My Father and Donnie Osmond

My Father and Donnie Osmond

Way back many years ago, about 1975, my sister really wanted to see Donnie Osmond in concert. He was going to be at the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia for one night only and my cousin Barbara was able to get tickets to the event.

The big day came and my sister was so excited she could hardly contain herself. My father was going to stay in town and run our Western Auto store while the rest of the family went to Atlanta.

A few hours before it was time to leave, my father and one of our shop employees went out to install a television antenna on the roof of a house. 

My father came back to the store limping and told us he had fallen from the second rung from the bottom of the ladder and jammed his knee. 


He had a bad knee from when he had dropped a heavy cash register years ago, so we did not think too much of it.

He sat in a recliner at the store and had me bring him readings from the registers just before we left. He counted the money, too. 

He sat in that recliner for several hours before it was time for us to leave for Atlanta. Finally, we left.

We met my aunt and my cousin at their house in Norcross, Georgia and soon left to take my sister and my cousin to the concert. We went to a store called Treasure Island. Treasure Island was owned by J. C. Penny.

While at Treasure Island I bought a one hundred twenty pound barbell set. This weighed forty more pounds than I did. 

I could not find any employee to help me load it into the buggy, so I laid the buggy on its side and scooted the box of weights into the buggy. Then, I used the bar as a pry bar to get the buggy back up on its wheels.

When I got to the car I rolled the buggy up to the trunk and sort of laid it down in the trunk and slid the box out of it.

That night, after we picked up my sister and cousin from the concert we went back to my aunt’s house and my mother called my father at home. 


This is what he told her:

As soon as we were safely out of town he had one of our employees, who was also an EMT, call the Iva Rescue Squad. 

The Iva Rescue squad backed an ambulance up to the door of the store and took him to the emergency room at the Anderson Memorial Hospital.

They took X-rays and discovered he had broken his leg. His femur was broken in the most painful way a bone can be broken. Instead of breaking across the leg, it had broken up and down the bone and basically split apart.

My father knew that if my mother knew he had really fallen from the roof of the house and had fallen into a rose bush she would not have left him in Iva and would not have taken my sister to the concert. My sister would have been heart-broken.

My father sat in a chair for hours in extreme pain with thorns embedded in him just because he loved my sister so much that he could not bear to see her disappointed.

The doctor told my father he could not come home. My father could be very persuasive. Finally, the doctor agreed to let him go home if there was someone there to care for him.

One of our shop employees, Marvin, was there with him when we got home. 

The pain was so great that just stepping on the floor near him made my father wince with pain. 

My father was not a baby and he often endured intense pain and “took it like a man.” But this was so bad he would tell me, “Don’t walk so heavy.”

It took my father months to recover, but finally he did. He sucked up the pain for hours just for my sister. I guess he felt she was worth it. After all, she was his only daughter.

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Your Bumper is in the Back Seat

Years ago my family and I went for a picnic at Hartwell Lake. We were traveling in my Aunt Gloria Mitchell’s Monte Carlo. We were on the Georgia side of the river when my auntattempted  to turn into the road to get to the state park. As she went to turn right the car behind her turned out to pass her. It hit her and tore off her bumper. The car kept going.


My father jumped out of the front passenger seat and began to chase the car that hit us on foot. The car pulled over onto the shoulder and he made them back up. The park rangers descended on us but since the impact had taken place on a state highway the Georgia Patrol had to be called. The closest trooper was in Taccoa.

After a long wait the trooper arrived and wrote up the accident. We went on the picnic.
My aunt was afraid that her husband, Franklin, would be mad at her so she asked my father to call him.


I still remember the exact words of the call.  “Hello Franklin.  Nobody was hurt and your bumper is in the back seat.” Franklin and my father talked for awhile and then he put Gloria on the phone. Everything was okay.

You can't judge a book by its cover

One day, before we actually opened the Western Auto Store my father was at the store working when an eighteen wheel truck rolled in to make a deliver. My father and the truck driver were working hard to unload the truck.

