Et Cetera Shop celebrates 25 years years ago
By JENNIFER WILSON
News editor
From its beginnings in a small room adjacent to the bowling alley to its current spacious location, Hillsboro's Et Cetera Shop has certainly come a long way.
Tuesday night, friends, volunteers, and former workers attended a dinner at the First Mennonite Church to celebrate 25 years of helping others through the Et Cetera Shop.
The shop had its beginnings in 1977 inside the mind of one Kaethe Warkentin. As a young girl and woman in Russia, she'd been helped by the Mennonite Central Committee.
After she came to the United States in 1943, she wanted to give something back to the MCC — and an Et Cetera shop seemed to be a logical idea.
The Et Cetera shop is a thrift store found in many locations through Canada and the United States. The shops help the local community by offering donated clothing and other products at a low price. The proceeds from the sales, minus operating costs, all go to the MCC for work overseas.
But Hillsboro's Et Cetera shop had to start out small. So Warkentin arranged to rent a room in the front of Hillsboro's bowling alley for $80 a month.
Milford and Kathryn Blair were on the shop's board of directors, and they remember that first location — it was pretty tiny, they said.
After that first month of business, once the rent was paid, the shop had just 26 cents left in its bank account.
"(The landlord) didn't donate us anything," Kathryn said.
The next month, the Et Cetera shop moved somewhere more spacious: a large location just under the American Legion on North Main.
"That was really the start of the Et Cetera Shop," Kathryn said.
The Legion let the Et Cetera Shop use their downstairs at no charge. Later, when the Legion built their own structure on West D Street, they let Et Cetera use part of the upstairs, too.
By the winter of 1978, Kathe Warkentin's deteriorating health forced her to resign her manager's job.
She gave it to the Blairs.
For the next six years, the Blairs devoted many hours to getting a solid foundation under the Et Cetera Shop.
The donations kept pouring in, they said.
"You name it, it came in," Kathryn said.
Monday mornings, three or four couples would come to the shop to help price items. But it was Milford who often spent 12 hours a day working at the shop — from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., he said.
Not all the donations were usable, he said. When Milford came in early at 7, often he would throw away sacks and sacks of what he called junk. One woman, he said, brought in a piece of carpet soaked with motor oil — definitely not worth selling.
Another problem was foul-smelling clothes. It got too expensive to launder all the clothes the shop got, but the body odor was overwhelming on some items.
Milford took to burning scented candles to alleviate the problem, even though his wife worried about the fire hazard.
But others brought in very nice items, such as shirts and suits.
One day, a farmer's wife came in, saw a particularly nice suit and asked if she could take it home for her husband to try on. He was too busy working in the fields to come into town, she said.
The Blairs agreed, and the woman left with the suit. A few days later she was back with the money — the suit had fit.
Over the years, Milford got many of his own shirts at the shop, Kathryn said.
Kathryn spent much time doing the bookwork, especially for the "Self-Help" program. Self-Help brought in handcrafted items from workers in other countries; the items were sold, and the bulk of the money was sent back to the craftsman.
The Blairs worked at the Et Cetera shop for almost seven years. When Milford's sister got sick, they needed to take care of her, and the manager's job fell to someone else.
For the next two years, Sam and Hilda Thiessen served as managers. In 1986, Jake and Linda Ewert took over, and ten years later, Don and Lenora Klassen stepped into the role.
In 1997, the Et Cetera Shop moved into its current location, filling the space formerly occupied by a Ben Franklin store.
The shop still maintains a working board of directors, which includes a couple from each of the local Mennonite churches.
Today, Joanne Heinrichs and Joyce Hanneman are the shop's two managers. Both have been on the job for four months.
Hanneman and Heinrichs enjoy what they do. Hanneman gets satisfaction from helping others and meeting people in the community. Heinrichs has developed a knack for arranging silk flowers into decorative arrangements.
Overall, the shop has around 50 volunteers, they said. These individuals usually work at the cash register.
The Et Cetera shop is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It takes donations during those hours, and it's best to leave items inside the back door. That way, they escape the rain, Hanneman and Heinrichs said.
According to the MCC Web site, there are approximately 50 similar shops across the United States.
