(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 13, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 16, 2024

Her mid-century business on Capitol Hill was a store of its dime

By Clay Eals

Funny what we recall from our younger years.

Once when we visited my grandparents in West Seattle, my mom took me to N&N Variety in the Admiral Junction. Its seemingly endless counters held innumerable tiny treasures, including toy figures, and my fidgety fingers fished one into my pocket. Outside, my mom found out, of course. She admonished me to return the item and confess to what I trust was my only instance of childhood shoplifting.

But the incident didn’t dim my enthusiasm for the shop. In fact, we all, of a certain age, hold great affection for what were called dime stores or the five-and-dime.

The term took off in 1879 with Woolworth’s, whose successful venture in Lancaster, Pa., eventually spawned a slew of chain and single-owner shops selling sundries at paltry prices — from yarn, shoestrings, mugs and other housewares to pencils, ornaments, greeting cards and jigsaw puzzles. They stocked the proverbial “little bit of everything” and became fixtures in nearly every mid-century neighborhood and town.

On Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the storefront at 422 15th Ave. E. housed a “5-Cent to $1.00 Store” starting in 1941. Buying the business in 1955 were Jim and Beverly Berto of Bothell, who renamed it the Capitol Hill 10-Cent Store.

Jim soon returned to commercial fishing, ceding the business to Bev. “After a couple of years of helping little old ladies select hairnets and measuring out satin ribbon by the inch, he gave up and told me I could run it myself,” Bev told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The interview with Bev ran in April 1973, three months after Jim’s death, when the shop lost its lease for expansion of next-door supermarket property. Therein, Bev lamented the impending loss of her everyday impact.

“Many customers … think of a visit to the store as their afternoon’s entertainment,” she said. “They were all very distressed to find I was closing. One little lady snapped, ‘We wouldn’t have let them close you down if we had known. We could have signed a petition or something!’ ”

Today, Bev’s grandchildren fondly remember the store and its proprietor. “Everybody on Capitol Hill would come in there, from kids to seniors, and mostly mosey along and browse,” says Jim Berto of Whidbey Island.

“Grandma was a gentle, quiet person, and she liked people,” says family historian Bev Schmer of Bothell. “She was a perfectionist. She wanted to do it just right. She was very patriotic, very family. She was just a jewel.”

The headline for the P-I story incorporated irresistible wordplay: “Store Will Close For Last Dime.”

That’s a priceless pun worth stealing.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Jade D’Addario of the Seattle Room of Seattle Public Library, Jim Berto, Jimmy Berto and especially Bev Schmer for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you also will find 6 additional images and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.