’s receipts on fishing gear; then drive back and stock the shelves.
Bear in mind, he was paying more than wholesale for this stuff. His markups had to be razor-thin, or he’d have priced himself out of business. And on many days, he made too little to put gas in the car. Decades later, my sister Kim came across some old register receipts from those days, and she cried when she saw how little business he did. Five dollars, some days. Six or seven on others.
On some of those lean days, his situation must have seemed almost cripplingly bleak. But like I said, he had a chip on his shoulder. He had something to prove. He wasn’t going to give in willingly. And ever so slowly, his little shop started drawing some regulars who recognized that this skinny kid knew fishing, knew gear, offered good advice. The word spread around town.
I wish I knew more about those days. He didn’t speak of them often, and I didn’t press. This much is clear: pretty soon, he no longer had to drive to Scranton for his inventory—he was doing enough business to place orders with wholesalers or buy directly from the brands he carried. He broadened his offerings: by 1952, he’d renamed the place Dick’s Army-Navy & Sporting Goods, and was stocking work clothes, a little sportswear, camping gear, and picnic supplies, along with an expanded array of fishing tackle. He was generating enough traffic to buy newspaper advertise
ments. He sponsored a monthly fishing contest that awarded forty bucks for the biggest fish. “Buy your equipment from an experienced angler,” he wrote in an ad in April of that year, “who will demonstrate the proper use of each item sold.”
My dad wrote all of the ads himself, and at times he got creative. One of my favorites was an ad that appeared in the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin in February 1953 and resembled a boxed news story. “Warning! Fishing Pox,” its heading blared. “Very Contagious to Adult Males. Symptoms—continual Complaint as to the need for fresh air, sunshine and relaxation. Patient has blank expression, sometimes deaf to wife and kids. Has no taste for work of any kind. Frequent checking of Fishing equipment. Hangs out in DICK’S Army-Navy store longer than usual. Secret night phone calls to fishing pals. Mumbles to self. Can’t sit still, wants to buy the best Fishing Tackle at the lowest possible prices.” The “treatment” was to “go Fishing as often as possible with tackle from Dick’s.”
In time he was doing well enough that he expanded into the other half of his store’s half-address. It remained an unpretentious operation in the same low-slung cinder-block building, but now he had three big display windows looking onto Court Street. And while he’d so far done the bulk of his business during warm weather, when fishing in the Southern Tier didn’t require hacking a hole through a foot of ice, he made a change that transformed Dick’s into a year-round destination: he started carrying rifles, shotguns, and ammunition.
My father was an occasional hunter—very occasional—but he knew enough about firearms to get by, and hunting seemed a natural extension of his existing business. This is a point that will be important later in this story: Dick’s has been in the gun business for at least sixty-seven years.
* * *
Successful as the operation seemed to be, Dick’s Army-Navy was vexed by a problem all too common to businesses in Binghamton. An explosion of car ownership was transforming America, especially its cities, and Binghamton was no exception; the shortage of parking just in front of Dick’s Army-Navy was soon frustrating customers.
So in December 1953, Dad decided to move the operation to larger quarters with off-street parking, about seven hundred yards to the west. A story in the paper—which read suspiciously like his own advertising copy—announced that the new place, at 389 Court Street, was “5 times larger than the present one and there is parking facilities for at least 300 or more cars. Just think how easy it will be to shop at Dick’s, drive up anytime, park and shop.”
The new store, while another single-story, concrete-block structure, was vastly larger, and set back behind a large parking lot. Business, it seems, was good—enough so that eleven months later, when a new shopping center opened a ten-minute drive north of town, Dad signed a lease on a second location.
Success seemed a safe bet. The Hillcrest Shopping Center was unassuming, by today’s standards—a small, stone-clad strip mall anchored by an A&P supermarket and a big furniture showroom—but busy State Route 7 passed out front. The new Dick’s Sporting Goods occupied the storefront next door to the grocery. Prime real estate.
My dad’s business philosophy was as simple as it gets: “If I take in more than I spend, I’m okay.” By such reasoning, it seemed the Hillcrest store couldn’t lose. It opened in late November 1954, selling toys in addition to sporting goods.
* * *
That was a busy time for my dad. Earlier that year he had married my mother, and he was soon to become a father.
My mom, Mary Ann Boyle, grew up on McNamara Avenue, just four houses away from my dad’s childhood home; the two families knew each other, so how my parents met is no mystery. To this day, though, I can’t figure out what brought them together. This was not a case of opposites attracting. They were alike in all the wrong ways—both high-strung and quick-tempered. Neither was demonstrably loving. Words of reassurance, or tenderness, or comfort, were not in their vocabularies.
