Strolling my old Des Moines neighborhood
Oh, what a great place it was for a young guy! “So’s Your Mother,” Boswell’s Select Foods, Reed’s Ice Cream, Smitty’s Donuts and (still there) Miller’s Hardware.
DES MOINES, Iowa — A new welcome center for immigrants and refugees is being completed this year at what might well be the crossroads of the whole metro area – the corner of 19th Street, Carpenter Avenue and Keosauqua Way, with Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway a block to the west.
A Des Moines Register news story about that appeared this past week, on a beautiful and rare 50-plus degree day. I decided it was a perfect time to go take a walk around that neighborhood, where I lived when I first moved to Des Moines in 1972.
If you’ve spent any time around the city, you know right where this is – the area right around the venerable Miller’s Hardware.
Miller’s Hardware is still right there on the corner.
That 78-year-old store is (I think) one of only two buildings in that immediate neighborhood that are still occupying the same spaces and serving the same functions as when I came to town. The other is the apartment building, right behind the hardware store, where in March of ’72, the 24-year-old me moved in from Shenandoah, Iowa, to go to work as a reporter for the Des Moines Register.
When I realized that during my stroll, I got a little emotional. I went into the hardware store and thanked the two young women clerking for being there. They looked at me about like you’d expect.
I told them how I lived for about 18 months in the then-almost-new apartment building. South side of it, third floor, middle apartment. An “efficiency” that I rented for $115 per month (I think).
My old apartment is still right there, too!
When I started asking about the history of Miller’s Hardware, they steered me to former owner Dave Beveridge. Now 76, he recalled that the hardware store was opened by Pete Miller in 1947, further south on Keosauqua Way. It had to be moved from that original location in 1959, when it was in the path of the new MacVicar Freeway that was being built. Pete Miller was succeeded as owner by his son Bob Miller. Beveridge, who had started working at the store in 1971, succeeded Bob Miller as the owner, then sold it in 2020 to Sonny and Robin Malhi.
It features the same huge inventory it always has, something that separates it from so many other hardware stores today.
From the beginning, Beveridge said, the store has also had an excellent business location – with a large population in surrounding blocks and a whole lot of commuters driving through on their way to jobs downtown. The population is diverse, perhaps now more than ever.
“The people there have always been just great,” he said. “I’d go back there in a heartbeat, to do business or even live there. We got along with everybody. You know if a person comes in the store to get help with a broken toilet, no matter what color they are or what culture they come from, if you can get them the parts they need, and at a fair price, they’re happy. We were happy to meet and help them.”
A closer view of Miller’s Hardware.
When you see the continuous flow of customers in and out of Miller’s Hardware today, it’s easy to understand how it’s been a real hub of the neighborhood for decades.
But the rest of the neighborhood? It’s now mostly filled with important providers of human services and a lot of nice-looking housing units – single family houses, to row houses, to small apartment buildings on up to larger complexes.
There’s probably no way you’d realize how, back in ’72, this was probably the hottest spot in the city for cool young people.
Let me count the ways.
Within two blocks, there were the businesses offering the “essentials,” like the hardware store, a Hinky Dinky supermarket, Cardinal Cleaners for our clothes, a Gulf service station for our cars, and a Katz Drug Store. (The latter is the building with the curved roof where the welcome center for immigrants and refugees will operate. You can read more about that project by clicking on this link.)
The welcome center will go into the building that was once a Katz Drug Store.
The eating places were wonderful and varied.
Next door to Katz Drug was a King’s Food Host, although that didn’t seem to last long. It was sold and subsequently turned into Uncle Sam’s night club, which on its marquee featured a sign saying, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”
But back to restaurants, there was metro’s first Mustard’s Last Stand – a great hamburger joint that in nice weather had an open-air front. Boswell’s Select Foods had the best breakfasts in the city, with a gourmet dream of variations on its hashbrowns. There was Brownie’s BarBQue.
My favorite was the headquarters of Reed’s Ice Cream, which I recall having excellent lunches and dinners, along with the best ice cream in the city. In a 2023 story in “dsm” magazine, Michael Morain reported that Reed’s started up in the southeast Iowa town of Sigourney in 1910, came to Des Moines in 1922 and eventually “had dozens of shops across the city.” At their headquarters in my old neighborhood, Morain wrote that they “could produce 500 gallons of ice cream every hour.”
The Sister Stella Neill Building on Forest Avenue stands on the sport where Reed’s Ice Cream had its headquarters location.
Smitty’s Donuts operated 24 hours, except from 8 p.m. Saturday night until early Sunday morning.
“I don’t know whether it was a good thing or bad thing to be as close to Smitty’s Donuts as we were at the hardware store,” said Beveridge, the former owner at Miller’s. “We’d try to avoid eating a bunch of them, but then we’d break down, call Smitty’s and say, ‘When are they up?’ They’d call us back when they had a new batch ready, and we’d send somebody over to pick up a couple dozen glazed donuts.”
Other than Miller’s Hardware, the most iconic business in the old neighborhood was the “So’s Your Mother” bar, located on the southwest corner of MLK Jr. Parkway and Forest Avenue. It operated from the early 1970s – when it was regarded as a “hippie bar” according to some old stories – until 1989.
The first I was aware of it was just before I moved to Des Moines, so late 1971 or early ’72, when “Mother’s” received statewide media attention for staging “turtle races” on the barroom floor. A big circle was painted there, with a very small circle in its middle. Someone would buy a bunch of tiny turtles at a pet store, bring them to the bar, and patrons could borrow one for the races. The turtles would be placed in a very small circle, sometimes bets were placed, and then the crowd would watch and cheer one of them to crawl past the outer circle.
The bar also featured good live music, generally rock or blues, and sometimes there’d be bands playing on both the ground floor and another bar room upstairs.
Where “So’s Your Mother” operated, there’s now a very nice Polk County Central Senior Center. I learned that older folks around the neighborhood sometimes refer to that being “So’s Your Grandmother.”
I love the stories of the old neighborhood. And I look forward to the new stories that will likely be happening there soon, especially with a wonderful new welcome center opening for immigrants, refugees and other newcomers.
Where “So’s Your Mother” once operated.
The former Hinky Dinky Supermarket is a Polk County Health Department center.
Smitty’s Donuts operated right here at the Keosauqua Way corner.
This law firm was a women’s resource center.
“The Rose” senior living residences are on the corner where “Mustard’s Last Stand” started.
A Vietnamese Buddhist Temple is located adjacent to the earlier site of Boswell’s Select Foods.
Martin Luther King Elementary School has been a wonderful addition to the old neighborhood.
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Nice column. Knew the area in the sixties and seventies.
Motherskh has moved to madisoson W. Jeff's d ughter runs it.