How Green Bay's soon-to-close Sears store shaped one ESPN anchor's life
I am looking for news on the Packers search for a GM but instead am struck cold by the headline in this very paper — “Sears to close Green Bay store.”
This cannot be. This is not right. This is … this is heartbreaking.
Sears has closed hundreds of stores across the country the past few years, I know this. It’s not a new headline. However, until today, I hadn’t considered the possibility that corporate decision-makers would shutter this Sears. My Sears!
This isn’t just some Sears store to me any more than Lambeau Field is just some stadium or John Wayne is just some cowboy or Frank Sinatra is just some singer.
No. Where most see just a department store, I see family history.
RELATED: Sears to close Green Bay store
I don’t make it from infancy in Iowa to the SportsCenter anchor desk at ESPN without this Sears. Does not happen. My life is tethered to the brown brick building at the corner of Military and Mason. Actually, it’s Sixth Street, but we won’t worry about the precise location until I learn to ride a bike and my mom needs to know exactly where I am at all times.
My mother is a 24-year-old widow with a 3-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old son. It’s November 1965 when her husband, my father, is killed in a car crash on a gravel road in rural Iowa.
I will never know my Kenny Anderson. My sister can recall some. My mom has all the memories, and in 1965, there are some hard days.
The three of us live in a small house in Mason City, Iowa. A place made famous as River City by Music Man composer Meredith Wilson. There are good neighbors on either side of us. Dear friends who help look out for us.
A few months pass and in February 1966, Larry Neville, the neighbor on the left as you face our front door, gets transferred to be head of the appliance department at a new Sears store in Green Bay. Larry was born in Green Bay and this is a chance for him and his wife, Verna, to return home.
That summer, my mom takes us to Green Bay to visit the Nevilles. There’s something about it that feels right. Something warm and inviting. I wonder if it would have felt that way in winter?
By the end of the year, mom needs a change. Iowa is home and all of her family is there, but so too is my father’s memory. Change can’t erase all the sadness, but it can take away the everyday reminders. Change is a chance to reset and move forward.
So as 1967 dawns, she follows the Nevilles’ lead and we move.
It is January. It is cold. But it still feels right.
My sister and I will grow up Green Bay: The Packers, paper mills, Kennedy Elementary School, Lombardi, Southwest, fish on Fridays.
The Sears store has made it so.
From there, my Sears tale is mostly retail. Everything a kid could possibly imagine needing — clothes, winter clothes, shoes, sporting goods, records. And everything he can’t imagine needing — carpet, drapes, house paint, tires and tools.
As I grow up, I wear out Sears’ indestructible Toughskins jeans like they are brown paper bags. The holes I make in the knees are patched with swaths of denim transplanted from pairs of jeans I’d outgrown the year before. The denim cycle of life if you will.
My mother remarries. My father is gone but I have a dad, Walter Collins, the best man I’ve ever known. He loves us unconditionally. He also loves tools on the condition they are Craftsman tools from Sears.
Tools are birthday gifts and Christmas gifts for dad and my stepbrothers.
For my sister, there are Barry Manilow albums (yes, I know the lyrics but only because she played them loudly and repeatedly) and Andy Gibb 45s.
Mom? If it has a bow on it, she’ll love it.
For me — what wouldn’t I like to have? But if I must pick just one thing, then it’s the football shirt (these are the days before the NFL cashed in on merchandising) with an action photo that looks remarkably like John Brockington on the front.
The building with the giant swan-like S on its side is our destination.
My friends and I have bikes and allowance money.
We’ve biked the route a thousand times, beginning from my house on Biemeret Street (as vexing to spell today at age 52 as it was when filling out forms in grade school).
Around the corner and down Katers Drive we go. Hang a right on Langlade. Then a left through the parking lots of a restaurant and gas station/convenience store. Be careful at the intersection of Ninth and Military. I can still hear my mom imploring me to this day, “Please, be careful when crossing at Ninth and Military!”
The whole trip is a ride past buildings that remain today but places that are long gone: The Village Inn, Western gas station, Red Owl, St. Agnes Bakery, the water tower, Ponderosa, Van Boxtel Ford.
Finally, we arrive at Sears. Always the backside of the store. Military and Sixth. The merchandise pick-up entrance by the automotive garage bays. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever gone in the front door of the place. We shop, we look, we loiter, we even, sometimes, buy. Childhood at its best.
Eventually, we graduate to the city bus and trips to Port Plaza Mall. Then we graduate high school and college and I move to Oklahoma, Arizona and Connecticut. I have a family of my own. And when our house needs a new washer and dryer, naturally, we go to Sears.
And I tell my kids for the umpteenth time about the Sears in my hometown. They know the one. The one that brought Nana and Auntie Les and Dad to Green Bay.
It’s more than a store. It’s my story.
John Anderson is a journalist and an anchor of ESPN’s SportsCenter.