At the Men's Store, She Figured Out What Orleans Women Would Buy

Two women left Watson's to start a boutique on the other side of Main Street. The racks are going now, and nobody has named the last day.

A sign in the window at 34 Main Street says it in three short lines. Retiring. Store closing. Everything on sale.

Inside, it doesn't look like an ending. When the Chronicle stopped by in early September, the shop was busy. Customers were browsing racks of colorful summer clothes. From the sidewalk it's business as usual. Then you read the window.

Maglebee's is closing this fall, after 36 years. "We don't have a final date yet," co-founder Laura Magleby told the Cape Cod Chronicle. "We're just selling things off, seeing how that goes."

If you've done the Main Street loop any time since 1990, you've walked past it. What you probably never knew is that this women's boutique was worked out inside a men's store.

"I could tell what was selling, what wasn't selling"

Laura Magleby grew up on Long Island and spent her summers in South Orleans. Her parents eventually built a house there and stayed year-round. In 1984 she moved down for good and took a job as a buyer at Watson's.

By then Watson's was already an institution. Charles Watson bought Orleans Dry Goods & Mercantile in 1951 and put his own name on it. The store still uses the motto "There's No Place Like Watson's."

A buyer's job is to watch what gets carried to the register and what gets put back. Magleby was also watching who was doing the carrying.

"When I was working at [Watson's], I could see that a women's store was the way to go," she told the Chronicle. "I could tell what was selling, what wasn't selling. I was able to look at all the information and get a good idea of what the town could use and what would be successful there. And I built on that."

She had a partner, and the partner had a past nobody would guess from the sales floor.

Before the men's store, a choir loft in Virginia

Gladys Gombos was born in Montreal in 1928 and grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to her obituary, she studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and performed professionally. After that she taught piano and voice, and for 18 years she directed the youth and adult choirs at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Culpeper.

She came to the Cape with her family in 1973. The next year she went to work at Watson's, and she stayed through 1991, working for owner Sumner Robinson.

So the women's store on Main Street was started by a menswear buyer and a conservatory-trained singer.

1991 was a hard year for Gombos. Her husband, Edward, died after 40 years of marriage. That fall, she and Magleby formed Maglebees Ltd. as co-owners. The store counts its own start from 1990, and Gombos's family remembered the fall of 1991. Either way, the Chronicle puts the new shop on the opposite side of Main Street from the men's store where they'd both learned the trade.

Today the listings tell a stranger story. Watson's is at 34-A Main Street, 508-255-3003. Maglebee's is at 34 Main Street, 508-255-3004.

The store that started across from Watson's now sits one letter and one digit away from it.

Gombos stayed until January 2009. That month she and Magleby sold the business, and she retired at 80. She died at home in Brewster in December 2011.

"Katie Magleby." "Becky."

Magleby kept working. When her daughter's family moved to Charlotte, with a granddaughter on the way, she followed them there. She went on working for the store remotely under the new owners and came back to the Cape when the work needed her. Two longtime employees, Carole Lagg and Jan Graham, stayed on to run the floor. She told the Chronicle that made it easier to go.

"I loved being there," she said. "I loved meeting the people, working with the people. I enjoyed the day-to-day. I looked forward to that. That's where the joy came from for me."

None of that is about clothes.

She was back in Orleans in August. She stood under the store's sign for a photo with her daughter and granddaughter. She walked up Main Street past Route 6A to the Orleans Health Food Store and took stock. The bowling alley was gone, and so was the laundromat. There were more banks now, and more thrift shops than she remembered.

At lunch, a woman stopped at their table.

"Katie Magleby," the woman said.

"Becky," her daughter answered.

Nobody needed an introduction. "Things like that make me feel good about me and my family being part of such a family community," Magleby said.

In August we wrote about PB Boulangerie in Wellfleet, where a staffer nicknamed one table of regulars "the book club." She never saw them open a book. A shop can be where people meet, and the merchandise is mostly an excuse.

Whatever speed Orleans buys them

Maglebee's still describes its service as "old school" and promises "a comfortable, no-pressure atmosphere." The posted hours are Monday through Saturday, 11 to 4.

No last day is on the calendar. The racks will empty at whatever speed Orleans buys them. Then the lights at 34 Main Street go off, one letter away from 34-A.

Magleby already knows where she'll be.

"It'll be bittersweet," she said, "but I will definitely go."

She'll be standing on the same street where, inside a men's store, she once worked out what the women of this town would buy.

Maglebee's | 34 Main Street, Orleans
Open through the liquidation, while stock lasts. Posted hours Mon–Sat 11 a.m.–4 p.m., closed Sunday.
(508) 255-3004 · maglebees.com