Pastime Hardware traces its roots to a tavern and a card room

David Pryde, now CEO of the business, stands in front of Pastime Hardware circa 1950. He’d been working there since age 8. Photo courtesy of David Pryde.

Hardworking they were, the Pryde Boys, Dick and Buster. Dick, a plumber, and Buster, an electrician, found well-paying jobs while still teenagers during the dark days of the Depression working for Pullman Co., which manufactured railway sleeping cars in Richmond.

But it wasn’t enough. Within a few years, for a time with partner Lloyd Christiansen, the brothers were running a business named Pastime.

Nearing a century later, Pastime is still prospering as a family-owned firm. It is, after Sunset View Cemetery, probably El Cerrito’s oldest business. Pastime has undergone remarkable changes, but it has remained true to its original goal: to support the family both financially and as a family.

Why did Donald H. Pryde (known as “Dick,” 1907-2003) and Norman G. Pryde (known as “Buster,” 1906-1994) start Pastime?

“Well, they wanted to be their own boss, for one thing,” says David Pryde, 84, Buster’s son., “and they wanted to get ahead. And when you work for somebody else, it’s hard, you know?”

David, who sat down with the El Cerrito Historical Society for an interview, has been Pastime’s CEO since the late 1980s. But Pastime did not begin as a place that sold saws, lawnmowers, garden furniture, and dish drainers.

Instead, the original Pastime opened as a café and then a bar, much in the spirit of El Cerrito in the ‘30s, a wide-open town ablaze in neon, with gambling joints, bordellos, jazz halls and prize fights. Some forms of gambling were legal, many were not. Both took place, facing regular police raids and regular police payoffs.

The site was historic even then. It is on or very close to the site where Wilhelm Rust opened a blacksmith forge and then a hardware business before the turn of the 20th century, one of the original businesses in the area. It had a post office, so the southern portion of what would later become El Cerrito was called “Rust.”

Pastime was a simple place, no tuxedos, no doorman, no illuminated stage.

Taking a gamble
“This wasn’t a big operation. The Kona Club, and then there was one across the street, Sally Rand’s, I think it was. Those were the wild places, you know,” David says.

About Pastime he says, “Well, they had a tavern, they had food and they had gambling. They didn’t have many customers back then,” he says. “They might get 20 or 30 customers a day, because there weren’t many people around in those days, you know?”

A February 1934 ad in the El Cerrito Journal newspaper for Pastime Lunch and Billiard Parlor proclaimed it a place “where good fellows get together for lunch and pleasure.”

Just a year later, following a remodeling that doubled its size, the Journal was filled with ads congratulating Pastime. World heavyweight champion boxer Max Baer, a friend of Lloyd’s, was at the grand reopening “with his little brother, Buddy.”

“It made a living,” David says of the tavern. “But what made the money were the slot machines at the end.”

David says his uncle Dick needed money for expansion and the banks said no. So, a regular customer, Walter Baxter Sr., who ran Sunset View, said “Here’s $5,000. Pay me back when you can.”

“You know, he paid them back in two years just from those four slot machines. That’s the only thing that really gave him any volume.”

El Cerrito was a small town then and people knew each other, which helped in many ways, including avoiding periodic raids that often hauled away slots and craps tables – before returning them. “Dick Pryde’s father-in-law was a sheriff in town,” David says, “so he warned them every time anything was coming out during the early ‘40s, late ‘30s.”

From near the start Pastime was a blended business. It began with Dick and Lloyd opening a café and bar (located at the front of the current Pastime store, near the cash registers). Buster came in a few years thereafter to open a sporting goods shop, and later added hardware.

Dick and Buster Pryde became sole owners in 1956 when Lloyd died.

The name ‘Pastime’ was not uncommon at the time, David says. “I mean, there were others, you know. You could go up to Truckee, there’s a Pastime club there.”

A liquor store, hotel and another commercial structure stood alongside Pastime in the early 1960s. Some were demolished, others incorporated into Pastime as the business expanded. Some were demolished to make way for an extension of Fairmount Avenue, which at the time did not go through to Carlson Boulevard. Photo courtesy of David Pryde.

Putting in lots of hours
The brothers did other work too. Buster “worked for El Cerrito Electric in the late ‘30s” as a foreman and “was an electrician at the racetrack” (the El Cerrito Kennel Club, a greyhound track on the site of the current Plaza shopping center).

Dick and Buster, who had grown up with their family in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, had learned their trades at night school.

During World War II, David says, “They worked the (Kaiser) shipyards, and they had the business going at the same time. So they were working a lot of hours.”

