NICK’S LAST SALE

Longtime owner of Struthers store puts contents, building up for auction

By JEANNE STARMACK

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

STRUTHERS — Nick Noviello kept his store going past the end of an era.

Now, it’s time for him to go, too. Nick’s Department Store is finally taking its place in the city’s history.

The store, first known as A&A, has been a fixture on Bridge Street for 64 years. Though it officially closed in September 2008, it has remained with its stock of men’s work clothes, shoes, boots and school uniforms still inside as if it’s all just waiting for Noviello, 79, to come back.

He’s not. Two years ago, Noviello had a stroke. While he was in rehabilitation, his daughter, Karen Brubaker of Canfield, and two employees kept the store going.

One of those employees, Moggie Bero of Poland, had worked for the store for 43 years.

“Besides Nick, I’m probably the longest employee,” Bero said. “He’s my family. We were in the store the last year and a half without him.”

But it got to be too much, said Noviello and Brubaker.

Thursday at 5 p.m., an auction will begin. All of Nick’s remaining inventory will be sold. At noon, the 4,900-square-foot store building will go on the block.

He isn’t likely to be there. Brubaker doesn’t plan on attending either, nor does she expect that her mother, Mary, will want to come.

“You don’t need to be here,” she told her father as he sat in the middle of the store last week, surrounded by all that stock and a vintage interior that he’s known his whole working life.

“You don’t know how hard it is,” he said. Emotion pooled in his eyes then spilled a little from the corners.

“I loved it,” he said, the declaration mixed in with the memories he eagerly shared.

He began working at the store 60 years ago while he attended South High School in Youngstown. Abe Averbach owned the business at the time, and it was known as A&A Department Store. Noviello did stock work, took care of customers and ran errands.

“He would go on trips, and I took over the store,” Noviello said of those early years. “He was a good man. He took care of me.”

Noviello joined the National Guard out of high school, and in 1951, he was getting ready to go overseas. Then his father had a stroke, he said, and he was discharged because of the family hardship.

He settled in at the store full time. “Even though I didn’t own it, it felt like my store,” he said. “He [Averbach] would ask, ‘What do you think, Nick?’ We had that kind of a relationship.”

Before he ultimately bought the store off Averbach in 1981, he had developed a business for it in school uniforms. He visited parochial schools throughout the Mahoning Valley, and at the height of it, the store was supplying uniforms to 27 schools.

When 1979 came and went, it took the nearby Youngstown Sheet and Tube works with it. Many other small businesses followed — the demise of the mill and the flight of businesses out of downtowns and into the suburban malls too much for them to resist.

Men no longer came in from the mill and cashed their paychecks to buy work clothes, shoes or boots, Bero said.

But A&A, soon to be Nick’s, kept going. It still sold clothes and footwear along with postal, police and nursing uniforms. It was the business Noviello had built up with the schools, though, that sustained it.

Noviello had made a living on Bridge Street, with Mary and him raising a family in Struthers that included three daughters and a son. He continued in business there even after most of his contemporaries were gone.

He had no immediate plans to retire, he said — the stroke forced that issue.

Now, he’s not sure what he’ll do. He likes to go to casinos, he said, and maybe he’ll do more of that.

Yes, he’ll miss the store and the people he worked with who were to him “like one family.”

The auction “is the best thing to do,” said Brubaker. “But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

The inventory and real-estate auctions at Nick’s Department Store, 122 S. Bridge St., Struthers, will take place Thursday.

kA preview is scheduled for 4 p.m.

kAt 5 p.m., Anglin’s Auction Service will auction the store’s stock and fixtures.

kAt 6 p.m., Byce Auction Co. will conduct an absolute auction of the real estate, which means the building is sold regardless of price.

kThe 4,900-square-foot building was built in 1925 and includes three storefronts. There are two apartments upstairs.

kThe successful bidder on the real estate will need a $3,000 nonrefundable deposit, and the deal will close within 30 days.

Source: Jeff Byce, Byce Auction Co.