THE FAMILY STOREFrom Behind the Counter of an Old-fashioned Stationery Store “If you can operate a mechanical pencil, you can operate an office supply store,” Dad said when he took possession of a small-town stationery shop. But running an office supply store was more than a twist and click operation. It involved being at the pulse of every facet of life in small-town Chandler, Arizona. The family store touched the personal lives as well as the business lives of people in the community. From birthings to buryings, from holidays to holy days memorable characters filed in to purchase gifts and greeting cards to commemorate milestone occasions. Businessmen and society women, cowboys and Indians, holy men and heathens came in for their pens and ink, journals and calendars, ledgers and notebooks and left a series of tales, sometimes wry, sometimes zany, sometimes mundane. The Family Store depicts a pivotal era in modern history – the transition from carbon paper to Xerox machines, from typewriters to computers, from slide rules to electronic calculators, from five-cent stamps to fax machines, to the rise of Big-Box stores and the demise of the old fashioned stationers. A collection of essays that will leave you laughing, pondering, or perhaps shedding a tear. The kind of store you will never see again.