Shank's Mare outfitters owners created a Susquehanna institution. Now, they're retiring

It began when Steve Winand’s prospective new employer asked him to shave his beard.

He had been working for Dentsply in York as a personnel manager when he interviewed for a new job at Amp, an electronics manufacturer with three plants in the area. The interview went well, and the company offered him a job, under one condition: that he shave his beard.

It was close to the end of the year, 1977 was turning into 1978, and he and his wife Liz were planning a New Year’s getaway at a friend’s cabin, spending the holiday cross-country skiing. On that trip, on New Year’s Eve, they decided to start their own business.

Liz and Steve had known each other since high school, and when Steve went into the Air Force after graduation, Liz followed him out to North Dakota where he was stationed and where they married. “We eloped, sort of,” Liz said.

They had always loved the outdoors. She recalls those summer days as a child when she and her friends would leave the house in the morning and not return until dinner time, playing in the outdoors. In North Dakota, they would pack up Steve’s motorcycle – pots and pans hanging from the handlebars and sleeping bags rolled up on the back of the seat – and go on camping trips in the stunningly beautiful North Dakota wilderness.

When they discussed starting a business, Liz said she always thought about opening up a mom-and-pop hardware store. But their love of the outdoors led them in a different direction. They recalled camping trips with gear bought at Kmart or some other big box store and how the gear often let them down. She recalled a photo of one of their campsites, the tent stakes pulled out of the ground and their sleeping bags sodden by a downpour, and how there should be a better way.

Their hometown didn’t have an outdoors outfitter, a retail space dedicated to those who love being in nature and reap the benefits of it. So, they decided to open up a store dedicated to selling not just gear, but also the wonders of the outdoors.

“There wasn’t anything like it in York,” Liz said. “There was a niche. It was all about the things we wanted to do.”

Steve gave notice to Dentsply − “I left just before the ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) that made everybody who worked there wealthy,” he jokes – and they started working toward opening their own business.

That was 45 years ago. They had no way of knowing where it would go and where it would take them − “We were young and dumb” Liz said – but the sense is that they knew something.

In hindsight, as they are heading into retirement, after establishing not just an outdoor outfitter but an institution along the Susquehanna River, they know they made the right decision, one that will have reverberations long after they step down from the business.

PBR in a Coke cooler

Shank’s Mare is currently housed in an old general store, a sprawling building that dates to 1890. It was along the old Susquehanna Canal, between Locks 1 and 2, the most level section of the canal, hence the area is known as Long Level.

The two-story building, with a huge front porch framing its front, overlooks the widest section of the river, an area dubbed Lake Clarke, a body of water formed by the Safe Harbor Dam five miles downriver. Immediately across the river is Turkey Hill, a promontory topped by a pair of wind turbines, which were turning languidly on one recent afternoon when the breeze was enough to lift whitecaps on the expanse of the water.

The building had housed Kauffman’s General Store for years. The second floor of the business was a cigar factory, the rolling tables still used as a part of the retail space. The back room, now stacked with kayaks, once housed a speakeasy in what was then, and is now, a dry township, Lower Windsor. An old timer told the Winands that on Sundays the women and children would go across the street to Ebenezer Church while the men spent the day in the speakeasy, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon dispensed in an old Coke cooler and sipping moonshine stored in the basement.

This place has been the home of Shank’s Mare since 1997.

And now, after Liz and Steve retire, it will become home to the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper.

Becoming an institution

The business’ first home was an old print shop on South Pershing Avenue in York – the building still bore the sign of Melvyn W. Fisher Printing when they bought it – on the east bank of the Codorus Creek.

The building was essentially one large room. It was run down, but it had a rustic charm, including large windows and a huge skylight in the ceiling. With the help of friends and bankers who believed in their vision, they converted the building into their retail space in 1978, paneling the walls with rough-hewn lumber and installing a wood stove to heat the cavernous space. A lot of sweat equity was involved in starting the business, they said.

The building housed the retail space, but they rented space along the river for the excursion and programming aspect of the business, running that out of a one-bedroom bungalow that they shared with their then-young son, Devin. (He got the bedroom and Liz and Steve slept in the living room.) Later, they moved into a centuries-old stone house that over looked the river.

They were committed to downtown York, though. When they felt they outgrew the space on Pershing Avenue, they moved into the old Codorus and Company building on West Market Street, near the creek’s boat basin. The idea was to turn the building into a sports complex, but it didn’t work out. They did help create a bicycle road rally downtown, and while it was fun, it didn’t last long and the building never attracted symbiotic businesses.

It was a disappointment. The Winands were dedicated to efforts to revitalize the city, and in those decades, progress was slow. They formed a downtown business coalition, hoping to attract more retail businesses downtown, but it was not as successful as they hoped. They served as organizers of the Olde York Street Fair, and while that was successful, it didn’t address the day-to-day issues facing the center city. The timing wasn’t right, and a variety of factors made it difficult.

They then moved to a building on the South Queen Street hill, just outside the city in Spring Garden Township’s Randolph Park area. The notion was the area had more traffic, and while it did, as Steve said, “the traffic just went by.”

