"Caching in on Books"

Gwen Gere talks about books among a selection at the bookstore on the Kenai River Campus of Kenai Peninsula College.

CACHING IN ON BOOKS

MAY 2011

Tucked away in an office behind the last row of textbooks in the Kenai River Campus bookstore of Kenai Peninsula College sits manager Gwen Gere, ordering, tabulating sales and expenditures, and planning. Although it might be unclear to the casual, Gere is laboring at more than just a job she loves. Given her family’s place in the history of Alaskan literacy, working with books may even be in her blood.

Gere is the second child of Russ and Doris Riemann, who came to Alaska in 1953 when Russ agreed to take over the managerial duties for a floundering Alaska News Agency, which was headquartered in Anchorage. By the late 1950s, the Riemanns had parlayed their knowledge of the wholesale distribution of reading materials into a new retail establishment—The Book Cache—which would become Alaska’s preeminent bookselling business for the next three decades.

Among its many retail outlets, the Book Cache included popular and profitable stores in the Carrs Mall in Kenai and the Central Peninsula Mall in Soldotna. When the Riemanns sold the business in late 1980s, the Book Cache chain comprised 17 outlets, including two, oddly enough, in Maui.

*****

Gere was four years old when her family made the move to Alaska from Bellingham, Washington. Later that same year, she and her sisters began joining their father on Saturdays at the news agency—the wholesale clearinghouse for all reading materials in Southcentral Alaska and beyond—and they were put to work.

The original staff of the Alaska News Agency.

“Let’s say we’re doing magazine distributions,” Gere said. “We have 10,000 copies of Reader’s Digest. You have to figure out where they’re going to go—which store gets how many—so at the time—no computers—you had this giant sheet that said, ‘Hewitt’s Drug, two Reader’s Digest, eight Time Magazine, 14 whatever.’ That was the pull-sheet that they would use to go and pull the magazines, wrap them, and send them out.

“My sisters and I were latch-key sort of children because our parents were running a business, so we would go in with my dad, and he would say, ‘Hey, how about adding all these figures up?’ So we’d sit there (at an adding machine)—which I can 10-key like a fiend—and add up all those figures to make sure they matched.”

Of course, it wasn’t simply all work and no play for the girls. The job had benefits, as Russ treated his daughters to a plentiful supply of comic books.

Gere, however, didn’t mind the work. Her favorite job in her early years at the agency involved opening the old canvas mail sacks. “That’s when I was probably seven or eight,” she said. “I used to love that. I don’t know why. It was the smell, or dumping them out, or whatever. And I remember on my birthday one time, my dad’s like, ‘Let’s go in, and you can empty mail sacks for your birthday.’ And I pulled the mail sacks over, and there was a (brand-new) bicycle. I was more excited about the mail sacks. I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and just kept doing the mail.”

*****

Roy and Doris Riemann met on Roy’s first day as hospital administrator at Camp Swift, Texas, where Doris was a physical therapist. They were married on April 1, 1945, and in the early 1950s found themselves in Washington state, with three young daughters and Russ searching for regular employment.

Working as a wholesale book distributor was nowhere near the top of his list of preferred jobs, but when the opportunity arose he checked it out. He flew to Anchorage to assess the job and then called Doris. According to Gere, he said: “Sell the house. Pack the kids up. Come on up.”

Two of the most important clients for the Alaska News Agency were the Anchorage military bases—Elmendorf and Fort Richardson—and behind Russ’s solid management, the distributor quickly sweetened its sour fortunes.

The Book Cache when it first opened at its 5th Avenue location.

Then in about 1958, the Riemanns began considering retail. Esther Tout had a small bookstore inside the Fifth Avenue building that housed Jonas Brothers Taxidermy & Furrier, and they joined forces with her in her 15x25-foot space.

During the first three months of business, according to an article in an Aug. 3, 1984, issue of Publishers Weekly magazine, the Book Cache grossed $2,300. In the following year, the store grossed $31,000—nearly $230,000 in today’s money.

In the early 1960s, the Book Cache moved into the location for which it would become best known—436 Fifth Avenue, between Alaska State Bank and the J.C. Penney building.

At first, the main sign on the front of the store read “The Cache,” suitable because inside were a “cache” of businesses.

