Bruce Ankeny is shown with his mother, Lois Ankeny, inside the 2:30 Fix Coffee and Ice Cream Shop, which is located inside the Ankeny Furniture store building. Bruce’s grandfather, Clayton Ankeny, built the building in 1946 as Ankeny Recreation Center. Later, Bruce’s father and Lois’s husband, Wayne Ankeny, took over the business. The building has housed many businesses over its 75 years.

In just a few weeks, a mainstay in downtown Blue Earth will be no more.

Ankeny Furniture will be closing, and the building sold. And, for the first time in 75 years, there will not be a business with the Ankeny name on the corner of Eighth and Main.

That may not sound like a Good News story, but the good news is that the building will still continue to have a couple of businesses in it when it becomes the home of Michele’s Sewing and Quilting.

And, the other good news is that Ankeny Furniture owner Bruce Ankeny will be able to retire, and along with his wife, Bonnie, who has already retired from her job at the Blue Earth City Hall, can enjoy some relaxing time to pursue family time and their hobbies.

The Ankeny building has had a long, interesting, and confusing, life since it was first built, Bruce Ankeny relates.

“It was built in 1946 by my grandpa, Clayton Ankeny,” Bruce Ankeny says. “It was named Ankeny Recreation Center, and it was a bowling alley, roller skating rink and a cafe.”

The family history story, told by Bruce Ankeny’s mother, Lois Ankeny, goes like this.

The site of today’s Ankeny Furniture was a vacant lot, and Clayton Ankeny ran a produce store in a building across Main Street.

“One summer Clayton watched out his store window as some folks put up a portable roller skating rink in the lot,” Lois says. “It was busy all summer, and Clayton said, ‘We have to build a roller rink there.'”

When it was done, there were six bowling lanes on the east side of the building and a roller rink on the west side. The cafe was where the current 2:30 Fix Coffee Shop is.

Lois says it was a hit from the start. Her husband, Wayne, came back from serving in the Navy in 1954, and joined his father Clayton in the business. Clayton more or less ran the cafe, and Wayne focused on the bowling alley and roller rink. Bruce adds his Grandma Lena made pies for the cafe and was famous for them.

But bowling in the 1950s and early 1960s was hot – everyone was bowling, Bruce Ankeny says, himself included.

So, in 1956 the decision was made to close the roller rink and add another eight lanes to the west side of the building, making a total of 14 lanes.

“They had league bowling every night and many days of the week,” Bruce recalls. “They once did 700 lines of bowling on a Sunday afternoon and evening.”

Bruce adds that despite all those many games of bowling, there was never a perfect 300 game rolled­ – at least not in league play.

“Jimmy ‘Jet’ Govern rolled a 299 game once, but I don’t think anyone ever had a 300 game,” Bruce said.

Jimmy Jet’s dad, James, was also famous at the lanes. He was one of the pin setters before automatic machines, and was able to hand set pins in three different lanes at the same time, Bruce says. Everyone else could only set two lanes at a time.

But then, in 1962, a bowling alley was built in Winnebago, and Bruce Ankeny says Ankeny Lanes bowling fell off by about half.

“The original six lanes on the east side of the building were then sold to a place in Green, Iowa,” Bruce says. “And we put a roller rink back in that space on the east side.”

That means that the original roller rink area, and original bowling lane area, had now effectively swapped sides of the building.

Seven years later, in 1969, they closed down that new rink. Lois Ankeny says it was pretty small, and skaters could only go in a continuous circle.

That is when Wayne Ankeny decided a furniture store would fit nicely in the space.

“The family story is that my dad had us three kids (Bruce, his older sister Cindy Steinke, and younger brother, Jay) who all needed new beds,” Bruce says. “So Dad figured he could get them wholesale if he was a furniture store owner.”

Lois says Wayne took the bus to the Twin Cities and went to a furniture wholesaler with the intention of getting set up to start the store.

“It probably would not have happened, but he ran into a woman there who had lived in Blue Earth,” she relates. “She made it possible for him to get started.”

