He left his heart in Central District

Richlen's Super Mini at 23rd and Union, with its neon Kick'n Chicken sign, has been a fixture in Seattle's Central District for a generation, so I was surprised earlier this month to see it closed and surrounded by a chain-link fence.

I called Jack Richlen to see what was going on with the gas station and store. Richlen, 82, has been retired for the past 5-1/2 years. He still owns the property but had sold the business to a Mukilteo couple, Il-Joon and Hee-Kyong Choe. The Choes filed for bankruptcy in February.

Since he retired, Richlen has been in the habit of dropping in for coffee, and one Monday he drove up and found the place closed, he told me. "I teared up a little."

He said he would have tried to help the couple if he'd known how bad things were. In his 57 years in business in the CD, lots of people helped him.

The area around the store has seen its share of ups and downs, and Richlen survived them all. I wanted to know more about that, and about him. And, yes, part of my curiosity had to do with his being a white businessman in the " 'hood."

He'd called me a couple of times in the past to let me know that he was just as much a part of the Central Area as anyone. That's true.

Richlen invited me up to his house in View Ridge to talk about it.

He took me to the room where he relaxes, a basement family room whose walls were covered with paintings of clowns, most of them by Red Skelton. There were clown figurines everywhere. "I like them because they have happy faces."

Richlen's wife, Pearl, told me their store was a happy place. They're celebrating 57 years of marriage today.

Let's backtrack a bit.

Richlen is here in Seattle because of the Russian Revolution, which sent his parents fleeing by ship to North America. They could only afford space in the lower stern area, and Richlen's mother always said she rode the propeller all the way to British Columbia. (She was pregnant with him at the time, and he jokes that the ship's vibration explains why he likes to dance.)

They first settled in Tacoma, but when the Depression put his father out of work in 1932 they moved to Seattle's Madrona neighborhood looking for work. Richlen is a 1939 Garfield High School graduate and always refers to the Central Area as "my neighborhood," or "our neighborhood."

When he was in high school he went down to the Pike Place Market and helped butchers out so that he could learn how to work with meat. He got a job making $9 per week, and after he graduated and joined the union he got $18.75 per week.

In 1945, a few months after he and Pearl married, he bought a small butcher shop in the Coleman Building across the Union Street from where Richlen's is today.

After a couple of years the guy who owned the building asked if Richlen would like to move to the prime corner spot. "He threw me the keys." Not only that, he didn't charge them rent for the first six months. Richlen eventually bought the property, which he's owned for 22 years. He's dabbled in other business in the area. He had a tavern for about three years.

There was a big migration of black people into the neighborhood after the war. Richlen got to know the new people and figured out what they needed. He said some of the folks from the South couldn't read or write. "I'd cash their checks for them, and they'd make their mark," he said. He empathized with them because, "My folks came from the old country and couldn't read or write."

"We had greens, yams, everything that area wanted," he said. "My customers taught me how to buy crabs." Over the holidays, they'd sell 30,000 pounds of chitterlings, and lots of big chickens instead of turkeys. "Anyone can sell a can of corn or peas, but to sell meat, you have to know your customers."

When he bought the current location of Richlen's 25 years ago, he decided to concentrate on chicken. He learned by experimenting with coatings and frying times and gave out samples until he got it right.

"Customers would come in and say, 'Hey Jack, give me some of that kick'n chicken.' " So he decided to put up the neon sign: Kick'n Chicken. Give the customers what they want, that's the key. "Two thousand pounds of chicken a week we were selling, when I sold the store."

Other businesses haven't done as well.

He thinks the media are partly to blame for hyping crime stories in the area. And he recalls the years when banks wouldn't make loans in the area after the black population soared. "Even I couldn't get a loan."

Richlen said he had plans for the corner just before he retired. He wanted to create a mini-mall. "I was going to put in a fruit stand and a flower shop. Younger people your age eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and buy flowers."

"But I was 78 or 79, and I needed a backup." He asked his son-in-law about playing that role, but he declined. "Three days later, I sold the store."

Now he's involved again, and fielding calls from people who want to re-open the store. He figures the business full of history still has a future.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com

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