Filling the long left wall and a portion of the back end of the rectangular space was The Book Cache. Also in the back left corner was the Stamp & Coin Cache. Up front and center was a floral-and-gift shop called Barb’s Cache & Carry, and along the right wall and into the right back corner were a lunch counter, a small bar and a cigarette machine—all part of Cache Dining & Cocktails.

Earthquake damage near the downtown Book Cache.

The dining-and-cocktails business became the first casualty. According to Gere, the owners ran into tax problems and were asked to leave. For a while, then, that section of the store was walled off.

On March 27, 1964, The Cache endured the magnitude-9.2 Good Friday Earthquake. In the Publishers Weekly article, Doris Riemann recalled hanging onto two display racks on rollers: “They rolled while books flew off shelves and the display windows (along the street) shattered. A cardboard Easter bunny in the window was impaled on glass shards, and the entire downtown area was in a shambles.”

Just up the street from The Cache, huge slabs from the front of the Penney’s building had fallen into the street; one of the slabs had crushed a sedan parked near the sidewalk and had killed the occupant. All over Southcentral Alaska, communication with the Lower 48 had been severed.

More quake damage.

Despite the damage and the uncertainty, however, the Riemanns were one of the first downtown businesses to reopen. “We had to—we had to have something to do,” said Doris. “And the bookstore was a meeting area. People stopped by to ask directions, and we became sort of an information center for the town.”

Eventually at the Fifth Avenue location, only the bookstore and the stamp-and-coin business remained. The large sign indicating the home of The Cache was replaced with an equally large Book Cache sign in bright yellow, a color that became identified with the business throughout its history.

Gere, meanwhile, continued to work for the family business, primarily for the Alaska News Agency. After graduating from West High School in 1967, she attended college in Colorado for a year and then returned to Alaska to complete her education. She enrolled in Alaska Methodist University and worked for both the news agency and the bookstore.

During the year she was out of state, the number of Book Cache stores doubled. As the State of Alaska experienced a booming economy and a burgeoning population, the serious expansion of the Book Cache franchise began in earnest. And Gere’s life among books continued.

*****

On the door leading into Gere’s KPC office hangs a red plaque that once adorned her father’s office at the Alaska News.

A reminder to speak out for what one believes in, the plaque relays a World War II-era quote from Pastor Martin Niemöller, who voiced regret at not making his own voice heard during the Nazis’ rise to power: “First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

A Book Cache tote bag.

Just as Gere’s parents were devoted to the social cause of literacy and the battle against censorship, Gere has a similar social sense. Behind her desk hangs another reminder of the past and another tie to the cultural touchstone that was the Book Cache. Clipped into place near a window is a small white waxpaper cup bearing a tiny bouquet of colorful synthetic flowers; printed in black on the cup itself is the Book Cache name and address and the familiar log-storehouse logo.

“I have a stack of those cups at home,” Gere said. “For years, my mother had this giant coffee urn in the Book Cache downtown, with little cups so people could come in and get a little coffee. All the drunks would come in and sober up on a Saturday morning—come in and have a cup of coffee and hang out. And Doris was their best friend. She never kicked them out.”

Russ and Doris Riemann were compassionate, not just about literacy, but also about their fellow human beings.

*****

Shortly after Gere graduated from high school, her parents successfully expanded the Book Cache into a second store—in the new Sears Mall, located at what was then a fairly remote location away from downtown. The mall bookstore established the blueprint for future expansion: Find a concentration of retail businesses (often other malls) and open outlet nearby. The Book Cache benefited from the business traffic already in place and contributed its own customers to the mix.

Huntington book signing at the downtown Book Cache.

Soon, booming with the explosion of paperback sales across the country, the Riemanns expanded to the Anchorage International Airport and later to the University Center and the Dimond Center. They also opened stores in a mall on Boniface Parkway and in Eagle River, Fairbanks, the Kenai Peninsula and Hawaii, a favorite vacation spot for the Riemanns. At its peak in the early 1980s, the Book Cache consisted of 21 stores, 19 in Alaska.

The Book Cache in Kenai opened in the early 1970s in a small space near the Carrs grocery inside the Kenai Mall, and it eventually expanded as its popularity grew and prompted a need for additional retail space. Gere remembers driving to Kenai to help paint the inside of the first location; her son, who was about a year old at the time, was given a brush and put to work on the lower walls.

