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Once touted as ‘folly,’ Iowa shop is still going strong

By ERIC C. RODENBERG
AntiqueWeek Associate Editor

HINTON, Iowa — Fifty years ago, the people of this town – out here on the rolling western loess hills of Iowa — laughed at Roy Franklin Bogenrief.

“What a folly it would be to create a library, a bookstore or … an antique shop … in this little one-horse town,” they all said.

But, Bogenrief had lots of books, lots of antiques … and a lot of guts. In his own quiet, unique manner, Bogenrief took stock of (and promptly dismissed) the community’s sentiment and opened Frank’s Folly Antique Store on Main Street. That was in 1960.

Since then, many businesses (and people) within Hinton (today’s population, 847) have come and gone. But the antique store – now a Hinton landmark – still bustles with sales along busy U.S. 75, 12 miles north of Sioux City. And Frank, who will turn 100 this summer, just smiles at the accomplishment (and the memories); he’s not the kind of person who would say, “I told you so.” But, he could.
In each such small Midwestern town there are those unique people who become commonly classified as “characters.” Often, these are people with a keener insight into life; always busy with new ideas, forever taking up new avocations, always chasing a vision. Frank Bogenrief is one of these characters. It was almost as if he, many years ago, peered behind the veil of life and said, “There’s much to do, and I must get busy.”

Bogengrief collected musical instruments; then he learned to play them. He bought antique cars and ended up restoring them. He was always buying and tinkering, people say.

“I have owned everything in the county at least three times,” he would say. “If you aren’t the first at an estate or garage sale, forget it.”

He was just as tough at auctions. “Dad could outbid anyone for the challenge, or take it all for almost nothing, knowing … sensing what would sell. (He had) a gift for knowing … sensing what would sell now and a gift for knowing what would be worth money “down the road,” says daughter Margaret Bogenrief Cain.

The large Bogenrief family lived well from Frank’s Folly.

“His closeness to farmers proved good enough to always provide food for our table, come the holidays, or any other time a hog was butchered,” his daughter says.

Frank’s Folly is, and has always been, a true “ma and pop” store. Frank was the “horse trader,” buying, talking, restoring and tinkering. His lifelong partner, wife Louise (who died last year at age 94), was content to sit in the shop. She made it the kind of shop where people didn’t have to come in and buy; if they just wanted someone to talk with, Louise was always there to listen.
But, the shop was always busy.

“Dad was lucky,” his daughter Margaret says, although sometimes he made his own luck by tenacity and knowledge.

“(There was) a Duffner and Kimberly floor lamp that was almost unrecognizable when dad bought it,” Cain recalls. “Someone had painted the lovely base and pedestal with an ugly brown paint, and dabbed it onto the glass itself, making it unrecognizable … but on that rainy day, at a poorly attended auction, Dad knew what it was and bought it for a song. It sold for a symphony years later after he spent endless hours restoring it to its original beauty.”

Within Frank’s watch collection was one of only three such models produced by the American Watch Co., with one being in the Smithsonian Museum.

“An avid collector who owned a museum flew in one day in his own plane and bought Dad’s entire watch collection,” his daughter recalls. “Dad knew which one he was after.”

From Frank’s collection of more than 500 typewriters, he sold an 1885 Model No. 1 to a fellow collector in Canada.

To the people of Hinton (where the Hinton Tractor Pull remains the town’s premier event), the Bogenrief travels would become legendary.

With six kids in the car, Frank and Louise, would scour the countryside, buying, buying and buying.

In their 1914 Model T Ford (now owned by a collector in Denmark), daughter Margaret recalls a typical adventure.

“On a trip to Pipestone, Minn., with all six of us kids on board, the front woven floor mat next to the hot engine wall caught on fire,” she recalls. “Mom grabbed a jar of her canned tomatoes and smothered it with that liquid (they were mighty good at using what they had at hand) and Dad threw it out onto the side of the road … what a scare.

“That evening, traveling back the same way we went up, we slowed down a bit at the same place dad had tossed the floor mat and, to our shock, the entire side of the road was burnt and brown for a full half mile.”

Later, Frank and Louise would often head up over the Rocky Mountains, around the coast line to California, back to Texas and along the Gulf Coast up into the Eastern Seaboard.

Frank came to his familiarity with the road in a natural way; during part of his 20 years with the U.S. Postal Department he had traveled all the rural roads around Hinton, Iowa (always, buying, buying, buying).

He had been appointed as Postmaster of Hinton by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, working as his father before him, out of the Frank’s Folly Antique Store building which then served as a Post Office.

More than 100 years ago, the building began as a bank which - following the dry winds of the Depression – withered in 1929. Afterward, the Bogenrief family acquired the building and for several years it functioned as the town’s post office.

After Frank retired in 1960, the post office moved. And Frank began his “folly.”

Today, that “folly” can account for a sizable amount of folklore in Plymouth County, Iowa, and beyond. It can account for two highly recognized stained glass artists (son, Nick at “B & B Art Glass,” connected with the antique shop; and his twin brother, Mark, “Bogenrief Studios” in Sutherland, Iowa). Both of those enterprises can trace their origins back to the Duffner and Kimberly floor lamp.
Frank’s Folly can account for a lifetime of pursuits and friends, while sustaining a family business that is entering into another generation.

Perhaps, Frank knew this all along. He’s not saying. But, it is possible that when Frank was committing his greatest folly in life, he had in mind what Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw said a half century before: “Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.” And that is what Frank created.

6/2/2010