AMHERST, Ohio -- Howard Mowcomber remembers the day in 1971 when his father announced he was closing his Ben Franklin craft store and looking for someone to take over.
"I said 'What about me?'" Mowcomber recalls. "My dad smiled at me and said 'I've been waiting for you to say that.' "
The younger Mowcomber has been running the combination hobby shop/fish and bird pet store ever since.
The shop, at 183 Park Ave. in Amherst, was built in 1906. It offers hundreds of car model kits, model trains, rockets and tons of other hobby items stacked floor to ceiling. There's also the constant background sound of the chirping of parakeets, parrots and other birds from the back of the store.
Mowcomber sometimes has to open his doors seven days a week to shoppers.
"I have dedicated customers who have been coming here for decades," Mowcomber said. "They could buy things online, but instead they come here and I appreciate their loyalty."
In return, Mowcomber, 69, offers his expertise.
"Let's say someone buys a train set on line and suddenly it's not working right," he said. "What do they do? Pack it up and return it. We sold someone a train set over Christmas and it developed a problem. He brought it in here and I spent two hours figuring out what was wrong and replacing a bad controller. That's just what we do."
Mowcomber sells things that are hard to find anywhere else and every now and then he surprises his customers. He recently brought out several dozen model car kits that were in storage since the early 1990's. Pristine model kits for a '62 Bel Air, a '78 Corvette and the ever-popular '56 Chevy are stacked along a back wall. He does not expect them to last long.
There are many such treasures in the shop, but the really cool items are the weird ones, like the beetle house kit for keeping the garden pests in a luxury house complete with food. He sells the so-called "Sea Monkeys" that were all the rage in the '60's as well as the "Magic Rocks," the multi-colored growing crystals.
Mowcomber takes special pride in his fish section called "Neptune's Cellar," which takes up his entire basement.
"I actually started out with the fish," he said. "My father bought the store in 1961 and while I was growing up, I raised fish. I used to sell exotic fish to pet stores in the area and I was quite good at raising them. When I offered to take over the store, (at age 24) I mostly wanted to expand the fish business. The hobby items and the rest just came along with it."
He also sells a few small animals, like chinchillas, hamsters, tiny hedgehogs.
Mowcomber also prides himself in helping customers figure out what they really want. He said he had a customer interested in buying an expensive B-17 model kit made of balsa wood and tissue paper.
"Those are pretty hard to put together, takes a lot of patience and work," he said. "I suggested maybe he should start with an easier plastic model first. I don't want people to get frustrated at the beginning."
Mowcomber's store is a Ben Franklin in name only, since the company went bankrupt in 1996. Now all stores bearing the name are independently operated.
But the nostalgic feeling is still there. If you want to see the store, you'll have to go there in person. There is a Facebook page, but given his feelings about the Internet, it's no surprise he doesn't have a website.