Mark LaFlamme: Speaker’s is closed, and Lewiston will never be the same

A man walks Tuesday afternoon up Spruce Street past a closed Speakers Variety, a well-known grocery store with a local flavor in downtown Lewiston. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

If ever there was a true sign of the coming apocalypse, this is it.

Speaker’s Variety store is closed. For real. As foretold in prophecy.

For nearly four decades, the downtown business has been tucked into its little space on Spruce Street, a buzzing beehive of a place where locals picked up hot food and groceries while also catching up on neighborhood gossip.

For 38 years, Patricia Speaker has been behind that counter, a smallish woman with a no-nonsense way about her that her customers have come to adore.

Two years ago, Speaker, then 83, was attacked by a pair of shoplifters inside the store and suffered a broken arm while fending off the hooligans. It didn’t slow her down much. Soon after, she was back behind the counter, doing what she could for her customers with one arm in a cast.

Speaker kept chugging along after that nasty encounter, but the writing was on the wall. The neighborhood had changed. This little patch of the downtown between Knox and Park streets wasn’t the friendly spot it had been for so long.

The humble store stayed the same over the decades, but the landscape around it went through a radical transformation. Her once gracious and respectful customers were replaced by strangers who had no regard for the store, or for Pat herself.

“It’s not like it used to be,” Speaker said Monday. “I used to enjoy going to work, but not anymore.”

The attack that left her injured in 2018 wasn’t the last of the aggression she would see inside her store.

“People were giving her such a hard time,” one lady wrote on a recent “Lewiston Rocks” Facebook thread where locals had gathered to ponder the fate of Speaker’s. “It was upsetting.”

Speaker is 85 now and she’s had some health issues. After so many years running to and fro behind the store counter, she has suffered some problems with mobility.

What else could she do? With no one left to run the store in her absence, the long era of Speaker’s Variety had to come to an end.

And my, how this one stings for those of us who loved the store.

It was the very first store I ever went into in Lewiston. This was long before I had any notions of becoming a reporter, but I knew — I tell you, man, I KNEW! — that if I was going to spend any time at all in this city, Speaker’s was a place I needed to frequent.

To me, the store felt like a demilitarized zone right there in the heart of the city. Cops went in on their lunch breaks, picking up hot chicken tenders or cold sandwiches to trot back to the police station just a few feet away.

Working Joes stopped in for groceries at the end of the workday, chatting with whomever was lined up at the counter at the time, be it a streetwalker, a crack dealer, or some high muckety-muck from City Hall.

Kids went in to pick up groceries for their mothers, perhaps adding a few pieces of candy for their troubles.

Much of Speaker’s clientele came straight out of Kennedy Park, just across the street. With such a diverse group of customers, one might have expected trouble, but there almost never was. Not back in those days.

“Even when the park was divided by druggies and prostitutes, we never had a problem,” Speaker said in an earlier interview. “We never had a problem with anybody.”

Speaker was known to help out young mothers and others in need when they couldn’t scrape together enough dough for the week’s groceries.

“So many times, she helped me when I didn’t have enough cash for what my family needed,” said Lin Bourque, who said she got to know Patricia while living on Knox Street around the corner from the store. “I always made sure I went back to pay what I owed. The best thing about that was that she trusted me.”

Speaker’s was a shining example of the true neighborhood store, where everybody knew everybody and there was no need for conflict no matter what was going on outside.

You know. Back in the good old days.

After I started working at the newspaper, I made a kind of second office out of Speaker’s Variety. I would go there in the early evenings for the best hot ham and cheese around and to check the pulse of the city.

A police detective rushing out with his chicken tenders might give me a hot tip about a case. The crossing guard lady, picking up milk and bread on her way home, might pass along an interesting little something she had seen earlier in the day. One of the streetwalkers might whisper in my ear some jaw-dropping gossip she had heard earlier at the Lewiston Social Club just a block away.

Speaker’s was paradise for a young reporter. The place kept me nourished, both literally and figuratively.

And so when word started going around that Patricia Speaker was throwing in the towel at last, I joined the rest of the mourners to express dismay at the news.

A bit of a jumble, were our feelings on this matter. On the one hand we’ll miss Speaker’s Variety and the good times it represents.

But on the other, there is an 85-year-old lady who spent half her life hustling, cooking and catering for a sometimes fickle clientele. This is a woman who has earned her rest 10 times over.

“I hope she is well and can enjoy her retirement,” wrote Carrie Wordell. “She has served the community well.”

“She is a sweet lady,” offered Grayling E. Cunningham. “She deserves a break — and yet at the same time, probably misses the commotion.”

On and on the comments go. We’ll miss the sandwiches, we tell each other. We’ll miss Pat, herself. Mostly, we’ll miss the store as a grand symbol of better times.

Speaker’s Variety is gone for good and downtown Lewiston will never be the same.