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Texas Treasure Businesses
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Mauritz Hardware Company The Ganado Hardware Company business originally opened May 15, 1902, by Shutt Brothers and operated for two years. Sold to A. Miks who operated for about a year. Then sold to Mauritz Brothers & Moore Lancaster. Business was incorporated on 8/31/1910. Moore Lancaster sold his interest to Mauritz Brothers in August, 1912. The corporation was dissolved, but continued to operate as a business. Mauritz-Wells Company incorporated October 30, 1933, with H. W. Wells as managing partner. Corporation was dissolved February 20, 1942, and Wells sold his interest to the Mauritz Brothers. The name of the company was then changed to "The Mauritz Company" and the three Mauritz Brothers and their trust estates were the owners. On May 1, 1945, W. J. Dierschke acquired 20% interest in the company and was manager. On May 1, 1946, he acquired an additional 20%. On May 1, 1945, Roy Selby acquired 1/12th interest in the company. On October 31, 1947, W. J. Dierschke sold his interest back to the other partners. The original hardware store burned down in August 1947. A new building was built with a grand opening held on November 27, 1948. The Company was at one time a Chevrolet dealership, sold hardware goods, appliances, lumber, lawn mowers, tractors and equipment and was a fuel distributor. The Company was incorporated May 14, 1948, for a term of 50 years, under the name of Mauro Corporation dba The Mauritz Company. The Company renewed its Certificate of Corporation on June 11, 2008 under the name of Mauritz Hardware Company. The Mauritz Hardware Company continues to operate today with the Mauritz Family descendants and Selby Family descendants as owners.
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Ganado Theatre
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Bep's Auto Supply Bep's Auto Supply NAPA has been a family owned and operated business for 92 years. In 1926, Fred Charles Boepple bought a service station in Ganado. Bep's Service Station sold gasoline and oil and worked on anything that had an engine. After graduation from high school in May 1953, Fred's son Mitch joined the crew at Bep's. He had been working summers, waiting until he was old enough to work full time. In 1954, Fred decided the business had outgrown the two little buildings they occupied so he built a new larger facility on the same site. Desiring to travel and fish, the founder and his wife turned the keys over to their son, Mitch, who took over the day to day operations. Mitch's wife, Molly, assumed the duties of bookkeeper. When Mitch and Molly's son, Robby, graduated in 1980, he came to work for a couple of weeks while his dad was on a hunting trip. He stayed on to learn the business and in a short time was put in charge of the parts department, with Mitch running the shop. Mitch and Molly sold the business to Robby and his wife Penny after 52 years of ownership.
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Ganado Telephone Company The history of the Ganado Telephone Company begins in 1908 with its first recorded owners, Oliver Dunlap and Rector Washington. Dunlap, a tobacco-chewer who frequently lounged in front of the phone office whittling a pine stick with a single-blade Barlow pocketknife, drove around Ganado in a Hupmobile. His more conservative partner and brother-in-law, Washington, rode a bicycle and courted his future wife with gifts of raisins instead of flowers. Today the company is headed by Raymond A. Young and Young's wife Jean, who was operating the switchboard in 1948 when Raymond came home from the war and fell in love with her. Their son, Royce, general manager of the company, and their daughter, Paula, who is assistant office manager, grew up in the phone office and represent the fourth generation of this family's ownership in the independent field. The first of the Youngs to get into the business were Raymond's grandparents and aunts who were brought to Louise in 1924 by pioneer phone man Frank Green to run the Louise Telephone Company. Green, much beloved in the area, had a strong interest in helping young people and running greyhounds. He spent much of his spare time with hounds and boys, hunting rabbits and passing along a little of his philosophy. Green soon sold the Louise office and in the fall of 1926 he bought out Dunlap and Washington for $4,918 and moved the Ganado office from 313 W. Putnam to a 2 1/2 story house on Devers. The new location was a mail-ordered prefab from Sears and Roebuck, a large beautiful house still standing today. Young's grandparents moved to Garwood to operate Green's switchboard there. In the spring of 1944, Roy and Gertrude Young, Raymond's parents, bought one-half interest in the combined Ganado-LaWard Telephone Company, then owned by Green. At the end of the war, Green's son Kenneth bought out his father's interest in the partnership. In 1948, the partnership was dissolved, with Kenneth Green and his wife Vicena taking over the LaWard Company, and Young's parents, Gertrude and Roy, the Ganado office.
