Ben’s Five and Dime closed for good Saturday evening, putting a period to some 77 years of dime-store retailing in downtown Perry. Owner Andrea Tunink and longtime staff member Lori Mallicoat were busy up to the very end with customers eager for close-out prices.
“We were hoping for a lot more years than five,” Tunink said stoically. “But times are just weird. We’ve said that a lot lately. It’s interesting times we live in, I think.”
The roots of dime-store retailing in Perry reach to the early post-World War II period, when P. E. “Gene” Yates in 1947 opened Yates Variety Store at 1211 Second St. in downtown Perry, on the ground floor beneath the Elks club.
In February 1952, Yates moved his family to Ames to operate a motel on U.S. Highway 30, and Ray D. Johannsen and Winifred Johannsen bought Yates’ Perry business and changed its name to Ben Franklin.
The Johannsens had opened a Ben Franklin store in Denison in the mid-1930s and operated it for 18 years until the store was destroyed in a large fire in the town’s commercial district. They later thought they would try their luck as owners of the first Ben Franklin in Perry.
Post-World War II America was the golden age of dime-store retailing. Sam Walton of Walmart fame got started by running Ben Franklins. Similarly, Walt Soll left off working as a school district superintendent in La Porte City, Iowa, and moved into more lucrative line of buying and fixing up buildings around Iowa and turning them into Ben Franklin stores in various towns around Iowa, from Cherokee to Britt to Northwood to Belmond — to Adel.
Soll and his wife, Blanche Soll, had a daughter named Betty. In 1952 Betty met and married Philip “Chick” Schwarzkopf, a Koean War veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and the Schwarzkopfs soon bought the Adel Ben Franklin store in December 1954 and then the Perry store from the Johannsens in 1968.
Since the Schwarzkopfs could not be in both Perry and Adel at the same time, they hired Harry and Betty Cooper of Knoxville to manage the Perry store starting in June 1968. The business thrived, and the Coopers helped supervise Ben Franklin’s move from 1211 Second St. to its present location at 1221 Second St. in 1973, and they oversaw the expansion of the store in 1977.
Chick and Betty had a daughter named Jan, who grew up to attend Loras College in Dubuque and then to meet and marry Jay Pattee, and together they ran the Perry store from 1980, when the Coopers retired, to 2019, when Tunink bought them out.
Jan and Jay Pattee saw the store through some hard times for Perry retailing, such as the opening of the Iowa Highway 141 bypass in 1980, followed by the economic depression during U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s first term, sometimes called simply “the farm crisis of the ’80.”
Tunink, a Perry native, bought the store in 2019, the year of Perry’s 150th anniversary as a city. She gave strong support to Ben’s Five and Dime for five years, investing much passion and vigor, but the climate for brick-and-mortar retailing has changed permanently thanks to Amazon and chains of dollar stores.
“This was my first job in high school,” Tunink said wistfully, as someone now with high-school-age children of her own. “Living here all my life, I know communities go through waves, and every community goes through cycles.”
Along with Saturday’s bargain hunters were many well wishers, cheering Tunink and Mallicoat on toward their next cycles.
