Abstract
Steve Presser, owner of Big Fun, describes his life in Cleveland Heights, being owner of a toy store, and his love for Coventry. He begins by giving a brief history of the path he took to owning Big Fun. He also talks about the renovations and construction he did to open the original store and then the current store. After that, Steve discusses his affinity for locally owned business and his affiliation with the "Cash Mob," which is a group of people who go to locally owned stores and spend money.He ends by talking about how special Coventry is and how each store and restaurant has a story.
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Interviewee
Presser, Steve (interviewee)
Interviewer
Fearing, Heidi (interviewer)
Project
Cleveland Heights
Date
2012
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
63 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Steve Presser interview, 2012" (2012). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 911072.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/806
Transcript
Heidi Fearing [00:00:01] Can you say something?
Steve Presser [00:00:02] Sure. Am I on? Do you hear my great nasal voice or my horrible nasal voice?
Heidi Fearing [00:00:08] [laughs] I don't think you have horrible nasal voice.
Steve Presser [00:00:10] Hi, my name is Steve.
Heidi Fearing [00:00:12] That'd be pretty funny. [laughs]
Steve Presser [00:00:15] That's all, folks.
Heidi Fearing [00:00:16] You could end with that if you wanted.
Steve Presser [00:00:18] I'll happily do it. You can ask me questions. Yes. I tend to talk too much.
Heidi Fearing [00:00:26] That's fine.
Steve Presser [00:00:26] So this is good volume, like this?
Heidi Fearing [00:00:28] Actually, it's perfect. All right, so can you state your name, where you're from, where you went to school, etcetera?
Steve Presser [00:00:35] Sure. Easy questions first. Steve Presser grew up in University Heights, right by John Carroll. In fact, my parents' house was the fourth house built on that street. A typical suburban grand plan of grid housing and streets. And I was the first child born on that street, so it was kind of cool. Went to Belvoir Elementary School, which is now Gearity, Wylie Junior High, graduated from Heights High, so graduated Heights High in 1976. And what else do you-
Heidi Fearing [00:01:07] Did you go on to school?
Steve Presser [00:01:09] Oh, sure, yeah. I went on to the University of Michigan, graduated with bachelor of science in psychology. I was pre med, was going to go to medical school and opted not to. I then decided that I was going to go to graduate school in psychology, and I moved. I was hoping to go to Berkeley and moved to California to get residency. I was there about six months in San Diego and just felt it wasn't the place where I wanted to be. Just beautiful people were nice, but there was no culture. And I just, I felt, you know what? I'm going to come back home. And I came back to Cleveland, moved back in home with my parents, and started working with the developmentally disabled and mentally retarded in direct care, and loved it at PVA Parent Volunteer Association, which is now called New Avenues for Independence. And it became a really important part of my life. I loved working, I'd always liked working with people with differing abilities and disabilities and worked there for a little over two years. And right when I started working there, September 16, 1981, I had the first date with my beautiful wife, now Debbie Apple, a woman whom I lusted after since I've been in 7th grade, literally 7th grade. Didn't ask her on the first date till roughly, let's figure this out, eleven years later. Her brother, her younger brother, is one of my best friends. So, Mark. So it's kind of odd going out with one of your best friend's sisters, but I knew she was the woman of my dreams, so. We started dating. And then I decided that it would be important if we were going to take it further that I would have to look for a job that would pay me more. And I love working with people with special needs, but financially, there just wasn't a lot of money there. So I opted to go and pursue another career. And unknown to a lot of people, I became a stockbroker, investment executive with Payne Webber for seven years. I wore suit and tie every day. I had a beard back then, but actually had a beard for about 20 years, but I wore a suit and tie every day. The first three years were pretty cool, but after that, I can see that it just wasn't something I was interested in. And I did that because my wife's an artist, and, you know, an artist, what an artist makes and what I was making, we needed to change, and so I did that. But in the meantime, I was still involved with people with disabilities, and I became a board member. And then I became the youngest board president of PVA. And then my brother in law Mark Apple is in construction. I saw there was a need for construction