Longtime Westmoor Music leaders reflect as one of Empire Mall’s oldest businesses closes

Astounded and chagrinned, Art Slumskie walked out of his meeting with Darrell Schultz.

He thought his interview to be a salesman at Westmoor Music had gone perfectly, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t been offered the job immediately.

“Three, four days later, I was getting kind of mad, and I thought, what have you got to lose, so I called and said, well did you hire anybody yet?” Slumskie said. “Darrell said, when can you start? He was waiting to see if I would follow up. He wanted to hire people that would be aggressive and get a lead and not let it go.”

That interview in the summer of 1977 led to a work relationship that evolved into a partnership that evolved into the kind of close bond that time and distance can never break. Slumskie and Schultz talk almost every day, the former from his winter home in Mesa, Arizona, the latter from his residence at Grand Living in Sioux Falls.

Their conversations cover a wide range of topics, but the minutiae of running a piano and organ store in The Empire Mall no longer is one of them. Six years ago, they sold Westmoor Music to Ryan Sather of Spencer, Iowa. Schultz retired, but as part of the sale, Slumskie agreed to continue working for nine months out of the year, allowing him to head south in the cold weather.

This year, Slumskie will return to what is essentially unemployment. Sather closed Westmoor Music in late 2021 and now refers customers to his store in Spencer. Westmoor’s departure from The Empire Mall marks the end of one of the oldest businesses there.

Westmoor Music opened in what was then known as the Sioux Empire Plaza almost 45 years ago in August 1977. Schultz located his original store, however, in Sioux City, opening in January 1976. Schultz was an experienced musician who had moved to the business side as he established a family. As a high school student in Howard, he joined a band that played five or six days a week, earning $13 or $15 a gig as the accordionist.

In the mid-1960s, Williams Piano Co. in Sioux Falls hired Schultz as a part-time salesman, and he eventually worked his way up to manager. But that company, founded in 1887, struggled in the 1970s. He considered taking a job with the Hammond Organ Co. in Chicago but didn’t want to move his wife, Pat, and two young daughters.

Before Schultz had quit playing in bands, he had taken up the Hammond organ. This was at a time when organs were for religious music, not frivolity.

“People just came to see what kind of goofy guy this was that was taking a church organ and playing it for dances,” he said. But when Schultz decided to start his own store, it wasn’t Hammond that first influenced him.

“At that point, Yamaha was the largest musical instrument company in the world, but people thought Yamahas were just motorcycles,” Schultz said. “I could just tell that they were going places.”

Nine months after opening in Sioux City, he started a second Westmoor Music, this one at 111 S. Main Ave. People advised Schultz to select a familiar location. Schultz chose a spot across from Fantle’s, then a long-established downtown department store. He opened in October 1976. Two months later, he said, Fantle’s hung up a going-out-of-business sign. Schultz called it a crushing blow.

But he rallied. Williams Piano Co. had planned on moving to the newly opened mall, the state’s largest that had opened in 1975. In his role as manager, he had visited the mall numerous times and became friends with mall manager Jim McCarty of then-owner General Growth. When he left Williams, and another music store failed within months of opening at the mall, Schultz stepped up.

His banker was hesitant about the proposed move, so Schultz arranged a meeting with McCarty. He asked McCarty to come downtown because as a one-man operation he couldn’t leave. He presented his proposal, which included paying 5 percent of his monthly sales in lieu of an established rent.

An agreement was reached and Westmoor — named after the two-block street where Schultz and his family rented a home — opened in the mall. That’s when Slumskie joined as a salesman. He, too, was a former traveling musician who had moved from Canada. He was one of two people whom Schultz had hired to run the new store, but the other salesman left after six months. Schultz would join Slumskie at the mall on weekends.

The two men opened a store in Rapid City in October 1979 and for a brief time had a fourth one in Fargo. The Rapid City store closed in 2005, and its manager moved to the Sioux City store. It closed three years later. Slumskie began to buy into the business about 10 years after he started; when Westmoor closed last month, he had worked at the mall for 45 years, likely giving him the most seniority of anyone employed there, he said.