Manual magneto operation was difficult after the war. There were no telephones to be bought, and Young remembers that he and his dad would cut wall phones in half and refinish them, using surplus automatic electric handsets to make their own phones. They bought short pieces of drop wire and spliced them together to install phones. In junk yards, they salvaged drop wire, p-clamps and anything else they could find. A 14-foot cedar post could be purchased for a dollar fifty. Some months, Young and his father bought 25 or 30 and used them to replace the 2x2 stakes that were tied to fence posts. Eventually, traffic through the old magneto switchboards grew too heavy. The Ganado Company with its three Stromberg-Carlson positions and one small OBX board to answer and record calls found it hard to keep operators, and nerve-wracking to train new ones. Increased oil and agricultural activity and the many returning veterans to the area forced the company to take out a loan of $60,000 and put into service a Stromberg-Carlson 300 terminal/line switch with a modified #3 toll board. Sufficient cable was placed in town for dial service, but the rural area was left on magneto to be cut over a line at a time. In 1964, the Ganado Company retired its operators in favor of unattended status. All of the toll since that time has been handled by operators in Victoria. Ganado's first REA Loan was approved in 1965 for the amount of $610,000. This was to include a new Stromberg-Carlson switch, terminal/line CAMA, all buried one-party core cable and common mode. The Ganado Telephone Company was the second in the state, following Riviera Telephone Company, to have a dedicated flat rate cable system, and the first in the state to install C. M. O. Mobil telephone service was established in Ganado in 1966: dial system, push-button, push to talk. Ten years later, a new IMTS system was installed. In June of 1988, Ganado installed a Northern Telecom S. M. S. 10 switch and at the same time began replacing all air core cable. 11.2 miles of fiber cable was installed from West EAB to Louise. Currently Young's company is cutting in a drop and insert, and planning to carry ATT traffic from Ganado to Corpus and Corpus to Ganado. By today's standards, telephone service in the postwar years when Raymond Young and Kenneth Green were shooting ducks and geese off ponds and rice paddies seems pretty primitive. A phone customer was about as lucky to complete a call in those days as he was to get to town if it rained. All lines were ground return, one wire grounded at each end. Subscribers had to pour water on the grounds during dry weather. All service in the rural area was by party line with code ringing. Each customer had a code combination of short and long rings. Up to twenty customers shared a line with all twenty phones ringing for every call. Toll calls on short distance were worked by a few lines to neighboring towns. Calls beyond these towns were passed and worked by Bell operators in hot competition to see who could complete the calls first. Delays were often so lengthy businessmen gave Central their call lists early in the day and hoped they could be completed by closing time. The Dark Ages, we say, yet today's technology isn't all new. At Raymond Young's office in the early fifties, Call Forwarding, for example, could be as simple as a note left at the switchboard: Doc at Hill's playing bridge. A customer up all night with a croupy child could leave a Call Waiting: Don't ring me, Annie, I'm napping till 3--or another one commonly used by suffering husbands, Call me, Annie, when my wife gets off the phone. Almost any day on the county party lines there were Conference Calls, and Sorry, Sadie, no more long distance calls till you pay your bill was an effective means of Toll Denial. "Plugging Annie" Martin, Ganado's "Central" for many years, would cheerfully tell you what was on the menu at the boarding house, what was playing at the picture show, and who could deliver wood. Enhanced service? They had it then--with a few precautions. Nobody dared call Annie after 10 o'clock unless the house was on fire or the cows were out. In 1953, Annie Martin's salary was one thousand dollars. In Oliver Dunlap's time, he might have looked up from his whittling and found the yard full of goats, watermelons or chickens--what folks paid with when they couldn't pay money. In Ganado, as elsewhere, the business "ain't" what it used to be" "Some things we miss," says Raymond Young, "and some things we don't!" In 1966, he and his wife Jean took over the family business. Two years before that, when the company for the first time went unattended, they enjoyed a Thanksgiving without Raymond having to take turkey and dressing to his mother, or Jean serving at the switchboard so other employees could be home with their families. The sixty years the Young family has been in the telephone business has been a time of great change and accomplishment in the industry. Young admits it's been a lot of hard work. "But it's been very rewarding in many ways. I thank God," he says, "for the friendship and help of all the wonderful people with whom we've been associated."
Taken from Hello Texas: A History of Telephone
in The Lone Star State, edited by Jerry F. Hall, 1990, pp
162-163
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55 Years, a Head at a Time Ed Kacer was working as an oil gauger in 1957, barbering part time while at the Houston barbering school when he heard that Ganado needed a barber. "I had a chance to go to Bay City but the barber there was younger," started Kacer. "Here, the barber was older and I had a chance to buy him out. I took over a year and a half later. I came over to talk to the barber here Friday evening, about 3 o'clock. I walked in the shop, he looked at me over the top of his glasses and he said, 'Can I help you sonny?' I said, "Yessir, I'm going to be a barber.'" That was the first time Kacer cut hair in Ganado and he hasn't stopped since. "The shop was full, all the kids were getting hair cuts, so he said 'You got your tools with you?' I said 'Yessir, they're back in my car.' He told me to go get them and set up in the front chair. "I told him 'Sir, I ain't going to take my barber test till Tuesday.' He said 'Never mind, jump up over there, I'm going to find out if you're going to make a barber or not.'" Kacer went to work that evening from three to six o'clock and said he must have cut eight heads of hair. "We closed the shop at six and he asked me what I was going to do Saturday. I said 'Nothing.' So he said to come back and work. I cut hair all day Saturday. we were making a dollar a head then, and I made 28 cuts and had $28 dollars. I thought I had all the money in the world then. He was offered a job in the shop after that. He took his barber's test that Tuesday. Kacer, now a father of six with two grandchildren and married nearly as long as he has been open, has been cutting hair in Ganado for 55 years at the shop bearing his name. Raised on a farm near El Maton and from a family of eight boys and four girls, Kacer was just 20 when he finished school. "I've got a lot of customers I've been cutting [their hair] for over 50 years and cutting their third, fourth generation. "I still go out, run a little bit, jog a little bit. I don't know how long the good Lord will let me work. I feel pretty good. I've put in 55 years, so I'll see how far I can go in the other 55. I appreciate all the business people have given me and Ganado supported me." Jackson County Herald-Tribune, Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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2019 photos courtesy of G. W. Franzen
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Copyright 2019-
Present by source contributors |
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| Created Apr 18, 2019 |
Updated Apr 20, 2019 |
Kenneth
and Raymond, still a little frisky after the war, sometimes put off
pursuing a case of trouble when the ponds in the rice fields around
Ganado filled up with ducks, but generally these men in the
telephone business earned their money.