for people with certain needs. So we created a company called Access Design Group. I was the social service person. I was the person that went in and talked to the families and individuals and care workers and caseworkers. And my brother in law Mark was the one who did the consultation. The big joke is I can screw in a light bulb and I can plug in and install a phone jack. Well, not the jack, the plug into the jack. So it worked out nicely. But again, we were at the mercy of the public in the sense of we had to deal with the state, and the state was low paying. So it went on and on a little bit. In the meantime, I'd always collected. I'd been a crazy collector for years. And I decided that I needed to do something I really loved. And when I went to visit a store in Chicago, my wife's friends all moved there after school in Madison, Wisconsin. A lot of Wisconsin graduates go to Chicago. There was a store there called Goodies that everybody told me I had to go to. In fact, one of her best friends told me I needed to go there. And I went there, and it was a very small store. Roughly 700 square feet. And the first time I walked in there, I. Well, I met the person who owned it. His name is Ted Frankel, who's from Shaker Heights. And I said, I have to sit down. He says, do you feel okay? I said, I feel too okay. Everything went off in my body. I mean, it was like. It was an epiphany. It was the glorious clouds opening up in the sun, every allegorical, every analogy. The best description of it for me was it was like the first time you see the Wizard of Oz. And it goes from black and white to color. That feeling is what I had. And I became very close friends with Ted Frankel, who owned the place. And he moved that store up from Goodies to, from 700 square feet to a 20,000 square foot warehouse with two floors. And he had a soda fountain and a bar, a candy bar. And upstairs there was clothing, vintage clothing. It was an incredible store. And we talked and talked and kept in touch. And I would go there all the time, twice in every trip. Once, the very first time I would drive in off Lakeshore, I go to his store, and then at the end of the trip I would go there. That was protocol. And I called him once and I said, you know, I'm thinking of changing lives. I'm thinking of doing something else. And I said, I'm thinking of opening a toy store kind of like yours. And he said, Steve, I'd be honored to help you. And I said, and by the way, I found a warehouse. And in our business, warehouses are like the old gold rush days, where you'd look for merchandise. And warehouses are old buildings. Warehouses, many of them are two, three stories, some of them are five or seven stories stories, and they're filled with oodles and oodles of old merchandise, old stock from the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies at that time. Eighties wasn't that hot back then. And I had found one, it was five stories in Columbus, Ohio. And in our business, you never tell anybody about a warehouse because it's the gold rush. You don't know what can happen. And we've all been burned over the years. But Ted was a friend and I took him there and I got the greatest lesson of life. I was like Indiana Jones Junior going through all these boxes and he says, oh, this company, the manufacturer, we found hats. And he said it was Batman cowl covers. He says they also do Green Hornet. And we looked for old boxes and anything that was made in Japan in the crates and things that were wooden crates and things that were made in Occupied Japan. And for a couple years, I bought things out of that warehouse and it helped me start my business, Big Fun. And I owe it all to Ted Frankel. And he also named it Big Fun, which is kind of cool. So he opened a store called Uncle Fun. I opened up April Fools of 1991. I officially opened up Big Fun at the store across the street at 1827 Coventry Road, which was in front of the kosher poultry place. It was now next to Hyde Park Grill. It's now Jimmy Johns. But I had opened up in November of 1990 while we were doing renovation. My old store was an empty, vacant business. It had many businesses, from bike shops to video stores. And when you walked in there, there was a gigantic dead rat, a sewer rat, right by the front door. And I said, it was so disgusting in there that even a rat died. And you can't even kill rats these days. I mean, they live forever. The walls were completely torn up. There was concrete floor. It was miserable. Roof leaked. Everything was wrong with it. And I decided that this was perfect. I mean, I'm a nut. This is perfect. You look at this thing, it's like, oh, this is perfect. There's a refrigerator with a door open and a dead rat. And that's all that's in the place. And I had design ideas and crazy ideas, an architect and brother in law that helped, and the city that saw that there was a chance and opportunity, and I participated. [beeping sound] Is that you?
