Cheryl Knop leaves a legacy of hardware know-how

There are people in a small town whose value becomes obvious only when they step away. We may not know exactly how often we relied on them until the day comes when we need the thing they always seemed to know.

In Lovell, Cheryl Knop was one of those people.

For 36 years, Cheryl owned CK Hardware Hank on Main Street, and for many of us, she was more than the person behind the counter. She was the one who could identify the odd plumbing piece you brought in from under the sink, locate the screw you did not know how to describe and tell you, with complete confidence, whether your project was headed toward success or a second trip to the hardware store.

A few weeks after she retired and sold the business to Michael Hendershot, a Chronicle reporter had the chance to sit down with Cheryl and talk about the store, her family and the long path that led a 10-year-old Minnesota girl to become one of Lovell’s most knowledgeable small-business owners.

The store’s story goes back to 1970, when Cheryl’s father, Freeman “Bud” Mills, bought a closed Coast to Coast store in Lovell. The inventory was limited, old, dirty and shopworn. It needed work, which suited Bud just fine.

Before coming to Wyoming, Bud had raised mink in Minnesota. When the bottom fell out of that business, he needed another direction. A nephew who owned a Coast to Coast store in Minnesota helped point him toward the opportunity in Lovell.

Cheryl, however, was not excited to be moving west.

“I was not thrilled,” she said with a laugh. “I was 10.”

Bud Mills was a man from the generation that believed you fixed what was broken or learned to live without it. Cheryl said that mindset came naturally to him. He had lost an arm in a cotton and corn shredder shortly before he was to leave for World War II, yet he remained deeply independent and capable. He used a prosthesis and could tackle almost anything.

That kind of example shaped Cheryl’s life, whether she realized it at the time or not.

As a girl, she did some dusting, stocked freight and checked in merchandise, but she did not grow up planning to own the family hardware store. In her early 20s, she worked for Coast to Coast, traveling around the West and into the Midwest to reset merchandise in stores. She learned the merchandising side of the business and saw how other stores operated, but after years of living out of hotels for four to six weeks at a time, she was ready to come home.

In 1990, her father mentioned that he might have the store sold to someone else. Cheryl responded that she would not mind buying it. Then she quickly added that she did not have that kind of money.

Still, they found a way to make it work. Cheryl bought the store from her father, and a Lovell institution entered a new era.

The early years were not easy. Corporate Coast to Coast was in financial trouble, and wholesalers were wary of extending credit to a business connected to the struggling corporation. Cheryl remembers calling suppliers, offering to buy in full-pack quantities and prepay, only to have them hesitate because Coast to Coast already owed money.

“It was a traumatic time for me,” she said.

She kept moving forward. The store eventually went through changes in suppliers and affiliations, and in 1998 it became Hardware Hank and C K Hardware. The initials stood for Cheryl Knop, but the name also came to mean something else to the people of Lovell: a store where a person could walk in with a problem and walk out with a solution.

Cheryl said plumbing was probably the department for which she became best known. That expertise did not come from formal classes or a degree. It came from years on the job, from listening to people explain their problems, examining strange parts they brought through the door and doing enough plumbing at home to know what worked.

“I just feel like I had to know everything about everything,” she said.

That is probably how most customers saw her, before they all believed a YouTube video could give us every answer, even when it was only one step away from making the problem worse. Cheryl belonged to the older and more useful school of hardware knowledge. You showed her a part, described the leak or held up the broken whatever-it-was, and she began narrowing the possibilities.

“Trust me, this is going to work,” she said of her approach to helping customers. “I’m not here to BS you. I’m here to study the stuff so you can finish your project and move on.”

Anyone who has stood at her counter with a leaking pipe, a stripped screw or an unidentified piece of something can recognize that tone and appreciate the help that came with it.

There were, of course, limits to her patience. Cheryl told of answering the phone from the back of the store at 5:59 on a Saturday, only to be delayed long after closing so someone could buy 29 cents worth of faucet washers. It was not an emergency, she said. The customer could have simply shut off the valve underneath the sink.

Every longtime retailer has stories like that. What matters is that Cheryl still answered the phone.

Owning the business meant long hours, often 60 a week and sometimes closer to 80. After 36 years, she decided it was time.

“I’m old enough, and I’m tired,” she said. “Thirty-six years of owning that place will make an old woman out of you.”

Retirement, she hopes, will include getting her legs and feet healed up and spending more time out in the hills. For now, she is enjoying a simpler pleasure: waking up at 8 in the morning and realizing she does not have to go to work.

Yet even retirement could not entirely separate Cheryl from hardware. On the first day Hendershot opened the new Ace Hardware, Cheryl was at home cleaning out her refrigerator when she discovered water around the sink. She needed plumbing parts. Of course, she knew exactly where to go.

She went down to the new store, bought what she needed and fixed it herself.

That may be the best final image of Cheryl Knop’s hardware career. The sign above the door has changed. The ownership has changed. But the knowledge, independence and practical confidence she built over a lifetime have not gone anywhere.

Lovell is fortunate to have Michael Hendershot carrying the store into its next chapter. Cheryl is emphatic that the community needs to support him, because local businesses, the newspaper, the schools, the hospital and the town itself are tied together more closely than we sometimes admit.

But Lovell should also pause long enough to thank the woman who spent decades helping us fix things, build things and occasionally rescue ourselves from the messes we made.

She knew where the part was. More importantly, she knew how to help.