Traudie Kauntz’s long, beautiful goodbye
Getting cancer cleared Traudie Kauntz’s head.
The owner of Household China and Gifts, an upscale kitchenware store that offered $10 hot lunches to students by day and gourmet cooking classes by night, was diagnosed three years ago with metastatic melanoma.
It’s not treatable with chemotherapy or radiation. It is spreading throughout her body.
And yet “it has opened up my world,” said Kauntz, who is 63 with a thick head of red hair, expressive blue eyes and a ready wit.
One of the first things Kauntz did when she got the diagnosis was start making plans to sell the store that her father started.
“I don’t want my kids to have to take over this business,” she said. “I grew up seeing how hard my parents worked.”
On Friday, 15 months after her first announcement that the store would close, Kauntz is still surrounded by tens of thousands of cups, saucers, plates, vases, ornaments and wine glasses.
The building has been sold and will be transformed into a workplace for the tech sector. Kauntz has to be out by May 1. The first of three auctions to clear the inventory begins April 7.
As she walks around the 16,000square-foot store, it seems that every piece has a story. What’s there now is mostly the inventory that her father purchased at a good price and put in storage, decades ago.
Some of the plates and mugs are so old, they’re new again. There’s lots of mid-century modern china with its gold and brown designs. There’s red “cranberry glass” from the Czech Republic, and plates commemorating Kitchener-Waterloo that feature the old city hall in downtown Kitchener, which was torn down in 1973.
“This is the original china that was in the original ‘I Love Lucy’ show,” said Kauntz, holding up a white plate with green ivy painted around the edges.
She says farm women come in to buy cake platters from a china set. They use the platters as oversized dinner plates.
Some of the items were wrapped with paper decades ago; it sticks to the plates as Kauntz peels it off.
There are boxes of black handles for pots, a remnant of the time when Kauntz was young and her father promised to repair or replace the handles of any pot that he sold.
Traudie’s father, George, was an immigrant from Romania who arrived in Canada after the Second World War. He got his start selling cookware door-to-door in the evenings, after putting in a day shift at the B.F. Goodrich
plant.
Then he opened a small shop in part of the home where he lived with his family. It was profitable, and George built the current store at King Street North and Hickory Street East near the family home in 1980. Traudie took it over in 2006. Since her diagnosis, her daughter, Shannon Rea, has worked beside her.
Now, as fast as she can, she is shedding the old inventory her father had picked.
Kauntz has seen the pressure retail stores are under. It has been happening ever since the year 2000, she said. The store would have to go sooner or later, anyway. She has no regrets.
“We’re going to walk away from retail and just enjoy life,” she said.
None of us has unlimited time on this earth. Kauntz’s diagnosis has made her more aware that each day is a blessing.
Once she has cleared out the building, she’s looking forward to a cruise to the British Isles, Iceland, and Russia.
“Don’t push things off until tomorrow,” she said.
“Don’t make wishes. Make memories.”