Heidi Fearing [00:09:13] Yeah. I need to turn off the volume. I thought I had. I don't even know where it went to... Sorry...
Steve Presser [00:09:32] No, that's okay. And so the city, the economic development department, the city, and the planning commission, Cheryl Stevens back then, but now she's a council person. They had a program. They had a rebate program. They had a loan program. And I also got a loan from the Hyde Park Grill, the owners of the property next door. And my father loaned some money, and I brought him in as a partner, so to speak. He was retired, and we decided to renovate the whole place. And it was cool. It was like taking- It was like a phoenix. I mean, we took a horribly dilapidated building and, you know, all new electrical, all new plumbing, all new heating and air conditioning, roof, all new walls, floors. The floors came from the Kinsman Lee bowling alley lanes. They were going to tear it down. Over on Kinsman and Lee on the Shaker- Cleveland border. And my brother in law and I cut those wooden lanes out, which were maple in some areas and pine in others. We went through dozens of blades because there's lots of nails and they weigh a ton. And we brought them back, and we had to build up the floor. And the floor in the front section of the store was made out of bowling alley lanes, which is very cool. The fixtures came from an old dime store on the west side called Madison Five and Dime in Lakewood, of which we still have those fixtures in my new store, the floor we couldn't schlep over. It just wasn't practical. Then I had these really cool, ornate, turn-of-the-century - actually, they're from the teens - jewelry cases from Taddeo's jewelry store in Little Italy. So those are the showcases in my store presently that are right in front when you walk in. And then behind, you'll see the big cases, the wooden cases. So there's long glass and marble show click cases, and then behind the wooden cases, and then in the back of our store now, presently, we have a couple of those cases. And the lighting fixtures in my old store were from Higbee's downtown. They're really cool. Spun aluminum from the forties. And so I created this little fun place over there. And it was intimate, it was small. My father worked there. It was very tight quarters, and I loved it. But I made it as accessible as possible because I worked with people with disabilities. So I had ramps to the second floor. I tried to keep the aisles as clear as possible, but with my mind and my clutter and everything else, it was difficult. But we made it as accessible as we could. And we had a good run there. 14 years. It was great. It was kind of cool to be next to a kosher poultry place, a slaughterhouse in the city of Cleveland Heights. And that's something you should probably look into writing about, because it was unusual to have somebody slaughtering chickens. Tommy will tell you great stories about a guy that used to break in and open the cages at night when they would deliver them at two or three in the morning and set the chickens free. I mean, it's kind of funny. Actually, the funny story for me was my first time in the summer there, I took out the garbage, and we shared a dumpster out back with the folks next door and with Hyde Park Grill. And the dumpster was closed. So I have my bag of garbage. I open the dumpster, I go to throw my junk in and out flies, I'm telling you, 18 or 20 crows, gigantic crows. Well, what probably happened is the birds were in there eating the remains and the entrails from the chickens, and somebody closed it on them. And so I don't know how long they were there, but they flew out. I'm telling you, it was like a Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe movie. I just. I lost it. I screamed. It would have been a great video. So that was kind of fun. And then we moved across the street about six or seven years ago, and we took over the old Hyde park, the old High Tide Rock Bottom space. Marsha Polevoi, who was a stalwart on Coventry for 32 years, 33 years. Incredible store, great gift shop. We went from 1700 square feet to 3300 square feet. The store has a basement. The old store did not have a basement, so warehousing the stuff, immediate warehousing this stuff was difficult. I have a warehouse now, and I have had one for years. But to have the ability to stock items from the basement, that now