Like my dad, my mom went to Binghamton Central High School, graduating five years behind him. She was a kid. Still, they married in January 1954 and bought a modest little one-and-a-half-story bungalow on Binghamton’s South Side. She’d worked as an operator for the local telephone company before they got together and kept working for a few months after the wedding. But just a few, because eleven months into their marriage, on December 27, 1954, I was born—Edward William Stack, named for my father’s father and my uncle Ed.
It was an inauspicious time for a baby to arrive, because things weren’t going as planned in my dad’s business. The Hillcrest Shopping Center had been developed by Mart Development Corporation, which the local paper described as “largely the creation of William M. Viglione, the tax accountant.” Viglione, a former IRS numbers cruncher, had little commercial real estate experience; he’d built a motel out west of Binghamton two years before, but nothing quite like a strip mall.
It showed. For all the traffic the highway out front seemed to promise, no great population surrounded the shopping center, and there wasn’t much prospect that one would develop. The situation wasn’t helped by Hillcrest’s weird mix of tenants: a furnace company, an insurance agent, and the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company, which made thermostats. Not exactly the sort of neighbors that attracted armies of shoppers. Being next door to the A&P—usually a good strategy—didn’t count for much, because the A&P was having trouble attracting customers, too.
Just four months into the two-store experiment, my dad decided to shut down his Court Street location. It was almost certainly doing better than Hillcrest; I can only guess that his lease at the strip center was tougher to break, so he chose to consolidate his merchandise there, rather than in town. My dad wrote a big advertisement that appeared in the paper in late March. “We have moved our Court Street store to the HILLCREST SHOPPING CENTER,” it read. “In combining the 2 stores, we will automatically cut our overhead. This means that we can offer you LOWER PRICES! Drive out, ‘Always a place to park.’ ”
One feature of the ad conveyed the nervousness he must have been feeling. Down at the bottom, it listed the Hillcrest store’s hours. Since opening his first store, he’d always operated from nine a.m. to nine p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and nine a.m. to six p.m. on Saturday. Now the store was open on Sundays until three p.m., and he kept it open until midnight on Thursday and Friday “for Your Last-Minute Tackle Needs and YOUR LICENSE.”
The desperation that emanated from that ad was even more pronounced in those that followed. By the time I approached my first birthday, Dick’s was advertising a “$50,000 stock reduction,” with deep discounts on just about everything under the roof. Rifles priced at pennies on the dollar. Double-barreled shotguns, 48 percent off. A huge range of stuff, from fishing vests to sweaters to model airplanes, to work shoes, house paint, and tennis balls, all for half off or more.
This wasn’t the behavior of your typical retailer nearly three weeks before Christmas. Struggling to survive, Dad had made a loss leader of virtually everything in the store.
CHAPTER 2 “IF I HAD WHAT I OWE, I’D TRULY BE A WEALTHY MAN”
When my dad spoke of the Hillcrest store later in his life, it was with anguish and frustration—not only over what happened there, but because he’d allowed himself to be talked into the venture. He never identified who it was who’d persuaded him that it was a good idea. He never blamed anyone but himself. “I should have been content with what I had,” he’d say. “I should never have opened that second store.”
Actually, if he’d opened west of town, instead of to the north, he’d likely have been just fine. The suburbs were fast spreading to the west: subdivisions, gas stations, and strip malls ran unbroken past Endicott.
Hindsight. He didn’t realize he was planting his flag in the wrong place. But by the time I reached my first birthday, it must have seemed inevitable that it would end badly, judging by those Christmas ads. The wonder, for me, is that the store managed to limp through the spring of 1956. Finally, on June 6, he took out a new ad
in the paper. It was topped with an immense heading: “We Quit.”
“We must sell out to the bare walls!!!!” it continued. My dad never was bashful about exclamation points. “To satisfy our creditors we are forced to GO OUT OF BUSINESS! OUR LOSS, YOUR GAIN. SALE STARTS AT 9 A.M. TOMORROW!” Below was the now-familiar assortment of drastically discounted merchandise, the prices even lower than they’d been before Christmas.
The next three weeks were a living nightmare for my dad. He was already burdened by a deep and abiding inferiority complex: His close friends from high school had gone on to college and were now finishing their studies to be doctors and lawyers. In contrast, he’d set himself up as a shopkeeper, which he viewed as second rate next to their achievements, and now he was about to fail at that. He’d tell me later that his nights were sleepless, agonizing, that he was tortured by the thought that he’d blown his one shot at success. He couldn’t provide for his family. Worse, his family was growing—he and my mom learned in the midst of the store’s collapse that she was expecting again. His life, it seemed, was in chaos.
My dad padlocked his place on July 15, 1956. I’ve been past the Hillcrest Shopping Center a thousand times in my life; years later, it remains an outpost. The furniture store is the only survivor, and it moved into a bigger building up the road. A storefront church occupies the old A&P. The space where my dad set up shop is now a gym.