Frank Olean: The man who helped make Public Square friendly
By Christina Knott
Watertown Daily Times
Frank Olean was a young, 17-year-old boy walking down the street on Public Square in Watertown when the clothing store that would one day be his called out to him. Literally.
The owner of Smith and Streeter, John C. Streeter, was standing in the doorway of his store in need of an errand boy. He saw Mr. Olean walking and asked if the boy wanted the job. He did. And on Jan. 20, 1868, his career with the clothing company began.
There Mr. Olean stayed, rising quickly from errand boy to clerk and, eventually, part owner. bought out the man who hired him to own the store, along with Mr. Streeter’s son, Fred W. Streeter, and another associated, Henry J. Brimmer.
Before he was partner, tension among stores in Public Square was fierce, as Mr. Olean described in an article about his retirement published in the Watertown Daily Times in 1925, from which the majority of this story is found.
“I well remember that our chief competitor and rival was the Great Wardrobe Clothing company, owned by George Wiggins and others. In those days, there was no fraternal spirit between the different merchants. They had nothing to do with each other. They never went in each other’s stores or had anything good to say about each other.”
Mr. Wiggins and Mr. Streeter would not even speak to each other on the street, he added, even though their stores were located almost next door to each other.
After the older store owners retired, Mr. Olean and his partners worked to improve relations.
“We immediately tried to establish friendly terms with our business competitors, and a fraternal spirit grew up, the product of which you can see among the merchants of today.”
Mr. Olean and his partners would visit each other’s stores and even send a clerk to search a competitor’s shop if they weren’t able to find what a customer needed.
Tailors, too, closely guarded their trade skills for fear that a rival tailor would learn his tricks. The only way to learn the trade was to pay a “great sum of money” to a tailor for the privilege of learning the skill. But the tailors too embraced the fraternal spirit, and organized into an association that freely shared knowledge with each other.
One more impact Mr. Olean had on the Public Square economy, his store was the first to get rid of haggling and introduce a fixed price system of having one definite price for all. Soon the other clothing stores followed their lead.
Speaking of prices, Mr. Olean also recalled as he retired how the cost of “whiskey, best grade and good sized glasses” cost three cents at any bar during his younger years.
Upon his retirement, Mr. Olean had been working as a salesman for 33 years, having left the clothing in 1892 to move into sales, and he remembered his career.
Mr. Frank Olean lived another six years after he retired from business. He died Feb. 10, 1931, at age 80 of bronchial pneumonia at his residence, 324 Sherman St. He was survived by his wife, his brother and law and sister and a niece. In the newspaper interview before his death, Mr. Olean summed up his long career saying, “My business life has always been most happy and successful. I have always enjoyed my work.”