was wonderful. And I have an office, a real office. My old office was the size of a prison cell, cut in half. It was small, very small. You open the door and you practically hit the wall on the other side. And it's nice. I like the new space now. It has twelve foot ceilings, 13 foot ceilings, and it presented some issues. I wanted to redesign. I didn't want to have the same store that Marsha had had, but it had good bones to it. And, you know, you can go crazy and spend lots of money. So I brought all my fixtures over, but I wanted to really design it to have a feel, like Big Fun. So we turn off half the lights on the ceiling, partially because we don't like the brightness. Well, actually, that's why. We are environmentally conscious folks, but we decided that the ceiling, which was dropped ceiling with these horrible white dropped-in panels, got to do something with it. Well, my son's a graffiti artist, and he knows an incredible amount about graffiti art and aerosol art. And so I said, I have an idea. I think I'd like to paint the ceiling kind of like the Sistine Chapel, but do it like really cool graffiti art. I said, Merrick, I need some people to help out. And he got together six of Cleveland's finest. In fact, a couple people came in from out of town, and we didn't know if it was going to be able, you were going to be able to spray upside down. Just the physics of spraying a can upside down, you know, after a while, it doesn't work. And then the panels, if they would absorb, if we would have to prime them, you know, a lot of logistics. There were lot of questions and how it would hold. And lo and behold, we were blessed on every level. They were able to climb ladders. One guy used scaffolding. A lot of them used gas masks. One guy used a bandana. And we had like a weeklong, about four days long, of a spraying party. Six different guys, six different areas. A lot of aerosol smell. I mean, you know, we opened the windows, of course, pizza, beer. And I think it worked out fantastically. And we have a really cool ceiling. And that was the start. The floor. I did some research, and I decided, you know, I didn't want to put down carpeting. We had wood. So we painted with this supposed to be incredible, ultra, uber industrial strength paint that, you know, highways and this and that. It was just okay. And so we ended up painting some yellow brick road, which my wife and a friend Carl helped out doing. My wife, Debbie, was incredible with the painting because then we chose all these crazy colors across the street. We had kind of fifties colors, some chartreuse, some pinkish and things like that. I decided to go with bold blues, reds, greens, and yellows, your basic kindergarten colors. So we did that. I had a photo booth across the street, a black and white photo booth, I ended up buying for, you know, for 14 years, I didn't have my own. Now I have my own. So I brought that over. I brought over the gigantic refrigerator that I got, I traded with one of my customers. He got out of a mansion out of Shaker Heights. It's probably built in the late forties, maybe early fifties. It's non functional, but it's cool and it's huge. And I started to design the store. I had old beauty cases. I used some of the cases that Marsha had. And it started to take form and shape. And I put up- I brought back the old awning effect that I had across the street, the red and white stripe, to give you the, you know, the circus feel. I had my neon sign that said "Big Fun" that hung in the window, the sign window. I unfortunately paid a gentleman to do a cool neon sign for my new store, and he left with my money. So I never got to do the sign until about three months ago. And there's a local artist by the name of Dana Depew, who's a wonderful artist that I become friends with. And I just love his work. I love his two dimensional work. I love his three dimensional work. He's a recycled artist, so he's a reclamation artist, which is what my wife is, too. And Dana takes old letters from neon signs and outdoor signs, and he puts them together. And he created a Big Fun sign with flashing lights, which is now probably over the front door. And then I said, well, we got this. And it was custom built. We got another panel, got to put Toys. So he built a Toys sign. And then we decided. Decided to do. Inside this door, I have some other artist friends. So