Tammy Dauth is seen here at her York shop, My Sister's Closet.
Photo by Virginia L. Woodwell
The best of times, the worst of times...
Tammy Dauth knows what it means to be squeezed between those extremes.
Only16 months ago, and in fulfillment of a dream, she opened a used apparel shop for women. Two months ago, struggling through tears, she arrived at the difficult decision to sell the place.
And that wasn't because the business is doing poorly, she told us when we met with her to discuss all this recently.
"As soon as I opened, it was very successful," she said, speaking, nevertheless, with a characteristic restraint and modesty. "People were thankful for it."
And since then, she reported, the business has been "holding its own," paying for its own rent, utilities, advertising and other overheads - a remarkable feat, she noted, considering that most businesses lose money in their first year.
The trouble is, she explained, that this business isn't bringing enough money into the Dauth family coffers to tide them through the currently depressed economy. Tammy and her husband, Fritz, have a daughter in college and another daughter, 18 months younger, who's just starting out on her own; Fritz is a real estate broker whose income has shrunk with the failing market, and their own Shore Road home is now for sale at a price less than they paid for it.
Tammy's current goal is to help generate a steady income to meet these challenges. But there's a grand irony here, which Tammy herself is well aware of.
It's that a used apparel shop for women would seem like a great business to be in during depressed times, and Tammy's shop may well be poised, in the hands of a buyer who can stand to wait, to take off.
For those who don't know it, the shop is called My Sister's Closet, and it's located on Route 1 North, right opposite Anthony's Food Shop.
On the late-August day when we visited, sunlight was streaming in through ample window space and contributing to a sense there of cleanliness and airiness. That was magnified by a white ceiling and white carpet, and by light-colored walls - and by displays of the clothes themselves. Those were hung on professional-quality stainless steel circular racks, or artfully arrayed on walls or mannequins, and their sparkling cleanliness and that of the shop utterly belied the fact that the clothing was "used."
The shop, in fact, looks for all the world like a conventional women's clothing shop - and even one that might be dubbed upscale.
We learned, additionally, that it differs from other used clothing shops in the facts that it's not a consignment shop, and that it offers women's clothing in all sizes, not just those up to size 14.
"Everyone," said Tammy in support of that last policy, "deserves to feel beautiful."
Tammy, we decided before we were through, was wise - as well as smart about quality control. She got her first inventory, she told us, by advertising for it ("We'll buy your clothes"), and she was instantly deluged.
"Within two weeks," she said, "we had so many clothes we were waist-deep in them... And they were beautiful; clothes that people had outgrown, clothes that they'd changed their minds about, clothes that were even new..."
Tammy, her two daughters, and a friend, Terry Woods, spent a full month sorting, cleaning and ironing them prior to opening day on April 20, 2007.
Since then, word-of-mouth has contributed mightily to refreshing My Sister's Closet's inventory - sometimes to the point, Tammy said, of being "overwhelming." She controls that influx by accepting clothes by prior appointment only (though sometimes she'll book six or seven appointments in a day), and she controls quality in advance by accepting no clothes with rips, stains or tears, and by requiring that clothing presented must be freshly laundered and delivered hanging or folded in a box or bin. She will accept no deliveries in rubbish bags.
Contributing to the appeal of her shop is the fact that just about the only items of women's apparel that she doesn't accept are undergarments; the rest range from dresses, suits, skirts, shorts, slacks, bathing suits and blouses to hats, belts, shoes, scarves and jewelry. Prices, she reported, range from, say, $10 for a J.C. Penney number to $100 for an Elie Tahari luxury suit that might have retailed new for $385.
As we talked with Tammy that day, we ended up unfolding story after story, some going way back in time and place, but all related, one way or another, to Tammy's being in this situation at this time.
The dream of having such a shop, for example, was not only Tammy's but that of her mother-in-law, Marge Dauth. And that was discovered only after Marge's death, when Tammy and Fritz and the family were sorting her effects and found a statement in a yearbook: "I always wanted to open a little dress shop," she'd written.
Tammy's shop was therefore in part for her as well as for Tammy, and Marge's death, Tammy reported, and the sad sense of dreams too-long deferred, helped impel her to start it.
Tammy also told us that she had helped care for Marge through a year-long battle with cancer. (When Marge requested meatloaf for Easter dinner that year, the clever Tammy delivered it in the shape of a rabbit, and Marge, laughing with great appreciation, said, "I knew you were up to something in that kitchen!") And the story of Marge's dying led to yet another: the fact that she died on a Friday and her husband Fred died of a massive heart attack just two days later, that Sunday. They had been together, Tammy said, "since they were kids."
Moreover, she added, Fritz's grandparents followed the same pattern. His grandmother, ailing, declared that she would not die before her husband, who'd been tending her. When he died in his sleep one night, she died 12 hours later. That grandfather, Tammy reported by way of aside, had been an Olympic gold-medalist in swimming who competed against Johnny Weissmuller.
And so, when Fritz was battling a virus that attacked his heart not long ago (he's fine now), he said to Tammy, teasing, "Be very afraid. We don't like to go alone."
We asked how he and Tammy had met, and learned that that happened in a nightclub called The Baggy Knees, in Vermont, where Tammy had grown up and to which Fritz moved by himself when he was only 18.
Fritz's family would follow him to Vermont, but Fritz and Tammy would abandon Vermont for York in 1993. They'd married in 1984, bought a house and fixed it up for resale in 1985 and 1986, bought another house that year, and then began having their children the following year - Elizabeth, whose 21st birthday was this week on Sept. 2, and Danielle, born on June 7, 1989. A wedding at the Cliff House introduced them to this area, and, for five years thereafter, they came here on vacation, to timeshare condos via an arrangement with the company for which Fritz was working as a house painter. One day, at the end of one of those vacations here, Tammy turned to Fritz and said, "You take the kids and go home. I'm going to stay."
He responded, "You, too?"
It would take them three years to sell their Vermont house, but they came right away anyway - to a rental first, then to another fixer-upper before their current home. Along the way, Fritz, atop a ladder one day, had an epiphany. He was going to find something else to do besides house painting. Tammy encouraged him: "You could sell snow to Eskimos and get them to sell it back at half price," she said. He passed all the courses and tests necessary to become a real estate broker, and began work in the same office (Ray Pape's Masiello Group) where Tammy had been working as a secretary.
But that, of course, brings us back to where we began...
Tammy, whose customers have now become friends, doesn't have the heart to tell those here for just the summer that she won't be back in the shop next year.
We left her with fingers crossed that a way could be found for her to continue, herself, My Sister's Closet.
If you've got any suggestions yourself, or if you want to shop there (she'll stay open until November), the store is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday - though she has closed on Sundays during winter, and opened at 10 a.m. on weekdays then.
