Beatlemania was hitting the U.S. shores, Ford introduced the Mustang and Hasbro rolled out G.I. Joe when Roy Carter and Ken Reutebuch purchased the Tavares Hardware store on Main Street.
It was April 1964, and today, the Fab Four, the Mustang and G.I. Joes are hallowed treasures — and so is Reutebuch, who recently was feted for his 50-plus long years at the Lake County store, an Ace Hardware franchise since the late 1970s.
The father of five, now 85, attributes his long career in the tools, nuts and bolts industry to a good work ethic and intense dislike for idleness.
“I’ve never been one to sit around and watch TV,” said Reutebuch, who now handles outside sales for the bustling Tavares Ace Hardware store, which moved from its downtown location to a new 8,500-square-foot building on State Road 19 in 2005. “I like working and staying busy.”
He has no plans to retire anytime soon either.
“I won’t quit — well, if my heart does I’ll have to,” said Reutebuch, who sold his share in the store to Carter in the mid-1980s. “I’ve met a lot of people over the years and made a lot of friends.”
The Carter family, including Roy’s son, Cadie Carter, currently own five other Ace Hardware stores in Lake County, as well as one in Apopka and one in Beverly Hills.
Jay Britton, manager of the Tavares location, said Reutebuch has been a fixture at the store so long that he has second- and third-generation customers asking for him by name.
“They’ll come in and say they’ve been coming to the store since they were a little kid,” said Britton, 34, who credits much of the store’s long-term success, especially in today’s competitive world of big box and discount home-improvement stores, to Reutebuch’s mantra of old-fashioned customer service.
“I’ve learned a lot from Ken — we all have,” he said. “But the main thing is by going above and beyond and giving great personal service, you’ll earn long-term customers.”
Britton said Reutebuch was successfully conducting business to business sales long before the corporate world did.
“He had so many accounts he couldn’t handle them all at one time,” he said.
Reutebuch’s storied history in the hardware business began several years before he and the elder Carter became business partners.
After moving to Florida from Indiana with his wife, Mary, and their children — four girls and a boy — in 1959, Reutebuch found employment with a combination appliance repair shop and hardware store in Sanford.
When the business struggled, its owners decided to figure out which side was most profitable, he said.
“They decided hardware was a better deal and so they went with it,” said Reutebuch, who’s resided at Lakeside Terrace in Altoona with his wife of 64 years,for the past three years. “I’m glad they did.”
It was several years later when Roy Carter, a wholesale sales representative who did business with the Sanford store, told him about E.D. Gardner’s desire to sell his hardware store, and the two decided to go into business together.
“I remember the first time we made a $100 in one day,” he said. “It was a big deal back then.”
From the store’s genesis though, Mary Reutebuch was adamant about one thing — Sunday was the Lord’s day and the store had to be closed, a tradition the Carter family still adheres to today.
“She told me if you don’t make enough money being open six days a week, a seventh day is not going to matter anyway,” said Reutebuch, a longtime member of St. Mary of the Lakes Catholic Church in Eustis who also served as a volunteer firefighter in Tavares for many years.
While modern technology has changed the way businesses run, Reutebuch still recalls the good ‘ole days: mailing handwritten invoices to customers and chatting with business owners over weekly coffee meetings at the drugstore.
“If you needed a nail back then though, you could buy one,” Reutebuch said. “Nowadays you have to buy a whole box of ‘em.”