Mark Jenks, this incredible artist, one of Cleveland's best artist, and I know a lot of artists, one of the most talented people out there, all media, all forms of art. And he does a lot of things for Parade the circle. And he and Patty have a frame shop over in Lakewood. Mark created this gigantic, oversized, Big Fun lunchbox. I mean, it looks like a real lunchbox with a handle. And the joke is there's a thermos inside, but it's fantastic. It's top of the refrigerator. And then I'm a big Pee Wee Herman fan. Let's face it. I love Pee Wee. My store is kind of like Pee Wee Herman meets Doctor Seuss meets Tim Burton. I mean, it just, I want it to be a playful area. He made John B's house from Pee Wee's Playhouse, and that sits on top of the photo booth. So we had that. And then I have a friend, Carl Jara, who works at the Cleveland Natural History Museum. Carl Jara is a world champion sand sculptor, and I know he can do great things. So I said, Carl, can you make something for me? How about a jack in the box hidden in the corner when we first opened up? Now we put over the front door, and it looks great. So Carl Jara did that. And then my clock, my neon clock, another person that works at, and a very, very fine artist that works at the Natural History Museum in display and design, Steve Misencik. He made a cool little sign above my neon clock. And then two local artists. This all happened in the last, last year with, I told you about Dana Depew sign, but with two local artists, John G. And Jake Kelly, famous for doing work for Melt with their ads and also their interior displays and things at Grog Shop, each of them independently, I had them do a mural of a sideshow. I said I wanted a sideshow. So that goes down the ramp to my greeting card area. And my wife right now is working on a special permanent display for my windows. She does reclamation and recycled art. And she had also done the Fencepiration from Heights Arts over on the south side of Cedar, across from Whole Foods and University Heights on the South Euclid side, which a lot of people love. And so she's working on that. And she also did my first window installation. And we're going to start working on that. We're going to start doing cool installations in the windows. So that brought you up to the next question, because I've gone ad nauseam, as I said, and I promised I would. So go ahead, ask me some more.
Heidi Fearing [00:21:12] You actually answered a lot of my questions so far. Let me see. How, besides being from University Heights, how are you connected to Cleveland Heights other than it was where you lived when you opened your first store?
Steve Presser [00:21:27] Well, you know, I. My wife and I lived in sin for a few years on Euclid Heights Boulevard, right around the corner from where the store is now, right next to Turtle Park. A lot of people know Turtle Park. It's a real cute little park, Euclid Heights by Hampshire and East Overlook. And our apartment building was there and we lived there for five years. And in 1987 we decided to stay in Cleveland Heights and move. And we moved diagonally across the street, maybe 500 feet, on East Overlook. So it was almost like the circus of moving our stuff from our apartment to our house, because as you can imagine, I collect a lot of things, so there was a lot of things that had to be moved. Speaking of circus moves, moving from across the street from Coventry from 1827, our old store to 1814 was pretty comical. I mean, we schlepped tons of boxes, but we literally had a moving company with dollies and moving fixtures across the street, almost like a circus, because there were a lot of very, very expensive, or not expensive, but important cases and artifacts from historical places that needed to be moved and preciously moved. And they were. And it was successful. We didn't even crack a shelf, so that was kind of cool. So we decided to raise a family in Cleveland Heights. We wanted to live in the Coventry area. We love the Coventry area. We like the eclectic nature of the commercial district. And this was before I had my store, because it was in 1987. And we liked the neighborhood because there's a mix of apartments, rental condos, houses and the commercial districts were very close by. It's a walkable neighborhood, so we can walk to Coventry, we can walk to Cedar Fairmount. And that was important. And if we wanted