All good things...

It has been a familiar fixture of downtown Franklin for decades: Fad News Stand is as much a landmark as any business in the historic downtown area.
An era comes to an end Saturday. Fad will close at the end of the day of the Franklin Harvest Moon Festival.
Since 1972, Claire Walker has managed and maintained a business that has evolved through many changes to adapt to a changing customer base in the city.
The store has been for sale for some time now, but no takers in the current economic environment. Walker and her daughter Brenda Hebert have decided to close the doors and retire.
Fad belonged to Joe Gigilo and his wife. Claire’s husband went to the store often to buy magazines and newspapers, when in 1972 Joe Gigilo said they planned to retire, and if Edmond “Bozo” Walker would be interested in taking over.
Bozo said he’d talk it over with his wife, and when he returned the next week, Gigilo said Marion Melancon had offered to purchase it. But that deal fell through, so Bozo and Claire went “to see what it’s all about.”
“So we come in here, it was almost noon,” Claire recalled. “They (the Gigilos) used to go to Polito’s every day to have lunch. About a quarter to 12 they said, ‘Here, Boze, you and your wife mind it while we go to lunch!’ We didn’t know the prices, didn’t know nothing! They had a big old antique cash register with 3, 6, 9 figures. I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ The first customer asked for a pack of cigarettes, and I didn’t know how much it was. I was writing everything down. I managed to open the register but didn’t know how to operate it.”
Jan. 1, 1973, the Walkers closed the deal. Fad was largely a print publication outlet. “They had magazines all the way from the back to the front,” she said. “Paperback books, toys, model airplanes and we sold the fuel, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, pipes galore. We kept all of that for a while until the prices went up on tobacco products and the state started charging for a license…five to six years later we stopped selling all of that.”
The store was open six-and-a-half days a week. “That was hard with three small children,” Claire said. “We sold The Houston Chronicle, The Morning Advocate, the Lafayette Advertiser” and many more.
“Papa Joe would still come and help Bozo sell the papers,” she said. “When the magazines would come in he’d come here to check in the bundles. Comic books were very good, puzzle books. That was before you had all the big department stores.”
About 10 years into ownership, the trophy shop was still separate and in a different location, but Claire began taking orders for the owner. “I got to looking at that and realized it was pretty good money,” she said. “I told him if he ever decided to get rid of it, let me know. It wasn’t long after that he said, ‘Here, you want the trophy shop, here’s the keys!’”
All trophy work was manually done back then. “My first order was the livestock show, and I had to stay half the night to do that order.”
Then a salesman happened to drop by selling computerized trophy-making system. “He saw what I was doing and showed me” the computerized method, Claire said. “He set it up right here, and when he showed me how fast it would do that…I was scared to ask the price of it. But Bozo said, ‘You want it? We’re going to get it.’ So he ordered it, about $10,000 at the time. It came in boxes, you had to set all that up, I didn’t even know how to turn it on.”
She learned, though, and it became a large part of Fad customer base. “I burned a lot of plates up, for sure!” she said.
Claire says the most rewarding thing has been meeting people. “You make so many friends, and now they’re all crying because the Fad closing,” she said. “I know I’ll miss it. I may not admit it, but I will. I mean, after this long, I can’t see myself not getting up to come to work. There’s so little you can do in the morning, you get home in the evening, check your plants, water if they need it...you know, I’m 76 years old. It gets me tired easily. It’s time.”
Brenda recalled that she “used to sit in that window at 12 years old. It was so boring! There were so many cars (on Main Street) in those days, there was always some action to see!”
She worked elsewhere for a time, then came to work for Fad and has been there since the early 1990s.
They served hot dogs, nachos and much more for many years, but the last few years have shown, economically, that it is time to bow out. “I would love to have sold it just like it was, but it just didn’t happen,” Claire said.
After the doors close for business Saturday, Claire and Brenda will still be packing things up and organizing the contents.
Then it’ll be off to a new life for the long-time owners of a business anyone from Franklin and the surrounding area knew, some for their entire lives.