Gere called the Kenai Book Cache a productive location and said that the Soldotna Book Cache was at least as productive when it opened about a decade later in the Central Peninsula Mall. By the time of the Soldotna opening, Book Cache had joined with Hallmark Gold Crown stores in many of its key locations, thus expanding its retail offerings and customer base.

By the time the Riemanns were interviewed for the Publishers Weekly article, Russ acknowledged that the total annual sales at their many stores were several million dollars, and they were still enjoying life in the bookselling business.

“They loved books,” Gere said. “They figured everybody ought to, and there should be a bookstore every place you

Doris and Russ Riemann.

turned around.”

So in 1988 when the Jim Pattison Group, a business conglomerate from Vancouver, B.C., came calling, the Riemanns said they were uninterested in selling.

A year later, however, circumstances had changed. Although the bookstore chain was still performing well, Russ had been having some health concerns, and the Riemanns reconsidered the Pattison offer.

They researched the big company and learned that its emphasis was on wholesale, not retail, and that its desire was to buy only the Alaska News Agency, the wholesale parent of The Book Cache, and not the bookstores themselves. The Riemanns told the Pattison Group they would sell either everything or nothing. So Pattison purchased the news agency, the full inventory of the Book Cache and the business—not including the stores themselves, all of which were leased locations.

Then, as the Riemanns began retirement with every hope that their employees and business would continue unimpeded, the Pattison Group began to divest itself of its retail outlets. From 1989 to 1993, it almost systemically began closing doors.

In a Dec. 22, 1993, article in the Anchorage Daily News, the Pattison Group announced that by the end of January 1994 only one Book Cache outlet—a 7,000-square-foot location in the University Center Mall—would remain open.

Already closed were stores in Fairbanks and Kenai and across most of Anchorage; also closed was the Book Cache’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Over the next month, the stores in Eagle River, Soldotna and the Sears Mall would cease operations.

Soon the University Center itself fell on hard times, and the once-profitable Book Cache chain fell with it.

As the end drew near, according to the Daily News article, Doris Riemann said, “We can’t help but be dismayed. We had 17 stores when we sold—all viable businesses, and it was exciting. We had lots of good, steady customers and reading material available in all sections of town. We were pretty proud of it.”

*****

Gere and her husband and children had moved in 1983 to Kenai, where she worked for her parents as an Alaska News Agency wholesaler in charge of a local warehouse. After her parents sold the company, she was downsized and soon went to work for K-Mart. About a year before K-Mart’s national financial collapse, she began a four-year stint with Fred Meyer, where she remained until the KPC position opened.

Gwen and Doris.

Now back among the books, Gere has found a comfort level.

“At K-Mart and Fred Meyer, you’re figuring out the thousands of things you’re going to sell,” she said. “And here you’re figuring out, wow, other than textbooks, well, if I can sell eight or nine, I’ll be a happy camper. There’s really not a whole lot of give-and-take as far as textbooks are concerned. There’s a bit of leeway with some of the general reading I can carry, but most of it is textbooks.

“If I screw everything else up in this job, I’d better have the books when class starts. That’s the bottom line. All this ‘froofy’ stuff is fun, but I’d better have the books. And the faculty here is wonderful. I don’t ask them for anything unreasonable, and they, in turn, work with me. I mean, this is a great gig.”

Her sense of joy is accentuated by the memory of what she was once part. “When they closed the last (Book Cache) store, it was actually—because of the way we grew up—like the death of a sibling,” Gere said.

The loss of the downtown Book Cache created pains that were particularly acute: “It’s not like one of those misty moments in my misremembered past— like, oh, how wonderful it was. It was! It was kick-ass fun. It was a good life. It was a feeling that what you did was more than yourself because it affected more than that.

“And I think, by comparison, despite the fact that this (the KPC bookstore) is just a little thing, and it’s not my store, what we do here at the college is more than sell books, advise students, teach class. There’s a bigger picture. And I think for me that is why I like so much. It’s more than all the parts. You can see the growth. You can see the excitement. You can see what’s going on. That’s a kick. I love it.”

 

The Book Cache at the University Center location in Anchorage.