Something for Everyone

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Memories of Lauerman Brothers Department Store

Michael Leannah

Journey back to a beloved Wisconsin retail institution and the golden age of department stores.

224 pages, 5.5 x 8, 121 b&w photos
Hardcover: $22.95 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-581-1
Ebook: $15.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-588-0
Publication Date: 4/23/2013

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Description

In 1890, the Lauerman brothers opened a general store in the lumber-boom town of Marinette, Wisconsin. The business prospered, and soon the brothers left their small quarters on Main Street for a magnificent department store on Dunlap Square in the heart of the city. Thanks to the Lauermans’ devotion to offering diverse merchandise, superior customer service, and employee loyalty, the store would remain a lively, vital part of the Marinette fabric for nearly one hundred years. And with later stores and businesses in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa, the company’s influence would reach far beyond this northeastern corner of Wisconsin.

Something for Everyone traces the history of the Lauerman enterprise and its importance to communities in dozens of counties in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A Marinette native and onetime Lauermans employee himself, author Michael Leannah draws on his extensive research and interviews with former staff and customers to create a unique tapestry of family, business, and community history. He takes readers on a nostalgic tour of the store’s most memorable and delightful features, from the plethora of merchandise offered to the record-listening booths to the famous “frosted malt” ice cream cones.

As it brings to life the people who worked and shopped at Lauermans, Something for Everyone tells the larger story of the golden age of department stores in the United States and transports readers back to their own favorite shopping destinations.

Author Bio

Michael Leannah has had a long career in the public schools of Milwaukee and Sheboygan. He has a degree in elementary education from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and a master's degree in creative writing from the UW–Milwaukee. His stories for children have been published in magazines in the United States and Australia; his radio plays have won national awards and have been performed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Leannah grew up in Marinette, Wisconsin, within walking distance of Lauermans Department Store. He lives with his family in Sheboygan.

An eloquent love letter to a vanished Wisconsin institution—and a vanishing piece of Americana. For nearly a century, department stores were the anti-Walmarts of their day: bastions of personalism whose owners lived on the same streets as their customers. Michael Leannah’s specific subject is Lauermans of Marinette, but his larger story is the golden age of American retailing, when delivery was free, candy was sold in bulk, and Christmas trees actually talked.

John Gurda

Historian and author of more than than twenty books

“The very atmosphere was magical. When I was old enough to walk to Lauermans by myself, I remember having a dollar to buy a gift for my mother’s birthday. Oh, the variety of things to choose from. Upstairs, downstairs, the store seemed huge to me.”

—Jane Champley Christenson, longtime Lauermans customer