Pictured left to right: Doug Busbee, Mae Busbee, Jud Busbee, Paul Salley, Betty Salley, Christopher Salley
Back row: Gwen Busbee Salley, Scott Moore
Photos and Article by Valerie Sliker, courtesy Wagener Monthly
After 69 years serving the community in five different locations, Busbee’s Hardware and Supply Company has closed the business to reopen under new ownership and a new name, same location. Paul and Tina Salley have purchased the store and have opened it under the name of Palmetto Hardware and Outdoors. The Salleys have extended the store hours. Follow them on Facebook/PalmettoHardware to stay current with the changes.
As Jud Busbee handed the keys to Paul Salley on February 9, 2017 in the presence of the store founder’s wife, Mae Busbee, his mother, the humorous spirit of store founder, the late Jim Busbee shone forth as Jud, leaving the store, took his mother’s arm saying, “Mama needs some gas money to get back home now.”
Jim Busbee would be proud.
Jim Busbee’s humor and infamous pranks will live on long past the closing of his store. First time visitors to the store were always invited to enjoy Jim’s special “ice-cream sale of the day” and encouraged to pop open the freezer to get an ice-cream. Locals are well aware that the freezer is stocked with a taxidermist’s dream, stocked full of larger-than-life vicious snakes and rodents killed by town residents, but new comers? Not so much. The screams could be heard throughout the store.
Jim and Mae Busbee opened their first store in the late 1940s as an army surplus at the corner of Church and Main where Dr. Antley currently has a vision clinic. Jim had recently come home from his service in the Army and had settled down with his wife on a cotton, produce and cattle farm only to find that farming would not support his family.
Within two years, the store relocated to Highway 39 in the currently empty lot next to Tyler Brother’s. After two more years, the store moved a few yards down to the corner at the stop light where Christ Central currently has some offices.
The store remained at the corner for ten years. The Busbees had four children by then, all of which would spend time at the store. Young Gwen Busbee (Salley) would scrape the nails out of the floorboards to earn a nickel per nail which she would immediately spend on candy nearby at Cleo Anderson’s ice station. Gwen and brothers Doug and Jud not-so-fondly remember the paved driveway at Anderson’s on which customers would pull up to get their block of ice or wait for it to be ground. They remember hopping around on the pavement, strewn with bottlecaps melted into the pavement, some turned wrong-side-up.
The store began selling appliances that were delivered by rail in box cars. Busbee’s son Rodney took an old Lance Cracker truck full of appliances around door-to-door. He had displays on the truck and would sell the appliances around the countryside. Then Jim began selling the gas at the store for the gas stoves that were sold off the truck. The hardware store naturally emerged, driven by the needs of the community, expanding into hardware, tools, lumber and concrete. Jim’s motto was that if you’re not trying to expand or improve, then you’re moving backwards.
Youngest son, Doug Busbee, current owner of Busbee’s Truck Parts out past the hardware store on Highway 39 in the Busbee District, was in charge of pulling up stumps from the woods, breaking them up for “fat lighter” splinters to sell to customers to use in their wood stoves or trash burners. Also, in the Summer, Doug’s job would include digging up bait and selling worms. Doug claims the job was a good fit because he didn’t like being inside the store.
The Busbee children agree on one thing: “If you came through daddy, you learned how to work.” Even the annual trip to the fair would become work as they would load every spare inch of the Buick with merchandise to bring home and sell. Later, it was a truck they’d fill up at Capital Supply Company in Columbia; every trip had to count.
Jim Busbee, like his peer Gene Tyler at the Red & White, taught many of Wagener’s kids how to work as many teenagers worked in the store during their high school years. Jim, and later his son Jud, had long-term employees that were critical to their success. In the early years, it was Norman Reese and Donald Shumpert. In the middle years, it was Otis Barr, Teresa Rushton and Louis Evans. Otis is credited with being a brilliant mechanic who understood how everything worked and could repair anything. He was also an expert in LP gas. Otis and Mamie Barr were like family to the Busbee children. Otis worked at the store from age 18 to his retirement at 62. Otis has passed, but Mamie still lives in Wagener.
The one blip in an otherwise smooth family success story is when the family home burned down after being struck by lightning during a hot July ‘66 thunderstorm. Gwen was home with caretaker Ruth Stroman and baby brother Doug who had scarlet fever. Everybody else was at the store.
The lightning blew out the phone. Ruth and the kids jumped in the car, with the noise of the fire in the walls behind them, and drove to the store. Jim Busbee saw the car pull up with Gwen holding the baby and he thought the baby had died, for why else would Gwen be holding a baby infectious with scarlet fever. Jim was actually relieved to have a burned house rather than a lost son. Gene Tyler, Joe Dodson and LeRoy Dodson were among many who attempted to save the house while Mae told them to save “Pa” Busbee’s things first.
The family home burned completely and the Busbees built a new home where Mae currently lives. Ms. Ruth “retired” soon after Doug was old enough to start putting snakes in her laundry baskets. The burning of the house was during a time when the store was operating out of a building rented from Pat Baughman, where the Blizzard Funeral Home is now.
After ten years at the funeral home location, the Busbees purchased land and built the current store on Highway 39, east of town, where it has remained from 1972 through its closing and re-opening with the Salleys in 2017.
Jim Busbee retired in 1990 and his son Jud Busbee took over the store after spending ten years serving the legislature as a state representative. Mae Busbee retired from the store’s office a year or two later and I took over her position for the next 24 years. The Busbees obviously inspire loyalty from their employees.
Closing out my interview on Jud Busbee’s final day at the store, I just kicked back and listen to the stories, the jabbing back and forth between Busbee siblings. “You learned not to be afraid of people, Jud said. “Daddy pushed you into the public.”
“But the real boss is over there,” Gwen pointed at her mom, Mae Busbee. Doug added, “No doubt. We all learned from the store, how to treat people with respect and dignity -- and how to take a cussin’ now and then.” Gwen added, “And had a lot of fun in the meantime.” And just like that, we’ve circled back around to Jim Busbee’s pranks, recalling when he took the Maytag Sales Rep and his trouble shooting man out to Springfield to do a repair.
The Maytag troubleshooter came down from Tennessee to help Jim Busbee fix a Springfield customer’s appliance. Enroute to Springfield, the troubleshooter mentioned he was a Baptist. Jim agreed that he, too, was a Baptist; in fact, he asked the troubleshooter, “Do you handle snakes, too? I can take you by my pastor’s house,” and Jim pulled, not into a pastor’s house, but into the Clamps’ house and pulled around back to their famous snake pit which has since relocated to the coast as Edisto Island Serpentarium.
After Jim took that repairman to the pit filled with rattlers and gators and all kinds of snakes, the word got back to the Maytag president. The Maytag president called the troubleshooter into his office and gave him a raise for “satisfying this man who handles snakes in South Carolina.”
