By Edward Colimore
In his office at Bellmawr Furniture, Rich Baseman was surrounded by 61 years of memories.
On the walls and shelves were family photos, some of his father and uncle who opened the store in 1945.
He paged through an album showing the landmark Camden County store in its early days and remembered, with a smile, how his parents and uncle once lived in an apartment in what later became the dinette department.
But yesterday – with the display windows on the Black Horse Pike covered with “Going Out of Business Forever” signs – Baseman spoke of good things coming to an end.
“We tried hard to stay alive here,” he said. “There are just too many other places to buy furniture… . I’m not bitter. It’s the nature of things to change.”
Bellmawr Furniture, once one of the few large furniture businesses in the Camden and Gloucester County area, is closing this fall, a victim, the owner says, of mega-chain stores now ringing it.
Baseman and a prospective buyer, who hopes to turn the 80,000-square-foot property into an indoor public storage facility, will take their proposal to Bellmawr’s Planning Board on Oct. 2 for consideration, Mayor Frank Filipek said.
And with the closing and sale approaching, a feeling of nostalgia and sadness pervaded the store yesterday. Longtime customers, some from many miles away, were coming back to pay their respects and look for bargains. And many of the 27 employees were contemplating a future away from longtime coworkers who had become like family.
“It is a landmark,” said customer Bonnie Downs, 57, of Mount Ephraim. “I can’t imagine anything else here. I bought my first kitchen set at Bellmawr Furniture 35 years ago. I still have the chairs.”
Downs’ mother, Mary Stone, 85, a longtime borough resident who was shopping yesterday for a love seat, couldn’t believe that the store was going out of business after so many decades.
“It’s part of Bellmawr,” she said. “I remember it when it had a toy department.”
At the end of World War II, when Baseman’s father, Harry, and Uncle Cy opened the business, it was a kind of general store, with furniture and a large toy department. For a time, it had a caged live monkey and Punch and Judy puppet show as attractions.
But as returning soldiers established households and the baby boom got under way, the Basemans’ store focused more on furniture and quickly grew. From 10,000 square feet, it expanded several times until the showroom took up 50,000 square feet and the warehouse 30,000 more.
More workers were hired, and many of them stayed on for decades.
“It wasn’t just a paycheck,” said inventory manager Joan Applebee, who has worked at Bellmawr for 22 years. “If that’s all it was, I would have left long ago for a bigger company with more room for advancement.
“It was like a family here. I saw more of people here than I did of my family. You knew everybody’s story. That’s the hard part.”
Sales manager Al Fitzpatrick, 75, of Gloucester Township, said he “will miss coming to work most of all. I had it nice here,” said Fitzpatrick who worked at the store for about 25 years.
“The staff was shocked and everybody felt badly, though we knew something was in the wind. We’ve been here a long time and don’t want to leave.”
Baseman, 56, of Voorhees, ran the business from 1980 to 1993, when he purchased it from his father. By then, at least 17 major furniture stores had opened in his trading area and were spending money on advertising, he said.
“My father didn’t have that many stores open in the previous 40 years,” said Baseman, a former prosecutor and defense lawyer in Wilmington. “Before he passed away in the 1990s, he said, ‘Rich, I don’t know how the heck you’re making it.’ I said, ‘We’re doing the best we can.’ But it was very hard to get our message across.”
Other independent furniture businesses began closing, and factories, fearing that they wouldn’t have enough distribution sites, began opening their own stores. A few weeks ago, after years of disappointing sales, Baseman finally gathered his staff together in small groups to break the news of the closing.
“I told them they had done an outstanding job, but we were no longer getting good results and it wasn’t their fault,” he said. “They were very disappointed but very nice. You can be the greatest surfer in the world, but if a 60-foot tidal wave comes up behind you, it doesn’t matter how much skill you have.”
Since the closing signs went up last month, Baseman said, “a lot of people have stopped in to express sorrow and disappointment, especially older people who lived here all their lives. We’ve also had people come from as far away as Maryland. It’s gratifying.”
Customer Kim Lucas, 40, of Runnemede, said she was “sorry to see it go. You could always count on coming here and being treated fairly.”
But across the pike, Paul DeAngelis saw the closing signs on the furniture store and knew the pressures facing a business. The owner of DeAngelis Auto Repair, he has run his shop for years and worked on Baseman’s cars.
“I understand,” he said. “Rich has got to look at this from the dollars and cents, but it’s still sad.”
