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| Hank Aaron and Ron Howard on Happy Days. |
This week, Happy Days turns its attention to Cunningham Hardware, the struggling small business that somehow keeps Howard (Tom Bosley) and his entire family living in a house the size of a football stadium. (No, really, look up 565 N. Cahuenga Blvd. in Los Angeles on Google Earth. The house and its property are larger than you may have guessed.) True, in Season 3, they had to take in a boarder, Fonzie (Henry Winkler), to make ends meet. But the Cuninghams never seem to want for anything. There are always clothes on their backs and food on their table, and they always have nice birthdays and Christmases. Plus they go on vacation rather often. And all this on the paltry few hammers and nails that Howard manages to sell at his store each week.
When I was growing up, my family actually had a small business. My mother and grandmother owned and operated a children's clothing store called The See-Saw in a strip mall on Corunna Rd. in Flint, MI. I don't know if I've written about the store on this blog or not. If I haven't, I should have. The See-Saw was a big part of my life when I was a kid. I grew up wearing clothes from that store and spent many hours there, either doing little chores or just waiting for my mom to close. And I'm proud to say that The See-Saw was a financial success. When we closed it in the mid-1980s, it was simply because my grandmother (who had owned her own dress shop, Catheirne's, decades earlier) wanted to retire.
My dad said that, if the store had stayed open a few years longer, we would have done a TV commercial. Now, even though this would have been one of been one of those cheap, lame, shot-on-video local ads, I couldn't help having huge ambitions for this thwarted project, and I was severely disappointed that we never got to do it. However, in the Season 7 Happy Days episode "The Hucksters," Howard and his family do get to make a TV spot for the hardware store... and they somehow manage to wrangle Hank Aaron to be in it!
Does Hammerin' Hank make for a good guest star? Find out when we review "The Hucksters" on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.