Small business, but a big impact
There was an irony spill to clean up in Aisle 5 a week ago Friday.
On the same day that Owen’s North reopened after the finishing touches were put on its transformation into a food megastore, Carl Repp, whose family was synonymous with independent grocering in Huntington, was laid to rest at Mt. Hope Cemetery.
In an age when food shoppers expect an ever-larger selection of goods at ever-lower prices, supermarkets on the scale of Owen’s and Marsh are filling the bill. Mom and pop groceries that used to be fixtures in almost every Huntington neighborhood are long gone. And convenience stores, catering to a different kind of customer with different needs, are no substitute.
Carl Repp was 103 years old when he died, and he contributed to Huntington all his life. He was one of the “sons” of the Repp and Sons markets in Huntington. The flagship store was on the triangle at Division and Guilford streets; others were at Etna Avenue and Wright Street and on East Tipton Street at Wilkerson Street. Carl Repp’s father, David, started in the business in 1901. Sons Carl and Meredith worked for their dad as teenagers and, when they graduated from college, joined the family business.
That was in the days — the first half of the 20th century — when a small grocery could be a family business, provided it was run as well as as the Repps ran theirs. The Guilford Street store contained a large butcher shop and even a milk-bottling plant. The replacement store the Repps built in 1937 on the northside triangle was a marvel of modern retail architecture at the time, complete with a row of glass blocks near the roofline that allowed extra light into the building. You could also fill ‘er up outside, with Repp employees pumping the gas for you.
Bob Hammel, who became one of Indiana’s premier sportswriters, stocked shelves and ran the check-out register at the Repp store on Tipton Street the summer before his junior year in high school. He recalls a business built on service and trust.
“The Bechstein and Repp operations were pretty similar,” he said in a recent phone conversation, evoking the name of another familiar independent Huntington family grocery. “These stores always had good meat operations. They were places where you could run a bill … and get delivery.”
Hammel toted grocery orders to homes within a couple of blocks of the stores. There seldom were deliveries beyond that range because you’d quickly bump into the territory of some other corner store.
“There was this strong loyalty between the stores and their customers,” Hammel said. “They were very much part of the neighborhoods.”
In 1966, the year I moved to Huntington, there were still 15 neighborhood groceries to complement the Marsh, Kroger and A&P supermarkets in town. The Repp stores had been sold five years earlier.
Over the years, Huntington consumers forgot about the Repp groceries, but Carl Repp never forgot the community that had given his family its daily bread. He’d taken the modest earnings from his career in the food business and invested wisely. In 2000, Repp presented a gift of $50,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Huntington County — a gift that, at the time, represented about one-quarter of the organization’s start-up budget.
A year later, at age 100, Repp presented the Huntington YMCA with a check for $10,000 to be used for scholarships to teach children to swim.
“He felt Huntington had given him a good living and he wanted to pay back,” explained Repp’s daughter, Carolyn Knapton, who returned to her hometown several years ago. “He had a very good life and he helped a lot of people.”
“He was a true gentleman,” said a friend and admirer of Repp’s, Huntington businessman Dick Poole. “I’d spend a lot of time with him, listening to him talk about how business was done back then. He was fascinating.”
Somehow it’s hard to picture folks 50 years from now waxing nostalgic about the cavernous supermarkets where they did their shopping around the turn of the 21st century. Charging food these days is done on plastic tucked in a wallet rather than of a ticket kept under the check-out register. Groceries are still sacked, but delivery is only as far as the trunk or back seat of your car. And customer loyalty can depend on what items are featured in this week’s coupon flyer.
Carl Repp’s career can remind us of how business was done in a simpler time, in a more personalized manner. His legacy of generosity will be a further reminder of how small businesses can and will continue to change this community for the better.
by Mike Perkins, editor of The Herald-Press
from the Huntington, Indiana Herald-Press, June 28, 2004