to put a good walk in, we'll walk to Cedar Lee too. And it was really important for us to be in an area that we really didn't have to have a car, if need be the case. But, you know, we drive our car, although I walk to work a lot. And my wife graduated Heights from 1975. Her father, her mother and father both graduated, graduated from Heights. My father graduated from Cleveland Heights High, and we decided that we wanted to raise our kids in Cleveland Heights and go through the Cleveland Heights public school system. Debbie's father, Robert Apple, was a school board president, so we have a lot of heritage there and it was wonderful. Our kids went to Coventry elementary school, Roxboro Middle School, where my father went to middle school. Coventry is where Debbie's, both her parents, I think, went to Coventry elementary school and then Heights High. You know, three out of our four parents graduated from Heights High. And it was cool. I mean, Debbie's father was elected to the Cleveland Heights High School Hall of Fame. I was elected, which was quite an honor. I got to accept it when my mother was dealing with the end of her life and, you know, terminally ill with cancer. And it was nice to go out and celebrate that. She was really proud. In my acceptance speech, I kind of confused people because I got up there and I said I was the second clown to be elected to the Heights High Hall of Fame. And everybody's like, what is he talking about? Well, the first clown was Larry Harmon, Bozo the Clown, who went to Heights High. So I jokingly said I was the second clown. Got a few laughs once I explained what I was talking about. So Cleveland Heights is an important part of our lives. And both my wife and I love the area, and we love our community, and we've been active in the elementary schools, middle schools, and high school. My wife's an artist, and I got interested in an arts organization called Heights Arts, which is one of the most incredible organizations I've ever been involved with. I mean, we've done incredible things. I'm a founding member. We're eleven years into it, and we're doing what we set out to do, which is to educate the community about the importance of arts and spread the good gospel of it. And Heights Arts has had wonderful projects in Cleveland Heights and especially in Coventry. It was responsible for the benches, responsible for the planter areas. Tyrrell Brinsley- Brinsley Tyrrell did those, and they're just magnificent. Barry Gunderson did the first Heights Arts public art piece, the sculpture by the library, by Coventry School, and the signage. I mean, we continue to be involved with public art, and it's an important part. I'm very active in the community. I have a difficulty saying no, especially to good causes. And I love Cleveland Heights for its activism and its community, and it's a wonderful community to live in. And so I'm entrenched. I know a lot of people just by my store, but I also know a lot of people by doing and working with organizations that are great out there, like Future Heights and Reaching Heights. And I think this year's maybe my 19th, 18th, 19th spelling bee, where I'm the master of ceremonies. I've got the easy job. I just have to pronounce the names of the participants and not the words. Although some of the names have gotten difficult over the years. I wear a jacket. I call it akin to the green jacket from the Masters I wear. My wife took an old tuxedo jacket I picked up at a thrift store. And she sewed on, or, no, she actually ironed on. My wife's an incredible, clothes designer and seamstress, but she ironed out all these different letters, and I wear it, put it on every year. And I jokingly say, here's the answers to all your questions. There's just numerous, numerous organizations. I go to Park Synagogue. I'm involved with Park Synagogue. Purim's coming up this Sunday. Both my wife and I will be there. I love my community, and there's just so much here that I, like, talked earlier about Cain Park. It's a jewel that 90% of Cleveland has never been to, and it's really one of the great things that Cleveland has. So I love Cleveland Heights. I love the sports teams. I used to be a jock, and I played soccer at Cleveland Heights High School. I played basketball there, too. I just- It's a wonderful place.
Heidi Fearing [00:27:54] [checking questions] Um, you answered that one.
