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GREENSBORO — Once upon a time, before the first falling flake of each snowstorm hit the ground, the storefront on Spring Garden Street was the place to go.

No marketing needed: Anyone who ever drove past Holliday Hardware — with its ever-present sidewalk display of red wagons and aluminum washtubs — knew this place was the one sure bet in town to find sleds and toboggans in the event of snow.

“That was my prime time,” owner Polly Holliday Crum said with satisfaction, recalling customers beating a path from Summerfield or Stoneville, and leaving credit card numbers on her answering machine.

The mystery behind this seemingly bottomless inventory at the store her parents opened in 1956? In the late 1980s, there were huge back-to-back snows and the Hollidays ordered sleds as fast as they could get them in — then the snows quit.

Rather than send the sleds back, the Hollidays kept them in a barn, stood back and waited for the inevitable cycle to return.

But in between snows over these past five years, Crum found herself standing back and waiting around more and more for hardware customers wanting her to cut window panes, measure copper pipe, and sell them drill bits or tools.

Meanwhile, other inevitabilities piled up. For example, the fact that customers started going to Lowe’s and Home Depot for big purchases such as compressors or skill saws.

Or the fact that the little supplies — light bulbs, extension cords — are sold anywhere. Everywhere. The supermarket. The curb market. That nice new Walgreens by UNCG.

“They’re not going to come to Holliday Hardware to get a plug or a light bulb,” said Crum, 59, who will close the store for good today. “I kind of felt like I was wasting the building. I just felt like this was the time.”

Crum, whose real name is Paula (“My friends call me Polly. So you call me Polly,”) took over the store from her mother, Edith, in 1986, after moving back to Greensboro with her husband, Gary, who was in the Army.

She and her brothers had grown up with the shop, and she learned the hardware business, the ultimate jack-of-all-trades, until it was second nature to her. How to rewire a lamp or fix a toilet, mix cement, repair a screen door, measure glass and PVC pipe.

Now, it may be true that Crum’s brother, Keith Holliday, gave out the key to the city in his former job as mayor. But how many times did Holliday’s sister cut the key to a house — still a deal at 25 cents?

“Sometimes a customer would bring me a key that would be broken off in the lock, and I would have to tape it together and cut a new one according to that,” she said. “I was always kind of proud that I could get it to work.”

One skill Crum never acquired was how to sit idle, and for the past five years, business was slow at the store. And so she did what a good shopkeeper does — took inventory — and found something in stock that was in demand.

Before taking on the hardware store, she worked in the medical field while her husband was in the Army.

She is working as a nurse tech at Wesley Long, pulling 12-hour shifts three days a week and thinking of going to nursing school.

“I love it. I go all day,” she said. “That’s me. I like to do that.”

Which is what she said about the hardware store, which is having a “retirement sale” and closing forever today.

Crum decided to donate most of the inventory that was left to the nonprofit building supply, Restore Habitat for Humanity.

As for the sleds?

“I sent ’em out to The Hardware Store,” she said, referring to a remaining mom-and-pop hardware at 3111 East Bessemer.

“I’m going to be faithful to the little guy. The little people are what built this country.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com