After a few years, the old general store in Long Level came up for auction. It had housed a country crafts store and some other retail operations, but by the time it was on the block, it had been vacant for about four years.

To the Winands, it was a perfect location. The view of Lake Clarke was perfect. The public boat landing across the street was perfect. Everything about it was perfect. They bid on it and they won.

In 1997, Shank’s Mare opened up in the old building on the east bank of the Susquehanna.

And it became an institution.

'Go Play Outdoors' is more than a motto

To understand the business, you have to start with Shank’s Mare’s motto: “Go Play Outdoors.” It didn’t come out of the blue.

When she was a kid, Liz recalled always heading down to the river with her father. “We were always outdoors,” she said. “We heard it all the time when we were growing up: ‘go play outdoors.’ It just seemed natural.”

Shank’s Mare came from a Scottish phrase. Steve said he first thought it was “a York County thing,” when his parents would tell him to "shank’s mare." It was actually a Scottish phrase that meant "to go by foot on a walk," in other words, to take a hike.

When they started the business, Liz and Steve were outdoors people. And they still are. It is something they are committed to. And in a way, they were ahead of the curve.

When they started in the business, kayaks were designed for navigating white water, their recreational use for casual kayakers not optimized. The business started with canoe sales, rentals and lessons. It moved into kayaks when the first touring kayaks came out, long before they became popular.

They always seemed just ahead of the trends, and sometimes it backfired. Liz recalled they started stocking Birkenstocks before they became popular with the kind of people who wore sandals with socks. They dropped them after the sandals failed to catch on. The following year, everybody was wearing them. The business, she said, was "always evolving."

The retail part of the business is just a small part of Shank’s Mare. They offered kayak classes and tours. They offered programs on the Susquehanna, its history and culture and its environmental importance, serving up education with dinner in the large, open room on the store’s second floor. Over the years, Devin said, they’d hosted some 30,000 students on field trips to learn about the river and what it has to offer. They just wanted to share their love for the outdoors with others, show them how to enjoy the beauty of the natural world. They wanted others to feel what they felt when they gazed at that expanse of the Susquehanna and its beauty.

The business, as all businesses, had its ups and downs, Liz said. Their dedication and love for it got them through the tough times.

But now, retail is tougher than ever. Competition from big-box stores and Internet retailers undercuts them, even though those outlets, they said, can’t offer what makes them and other mom-and-pop stores special, developing a relationship with their customers.

“Retail is a really tough business,” Liz said. “Fortunately, we have a loyal and supportive clientele. We want to run our business a certain way, but it’s tougher and tougher and tougher to do it.”

As Steve and Liz pondered the future of the business, they started thinking about retirement. Steve is 74 and Liz is 73. They are in good health – Steve still sports a bushy beard, albeit turned gray now – and they wanted to be able to do some things they always wanted to do before it’s too late.

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They left the decision whether Devin wanted to take over the business to him. He balked. "It wasn’t an easy decision," he said. "It wasn’t taken lightly. "

He grew up in the business and loves it. But working retail in these times is tough. “I’m 42 – Shank's Mare is 45 – and all I knew is I don’t really want to remain in retail," he said.

The three of them came to a decision together: What if we pass the property on to the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association? It made sense. The riverkeeper’s office is housed in the building, and the organization needed to expand its operations.

“We thought, how can we leave this in a good place?” Liz said. “We wanted to step back from Shank’s Mare, but we didn’t want to see Shank’s Mare go away totally. It’s a win-win.”

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Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Ted Evgeniadis said Steve and Liz pitched the idea to him last year, and at the beginning of this year the association “started to see how we could get this done.”

The location is perfect, and it provides the association with a means of expanding its educational and programming projects. The details have yet to be worked out, and Evgeniadis said, “As far as what we’re going to do, we’re going to figure that out.”

The association needs the room, he said. As it is, his office is stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes of documents. The association needs to add staff. And it wants to use the indoor space to expand educational programs “to create the next generation of stewards,” Evgeniadis said.

“It just makes sense,” he said. “It’s going to allow us to do much more.”

Devin, who has run programming at Shank’s Mare, is expected to take that same role with the riverkeepers, moving from retail to the nonprofit world. But, he said, “There’s a lot of good stuff happening."

Blue highways

Steve and Liz have their own plans.  The store has already started liquidating its inventory and the Winands hope to have everything wrapped up by the end of the year.

“I’m just so excited that I won’t have to work Saturdays the rest of my life or be able to take vacation in the summer,” Liz said.

They plan to travel, taking road trips to National Parks and exploring the country and its wide open spaces. They have already plotted out trips across the country, taking the blue highways, so named because they appear in blue on road maps, no interstates and no fast food.

Asked about their plans, Steve said, “See that travel trailer out back. Just enough room for two people and a dog. That’s the plan.”

Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com. In the interest of full disclosure, his band, JC Fisher, has played regularly at Shank's Mare's summer Friday night gatherings.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: The owners of Shank's Mare in Long Level are retiring