By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Greg Halamay to shutter his business, the iconic downtown shop Finders Records.
“I was home for two to three weeks and totally enjoyed it,” he said. “It was the first time I’d been on vacation for two weeks.”
Benefiting from an early spring he spent time outside doing yard work. But after a bit, “guilt and conscience” brought him back to the shop.
He’d lost all his “terrific staff,” he said, so for the next 14 months he ran the operation solo. The doors remained closed, except for slipping a bag of recordings out the door to customers who had ordered online.
“Since I owned the property, I was able to play it safe,” he said. “I wasn’t about to gamble with my health.”
After 14 months he reopened “and business just boomed.”
Halamay said: “The pandemic has generated a tremendous community spirit on how important it is to support your local retailers and restaurants and everything that exists in your community.”
And while other stores and online sources were feeling a supply crunch, he had a backlong of a year and half’s worth of the product that customers were demanding.
That included the new-old hot items, vinyl records. For 15 years, vinyl had been surging in the market, grabbing an increasing share of the music buyer’s budget. On any given day, Halamay said, 65-70 percent of his sales are in vinyl.
He had another reason for reopening: “Emotionally I wanted to complete my thought process on how and when to retire.”
The pandemic, Halamay said, was “it allowed me to slow down mentally and think things through more clearly instead of just coming into work every day.”
And he decided it was time. He’d been talking to friends about retiring for five years. “I have never really been able to figure out the formula of how to achieve my retirement.”
The pandemic convinced him the time had come. “You’re at a certain point in your life you have other objectives in life.”
He hopes to make the transition this coming fall, about the time the shop turns 51. He promised himself last December that 2021 would be his last holiday season as a retailer.
He teased the news on Independent Record Store Day in April. The sale poster included “Our Last Waltz,” a reference to the documentary about The Band’s farewell performance, on it. Not many people took note of that, Halamay said.
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Then he posted small signs announcing that the owner was retiring and the business was for sale. Those have now been replaced by a large sign that takes up an entire window.
This could go a couple ways, he said. Someone could buy the record store business or if no one is interested the space could be home for another kind of venture, or given its size, ventures.
He will retain ownership of the buildings. This has been his work home for 50-plus years, and he’s not willing to give it up. He enjoys working with tenants – the upper floors have offices and art studios.
He tells friends: “One step at a time.”
The record business remains strong, driven by the demand for vinyl records. Unlike other shops though, Finders hasn’t given up on the compact disc format. “We have so many customers that are over 50 and that’s their preferred medium.” Though many older listeners are also rediscovering vinyl.
“Vinyl is tactile,” he said. “The album art has caught the eyes of music lovers. … It’s heartening to know the beauty of listening to vinyl has surged into new generations.”
This brings Halamay back to where the shop started.
Halamay, 70, founded Finders 50 years ago with his father Ross Halamay. The younger Halamay was a student at BGSU.
The elder Halamay had a long career in music starting as a big band leader before moving into the record business as a representative for Decca and RCA. After about seven years, the elder Halamay retired leaving his son the business
Through the years the business grew. Halamay started offering CDs, even when he had only a dozen from Telarc to sell.
By the 1980s he operated five stores. He had shops in Maumee, Sylvania, Findlay, on East Wooster in BG across from Harshman as well as the main store in downtown Bowling Green.
The store near campus was “a learning experience,” he said, and lasted only five years. The economic downturn in the late 1980s was the death knell for the Sylvania and Maumee stores.
A historic flood of the Blanchard River flooded the basement to the ceiling and soaked the store’s wall to wall carpet upstairs. With the danger of the river flooding again, he decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
That was also a low point for the record business. “Technology was hitting us below the belt, and the large discount stores were low balling compact discs and DVDs as loss leaders,” he recalls. “We toughed it out. I don’t want to give it up easily. I didn’t have anything I wanted to do more.”
Then the business turned around and headed upward, and continued to do well for the past decade. The creation of Independent Record Store Day has been a boost with sales as strong as at Christmastime.
There are even signs that CDs may stage a resurgence, he said. “The compact disc is coming around for full circle for younger people,” Halamay said. Now it has a “cool factor.”
And he believes there’s always a new configuration on the horizon.
He just won’t be at Finders to sell it.
“You realize there’s more to our lives than simply coming to work every day and doing business as usual,” he said. “I could carry on until the day I die, but that’s not how I’m hoping to conclude things.”
He still has energy and is considering hitting the road. Halamay said he traveled a lot before Finders opened. “I think about that a lot,” he said. “I’d like to get in my car and not have a timeline when I get back.”
The memories will remain of a half century of “momentous occasions, the history that vibrates in this building for all those years,” he said. “What a great career I’ve had here. It’s simply time to change course and perhaps turn the story over to another individual.”
