February 23, 2006

By Diane Chiddister

Ken Simon is closing his downtown shop but plans to operate a framing business out of his home.

A former philosophy professor and lifelong musician, Ken Simon has never been your average shopkeeper. In fact, he never meant to be a shopkeeper at all, and he seems genuinely astonished when telling a customer that his store, Gemini Gallery and Music, has been around for 26 years.

For more than two and a half decades Simon has presided over his Xenia Avenue store with his quirky mixture of bemusement and good cheer, sitting on the high stool behind the counter among his custom framing equipment and exotic musical instruments, or, if the weather permitted, outside on a bench. And sometimes he played his flute, the tune lilting throughout downtown.

But enough is enough. Last month Simon decided he no longer wants to be tied to store hours, and at the end of February, Gemini will close its doors.

He’ll miss most of all being a part of downtown, Simon said, having a front row seat in his store or on a bench to ponder villagers’ comings and goings, enjoying chats with customers and passersby. It may be a small town, he said, but he never was bored.

“I’ve always liked to sit and watch cars and people go by,” he said in an interview last week. “Ever since I was a little kid I liked looking out the window.”

But while Simon will no longer have his store, he is keeping his framing business, which he will operate out of his Lincoln Court home. He hopes his regular customers and new ones, too, continue to bring their favorite paintings or prints to him. He has always charged reasonable prices, he said, and he can now charge even less, and he can offer pick up and delivery service.

Like many things in his life, Simon said, his framing business began by chance, but evolved into something much more.

In 1980 Alan MacBeth decided to sell his framing business at about the same time that Simon decided he needed a regular job, so MacBeth taught Simon the craft. An artist who loves working with his hands, Simon was not surprised that he found pleasure in producing beautiful products. But he hadn’t expected that the process of framing pictures would turn into a sort of spiritual path.

“There are 100 ways to make a mistake when you’re framing something,” he said. “You can make a wrong cut or sneeze or a speck of dust can appear. It’s very precise work. It takes your attention.”

Most of all, Simon discovered that to be a good framer he needed to work slowly and carefully. He needed patience. And while some people seemed to have been born with a patient nature, he said, he was not one of those people.

In the beginning, Simon said, when he made a mistake, which was often, he might smash something against a wall, then march across the street to Weaver’s Market to gorge on a doughnut. But over time he made fewer mistakes and these days, when he does, he takes a deep breath and starts over again.

“At some point I decided this was the job I needed to practice becoming more patient,” he said. “And I did. It’s been good for me.”

Simon is something of a purist about his work, and plies his trade with the same $12 mat cutter that he learned on in 1980. Hardly any framing shops use manual mat cutters any more, he said, relying instead on the far more expensive mechanical cutter that requires little training to operate. But Simon has no intention of changing his ways.

“I like doing it this way,” he said. “If all I had to do was to press a button, I wouldn’t want to do it.”

While Gemini began as only a framing store, over the years it evolved to reflect Simon’s other interests. A devotee of world music, he began stocking his store with African drums and Australian didgeridoos, along with many other exotic instruments. Through its hard-to-find instruments, Gemini attracted world music lovers from far away, some of whom took Simon’s workshops, which were unusual at the time, in music and spirituality. During those years the store flourished, as customers drove to town from Indianapolis, Cleveland and Columbus.

But as world music became mainstream, many stores began stocking the instruments, and lots of people offered workshops, Simon said. Gradually, he said, his music business dwindled, as did his workshop business.

“There was a time when lots of people came in and treated me like I was some sort of authority on music and spiritual stuff,” he said. “It was kind of fun. But then it passed.”

Other things changed as well, including certain assumptions about behavior among local retailers, Simon said.

Years ago, he considered selling music tapes because they seemed a natural outgrowth of his business. But Gail Lichtenfels was already selling tapes at Epic Book Shop, then located across Xenia Avenue, and, Simon said, there was an unspoken assumption that one retailer didn’t compete with another. So he never sold tapes, he said, until one day years later when, roaming through downtown stores, he discovered about 10 businesses selling tapes. He realized, he said, that the rules had changed.

“Now it’s normal, but it didn’t used to be normal,” he said of stores selling items already carried by other local shops. “That’s how the world has changed.”

Before he opened Gemini, Simon ran a local restaurant called, appropriately, The Restaurant, and before that he taught philosophy at Central State. Prior to coming to Yellow Springs in 1968, he taught at the University of Illinois. He has 12 years of graduate study in both philosophy and psychology, he said.

While Simon never exactly meant to spend 26 years as a retailer, he reaped rewards he never expected, he said. He enjoyed sharing his interests with others, learning to be patient, and having countless friendly chats with the people of Yellow Springs.

To reach Ken Simon Framing, call 767-1022.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com