Penny Auntie Returns Under New Name

It was pandemonium on Lower King Street Friday afternoon. The nearby Robert E. Bell Middle School had just let out and kids started their weeklong break. Soon they began to flood a store that has been a Chappaqua mainstay for more than three decades. As usual, store policy prohibited backpacks inside, so kids left them to pile up and form a mound on the sidewalk.

What made this occasion unusual was that the store made a comeback.

After having shut down in October, Penny Auntie came back to life under the new, inverted name of Auntie Penny, although one would not know it if they were to merely look at the store's front sign, which has not been replaced yet.

Co-owners Eve Spence and Linda DeMase, both of Yorktown, made Friday a special grand opening for the kids. While Saturday was the official grand opening, Spence said Friday was added because the school break meant that kids would be going away for vacation, and that they also did it to thank them.

"We wanted to give them things that they would like and appreciate," she said, referring to the items being sold, as the store was stocked with goodies ranging from poppers, to chocolate coins, to Japanese eraser. The store stocks a hodgepodge of items for children of all ages, ranging from games to candy.

The general grand opening for Saturday also went well, according to DeMase.

While the traffic was not all at once like on Friday, Saturday's traffic was "a nice steady stream," she said.

For Spence and DeMase, reopening the store is only the latest milestone in a long affiliation with the place.

Both started working at Penny Auntie in 1999. In Spence's case it was to find a job after a divorce, one with benefits.

Spence also felt that the store then-owners, Linda Fogelson and Suzie Maltz understood what it was like to work and be a mother, having kids of their own.

"It was just a wonderful job for me in so many ways," she said. "Plus, you know, I always say that the ladies truly understood that my real job started when I went home."

DeMase's work began when Fogelson's mother-in-law referred her to work at the store. DeMase had previously worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. She started out doing window designing, and the job also offered flexible hours that came in handy as her son started kindergarten.

Spence also explained the store's history of ownership, using a print copy of a recent LoHud profile story on the store as a partial reference. At the time that they were hired, Fogelson and Maltz had not owned the store for very long, having taken it over from its original owners in 1998, Marian Giraldi and Barbara Radin, who had founded it in 1978. In 2007 the store was sold to a woman named Karen Lustig, a Lewisboro resident looking for a career change from the corporate world.

Lustig's run with the store was brief due to a variety of factors. Spence cited the bad economy, the start of construction on the Route 120 bridge downtown and a lack of sufficient parking as a result, as factors - "a perfect storm of problems," for Lustig and the store.

Ultimately the store closed in October, and remained so for about 10 weeks, DeMase said.

Looking to give the store to someone else, Lustig was in discussion with Spence and DeMase about having them take over, but chose someone else. For a brief period they were without jobs, and were even collecting unemployment benefits.

However, things changed when the planned deal fell through, and Spence and DeMase wound up in talks with the building's landlords, Mike and Rick DiNardo, about keeping a store there. The store reopened unofficially in early January, but under the new name of "Auntie Penny."

Spence explained the reason for the name change and said that they hadn't actually bought the store, and it was unclear as to who owned the "Penny Auntie" name. However, the new name has an established history of its own. Based on a conversation she had with Marian Giraldi, Spence said that kids in the store would often call it "Auntie Penny," and would think of Giraldi as a relative.

Despite having been open for a month and a half, Spence and DeMase had to spend time restocking with new items, a task made more difficult by the post-holiday period when toy companies had down time. They also relied on help from sales reps from toy companies who had helped the store's previous owners.

Despite not having an advertising budget, DeMase and Spence were able to get the word out for the store's grand opening in a creative way. The middle school-aged daughter of a woman named Catherine Frieder, who had previously been interviewed by LoHud on the store's reopening, offered to read an announcement to the student body about the store's grand opening. Once she did, Spence said that almost immediately kids and parents came in to ask about the opening.

Once more, the backpacks piled up and the kids returned.