Lakewood Lore

Shanty and owner bring back colorful memories

There are in the memories of many of us an auto parts store called the Shanty and its colorful owner, Arthur E. Kellogg.

The store was a downtown Lakewood institution for more than a half century. It opened in 1918 and originally was pretty much what its name denoted -- a small, unadorned structure. It might easily have been mistaken for a portable voting booth.

It stood on the south side of Detroit between St. Charles and Belle, at 14607, about where Cardinal Federal Savings Bank is now. At first, it sold only tires and batteries.

In 1925, the business moved into a building across the street at 14614 Detroit and took on a wide range of auto supplies plus paint, hardware items, sporting goods and toys. Finally, in 1953, it doubled its space by relocating next door, where it remained until it closed in 1970.

Proprietor Art Kellogg was a familiar figure in our community -- jovial, moustached and cigar-smoking, and ensconced in a favorite rocking chair he bought for $2 at a Lakewood Kiwanis auction. The chair sat in the middle of the store, and from it he carried on long conversations with customers.

"All that was missing was a pot-bellied stove," recalled Pauline Kellogg Groth, his daughter-in-law and secretary of the Shanty Co. for many years.

Art had an enormous appetite and, like President Taft, was a big man both fore and aft.

"In spite of his heftiness, however, he was light on his feet and loved to dance," his daughter-in-law remembered.

"He was a joiner, too -- long active in the Masonic Order here, and an early Kiwanian," she pointed out.

Art was born on Cleveland's West Side in 1878, but at the time of his death at age 78, he had been a resident of Lakewood for 55 years. Most of that period, he lived in an apartment above the former Babin Furriers on the corner of Detroit and St. Charles.

In 1905, he built an auto repair shop on Larchmont in Lakewood. Soon he discovered there were rats under the floor. One day in 1910, he caught one of the critters, dipped it in kerosene and torched it; whereupon it ran under the shop and burned down the building.

Through the shop, he became associated with Harry Turnbull in opening the first Ford dealership in Lakewood. He also had careers in real estate and as a building contractor. During his lifetime, his foremost source of pride was the scores of attractive, soundly constructed homes he built in Lakewood.

Art and his wife Lydia Young Kellogg, who lived to be 82, had a son Oscar and a daughter LaVerne. Oscar began doing odd jobs at the Shanty at an early age. When a boy of only 9, his father taught him to drive the family car from the driveway into and out of a narrow garage behind the store. This was necessary because the elder Kellogg was so outsized that he didn't have enough room to get out of the vehicle once it was inside the garage.

Daughter LaVerne worked as a clerk in the store from 1925 until she was married to Lakewoodite Vernon Fisher in 1937. She is now 82 and a widow living in Billings, Mont.

After father Art died in 1957, son Oscar took over management of the store until it was closed in 1970 to make room for construction of today's 15 story Lakewood Center North office complex. Oscar died in 1976.

His widow Pauline, daughter of the late Henry M. Mayer, our area's most notable nature photographer, remarried Herbert D. Groth in 1979. She now lives on Parkwood in Lakewood.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post August 24, 1989. Reprinted with permission.

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