How one family business kept old things running for 82 years
How one family business kept old things running for 82 years
In the early morning of January 26, 1983, a fire broke out in the attic of Schulze Home Furnishings, a family-owned appliance retailer and repair shop in Richmond, Texas.
“Hours later, the determination was that it was an electrical fire that was started in the upper reaches of the attic by a squirrel who had been chewing on the wrong cord,” said Stacy Schulze, who was eight years old at the time but still remembers the smell of burnt paper from that fire.
“As far as we know, the only [life] lost was that squirrel,” she said.
A local newspaper, the Fort Bend Herald, reported that morning that Schulze Home Furnishings — which had recently celebrated its 50th anniversary — had been “destroyed.” But the Schulzes, who were in the business of fixing old things, set out to rebuild their company.
“One of the things that had to happen in rebuilding the business was going through all those old account books that had been singed, damaged, [or] waterlogged … trying to figure out what was owed by whom,” said Schulze. “There was no backup.”
Some customers, knowing the account books had been damaged, came in to tell them how much they owed. “People came back and said, ‘I’m still good for it and we will keep paying,’” she said.
Stacy Schulze’s grandfather, Arthur D. Schulze, began fixing radios in 1933. “Over the years, as more of the county gained electricity and more electrical appliances were available, he would sell those and fix those,” she said.
Stacy’s father, Kenneth Schulze, eventually took over the business and kept it running until he died in 2015, even as it became more difficult to find parts for the appliances he worked on. “That’s probably what I still take away the most,” said Stacy Schulze. “Keeping something operational is like almost in my DNA.”
Click the audio player above to hear Schulze’s story.
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