Don Leary’s was the place to buy records

Don Leary could sell just about anything, and he did: Gas refrigerators, TVs, jukeboxes, radios, phonographs and clothes dryers. But what he was best at selling was records.

For 58 years, 1931-1989, Don Leary’s was the place to go to for the latest hits. He stocked them and sold them by the thousands, from Bach to the Beatles, in his shop at 56 Hennepin Ave. on Nicollet Island, at 223 E. Hennepin and later at 2927 Pentagon Drive in St. Anthony.

James Donald Leary was born in Milwaukee, Wisc., in 1907. His father, James H. Leary, was working as a clerk; his mother, Ella, was at home with her new son. Three years later, the Learys had moved to Minneapolis, where, according to the 1910 Federal Census, James H. sold real estate. The family lived in the southwestern portion of Minneapolis and Don attended West High School.

Don’s parents divorced when he was 16, and he was soon out on his own. He worked for a while as a handyman. 

In the late 1920s, a nightclub singer, Dorothy Deforrest, caught his eye. She cut a record in 1929, and composed a song, “Nobody’s Got The Blues But Me,” which debuted at the Minnesota Theater on 9th St. and LaSalle Ave. In her 1992 Star Tribune obituary, Don recalled, “About a month before we broke up, she wrote that and then we got back together and got married, right in the middle of the Depression.

“We didn’t have any money, not a dime, but we made it.”

In 1931, the Learys opened the store on Nicollet Island, along a block that is mostly empty now, save for the parking lot at the Nicollet Island Inn. 

Don grew up listening to radio broadcasts (TVs didn’t exist then), so selling radios and record players came naturally. He sold records because he thought people would like to purchase records from the same store where they got their phonograph.

He made good money selling jukeboxes, too, when Homer Capehart, Sr., who later became an Illinois senator, asked him to place some around the Twin Cities.  Leary averaged placing one new one a week in in bars, malt shops and restaurants during World War II when materials for manufacturing records were hard to get.

Big spender on ads

Leary was an enthusiastic marketer, and he used the tools available to him at that time – newspaper advertising and radio. He also distributed a monthly newsletter, “Don Leary Record News,” to a mailing list of 25,000.

He placed an advertorial in the Aug. 15, 1948 Minneapolis Star which proclaimed, “Don Leary named country’s outstanding record dealer.” In paragraph after paragraph, he revealed his marketing strategy, ending with a quote: “When someone walks through your door and asks for a record, I think you should have it in stock all ready to be wrapped. The customer gives you a break when he comes into your place. Give him what he wants and you’ll get him to come back.”

Leary thoroughly understood the power of radio broadcasting.

In the 1940s, he hosted The Disc Jockey Show, which aired at 4:30 p.m. Saturdays on WDGY. The show originated at the store, and Leary played records and interviewed various musical groups. There were giveaways, too — record albums, theater tickets and free dinners at Curly’s Theater Cafe, a strip joint at 20 S. 5th St. in downtown. Leary was building the reputation of the “N.W.’s most talked-about record store.” (Minnesota used to be considered part of the “great Northwest.”)

Leary bought out McGowan’s, a record store on 9th and Nicollet downtown, in 1951. In an ad in the Sept. 19 Minneapolis Star, Leary offered boxes full of records — “a $13 value” — for $2.95 each. “There were a lot of records left around when we moved into 921,” the ad said. “… in order to move them in a hurry, we boxed up assortments of 15 brand-new records to a box (30 tunes).” 

The following year, Leary hired a square dance caller, Dale Lounsbury, to help curate the store’s collection of folk dance records. Leary had acquired the stock of Morey’s Folk Dance Supply House and Lounsbury was an active member of the Minnesota Folk Dance Federation. He worked at the Nicollet Ave. store.

For a while, the Learys operated out of both locations. The Nicollet Ave. store was “convenient when you’re shopping downtown.” The Nicollet Island location offered free parking (“You can save a nickel”).

One driver accidentally parked his car inside the shop in 1951. Myron Peterson, who lived about a block away, collided with a Como-Harriet streetcar, “leaped the curb in a 25-foot space between cars” and crashed through the plate glass window. Peterson and his wife were taken to General Hospital; no streetcar passengers were hurt.

By 1956, Variety listed Don Leary’s as one of the top 20 record dealers in the nation. He had more than a quarter million records in stock.

When urban renewal came to the island, Leary moved up to 223 E. Hennepin Ave., approximately the location of the parking lot at Kramarczuk’s Deli today.  On Jan. 22, 1961, fire swept the block, taking out the East Hennepin Furniture store and damaging others. Photos taken later in the decade showed that Leary’s and its neighbors to the south survived.

Leary purchased lots of newspaper ads. Some were big display ads. Others were scattered throughout the classified sections, coaxing parents to buy a record player for the kids or promoting an Admiral TV for the family. (He was the exclusive dealer for the brand for many years.)

One of those TVs ended up at the wrong house. Merton Collum of Crystal was surprised when Leary’s delivery men came in, took his old TV set and delivered a television-radio-phonograph, retail price $599. Indignant, he contacted his attorney and asked for his old set back. Leary, ever the PR man, told Collum if he provided him with a bill of sale for the old set, he could keep the new one, free of charge.

Move to the suburbs

It’s not clear when he left the downtown store, but Leary expanded to the suburbs in 1954 when he opened a store in the Miracle Mile Shopping Center in St. Louis Park. He stayed there for four years.

The East Hennepin store and other buildings next to it, structurally weakened by the fire, fell to the wrecking ball in the late 1970s, but Leary got out early. In 1971,  he saw the handwriting on the wall and set up shop in the St. Anthony Shopping Center, about where Hidden Treasures is today.

Don Leary’s was the store you called when you wanted an obscure recording. People came from all over to flip through the albums and 45s. If you wanted to know about how FM radio worked, you wrote to the Star Tribune’s Fix-it column and Don would explain it. If you wanted a list of all the albums put out by the Second Chapter of Acts or the address for the Dave Clark Five fan club, Don could provide you with contact information. His knowledge was as encyclopedic as his record stock. 

Asked to recall when the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, Leary said 20 years later he’d been warned by Capitol Records to get ready for a tsunami of record buyers. “Everybody expects sales to jump after a big show like that, but it takes time for people to get interested,” he said. “What is interesting is that they still sell. People are still collecting those records today.”

Leary had a reputation for being gruff, but friends knew him as a storyteller with a never-ending supply of tales.

Leary continued to sell records until 1989, when the shopping center’s owners wanted him to sign a two-year lease. He was 82 years old. “Why would I want to sign a two-year contract?” he asked. “I could croak in a year and a half.”

He lived until 2000. Saturday nights, he could be found at Nye’s Polonaise Room, hanging out with “the guys” and telling stories until three weeks before his death.

Sources:

Twincitiesmusichighlights.net

“Car Crashes Radio Shop,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 1, 1951

“It’s Finders Keepers With TV Set,” Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 3, 1954

Strickler, Jeff, “Beatles remembered in Year 20 ‘A, B.’,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 9, 1984

Foley, Ellen, “Leary’s closing to leave record collectors looking,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Nov. 21, 1989

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