Gone Shopping.

According to Family Legend, there’s a long-ago family connection back to the Leonards, but I’m not entirely clear on what it was. Story is that an ancestor was invited to buy in to the store one way or another, but didn’t think they had enough chance of succeeding to get involved. Said ancestor (this is either my grandfather or his father, approximately) responded to the brothers Leonard along the lines of “you boys will never be able to turn a profit running a business like that.” (My branch of the McKees exhibiting its traditional business acumen.)

Not too many Christmases later the phone rang somewhere in the depths of McKee Manor – one of the Leonards calling to say just how much of a profit those boys had turned during the previous year. It was, let us say, a fairly significant figure. The Christmas Call became an ongoing thing – for years. When you zing people good, they tend to remember, and zingers, we’re good at. Investment counseling, maybe not so much.

I do remember Dad, who was somewhat prone to minor exaggeration, telling me several times that if you couldn’t get it at Leonard Brothers, you didn’t really need whatever it was. He may well have had a point… and the museum has a goodly array of examples to prove it.

The big photograph on the wall is the original store, complete with washtubs. If you notice a plethora of products with “Leonards” branding, this is NOT a coincidence. The store’s marketing slogan was “More Merchandise for Less Money” and Leonard’s began offering “house brands” very early on, when name brands became too expensive for many of their customers. The “Leonards” brand covered everything from cigars to clothes to sporting goods to auto supplies.