A few mornings a week around ten o’clock, Angela and Frank Stritzel unlock the gate over their Western Avenue storefront, Stritzel’s Appliances. Angela’s window display, which changes twice yearly, currently features a meticulously ordered regiment of slightly faded toys: police cars, locomotives, flying machines, fake stuffed owls and fighting cocks, a demented chihuahua, a plush seal balancing a beach ball on its nose, a motorcycle-riding monkey, and a plastic duck decoy sitting inside an opened oven. Lately an American flag hangs from the stovetop.
don’t have to depend on the store anymore. Business has been slow. Days go by when no one comes in. “Before,” says Angela, “we sold a lot of appliances. Not anymore. Nobody wants to come over here and buy. Maybe we are too expensive.”
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But laughs are cheap at Stritzel’s. A trio of miniature Godzillas form a menacing phalanx atop a refrigerator. A stack of Tune-a-Burgers–cheeseburger-shaped AM radios–sits in a display case. A plastic hatchet emits a bloodcurdling scream if thwacked, say, against Frank’s head. They have an ample collection of bathroom drollery, including the Bub L. Beeper, a vaguely Clinton-esque figure who blows soap bubbles out of his butt. They also stock the Coin Commode, the Wee Wee Water Squirter, and a window-mountable obese figure that drops its trousers when a prankster manipulates a remote hand pump. Frank demonstrates: “People, when they get too nosy, they look at the window, he drops them, and they start laughing. When they start laughing, you do it again.”
They keep a worried ear on the news, but neither one says much about what happened September 11. It reminds Frank of his boyhood. He was born in 1931 in an ethnic German enclave of Slovenia called Gottschee, whose population was relocated by the Nazis in 1941. The town was given another ethnic cleansing by Tito’s partisans after World War II. Frank and his family were refugees. He remembers days that still close his throat and make his eyes go glassy when he’s asked about them.
Business slowed when Lincoln became a one-way street between Leland and Lawrence. They moved a block west to Western and began selling hi-fis, then toys. “Because customers come in,” recalls Angela, “and they asked, ‘You don’t have no toys?’”
Their only other visitors are the woman who won’t give her address and a neighborhood realtor who wants to sell the building for Frank–but won’t name a price.
By three o’clock, Frank is tired of sitting around the store. He announces that he’s going out.
