End of an Era

It’s the end of an era in Columbia Falls.

The Klothes Kloset thrift store at the north end of Nucleus Avenue will close in December, after about 70 years of giving back to the community.

The nonprofit organization simply doesn’t have the volunteers to continue anymore, noted Betty Henneberg, president of Columbia Falls Church Women United, which owns the building.

Church Women United is a group of women from St. Richard’s Catholic Church, All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and The Columbia Falls United Methodist Church.

The Kloset initially opened in the Episcopal Church, decades ago, offering second-hand clothes and deeply discounted rates for area families.

Proceeds from sales, in turn, went back to a host of civic organizations.

“There were fewer women in the workforce (at the time) and many more older women to assure good attendance,” vice president Marion Fisher said in a history of the organization.

Then the late Ruth Renfrow brought up the idea of of a resale retail store operated by the Church Women to raise funds for a 1970 Columbia Falls High School band trip to Europe. Renfrow was a go-getter and she found a small building that was formerly a drive-in restaurant on Nucleus Avenue to house the store, Fisher recalled in an interview last week.

The Ministerial Association loaned the women $25 for the first rent.

“High finance for 1970,” Fisher recalled.

The store was open one day a week and the late Barbara Lawrence was host for several years, baking cookies and making coffee for the ladies.

The band made it there and back to Europe and the Kloset expanded. The women would cut old cotton clothes into rags for multiple industrial businesses and mills in town. They also made lap robes for veterans.

In 1976 they bought a former lumber yard at the end of Nucleus, where the store still resides today. It was a success and by 1988 the mortgage was paid off.

Twenty years ago on Tuesday and Thursdays the place would be bustling with women making robes or cutting rags.

The store, which was open just two days a week, still gave between $13,000 to $25,000 a year back to community causes, including the food bank, support for homeless teens and a host of other organizations.

But slowly, but surely, it started to lose volunteers. Women have to work nowadays to make ends meet for most families and many older women have died, the women explained.

The store has one employee — Jamie Meyer.

“I love this job,” Meyer said last week. “I wish I was retiring. But I have to find something else.”

The building is up for sale and the proceeds will go back to the churches, which, in turn, plan to support the same organizations it has for decades, just with one larger, but sadly final award. A buyer hasn’t been found yet.

All of the women said it was the people that made the place special over the years.

Fisher’s favorite part of the store boils down to one word for her.

“Belonging,” she said.

Fisher is 93-1/2 and she keeps her humor.

“In Denmark you celebrate half-years, because you don’t know if you’re going to make it,” she said with a smile.

“I’m going to miss all the people,” said Marie Clark, who worked there 10 years. “They were fun and you learned a lot.”