A station wagon with no doors on it rolls into the as yet unpaved parking lot and a gentleman gets out dressed in a torn dirty shirt and torn jeans. The hood to this car is held down by rope and wires and most of the car is in pretty bad shape.

The man comes up to my father and starts to help him unload the truck.  They shoot the breeze a little as they are unloading the truck and when they finish my father reaches into his wallet to take out a little money to pay the man for his help.

The man tells him thank you but that he could buy the place if he wanted to. As it turns out this man owned a lot of land, a lot of houses and could in fact buy the store if he had wanted to. You never know by looking or even talking to a person how much or how little money they have. You have to treat each and every person the same.

Bruce McClendon

I was born into a retailing family. My great grandfather, Luther Jack McClendon owned a small grocery store in Modoc South Carolina.

My grandfather, Robert Bruce McClendon Sr. owned a small grocery store in Johnston South Carolina.

My father was born in Modoc South Carolina in his grandfather’s house behind his store. When my grandfather died my father, although still a teenager, took over that store and tried to run it. The problem he ran into was allowing people who should not have had credit to buy on credit.  My father lost that store.

My father attended Newberry College in Newberry South Carolina for one year. He went on a football scholarship. Normally when sons go off to college they live off of money sent from back home by their parents. For Bruce, it was the reverse.

 He attended college where he studied business and played on the football team. He also sent money back home to his ailing mother to take care of her and his younger brother and sister.

He earned money by working in a drugstore and by making an arrangement with a local dry cleaner. He would pick up laundry from fellow students and walk the several miles to the dry cleaners to drop it off. The dry cleaner gave my father a discount and my father charged a fee for pick-up and delivery.

 My father told me that some of the guys he did this for would drive by him in their new automobiles as he was walking to the dry cleaner and blow their horns and laugh at him. He would say “I am going to be able to buy you someday.”

My father decided that perhaps the air force was the best bet for him. Perhaps he could send money home and get an education. He enlisted and became a weather man and a training instructor. When his hitch was up he went to selling insurance for Life of Georgia Insurance Company and later found a job selling cash registers for National Cash Register which later became known as NCR.

While my father was with NCR he was normally the number one or number two salesman in the company. He worked hard and did the best he could. He won many sales contests where the prizes were trips or televisions, jewelry and other things.

Once his fellow salesman decided that the only way they could beat him in a contest was if they did not tell him there was a contest.

The one thing that motivated my father to do something, other than a contest, was to tell him that he could not do it.

On the final day of the contest there was a salesmen’s meeting where the then leading salesman in the contest bragged to my father how he was in the lead and that there was no way my father could beat him because there was only a few hours until the deadline.

My father went to his office and called people who had purchased from him before and put his cards on the table. He told them what had happened and asked if those companies had any need to make any purchases. Several of them did (especially the man from the bowling story) and my father was able to win the contest with plenty of room to spare.

About 1973 National Cash Register began to take a new direction. They decided that salesman would no longer earn commission.  My father was making more than sixty thousand dollars a year (which at the time $60k would buy a 3,000 square foot brick home in a nice neighborhood in Spartanburg South Carolina) to just over twenty thousand per year.

Obviously my father had to do something.

He began to investigate franchises.  He settled on Western Auto and we set off to find a town where we could open a Western Auto Store. A few years before a man had decided to open a Western Auto Store in Iva South Carolina and had gone so far as to buy land and stake off a building. He found that the powers that be in that small town were not very welcoming to a new business and so he decided not to open a store there.

My father found Iva and had a great deal of time trying to get anyone to sell him land. It seems that one or two local business men would hear that he was looking at a piece of property and would go out and convince or coerce the owners of that property to sell them an option on the property so that my father could not buy. The idea was that my father would have to lease the property from the businessmen.

Finally my father found a widow woman who owned some property and did not want anything to do with those businessmen. She sold my father the property at a fair price and he made plans to build the Western Auto.

We put our house in Spartanburg up on the market and went to building the Western Auto. Everything worked against the building of that store. The weather, Western Auto itself through miscommunication, government policy, you name it everything went wrong.

Finally it came down to a point where two payments of sixty thousand dollars each were due the same day. My father had sixty thousand dollars of savings left in the bank and wrote two checks of sixty thousand dollars each to pay for the two payments. On the very day the second check cleared the bank the closing took place on the house we were selling in Spartanburg and the final amount paid to my family for the house after all expenses and commissions were paid was exactly sixty thousand dollars. God was with us all the way.

We started out with that original sixty thousand dollars in investment in a brand new 5000 square foot Roebuck Building (Metal Building whose builders were based in Roebuck South Carolina). We had to do it all.
My father built fixtures. I learned to put shelving fixtures together and merchandise shelves. The installer from Western Auto came down to show us how to set up displays and found that we already knew how to display better than he did.

We hauled merchandise from the Western Auto warehouse in Gastonia North Carolina on our Johnny Cash special Chevy pick-up truck (67,68, 69,70) and we built what we needed rather than buy it whenever possible.

During this time I would tell my father that I did not know how to do a particular thing and he would tell me “You won’t never learn no younger.” This was his way of saying now is the time to learn.  And learn we did.

This store stayed in business for thirteen years up until my father’s death and I learned a great deal of retailing from him and from merchant friends of his.

One of his best friends at the time was John Graham of Carolina Cash in Spartanburg South Carolina. Mr. Graham and my father became friends while my father was servicing his company

McClendon Studios Presents: Football Helmets and Cleats

McClendon Studios Presents

Football Helmet and Cleats

Robert Bruce McClendon Jr. was also known as “Bones”.  He was a scrawny, skinny teenager.  He still went out for football.

When he first made the team, there weren’t enough helmets to go around. Bones went to the equipment area and found an old helmet.  It was scuffed up and beat up and very dirty.  He asked the coach if he could wear it if he cleaned it up.  The coach told him yes.

He painted it and polished it and got it looking really good.  He wore his helmet to the next game. He was extremely proud of that helmet.  

Not long into the game, one of the starters broke his helmet. The coach made Bones give his pretty helmet to the starter.

Sad and disappointed, Bones went back to the equipment room the next chance he got and found another helmet and fixed it up.  He got to keep this one. It wasn’t too long before he was a starter

Years later, Bones and his brother Carl were on the same football team. 

Johnston High School Varsity Football 1953

During one game, Carl was in and two large opponents decided to try to take Carl out.  They kept hammering at him and hammering at him.

After a few plays, Bones went to the coach and said “Put me in, coach.” He did this even though it would have him playing, “The opposite side of the ball”.

The coach got an evil grin and sent Bones in to play.

On the first down after Bones went in, he looked across to the opposing line and said to the bigger of the two offenders, “Get well soon”.

The ball was snapped and he made contact with the first of the two offenders.

He hit him so hard that the opponent could not get up.  They found his helmet on the other side of the field, split in half.  It was a very hard hit. The opponent just laid there in agony.  

Being the polite Southern boy he was, Bones decided that stomping on him with his football cleats would aid the guy in getting up.  Back in those days, football cleats had sharp, metal spikes.

Bones stomped on the first boy’s arms and legs with those cleats and did so much damage they had to load the boy in an ambulance.  No penalty was called.

Second down.  Bones crouched and looked across the line at the second boy

and said, “There is room for both of you in that ambulance”.

The ball was snapped and Bones made hard contact.  Down went the second of the two offenders.  Bones began his celebratory dance on the offender, stomping hard on his arms and legs.  The ambulance was called back.

Bones yelled across the line, “This is my brother Carl.  When you mess with him, I mess with you.”  He went back to the bench and sat down.  No one, not even his teammates, touched Carl the rest of the game.

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McClendon Studios Presents: Football Helmets and Cleats

McClendon Studios Presents

Football Helmet and Cleats

Robert Bruce McClendon Jr. was also known as “Bones”.  He was a scrawny, skinny teenager.  He still went out for football.

When he first made the team, there weren’t enough helmets to go around. Bones went to the equipment area and found an old helmet.  It was scuffed up and beat up and very dirty.  He asked the coach if he could wear it if he cleaned it up.  The coach told him yes.

He painted it and polished it and got it looking really good.  He wore his helmet to the next game. He was extremely proud of that helmet.  

