Spindler’s Hardware Opens on Main Street; Adele Spindler Says ‘If We Don’t Have It, You Probably Don’t Need It’

I WANT TO BEGIN with a disclosure: I own this store and I write this column. Rod Black has told me this is a potential conflict of interest and that I should be transparent about it. I agree. I am transparent about it. I own a hardware store. I write a column about local businesses. Sometimes those will overlap. When they do, I will say so. Today they are overlapping entirely because the most interesting new business in this town, in my informed opinion, is mine.

This is the sort of statement that would be more convincing coming from someone else. I am aware of that. I will write about other businesses in future issues and be scrupulously fair about them. Today, however, is the first issue, and the first issue is opening day, and on opening day I am writing about the store I opened.

My grandfather opened Spindler’s Hardware in Antigo, Wisconsin, in 1952, in a building on the main commercial street that is now a cell phone accessories shop. Emil Spindler was sixty-one years old when he retired in 1978 and handed the store to my mother, Connie, who ran it for forty-one years and who would have run it longer except that her knees gave out in 2019 and she told me, over coffee, that it was time. I bought it from her. She gave me what she said was a fair price. I have not independently verified this because she is my mother and I trust her judgment, which is also a conflict of interest I am disclosing.

My grandfather could tell you the correct fastener for any application without consulting a reference. He had this knowledge in his hands and in his memory in a way that was, by the time I knew him, inseparable from his personality. You could bring him a piece of wood with a stripped hole and he would look at it for three seconds and say: “Deck screw, stainless, #8, an inch and a quarter, countersink it.” He was right every time. I watched him work for twenty years before I understood that what I was watching was a form of intelligence — specific, practical, embodied in the material — that you could not acquire from a book or a website but only from the slow accumulation of solving problems in hardware.

I can do that now. It took twenty years after his retirement, and about four years after my mother’s, and several hundred encounters with people who had the wrong fastener in a difficult situation, but I can identify the correct screw for a given application without consulting a box. This skill is, in my experience, funny to most people until they need a specific screw at 6 p.m. on a Friday, at which point it becomes the most important skill in the room.

I moved the store here because I believed in the project. I have a Bespoke AI Model — I was one of the early fittings, through a professional connection — and I find it genuinely useful in the way that hardware is useful: it does specific things very well, and the more specifically you direct it, the better it works. A tool is not a miracle. A tool is a precision instrument for a precision problem. I understand that. The people making these tools understand that. That is why I am here.

The store at 122 Main Street stocks full lines of fasteners, plumbing supplies, power tools, hand tools, paint (with in-store mixing), and garden materials. I do not stock decorative items, seasonal displays, or what I call “the gift section” that larger hardware stores have added in the last decade. “If it’s in my store,” my grandfather used to say, “it’s because someone needs it to fix something.” I share this philosophy. If you need to fix something, we probably have what you need. If you need a decorative gourd or a monogrammed doormat, the gift shop on Third Street should be opening by October.

Hours are Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Sundays, per my grandfather, whose position on Sundays was theological and firm. If you have a Sunday hardware emergency, which does happen, please call me at (715) 555-0133, and I will do my best.

I am the only employee for now. That will change as the town grows. For the time being: if you come in and you cannot find someone, I am probably in the back. Call out. I will hear you.

Under New Management (Adele Spindler) profiles local businesses every Thursday. This is not a conflict of interest. It is a disclosure. Spindler’s Hardware & Sundries: 122 Main St., (715) 555-0133. Mon–Sat 7 a.m.–6 p.m.