A brief introduction:
My name is Paul Howley, owner
of the Eisner Award winning pop culture collector’s store known as “That’s
Entertainment” in Worcester, Massachusetts and a second store in Fitchburg,
Massachusetts. Some people have called me the “luckiest man in the comic book
business.” (I’m not) My stores have been around for over thirty years and it’s
been a long and interesting combination of events and people that have brought
these stores to this current place. It is not my intent to boast or brag about
my store or my life. I just want to tell you my story. In many instances, my
wife remembers things a little differently, but this is the truth as I remember
it.
The Current Cast of
Characters:
Paul Howley: age 48
Mal Howley: age 48
Adam Howley: my son, age 21
Cassy Howley: my daughter,
age 18
MY LIFE WITH COMIC BOOKS: THE
HISTORY OF A COMIC SHOP: Part #207
As our planned house-hunting time in south
Florida was nearing its end, even though we had visited dozens of interesting
homes, we hadn’t found a house that we were ready to buy. Mal and I carefully
reviewed the listing information sheets of many of the homes one night and
then, with no decision made, we went to sleep. The next morning, Mal told me
that she had prayed for some insight and when she woke up she felt that she
wanted to go back to see the property with the guest-house.
Grace Noble, our real estate agent,
dutifully took us back there. As we remembered, the house wasn’t very dynamic
looking but it could meet our needs. It had a nice lot of nearly two and a half
acres including lots of tropical south Florida vegetation that created a nice
wall of privacy between the house and the neighboring homes. The completely
screened-in swimming pool was a nice full-sized pool (not the usual small
suburban Florida pools we had seen in our house hunting). The house was one of
only five homes on a private unpaved road and it was conveniently located
within walking distance to a shopping plaza that contained a grocery store,
restaurants, a bank, a video rental store, a cell-phone store, and a
full-service mobile Post Office van. At first, we were a bit concerned that
this shopping plaza might be too close by but there were enough trees to
completely block the plaza from view. The guest house was the biggest
“negative” thing about the property for us. We certainly didn’t need this extra
space and the property “asking price” reflected the inclusion of this
guest-house.
The owners had listed the home for sale at
$529,000.00. The property had only been on the market for eleven days and the
real estate market in south Florida was pretty strong at that time. We decided
to make an offer of $464,300.00 for the property and we were actually shocked
when the owners accepted our offer. The only contingency would be a
satisfactory home inspection. Normally, I don’t hire home inspectors because
I’m pretty good at spotting potential problems but since Florida is quite
different from any other area I’ve lived in before, especially because of the
potential for termite infestations, I hired a professional. The report came
back indicating that things looked pretty good. We were feeling confident that
this was the right property for us to buy.
We had a couple of days left before had to
drive back to New Hampshire and we had a lot of little details that needed to
be completed to ensure that the home purchase would smoothly move forward. One
issue was obtaining home-owner’s insurance. I assumed this would just take a
quick phone call to a local insurance agent and I was surprised when I was
informed that no insurance company would be interested in selling me insurance
on the property because it was considered to be in a “hurricane-zone.” The property was only six miles from the
ocean, and even though there hadn’t been a hurricane in Jupiter, Florida in
over forty years, the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in south Florida was
still too much for insurance companies to overlook the possibility of another
hurricane hitting Florida. We called our real estate agent and told her that we
obviously couldn’t buy the property if we couldn’t get insurance on it. She
called the sellers and they called their insurance company and convinced them
to offer us an insurance policy on the home. Instead of the $500 per year that
we were accustomed to pay for an annual insurance premium, this policy was over
$6000 per year with an $8000 wind-related deductible! We wanted the property
enough so we purchased the insurance and set everything in motion to buy the
place. Grace would get everything taken care of and we could complete the
transaction through the mail since we needed to get back to New Hampshire now.
Next chapter: The summer seems short as we
prepare to leave our amazing friends.
