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Sitting at a table in the back of his bleak eatery on West Main Street, Frank Bell makes a sweeping gesture with his hands, taking in the room.
“The place is empty,” he says of his National Cigar Store, a classic Indiana cigar store, a small, dingy place in which everything is aging. “See? It’s empty.”
It wasn’t always that way. For decades, at least six or seven of them, the corner of Main and Harrison and areas nearby were a good place to do business.
Bell started his career there at age 10, selling newspapers on the corner for 3 cents each. He grins as he tells how he found it handy to tell customers he didn’t have change when they gave him a nickel or a dime for a paper. Customers would let him keep the change. He’d make a dollar and a half a day that way, pretty good money for a kid back then, in the depths of the Depression.
That was in 1932, when America was different and when Bell fell in love with the Chicago Cubs, who aren’t much different even today.
“I’ve been a Cubs fan since 1932,” Bell says, and though they’ve broken his heart many times, pictures of Cubs players still line the wall of his little shop.
There’s also a picture that shows the sign on the front of Wrigley Field lighted up with the phrase “Cubs Number 1 Fan, Frank Bell.”
“I saw my first doubleheader at Wrigley Field in 1935,” he says. It was against the Giants, and the Cubs were winning 2-1 in the ninth, he says. Then the Giants’ Mel Ott hit a home run and the Cubs ended up losing both games, Bell recalls.
The Cubs have been breaking hearts like that for a long time. Bell must be used to it by now.
Bell worked at General Electric for a time, making 45 cents an hour but eventually ended up at his uncle’s little restaurant on Harrison Street.
“I only wanted to help,” he says, but they paid him more than he thought he was worth, and eventually he bought the place.
In 1969, he opened National Cigar Store at 123 W. Main St., half a block from the Courthouse.
Back in those days, the railroad workers, the roofers, the iron workers, “hardworking people who went to work early, they ate breakfast,” Bell says, and they ate at his place.
From 5 in the morning until 10 at night the place would be full, in the morning with hardworking, hungry people and later in the day with men who sat around and played cards. Yes, they played for money, but nothing big, poker for a quarter a hand and pinochle for a dollar a game, and more than once Bell got busted for that.
Outside the front door, there was always a show as the public packed the streets late into the night. There was the cop who busted a thousand people a year for being drunk, Bell says. You could see couples fighting.
“It was fun,” he says. “I always said I was going to write a book about this corner.”
But he never did.
You could float a check at Bell’s place if you were broke, and even today, when people get out of jail, they get a check for the amount of money they had when they came in, and the jail sends them to the National Cigar Store to cash it.
But the world has changed, Bell laments. The railroad left. Other businesses left. His customers, the hardworking folks, got old. The card players who filled the place got old. The city’s smoking ban emptied his place of the last of his customers. The slump turned his shop into a money-loser.
So Frankie, as people call him, relied on an old standby. He had tip boards and pull-tabs and Cherry Master machines. The gambling devices brought in enough money to keep him afloat, he says.
Last week, reportedly the result of a complaint, Bell’s place got raided, and police seized Cherry Master machines, a pull-tab machine and $2,689 in cash.
“Someone complained, but not the ones who played it,” he says. “Someone’s always sticking his nose into things. Maybe I said something wrong to someone,” although people who know Frankie Bell would say that’s unlikely. His ability to get along with people made him a legend.
“I was just trying to survive,” says Bell, who is 87. His business has been losing money for two years. “My wife’s in a nursing home. I’ve spent half a million dollars trying to keep her alive.”
He’s even sold his house and his Cadillac.
Now it’s all gone.
“I had a lot of money in my checking account, but it’s down to $1,500. It’s all I got left.”
“Everything’s gone wrong,” he says.
His old customers are in nursing homes now, or dead, and about six months ago his cook died.
No one has been charged in the raid at this point. The case has been turned over to the county prosecutor for review. But there’s not much left to prosecute.
The raid, if you want to call it that – “They were nice,” very polite, Bell says – was the last straw.
National Cigar Store is closing.
After 76 years of hawking newspapers and coffee and eggs and cigars downtown, Bell is calling it quits.
Today is his last day.
“I love the place, and I hate it,” he says.
Once, he says, there were five businesses like his within a block. They’re all gone now, except for him, he says.
Tomorrow, he’ll be gone, too.
