ONE MORE PIECE OF AMERICANA GONE.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

GRANADA HILLS - Norman Rockwell would have felt right at home at Pat and Rae Sturgeon's place.

The famed magazine illustrator would have pulled up a chair, lit his pipe and had a ball painting the people coming in and out of Granada Hills Hardware. But the store is closing Jan. 15 - after more than 50 years of selling hammers, nails and anything else neighborhood people needed to do fix-it jobs themselves.

``You weren't going to the hardware store, you were going to visit a friend,'' said longtime customer Al Krogstad, whose picture is up on the wall with hundreds of others.

``Not just the Sturgeons,'' he said, ``but the store itself. It was our friend, too.''

Try walking into one of the big-box stores and being invited to sit down for coffee and a chat before getting help with whatever you need.

``They made you feel like you were living in Mayberry, not the big city,'' said another longtime customer, Lyle Custer. ``It breaks your heart to think it's going to be gone.''

Rae Sturgeon's been hearing a lot of comments like that from loyal customers since the word spread that she and Pat were thinking of retiring - again.

She admits she didn't know a thing about owning a hardware store back in 1976, when Pat retired from the Los Angeles Police Department as a sergeant after 25 years. The couple bought the local hardware store from the Partains, who had bought it from the original owners, the Grossmans.

``I quit my job at Bullocks in Sherman Oaks to help him - and learned fast how to run a hardware store,'' Rae says, laughing.

The first thing she and Pat learned is that you treat people walking in the door like you'd want to be treated - warmly and fairly. Do that, and they become not only your customers for 28 years but your friends.

Before long, their pictures are hung on your wall and their kids are working for you during the summer. You know when something important happens in their lives because you're talking about more than just nuts and bolts when they walk through the door.

You're talking about each other's lives - the happy parts, and the sad. So it's completely natural to reach out and hold the hand of a longtime customer who's worried because her daughter is now serving in Iraq.

Like Lyle and Al say, they're not losing a store - they're losing a friend.

``My background in the police department and owning this little hardware store has always been to try to serve the community,'' Pat said Friday. ``It seems the bigger stores want the community to serve them.''

He's not being driven out of business by the competition, Pat says. And he's not bitter - just a little sad because he knows no community is ever the same again when it loses one of its longtime mom-and-pop stores.

The Sturgeons are retiring because it's getting tougher to find good help, and at 76 it's time for them to slow down and smell the roses, and maybe do a little traveling.

So it's time to say goodbye, even though their customers wish they wouldn't.

``We're going to miss them,'' Rae says, pointing to the snapshots up on the wall. ``It's been a privilege to serve them over the years, and to call them our friends.''

Yeah, Norman Rockwell would have felt right at home, pulling up a chair and lighting his pipe, over at Pat and Rae Sturgeon's place.

Dennis McCarthy, [phone]

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Granada Hills Hardware owners Rae and Pat Sturgeon are calling it quits after 28 years. The 50-year-old neighborhood store will close on Jan. 15.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer