Jun 30, 2010

Still Searching for that ‘Golden Ring’By Colin DailedaConnectionNewspapers.com

It’s Friday, June 25, 7:45 p.m., and Shelley and Lanny Jennings have 15 minutes left. A quarter of an hour before the music gets cut, the lights go off and the glass double doors are locked for the last time. Just 15 minutes until Collectable Treasures closes up shop at Old Keene Mill Center. But customers still flow in and out, intrigued by the smattering of sale signs scattered all over the glass wall that separated the muggy day from the air conditioned interior.

Inside, the store is lively, but with an aura of emptiness. Owners Shelley and Lanny Jennings stand behind the counter chatting with customers as they make their last purchases. Some shelves are still full of stationary, candles and hand-bags, as if the store would be open for years to come. Others sit idly off to the side, white shelves starved for the gifts that once brought them color. A woman walks around the back of the store, arms packed with stuffed animals, making the most of the sale. A rug surrounded by small figurines is slanted. A door in the back marked “Employees Only” is ajar. It’s as if no one has the heart to maintain the gift store anymore. After all, the clock just ticked over to 8 p.m. It’s closing time now.

Collectable Treasures, a store about the size of the average Hallmark squished between a Walgreens and a Solar Planet tanning salon, was where the Jennings’ dream of owning a business took flight. But the couple’s entrepreneurial ambitions first materialized in a much more unofficial setting — their garage.

The product was baseball cards. Lanny Jennings, a bald man with a bushy, brown beard who stands around 5-foot-7, is a sports guy, who had loads of cards to sell when the idea came to him in 1992. His wife Shelley, who is around his height with jet-black hair and today has eyes sparkling with nostalgia, wasn’t into baseball cards, and Lanny Jennings found a selling partner in a neighborhood boy. The two of them quickly went from talking about cards to selling them at card shows.

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