The Lake House
My name is Walter Kowalski. I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1958, in a house that smelled of kielbasa and radiator heat and my mother’s hand lotion, and except for four years in the Navy and two business trips to a plumbing trade show in Las Vegas, I had spent the whole of my life within a reasonable drive of Lake Erie. People who are not from that part of the country sometimes ask what keeps a man there. I never had a good answer for them. It was the water, maybe. The flat gray light in November. The way you can smell a storm coming off the lake two hours before it arrives.
I built a plumbing-supply company from one delivery van and a rented storage unit into four warehouses stretching across Pennsylvania and western New York. I am not saying that to boast. I am saying it because I want you to understand something about the kind of man I am: I know what it costs to build something from nothing. I know what early mornings feel like when you are the first one in and the last one out, when you are locking up alone in the dark because the business is yours and no one else is going to do it, and you understand, in a way that is partly pride and partly grief, that this is simply how it is going to be. I know the particular weight of a thing you have made with your own hands and your own stubbornness and your own willingness to stay when other people would have walked away.
I came out of the Navy in 1980 with a practical education in pipe systems, hydraulics, and the organizational psychology of men under pressure. I started Kowalski Plumbing Supply in 1983 in a storage unit off Peach Street with a secondhand delivery van and a phone line I shared with the unit next door, a woman who did alterations and who would holler through the wall when a call came in for me. By 1991, I had three employees and a small warehouse. By 2000, I had four warehouses and seventeen employees and a reputation in western Pennsylvania and western New York that I had built one contract and one on-time delivery at a time. I sold a partial interest to a private equity group in 2019 and retained enough control to keep the company running the way I had always run it, which is to say with the understanding that the people who work for you deserve to know you will be there.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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