Buster and his wife Frances (1911-2001) were raising two boys, David, born 1938, and Donald (1933-2013) in a small home on Santa Clara Avenue, in Richmond Annex, a few minutes’ walk to the tavern, and young David would go there often.

“We had a pool hall. I used to sleep on the table,” David recalls. “My dad, I know, they slept overnight sometimes. With their card games here, they would go for three and four days. And my dad and uncle would sleep there for three or four hours. One would be the dealer while the other one was sleeping. So my dad and uncle spent a lot of time here in the building.”

“I started working here in ‘46,” David says. “I was eight years old. And I cleaned spittoons, did the bathrooms. All types of dirty work, mopped the floors and all that stuff. So that’s how we got started (learning to work hard), the right way, you know?”

Four years later, the family’s hard work was clearly paying off. They moved from Santa Clara to an impressive Storybook-style house with a swooping roof at 522 Carmel Avenue in Albany, across from Albany High.

Tough guys, but nice guys
“My dad and uncle could drink anybody under the table, but they weren’t raucous or anything. My dad was a good person,” David says. “They were both tough guys. I mean, they’ve had their problems, threw drunks out of the place and stuff like that.

“But my dad and uncle were just nice people. My uncle would always, if a guy had trouble, give him money. You know, it was the Depression. And never even ask for it back.”

A staph infection plagued Buster for much of his life, David says.

”My dad had 15 operations on one leg between the teens, up till to ’46,” when penicillin treatment finally succeeded, David says. “My dad lived to 88 … He was a tough bird.”

There were two other Pryde brothers alongside Dick and Buster. For a time, Jack Pryde (1910-1978) was a partner with Walt Gatto in the It Club across the street from Pastime, a popular entertainment venue that hosted top acts. “But my uncle was a type, he was a real estate guy who didn’t want to sit in a bar all the time,” David says. For years Jack ran a real estate office in town.

Back briefly ran a gas station (which can still be seen, boarded up, on San Pablo Avenue at Lincoln Avenue). George Pryde (1916-2013) took over the station when he returned from college and ran it until 1995.

Back at Pastime, David recalls, the sporting goods side of the business was proving disappointing.

“We had sporting goods, we had fishing tackle and all types of hunting weapons, you know, pistols, shotguns, rifles and everything like that. But that only went for so many years because hunting season is a very limited amount of time, and a guy comes in and buys a hundred dollar gun, which would be two or three thousand now.

“And he put it on time. but when hunting season was over, he wouldn’t pay. So my dad said, Let’s go into hardware. And that’s when, in the late ‘40s, they drifted into hardware, even though they kept the bar.” They also kept selling sporting goods for a time.

Robert Pryde arranges baseball bats in Pastime’s sporting goods section in the mid-1950s. Photo courtesy of David Pryde.

Becoming Pastime Hardware
The year 1946, about the time David began working at Pastime, was a turning point in the history of El Cerrito. Reformers calling themselves the Good Government League recalled city council members who had made draw poker legal and turned their eyes away from illegal slots. The new good government council banned poker and cracked down on other forms of gambling and vice.

Pastime tavern was now Pastime Hardware, with a small tavern that was more of a sideshow. 

“We kept to sporting goods for a while, but we went to hardware at the same time, so we kicked out all the card tables,” David says.

“I don’t know why they kept the bar,” he says, “but it was a testament to my uncle because that’s how he started (the business).”

“I tried to get them to close it,” David recalls. “I was in college in ‘60 and I tried to get them to close it down then. They didn’t listen to me. It didn’t make any money. It was just breaking even, that’s all.” The bar finally closed in 1972.

As the first generation of Pryde brothers aged, the sons played a larger role in Pastime, eventually taking over. Where once there had been two Prydes in charge, now there were four: David and Donald, sons of Buster, and Robert and Richard, sons of Dick.

Growing into a conglomeration of buildings
Shoppers at Pastime today may notice that floors of different sections are at different levels, walls are sometimes angled. That’s because Pastime, with about 40,000 square feet of selling and storage space downstairs and about 10,000 square feet of storage and office upstairs, is a conglomeration of several buildings that were pasted together over time, some older existing structures, some built fresh, starting in the late 1940s.

“So we started to go into hardware and that’s when we started thinking, Well, we need more room,” David says. Pastime acquired nearby buildings and other sites for expansion.

“There’s probably about four or five pieces of property here, because Villa’s market used to be here,” he says. “If you go into the opening of the store, if you go to the left, there’s a hallway that goes upstairs, about 30 steps up there. The union for Richmond’s Ford assembly plant used to rent that and have their union meetings there for years.” 

David says that section, built in 1927, is the oldest structure in the complex. He adds: “It was McDermott’s meat market grocery store for years.”

