Feature Article February 26, 2004
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Ken Harper retires from Verona Hardware
One summer over 30 years ago, Ken Harper convinced Vic Merrill to sell him Veronas hardware store. I got this brainwave to leave a really well-paying job and go into business out here, grins Ken with characteristic irony. Ken had an offer from Bell Canada that would see him transferred to a plum promotion in Cornwall, but he wanted to run that hardware store. I bugged Vic every weekend till he closed the deal, he says.
Merrills Hardware had been a Verona fixture since 1929, long before Ken was a boy in Oak Flats. The store sat on the site of B&J Discount (its latest incarnation, but not its last, if Ken has any say in the matter) till Ken moved it a few doors north to its present location.
Kens early years in Oak Flats and Verona must have given him the inside he needed to serve what was then still a very rural community. It had been his boyhood chore to walk the half mile to the pump several times a day for the household water, and he was halfway through Grade 9 before he moved into a house with electricity. As a hardware store proprietor, he needed to call on that early experience as well as his prior work as well driller because, as he says, The first day I ever worked in a hardware store, I owned it. Nevertheless, he did a lot of on-the-job learning. I trained myself to repair many appliances using customers machines, he says. But I only charged for the time it would take a trained repairman to do the work.
That can-do approach is part of the secret of Kens business success, and when pressed for more advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, he has a ready reply: Keep prices as good as you can. Back up what you sell and what you say. Try to stock what people ask for. Most of our new products have come from request, he says. If one person wants it, then likely more people do.
Its been no secret that for several years now Ken has been looking for someone to buy the store, and it is Veronas great luck that hes found two young men to pass on what was passed on to him by Vic Merrill. Like Ken, Andrew Asselstine was raised in the Verona area. He brings a knowledge of the area and a knowledge of the more technical side of the business. Chad Van Camp grew up in the Kingston area and had been working in retail management in Ottawa before partnering with Andrew. He and his wife (the former Nicki Abrams) and their two daughters are now active young community members in a village that has seen a lot of changes since Vic Merrills day.
But Verona Pro Hardware remains more constant. Ken says the store still stocks pretty much everything Vic stocked (although they no longer make the sap buckets that they sell). They still, however, still make special stove pipe pieces, using Merrills original sheet metal tools. Ken would love to see a Verona museum established so that he could donate the tools that are no longer needed in the store.
Ken is now officially retired from his 30-year Verona hardware career, but like most successful entrepreneurs, he will always find a project. Many of his past projects have been community oriented. Hes a dedicated member of the Verona Lions Club, and has put his business and technical skills to work in dozens community projects often behind the scenes. But he plans to take it a little easy for awhile. Im going to do some fishing, some more golfing, more time at home, he says. Oh yeah, and hell be expanding the clubhouse at Rivendell Golf Course, dont you know.
We asked Ken to imagine that he was 29 again and looking for a business opportunity in Verona. The spark of adventure lights up his reply. In my bones, I predict that in five years you wont recognize Verona, he says. All the small empty storefronts will be occupied. After a pause he adds, The most exciting part, besides the fact that I get to retire, is that there are two young men running the store who can have it as good as Ive had it.
Congratulations to them all.
