Great Recession hits a little close to home

April 16th, 2009 at 04:26pm Alex Gary

With more than 28,000 out of work in Boone, Ogle and Winnebago counties at the end of February and a couple thousand more that have lost their homes in the Great Recession, my little story here isn’t nearly as tragic.

Still, it means something to me. Facets Stained Glass & More, 5440 N. Second St., Loves Park, will close at the end of the month, the owner unable to weather the severe drop in sales in anything to do with housing. Items already are marked 60 percent off in an everything-must-go sale.

Old-time Loves Parkers remember that site more as Lenz Drug Store, a neighborhood hangout for a couple of decades. There still were grooves in the floor from the old shopping traffic patterns.

To me, though it’ll always be my mother’s stained glass store. Joan Schoeneck bought the building in 1995 and my family and her boyfriend spent several months strengthening the floor and building displays, including a massive wrack for the more than 100 varieties of stained glass. My major contribution was laying on a scaffold for several days repainting the ceiling.

She ran the store for nearly three years. You can still see the work of the store under her watch in the front door window of the Hope & Anchor Pub — she made it for the old Mayflower and the window has survived several incarnations since — or in the intricate stained glass doors of Giovanni’s Restaurant & Convention Center off Bell School Road. That was the biggest job she ever won.

The first year was very tight but a good holiday season put her on solid footing. I’ll always remember her silly grin on Christmas Eve in church that year.

I asked her later what was so funny. Because of a rush of holiday procastinators she had an extremely good day and was sitting there with $2,500 in her purse. She said she was asking God how much of it she should give to the church since she really, really needed the money. I think the church got $100.

In 1997, she entered a booth in the home show at the MetroCentre and sales and people enrolling in stained glass classes really began to take off. We even did some radio advertising. Strangely, the success was a little overwhelming for her. Some people can only work so hard and it was taking longer and longer to keep up. She was actively trying to sell the store when she died suddenly that October at age 53.

I’d only been working at the Register Star one month when she died. My wife, who has a full-time job in the insurance industry, and I spent the next six months running the store with the help of my sister until we could find a buyer.

The buyer hurt our feelings when she said she was going to make major changes. In the end, she changed almost nothing. We didn’t stop in the store for a couple of years. When we did it was like walking in the first day it opened.

The buyer, Shirley McKinney, kept it going and undoubtedly benefitted from the housing boom of much of this decade. She sold it to Linda Kleczkowski a couple of years ago, who took beginner’s classes there. Unfortunately, Kleczkowski’s timing wasn’t nearly as good. This economic downturn is crushing companies big and small.

I already have several keepsakes from the store but will stop in to pick up some more.If you have time, you should too.

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