There is much more to the furniture store story.

“The Red Owl store was where the Minnesota Valley Action Council building is now, and then it moved to the Town and Country Plaza, now called the Ag Center,” Bruce recalls. “So my dad sublet the former Red Owl store building and moved Ankeny Furniture there, too.”

Wayne kept the former furniture area in the Ankeny building for used furniture.

“We also had Ankeny Furniture Annex, in a building at the other end of the block, which isn’t there anymore; it is just a lot,” Bruce further explains. “It is where Legacy Trees are now sold in the summer.”

After they quit selling furniture in that building, the Ankenys turned it into a Gold Bond Stamp Redemption Center.

“It also became The Record Roost, a vinyl record store I ran,” Bruce says. “Among other things.”

But, back to the main Ankeny Furniture store. It has housed many other businesses operated by the Ankeny family over the years.

“In 1982 we bought the Radio Shack franchise,” Bruce says. “Originally we had it in the coffee shop curved area. Then it grew and we moved it to a fourth of the furniture area on the east side, and eventually it was moved to the west side and filled half that area.”

There was also the American Handicraft Store, which was run by Lois and was also located in the now coffee shop area.

Over the years the building was also home to Clark Music, The Strawberry Patch Gift Store, The Sports Card Corner, and was a Greyhound Bus Depot as well as a drop off point for King’s Dry Cleaners and Weaver’s Shoe Store.

In December of 1987, the Ankenys opened New Weigh Exercise Salon in what had been the bowling alley lobby on the south side of the building. It was run by Bonnie Ankeny.

Bonnie says Wayne and Bruce had bought this equipment and so they wanted to set up an exercise center and needed someone to run it.

“It was interesting equipment,” Bruce explains. “The person just laid there or sat there and the machine did the sit ups or other exercise for them. But, it only lasted a couple of years.”

In more recent years, that area has been used for other businesses, including Eighth Street Framing and Scrappy’s Scrap Book Store run by Bruce’s daughter-in-law, Ana Ankeny, and Prairie Chic Boutique owned by Bruce’s cousin, Shelly Greimann.

“Oh yeah,” Bruce remembers, “Part of the furniture area was used by the Knights of Columbus for their Bingo Night for a while.”

There was one other additional activity that was part of the recreation center.

Back when the recreation center had been in operation for a while with its bowling alley and roller rink, Clayton Ankeny decided to add a few more features.

“He put in this large slot car racing track,” Bruce Ankeny recalls. “He charged by the minute to run slot cars. And he also added a bunch of pinball machines.”

Bruce says Clayton wanted to fill every available space in the building.

“He believed every square foot of space in the store needed to produce some money,” Bruce says.

“Clayton was a real entrepreneur, all the Ankenys were,” Lois says. “He would do things like buy watermelons in Texas and then sell them at the fair.”

Lois Ankeny says she met her husband, Wayne Ankeny, on the roller rink at Ankeny Recreation Center back when it first opened.

“We fell in love and kept going around in circles our whole married life,” she says with a smile.

Wayne Ankeny died in 2009. Clayton Ankeny died in 1972.

Bruce Ankeny says he started working part time at the bowling alley in 1955, which is hard to believe as that was the year he was born.

“But I did start working here full-time, and was paid, starting in 1974,” he says. “I had started here when I was a kid, when it was still a bowling alley and a furniture store.”

He adds that he had to clean the alleys, drill finger holes in the bowling balls (he was ABC certified to do that), and do just about anything that needed to be done.

And bowl. A lot.

“Yes, I did a lot of bowling over the years,” he recalls. “And one of the nice things about having a family-owned bowling alley is that after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, we could all come down here and open the place and the whole entire family would go bowling.”

A lot of great family memories.

The sale of the building by the Ankenys to Michele Hard is effective on Jan. 3. Bruce says he plans on spending more time with his wood carving hobby, going camping in the summer, and being able to spend a lot more time with family.

“It will be a lot different,” he says. “After all, I have spent all of my life in this building. And there really are an awful lot of good memories.”