The late Richard Pryde (1943-2014), David’s cousin and the son of Dick Pryde, gave a private tour of the store in 2010, revealing an upstairs room with early 20th century-style moldings that had served as a meeting and dancehall. There was a dental office in an adjacent upstairs building, Richard said, and a dry cleaners downstairs.

In 1970 the Prydes brought in Berkeley architect Leon Rimov & Associates to remodel the store. The result is the Pastime we see today, with walls of glass on the first story and a mansard-like roof obscuring the second story, hiding any evidence of the sometimes historic buildings that make up the structure.

In 1998 the section to the north, that had once been a grocery and later Travalini’s Furniture, was incorporated into Pastime as well.

A rendering by Berkeley architect Leonard Rimov & Associates shows Pastime as it would be remodeled in 1970 and as it largely looks today. Photo courtesy of David Pryde.

Dick Pryde, El Cerrito builder Marvin Collins and architect Leonard Rimov place a time capsule in the ground during a ceremony at the newly remodeled store. Photo courtesy of David Pryde.

Joining the Ace Hardware co-op
David attributes Pastime’s growth over the years and its success to hard work (he’s a big one on hard work), and to being “more progressive. We joined a co-operative for buying.”

This was Ace Hardware, a Midwest cooperative that had yet to move to the West Coast. “So my cousin (Robert Pryde) and I flew back to Chicago,” David says. “We had a group of 30 (from other California hardware stores), and we flew back there saying that we wanted to have them come out this way.”

What was the benefit of allying with Ace?

“Well, you get to buy much cheaper. We eliminated the middleman. We used to buy from wholesalers, maybe 10 or 15 wholesalers, where they had 10 or 15 percent of their margin. Well, now, we get that margin. So that made it profitable for us, and if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t make it,” David says.

And bear in mind, Ace is not a chain. Ace does not own Pastime. “No, we own it,” David says. Ace is owned by its member stores.

Shoppers at Pastime, wondering where to find a particular item, or with questions on how to use it, grab a number and wait for assistance. It’s a feature most people seem to like, and “the numbers system,” as David calls it, was devised in the 1960s by his cousin Richard Pryde.

“The youngest one, he came up with the best idea,” David says.

Pastime has always focused on homeowners, handymen and small contractors, not large builders.

“We didn’t do the big contracts,” David says. “You know what happens? They want to put it on the cuff. They want you to buy this and that, and you get stuck with this. You get stuck with that.”

One Pastime is enough
Nor did the Prydes ever open other stores.

“We have enough right here to handle ourselves. We didn’t want to expand to more stores and everything. We wanted just enough for the four of us.

“There were four sons, two on each side. We all worked. We had four weeks. Every fourth week, I’d get a week off, every fourth week, my brother would get a week and then my two cousins. So we worked it so we didn’t overwork ourselves, but we still could make a good living.

“And we didn’t want to open other stores because then we’d have to work harder and harder and harder. And we have enough here, if we stuck to it, and we have stuff for our kids to do if they want to work. We made a good living here and we had time for a family. We weren’t like trying to be millionaires.”

Is it hard to run a business with family members, David?

“It wasn’t anything major, but it was abrasive at times. But when you have four different personalities and four different wives, you’re going to have that, you know?”

Today David Pryde remains CEO of Pastime, serving alongside several third-generation Prydes. David’s son Jeffrey is manager, as are Dan Pryde, the son of Donald Pryde, and Susan Estrada, the daughter of Richard Pryde.

The current Pastime management includes Dan Pryde, Susan Estrada, daughter of Richard Pryde, Jeffrey Pryde and David Pryde. Photo by Dave Weinstein.

David, who studied “accounting, and girls,” at UC Berkeley, played basketball on the Bears team that, the very next year won an NCAA national championship. “And I couldn’t play,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, I could make the team, but that was it.”

He’s been a sportsman, hunting and fishing since childhood, fishing at Point Isabel (before it was reshaped by grading and expanded with bay fill), and learned to make arrows from his uncle George, who “had a hunting club up in the mountains. We used to go there every summer and hunt.”

David’s never been much of a gambler. His dad had advised against it. When asked what makes him proud, both answers revolve around family and the family business.

“That we did it, that we held on here,” he answers. “How many businesses can last as long? It’s been in business almost 100 years. I’m proud of our parents. They started this. I’m getting teary eyed,” he says, near the end of our interview.

“They had foresight, but they weren’t stupid about it. They wanted you to have a good time and still make a good living and don’t kill yourself. But still you’ve got to work, you know? And that’s the main thing, we’ve all of us stayed together. We butted heads. We don’t think alike, but we’ve gotten along.”

Written by Dave Weinstein. This article appeared in the August 2022 issue of The Forge.