The Store That Had Everything

Fisher Big Wheel sat on Pearl Road just north of Drake, across the street from the big Catholic church, and if you grew up in Strongsville in the seventies or eighties, it was the center of the known universe.

It wasn't fancy. It was never fancy. It was Strongsville's version of Walmart before Strongsville had ever heard of Walmart — a big, flat, fluorescent-lit everything store where you could buy flip-flops for a quarter, pure white tennis shoes for five dollars, a stuffed animal for your kid, a ten-speed bicycle, bullets, a machete, and fireworks, all in the same trip. Nobody thought twice about any of it. A twelve-year-old could ride up on his bike, buy a box of ammunition and a bag of popcorn from the snack bar, and ride home through the woods. That was just Tuesday.

The woods behind Big Wheel were half the point.

There were trails back there — real trails, carved into the dirt by generations of kids on BMX bikes, three-wheelers, and motorbikes. You could ride from your house on Drake through the paths and come out right at the store. The Vanderwysts had lived on that property before it was torn down, and the land remembered being wild. Kids built forts. Kids bought machetes and built better forts. When they finally cleared those woods for the Echo Lake development, they found a mountain of old tires back there so enormous it became its own kind of landmark, a monument to everything Strongsville used to let slide.

And then there was the roof.

Ty Weiss will tell you about the roof. He'll tell you more than once. He and Russell Fritz had a fort up there — an actual fort, on the roof of a retail store — and they'd ride their bikes up somehow and sit there like kings, drinking Little Kings, looking out over the parking lot and the church and Pearl Road stretching away in both directions. Troy was up there. Lee was up there. Ralfy G. Half the neighborhood, at one point or another, partied on the roof of Big Wheel. It was the kind of thing that could only happen in a town where nobody was watching too carefully, where kids were expected to be gone all day and come home when the streetlights came on, and whatever happened in between was your business.

Everybody got their ears pierced at Big Wheel.

Not at a jeweler. Not at a doctor's office. At a discount store on Pearl Road, probably by someone making minimum wage, probably with a piercing gun that had seen better days. Karri got hers done there. Kim got hers done in eighth grade, right after confirmation, because that felt like the kind of grown-up thing you were finally allowed to do. Tish got hers done at five years old at the Brunswick location, and on the same trip she learned to carry a purse, left it in the cart, had to go back, and got a three-hour lecture from her mother. She's never forgotten any of it — not the piercing, not the purse, not the lecture. That's what Big Wheel did. It turned ordinary errands into origin stories.

Half the teenagers in Strongsville worked there at some point.

It was a first-job kind of place. You stocked shelves. You worked the shoe department, though maybe not for long. You unloaded trucks in the back, freezing in the winter, and the bullet pallets were the worst — heavy as sin and seemingly endless. You worked the stockroom with your friend and laughed so hard the manager came back to check on you, and decades later one of you would find the other on Facebook and say, "Remember when the sting happened? All those people got busted for stealing?" and you'd both laugh again, older now, but the same.

Linda and Robin worked the stockroom together and loved every frozen minute of it. Lisa's first job. Laura's first job. Linda's first job. Beth worked shoes. Anthony unloaded trucks and drove the manager crazy by covering the security cameras — not because he was stealing, but because watching the camera follow him around felt creepy, and he was sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds don't need a better reason than that.

The things people remember are so small they're enormous.

Mike Kraus woke his mom up early — really early — because Big Wheel was selling Transformers, and he'd saved for four months, four months of allowance and odd jobs and wanting, and this was the day. That kind of wanting doesn't exist anymore, not in the age of next-day delivery. That wanting had weight. It taught you something about patience that you didn't even know you were learning.

Stacey's brand-new ten-speed got stolen from the parking lot, and her mom was so upset. Allison got her favorite stuffed animal there when she was five, with her dad, and she still remembers which one it was. Renee won a Care Bear in a coloring contest and got her picture taken, age five, and that was a whole day, a whole perfect day. Ernest used to walk over from his buddy's house to play Pac-Man in the vestibule and get popcorn from the snack bar. Ray played Bad Dudes and loved it so much that years later, when a customer gave him the actual arcade board, he set it up and still plays it.

Glenn Fox found a can of vegetables in his grandma's cupboard with a Big Wheel price tag still on it. Twenty-five cents. A little past the fresh date, he figured. A little.

Greg stole his first pack of baseball cards from Big Wheel. Got in the car with his dad. His dad made him go right back in and tell the service desk what he did. That's not a Big Wheel story. That's a dad story. But it happened at Big Wheel, so it belongs to Big Wheel now.

The store closed around 1990. It became a Marc's, which is fine, which is what happens. Paul Larkin still considers it Big Wheel. Chuck Bruce still accidentally calls Target "Big Wheel" and his kids say "where?" and he doesn't know how to explain that he's not talking about a place, exactly. He's talking about a time.

Joe Muraski still has the shirt.

People who moved to Strongsville after it closed will never quite understand what it was. It was just a store. It was just a big, cluttered, fluorescent store on Pearl Road that sold everything too cheap and didn't ask how old you were. But it was the store where your mother took you when she wanted to make an afternoon of it. It was the store you begged your dad to visit after church because it was right across the street and flip-flops were a quarter. It was the store with the roof you weren't supposed to be on and the woods you were never supposed to go that deep into and the video games in the vestibule that ate your quarters one at a time, and you let them, because where else were you going to be?

It was the store that had everything. And the everything wasn't on the shelves.

It was the Saturday morning your mom held your hand while a stranger pierced your ears. It was four months of saving for a Transformer. It was your dad making you walk back in and confess. It was the freezing stockroom and the friend beside you and the years that passed before you realized those were the days you'd spend the rest of your life trying to describe to people who weren't there.

It's a Marc's now. Everyone knows it's a Marc's now.

But if you were there — if you rode the trails, played the games, worked the register, stood in that parking lot watching fireworks, or sat on that roof with a Little King in your hand and the whole town spread out below you — you know what it really is.

It's still Big Wheel. It's always Big Wheel.