Steve Presser [00:28:08] How about I can talk about- No, you can look at that. I'll talk about Big Fun. When we first opened up, the concept was things you don't need, but gotta have. And it really is. There's so much nonsensical junk, but we spell junk j u n q u e. So it's. It's. It's funk and junk. The whole idea is to come shopping and leave smiling. We want people to have a great time, and I think they do. I know they do. I mean, we, people really laugh. I don't care if it's the greeting cards, you know, the back they laughing at, or it's the joke and gag stuff, or the toys they remember from their childhood. We take great pride. We. I don't think there's a store anywhere around that has the depth of the collection of collectibles we have. And we're different than most stores. Like, there's collectible stores out there that are purely collectible stores, that, you know, like, they have similar items of us, like GI Joe's, the Transformers, the Star Wars, the Hot Wheels, He Man, all those kinds of wonderful toys. You know, we're a little bit different because we do more of the girls line. So we have Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony and Rainbow Brite. So we're a non-sexist, non- We're just nondiscriminatory. We like to have lots of good things for everybody. And what's happened now is the eighties toys are taking off like crazy. So that's the biggest market. The people that work for me, every person that's worked for me, who's an employee, was a customer before, and an avid customer. They loved to shop. They loved this stuff. And they decided that, you know, they wanted to work there. And some people just help out because, you know, they have regular jobs and they just help out on the weekends. It's important for me to perpetuate the mom and pop, and I become extremely vocal in the buy local movement. And I think it's important because neighborhoods, and there's many great neighborhoods in Cleveland Heights, you know, the Cedar Fairmount, Cedar Lee, Coventry, they're unique. And many of these neighborhoods are dying off because big box is coming in and the Internet has caused problems. And there's a whole generation that doesn't know what a small independent store is about. They're used to going to the mall or they're going to their smartphone and buying stuff. So we're trying hard on Coventry to keep the importance of a local neighborhood vibrant. And so we've done everything in our power to keep out for the most part, let's say keep out national chains. I mean, there are a couple, but we try to keep it a really heavy mix towards local entrepreneurs and what I call mom and pops. And for me, you think of mom and pops. I mean, it was Steve and Pops. My father was Pops. I mean, that's what I called him. And so he was there for many years. He got sick, unfortunately, and passed away of cancer. And my mother had helped out before, but then she stepped up and it was Steve and Mom, and then she got sick. And my family helps out a little bit. My wife comes in more often. My kids, I love my kids dearly. And Big Fun has never been their place that they want to settle down into, and I respect them for that. They've helped. They've helped paint and stock and price and do things like that. But to work there, very rarely, and that's okay, that's okay. But the whole idea for me is to retain that friendly atmosphere that when someone walks through the door like, hi, how are you doing? And I recognize them, they recognize me. And if I don't recognize them, I want them to feel like they've been recognized. So the next time they come back is, hey, how are you? And so we offer things. We're like a comfort food restaurant, but we don't sell food, except for our candy, which is pretty cool, all the retro candy. So it's all the stuff from your childhood. We have a magic section with a magician, Amazing Gary, that comes in every once in a while. We've got a video section that we sell old-school video games. We're talking about Nintendo's and Atari's and that stuff from the eighties and nineties. We have joke and gag stuff, which is a schmegegge like me, who grew up, I was a prankster. And, you know, I love that kind of stuff. So I would go down to Schneider's Magic Shop or Jean's Fun House downtown as a kid. And that was, you know, ride the rapid with a friend of mine. And that was, you know, you'd spend $2 and you get a sack full of fun junk. I mentioned we have the photo booth machine. We've had several people take their engagement pictures, or they got introduced. And when they were first dated, at Big Fun, they've come back and they've sent me photos, or they've sent out announcements using the Big Fun photo booth. So that's kind of cool. We have people now that work for me who are really, really artistically engaged and inclined. So our display has never looked better. And just the presentation of everything, it's overwhelming. And there's people who don't know, who walk in, don't see the ceiling that we have a Sistine-type ceiling. And then we have Alfred E. Newman, and then we have up there, we have Mister T. And we just have a whole host of characters. And then the floor was. We had graffiti artists do the floor in a couple of areas. And then we added some artwork where we did some decoupage, so to speak, on the floor. And we laminated over that. And then Amy, a gal that helps out, she made this R2D2 garbage can, which is great. It's right by the front door. It's just- my friend Ted Frankel from, you know, from Goodies and now Uncle Fun and now has a place in Baltimore called Sideshow - it's the best gift shop in the world - he says our store should be the safe place on the Monopoly board. And I agree with him. It's like you leave all your cares and worries away outside. And when you walk in that door, like I did the first time I walked in there, you should feel a load off your shoulders. And you should just play and feel like a child again and act appropriately. Because some people do play a little bit too hard in there. But just to enjoy yourself and go back to a time in your life that was hopefully really wonderful. And that's what we
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