It's hard to separate one of East Aurora's active seniors from the village's senior business, Vidler's 5 & 10 Cent Store. Not only has this reminder of earlier times flourished on Main Street since the darkest days of the Great Depression in a building now more that a centure old, it's developing a new clientele: senior bus tourists.

"In retailing, when a huge crowd shows up, you ask: What happened? Did a bus pull up?" says Edward Vidler, 69, who owns Vidler's along with his brother, Robert, 73. "Well, one fall day some years ago the store suddenly filled up. And I asked my brother what happened. He said a bus did pull up!"

It was a senior tour returning from a fall foliage trip to Letchworh State Park. Those bus tours - encouraged by notes the store sends to tour operators - have increased in number.

These days, the brothers have cut way back from the 80-plus hours they devoted to the family business every week for decades.

"Bob is semi-retired now. He comes in about four hours a day," says Ed. "I'm at half time, maybe 40 hours a week. but people get a kick out of seeing us old geezers at work."

Every small town in America has guys like this running family businesses. They're like farmers, really who must stick close to the barn all the time. Ed and Bob unloaded trucks, stocked the shelves, waited on customers, made a payroll that numbers 35 employees and earned a decent living.

Virtue, Necessity
and
Plenty of Nickels

The Vidlers Are
Main Street, U.S.A.

These days, Ed's daughter, Beverly, and a nephew Cliff DeFryer, are the store managers - and they keep Ed busy.

"I don't run and jump like I used to, but I figure climbing ladders and unloading trucks is what keeps me healthy," says Ed. "I'd rather work than go to a gym and walk on a treadmill."

 Ed has spent his entire working life in the store his father opened on June 21, 1930. After graduating from East Aurora High School in 1946 and the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1950 with a degree in retailing, Ed joined his older brother Robert S. Vidler Jr., who joined the store after he was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1945. They bought out their father 45 years ago and have expanded the operation ever since.

"We incorporated as 'Vidler's Five Cent, Ten Cent Dollar and More.' We never wanted to get away from a five-and-dime store," says Ed. "We have sections - not departments - and we still sell the same stuff we did a half-century ago. You can buy a single safety pin for

3 cents. Some people do not like to buy more than they need."

Their father, a polio victim who went to the Rockies to regain his health, eased into storekeeping while working for the Midwest Oil Co. in the company town of Midwest, Wyo. There he met and married Gordys White in 1922. But after a superior took the credit for Vidler's profit-making innovations, he quit and drove to his wife's home town of East Aurora with their two small sons in 1929 - just in time for the Great Crash.

"My Grandmother told him it was a pity people had to go into Buffalo to buy a spool of thread, so he decided to open a five-and-dime," says Ed. "That's where you found thread, bindings, needles, thimbles, small toys - things like that. Dad used every penny he could scrape up to stock the place - he never liked credit - and we got by.

"Today you'd say he was 'undercapitalized.' But in those days people just plowed ahead. We did without.

 It was pretty tough, but of course, Bob remembers that better than I do - I was only 1 when I moved here."

After World War II, Vidler's bought the main building, then the property next door, and put additions to the rear of both. Moms still buy spools of thread and kids still come in for 10-cent bags of popcorn. Though the place is clean ("I sweep 400 feet of aisle every day - and have done so for 40 years. That's impressive mileage, if you work it out," says Ed), the wooden floors and fixtures are original.

"We have made a lot of modern improvements, though," Ed says. "We were the first store in Western New York to install fluorescent strip lighting back in 1945, and we bought that popcorn machine 35 years ago, after the original broke. I guess we're just thrifty."

In the 1960s, the brothers hired an architect to discuss modernizing. A new facade alone would have cost $30,000 - more than the building then was worth.

"Rix Jennings, a local artist, told us we ought to enhance, not change. He drew up a plan for the facade that just used paint and color. We could afford that, and we've stuck with it. We kept all the original store fixtures, too, to save money."

Thus Vidler's has true patina, missing from the "clever" decorator touches one sees slapped up on the walls of bars and restaurants everywhere these days. At Vidler's the walls hold goods for sale, not display.

Two other events occurred about the time the brothers decided to make necessity into an architectureal virtue: T-shirts and television.

"We began selling souvenir T-shirts in the late 1960s, but nobody seemed to wear them," Ed recalls. "So we offered a prize - a penny a mile - for the snapshot showing the Vidler's T-shirt farthest from town. I think the first week we had the display in our window we paid a guy 7 cents."

 In time, the contest saw snapshots of the Vidler's T-shirt on high Alps, Australia's Great Barrier Reef and every point in between - including one elaborate hoax involving a fake Jimmy Carter at Billy Carter's gas station in Plains, Ga. Then Liberty Bank asked to use the store in a TV advertising campaign.

"Liberty, now Fleet Bank wanted better name recognition with ads using local businesses as backdrops. It took us five seconds to agree to that," says Ed. "Camera crews showed up one day, along with Peter Graves. The ad showed the store and us, too, and Graves talked about our place and mentioned that we had been Liberty customers

Vidler's has true patina, missing from the "clever" decorator touches one sees slapped up on the walls of bars and restaurants everywhere these days. At Vidler's, the walls hold goods for sale, not display.

for 50 years. Well , you can imagine that happened. Everyone saw that ad. People started coming in from Canada, Rochester, all over Western New York."

The latest local promotion - which grew from an employee suggestion - is the Vidler's Drill Team. Members wear the store's trademark red aprons and march in the Fourth of July parade, swinging the combination walking canes and yardsticks the store has sold for years.

"We figured we'd better do a variety of maneuvers - we could never march in step," Ed says.

Despite this long, affectionate relationship with their hometown, the Vidlers never pushed their kids to join the business.

"Seven years ago, when Beverly decided to come home after years working in Boston, I was very pleased," says Ed. "But she'll suffer from 'fatherism' the same way Bob and I did. We've owned the business longer than Dad, and expanded it. But people always think children have something handed to them when they take over a family business.

"This kind of work is not for everybody," he adds. "I'm a 'homer,' anyway. I've always come home for lunch every day and love being a Main Street storekeeper. The downside of that is, you worry every time the fire siren goes off.

"And I love waiting on customers. It's the icing on the cake, really. One in 10 has an interesting storey about a new grandchild or a trip they took, and one in a hundred has a storey you never forget - like Mr. Max. He drove a horese and buggy to deliver baked goods from Hall's Bakery, and he claimed to have built the first portable radio back around 1920.

"Mr. Max had a helper, a real hustler, a kid who'd not only run up five flights to deliver bread, but would take along a box of doughnuts and try to sell those, too. Well, the kid said he needed to have time off to hear the World Series, wihich was going to be broadcast on the radio for the first time that year.

"Mr. Max loved to tell how he'd got some wet-cell batteries and about 100 feet of copper wire and ran that around the bakery wagon so they could hook up a radio, and how he figured that must have been the first car radio, even though he wasn't driving a car.

"It's stories like that you remember," Vidler says, "people like that who make you want to come to work everyday."