The Years of Living Dangerously

The footage revealed a conflicted perpetrator--a man taking money from the till, then putting it back; a man picking up the cash box, then disappearing out of the frame. Finally, the camera did not lie. Meredith's employee confessed when confronted. He had stolen $5,500 in cash.

The lack of trust between people, the lack of conviction in them, still eats at Meredith. He now makes it a policy not to socialize with any of his partners. Ask him about personnel, and he will nudge his office door closed before heaving a deep sigh. "There's no respect today. It's all 'me, me, me.' 'When do I get a raise?' 'How much vacation do I get?' Nobody asks, 'What can I do for the business?'" Meredith now has a simple remedy: he prefers to employ older, more experienced workers. "The other day, I hired someone who's 68."

"To survive in a business like this, you'd better be sure you got a good partner, and I don't mean a business partner," says Meredith. His partner is Pat, to whom he has been married for 34 years. When I first met Pat, an erect and handsome woman, she eyed me carefully. "What's this article about? We're private people."

I told her that I was interested in the business.

"Well," she said, "the business is part of our private life."

The next day, over lunch, Pat was less wary, but no less acute. She wanted to know what I thought, what conclusions I have drawn in my travels as a business writer. Then she and her husband told me a little about their lives.

Doug and Pat have four children. Three are teachers, and one is a landscape architect. Pat says, "We told them, Do something you enjoy, and don't marry for money." Doug completes the thought, laughing: "And they took us too literally."

Pat works about 20 hours a week in the store. She also promotes literacy in the county. She says she is leery of computers. What will happen, she wonders, in a technologically driven future bereft of people inspired to make art?

Pat buys crafts for the business, a thankless task given that Wal-Mart, practically next door, often sells the exact items in bulk below her cost. She recalls one such case concerning felt fabric: "I kept looking at it and wondering how they could afford to charge so much less. For the longest time, I couldn't figure it out. They looked exactly the same." Then one day the sales rep was in town. Pat asked, "What's going on here?"

He disclosed that Wal-Mart often sold goods manufactured to its specifications. Look more closely, he said. And she did. The thread count in the Wal-Mart fabric was 120 threads per square inch. Meanwhile, Bay Pharmacies' felt had 144.

A Lake in the Woods

Doug and Pat Meredith grew up in the woods of northern Wisconsin. She's from the Hurley area, and he's from Hurley's sister city, Mellen, in Ashland County. The area once had a population of almost 18,000. Now there are only 6,500 residents, and 65% of the population is over age 65. The iron mines have long since closed, having lost out to lower-cost foreign sources. Technology has transfigured a marginal timber industry, with half the number of men now able to cut twice as much forest.

Doug and Pat first met when he was 12 and she was 8. Their families had cabins on a small lake in the woods. She graduated second in her high school class. He chose to pursue much of his education elsewhere. "I always loved being outside," he says. He would often leave school after lunch to hunt, fish, or trap. In the summers, he fought forest fires.

The lake of their youth centers their life still. Once a month they drive up to the cabin for a restorative weekend. They eschew snowmobiles and opt for cross-country skis. Meredith splits his own wood and makes his own sausage and sauerkraut in 100-pound batches. Until just five years ago, the cabin had no plumbing or electricity; most of the amenities it has now Meredith installed himself.

Back in the 1950s, after high school, he went into the army for two years. He came back to run the store in Mellen that his father inherited from his father. Then Doug's father had a disabling stroke, and Doug took over. As Cold War tensions wound tighter around Berlin in 1961, Doug received orders to ship out. But he had already served. His letters of protest went unheeded. As induction day approached, he had no choice but to sell the store's inventory at 50% off and close down. Three days before he was to ship out, the Pentagon caught its mistake and revoked the order. But by then, it was too late. The merchandise was gone, and with it went the customers and then the family business.

Maybe it didn't matter. Doug and Pat were married in September 1962, and north-woods Wisconsin was changing. The last iron mine closed in April. Everyone was heading south to find work in the auto plants of Kenosha and Janesville. "I couldn't see how I would be able to raise a family there." He knew he had to quit the country for jobs working in other people's stores, in other people's places like Chicago and Milwaukee.

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