Not long into the game, one of the starters broke his helmet. The coach made Bones give his pretty helmet to the starter.

Sad and disappointed, Bones went back to the equipment room the next chance he got and found another helmet and fixed it up.  He got to keep this one. It wasn’t too long before he was a starter

Years later, Bones and his brother Carl were on the same football team. 

Johnston High School Varsity Football 1953

During one game, Carl was in and two large opponents decided to try to take Carl out.  They kept hammering at him and hammering at him.

After a few plays, Bones went to the coach and said “Put me in, coach.” He did this even though it would have him playing, “The opposite side of the ball”.

The coach got an evil grin and sent Bones in to play.

On the first down after Bones went in, he looked across to the opposing line and said to the bigger of the two offenders, “Get well soon”.

The ball was snapped and he made contact with the first of the two offenders.

He hit him so hard that the opponent could not get up.  They found his helmet on the other side of the field, split in half.  It was a very hard hit. The opponent just laid there in agony.  

Being the polite Southern boy he was, Bones decided that stomping on him with his football cleats would aid the guy in getting up.  Back in those days, football cleats had sharp, metal spikes.

Bones stomped on the first boy’s arms and legs with those cleats and did so much damage they had to load the boy in an ambulance.  No penalty was called.

Second down.  Bones crouched and looked across the line at the second boy

and said, “There is room for both of you in that ambulance”.

The ball was snapped and Bones made hard contact.  Down went the second of the two offenders.  Bones began his celebratory dance on the offender, stomping hard on his arms and legs.  The ambulance was called back.

Bones yelled across the line, “This is my brother Carl.  When you mess with him, I mess with you.”  He went back to the bench and sat down.  No one, not even his teammates, touched Carl the rest of the game.

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McClendon Studios Presents: Discount Dentures

McClendon Studios Presents:

Discount Dentures

Disclaimer: Many of the stories are completely fictional.  Other stories are fictional accounts of true stories.  Other stories are completely true.  Sometimes the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

My father was always a little bit of a devil.  He also loved to tell a little yarn and see who would believe it. He was generally surprised to learn that people really did believe him.

One day Mrs. Fitzgerald was in my father’s store.  She was telling my father about how she needed to get a new set of dentures and how they were way too expensive for her.

My father, playing around, told her “Why don’t you do what I do?”  He said that he went down to the local funeral home and bought his dentures.

We had two large reputable funeral homes in our area and several smaller ones.

He told Mrs. Fitzgerald that, as you know, they don’t bury people with their dentures in.  He told her they don’t throw these teeth away; they save them.

He said that what you do is you go up to the funeral home and you tell

them you would like to buy some dentures. He said when you first go they will tell you that they don’t do that. He said that you have to tell them you know they do.

He went on to tell her that you have to insist you know they do and they will repeat that they don’t do this.  He told her that, after a while, you have to tell them that you know they do because Bruce McClendon in Iva told you that they do.

He went on to describe how the whole procedure works. He said they take you in a room and give you two baskets.  They bring you in a basket of uppers (don’t worry, they have been washed and sterilized).

One of the empty baskets is to put the uppers in that don’t work and the other is where you put the ones that might work out for you.  You keep trying uppers until you find a pair that is comfortable and you are satisfied.

Once you have your uppers, they bring you two more empty baskets and a basket of lowers to try on.  He said once you have found the best fitting uppers and lowers you can find, then you can make arrangements for payments.

The sad thing is that Mrs. Fitzgerald believed him. She put all of her fears and pride aside and went up to the funeral home. She began to insist that she wanted to try on a pair of teeth and that she knew they did it.

Finally, the director had to call my father and get him to convince Mrs. Fitzgerald that he was only playing.  Mrs. Fitzgerald's son came to our store with the intention of whipping my father’s tail for such a stunt.

I have included this story as an example of what NOT to do in retailing.

Notice: The story you have just read was told to me by my father as if it were true.  There is no way to know for sure whether it is really true or not.  My father liked to tell stories with real people names even though they never really happened to him.  I cannot confirm or deny this story. All names, other than my father’s, are fictitious.

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