More Than Hardware: Nelson’s at the heart of community’s history

When Gordy Nelson’s mother heard he was opening a hardware store in Baileys Harbor in 1945, she laid her head on the table and cried. “How can a good Baptist boy like you move from Ellison Bay to a place with more taverns than churches,” she wailed.

The decision proved to be a good one for Gordy and for Baileys Harbor. Over 65 years, the Nelsons and their business have been among the town’s biggest boosters – sometimes in remarkable ways.

The façade of the Baileys Harbor store in earlier days.

Some years ago, Gordy noticed members of the town board measuring his basement doors. When he asked what they were doing, they said they needed a place to park the new fire truck donated by the Boynton Estate. The truck fit, and Gordy received $5 a month rent and the privilege of serving as fire chief. A bit later, the county building inspector came to Gordy in amazement. “There’s a fire truck in your basement!” he exclaimed. Gordy allowed that he was aware of this. To ease the inspector’s concerns, a firewall was built, paid for by Gordy but reimbursed through a one-year rent increase passed on to the town.

The partnership between Nelson’s and the town has now spanned 65 years.

“Baileys Harbor has always been a great neighbor,” says Gordy’s son Gary, “and we’ve tried to be a good neighbor in return. A decade ago, when the town lacked enough land to build the new marina, we sold 45 feet behind our building and gave up our riparian rights. In return, I have a restricted easement for motel parking and two boat slips in perpetuity, which I think means forever.”

Not only the town, but countless business people depend on the Nelson Shopping Center. Barb Anschutz of Anschutz Plumbing, and a member of the town board, says that Nelson’s has been the heart of Baileys Harbor for years.

“The guys who work for us would be lost if Nelson’s wasn’t here,” she says. “We get everything we can from them, and they’re always willing to order things in bulk that we aren’t able to obtain on our own. They’re a great asset to us.”

The Nelsons keep it in the bloodline. Gordy Nelson (left) passed the business on to Gary (center) who hopes to someday pass it down to his son Adam (right).

Bob Brandriff, a local carpenter, agrees.

“There are so few hardware stores like this. It’s an absolute treasure,” he says. “I can’t believe how often I go there. What separates them from everyone else is service. They don’t just point you to an item, they take you to it. And I can’t count the number of women who’ve told me that the first thing their husbands do when they arrive in Door County for the summer is to go to Nelson’s to walk up and down the aisles to see what’s new.”

There is always something new, despite the fact that it’s hard to imagine one more thing that can’t already be found in the towering shelves that line narrow aisles on both levels. That basement where the fire truck used to park, by the way, was shoveled out by hand by Gordy, and it is now a veritable maze of merchandise. No shoppers have been reported missing, but if one was it wouldn’t surprise. One can, of course, find every type of hardware imaginable, along with dishes, books, craft supplies and…clothing. (Yes, there’s a fitting booth.) As one local housewife observed, “If they sold bread and milk, we could live out of Nelson’s!”

After Gordy married Phyllis Gustafson in 1948, his family grew to include five children and Phyllis’s mother. With a short season in a small town, it was hard to make a living for eight people. For several years, the family operated a laundromat in the basement of the store with 12 – 15 washers and four big dryers. The charge for washing, drying and folding a load of clothes was 75 cents. Gordy drove a strawberry truck for Phil Erickson, down to Milwaukee and back overnight. He drove a Baileys Harbor school bus for years and also served as constable and justice of the peace.

“As a kid,” Gary says, “I thought Dad was doing all these different jobs for fun. Later, I realized how hard he worked to make a living for all of us.”

Gordy Nelson got his start in business with a hamburger stand in Gills Rock in the 1940s.

As busy as he was, Gordy always found time for community service with the Baileys Harbor Lions Club, the Sister Bay Baptist Church, the Door County Chamber of Commerce and, for more than 20 years, the Gibraltar Board of Education.

Grandma Gustafson sank her life savings into the second story of the family home built next to the store. In Minnesota, she’d lived near a small river that flooded regularly, and she looked warily at Lake Michigan, near their back door. Gordy assured her there was no way it would ever flood. A year later, a violent seiche, or surge, hit the lakeshore, inundating Ridges Road, tossing boats onto roads in Ephraim…and flooding Nelson’s basement. As Gordy, in hip boots, attempted damage control, he looked up to see Grandma in an upstairs window, slowly shaking her head.

Phyllis and all five kids worked in the store, but only Gary was committed to continuing the family business. He loves the store, but not the bookkeeping. Fortunately his brother-in-law, Paul Burgess, a bookkeeper for Beneficial Finance in New Jersey, was eager to move back to the Midwest, so the family built a second store south of Ephraim. Paul runs it and keeps the books for both locations, and his wife, Janice, is the buyer for all the things that make Nelson’s a shopping center, not just a hardware store.

Nelson’s became a True Value store in 1965, a major turning point for its operations. True Value has its own trucks – a major advantage, because without that affiliation the Nelson’s often had to wait for a common carrier to have a full load for Door County to recharge its inventory. But by the mid-‘80s True Value required each store to have a computer system.

“Computers forced my parents out of the business,” Gary says. “It now took 10 keystrokes to sell a newspaper, 12 if the customer didn’t have exact change. Although there were other things they could do in the store, they were no longer interested in working at the checkout counter.”

For years, Gordy and Phyllis went to Florida for two or three weeks each winter, and when they returned, Gary and his wife, Peg, got away for two or three. Eventually, the senior Nelsons’ time stretched to four or five weeks, while vacation time for Gary and Peg kept shrinking. “My folks graciously let go of the reins,” Gary says. But Gordy was a true entrepreneur to the end. When a July 4 parade in the mid-1990s was inundated with rain, he went up and down the street selling trash bags for 75 cents and showing parents how to create ponchos for their children. He died in 2002, and Phyllis has lived at Scandia Village Retirement Center for about five years. “The day before she moved there, she helped us with freight,” Gary recalls. “I asked if she planned to come back to help the next day, and she said, ‘I’d rather not!’ ”

With Gordy and Phyllis gone, the family home became the Nelson Lakeview Motel, with five suites and one single room. Peg manages that business and helps with the store. Son Adam is following in the footsteps of his grandpa and dad as a volunteer fireman and full-time employee of Nelson’s. Sixty-five years after Gordy started the business, Adam will be the third generation to take over its operation.

“Maybe one of these days,” Gary jokes, “Peg and I can start spending four or five weeks in Florida.”

Editor’s Note: Some of the information for this article was taken from a presentation organized by the Baileys Harbor Historical Society about Nelson’s Shopping Center on July 14.