“When it first opened, it was really exciting and fun,” Slumskie said. “Organs and pianos were a big deal in the ’70s and early ’80s. We weren’t fighting with computers and board games. Organs were more of an impulse buy than a piano. We did what we called ‘frumping’ — front pumping. You put a small organ at the front of the store, and you tried to attract people. With the organs, you sounded like a whole band.”

Westmoor Music opened in the mall’s JCPenney wing in August 1977, but for 17 years it was close to the main mall entrance, near what was then the food court.

For 10 years, two Slumskies worked together at Westmoor Music. Daughter Sara Dockter served as assistant manager from 1999 to 2009. She also gave senior organ lessons, teaching five or six classes of 10 students each to older adults.

She started at Westmoor when she was 19, making her by far Westmoor’s youngest employee. So Dockter turned to neighboring Empire Mall stores to find her peer group.

“There was a community of stores around us,” she said. “Aladdin’s Castle, Harold’s Photo, Helzberg Diamonds, across from us was China Express. We’d go to Aladdin’s Castle and play games, go to the backroom at Harold’s, go to Sbarro’s and grab a calzone. It was a real family situation among the people that worked in the permanent stores and a good bunch of people to work with in a unique situation.”

Dockter found satisfaction in working with senior citizens who didn’t realize how the purchase of a home organ could enhance their lives. They didn’t think they had any musical talent, she said. After an organ lesson or two, they could entertain themselves for hours. The classes also allowed them to make new friendships, which spilled into other activities. Dockter still sighs blissfully remembering the potluck meals she was invited to join.

Slumskie’s annual trips to national Yamaha conventions in California also meant he met recording artists such as Elton John and Billy Joel. Slumskie would lobby to bring them to Sioux Falls for concerts, Dockter said. When they did, he would arrange for them to perform at Tri-Valley School District.

“You’d have a Hollywood guy doing scores for the biggest films of the ’80s bring out a gigantic organ and sit there and do whole assemblies for the whole school,” Dockter said. “My mom was cooking them dinner, and they were doing shows and moving organs and pianos in and out.”

Retired music teacher John Mogen still gives piano lessons every afternoon. For one year in the mid-1980s, however, he was a salesman at Westmoor Music.

“I loved working there,” he said. “You got to sit and play keyboard all day.”

Often, sales were made to people who walked through Westmoor Music’s doors out of curiosity. They then discovered how much fun it was to play the organ. What Mogen discovered was that as a salesman, he was a better teacher.

“You need three things to be a good salesman,” he said. “You’ve got to know how the products are built and how they work. You’ve got to greet the people and make them feel comfortable with you, then you’ve got to reach in their pockets and spend their money, and I was not very good at that.”

For Schultz and Slumskie, salesmanship and music meant bringing beauty into a customer’s world. Their customers, Schultz said, were first-class people who appreciated music. The same could be said for their staff. He still speaks in glowing terms of the people who, as Slumskie said, “worked with Darrell, not for Darrell.”

Take Faye Stryzewski, now of Chamberlain. Yamaha’s philosophy was if you sell people a piano, you’re obligated to help them learn how to play it, Schultz said. He attended an education program in Winnipeg, Canada, where he was urged to hire a teacher that was energetic, personable and between the age of 25 and 30.

“How are you going to find somebody like that?” Schultz asked himself. Then, he returned to Sioux Falls and “who walked in but a lady by the name of Faye Stryzewski. She was the model teacher, and she was looking for a job. She really started the teaching program, and success attracts success.”

In the beginning, Schultz made the deliveries himself. As demand increased, he sought help. A man named Curly Jennings started assisting part time and then declared, “I’m going to go to work for Schultzie, and he did,” Schultz said. “He was one of the greatest employees you could have, but I never thought of him as an employee. He was a great friend.”

Slumskie walked into Westmoor Music as a 24-year-old newlywed, eager to start a new chapter in his life. The thought of the store being gone has not bothered him — at least not while he’s in Mesa. That may change when he returns later this winter.

“It’s going to be harder when I go home,” he said. “When I was home, I was always working. I’m so used to going to work every day.”

Then & Now: The Empire Mall