Out in Greene County, Iowa

The tiny town Exline, Iowa, has a new store and new spirit, and both are luring visitors

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
January 26, 2004
EXLINE, IOWA

A project that some doubters in southeast Iowa thought might never happen, has indeed happened.

And let me tell you, the Exline Old Country Store & Antique Exchange, which opened last October in a new building on the main corner of this old coal mining town of 191 people, is just as good as its owner Morgan E. Cline said it would be.

He is the 72-year-old, retired advertising executive who made a fortune in New York City, handling large accounts for pharmaceutical companies. He sure never forgot where he came from, for in the past half-dozen years, he has invested $15 million or more in his old home area of Appanoose County, Iowa.

His projects have reinvigorated the town square in the county seat of Centerville. He has built fantastic independent-living and assisted-living facilities for senior citizens there. He has underwritten several restoration projects of gracious old Centerville buildings and homes, turning them into viable and vital community businesses and attractions.

And then he turned his attention to Exline, the town halfway between Centerville and the Missouri border. He grew up on a hardscrabble farm just south of the town, and he was in the last graduating class at old Exline High School in 1949.

His new Exline store – the first business to open in a new building in the tiny business district in at least 40 years – is built to look old, kind of Old West, with a high façade.


The Exline Old Country Store & Antique Exchange opened last October in the southern Iowa town of Exline (pop. 191). It's the first new retail business in downtown Exline in more than 40 years. Hometown boy-made-good Morgan E. Cline, who made a fortune in New York City doing advertising for pharmaceutical companies, has invested more than $15 million in new developments in Exline, Centerville and the rest of Appanoose County in recent years. One reason he built the new store in Exline was because he saw the need for a local gathering spot. (All photos with this column are by Jon Dorman.)

The brown steel skin mimics barn-board construction. There’s an 80-foot-long porch that wraps the front and sides, with a roof overhead and a nice railing, creating the feel of a boardwalk. In warm weather, 18 wood rocking chairs are kept out there, open to all loafers who want to sit a spell.

The Exline store is so good that after my first visit, I have now made a solemn vow: I will spend at least one afternoon here each year for the rest of my life, occupying one of those rockers on the porch.

And, should the weather not be so good, well, then I will spend the afternoon inside the store in its “Sit & Spit Corner,” which features seven captain’s chairs ringing a wood-burning stove, with a game of checkers always either underway or just about to start there.

Word is that Cline invested $500,000 in building and equipping the 4,000-square-foot store.

Now, half a million dollars might not buy a lot in the nation’s cities, but let me tell you, that amount still goes a loooong way in Exline, Iowa.

It not only built a new building and started up a business. It is rebuilding the whole sense of community here.


The sales counter at the Exline store. Note the piece of frosted glass, upper right, displaying the name of store owner Morgan Cline.

The Exline store is open 7 to 7, seven days a week. You can get three meals at the snack counter, including a breaded tenderloin sandwich that has quickly become the talk of the territory. There are pastries and desserts.

And for $3.99, you can join the store’s “Coffee Club,” which gives you a hefty mug with the store logo on it, and thereafter your coffee is 25 cents per cup, “no matter how long you sit, or how often you fill it, on each visit.”

You can buy and sell antiques in the store. You can get groceries, snacks, pop and carry-out beer. You can buy books and crafts and souvenirs of the area. You can buy area newspapers, and you can fill-up your car with Sinclair gasoline. You can even buy salt blocks and bags of livestock feed, just in case you get caught without.

“The store has been good for this town in a lot of different ways,” said John McKee, 53, a regular customer who does custom leather work in Exline. “But the single best thing it’s done is become the place where we really get to know our neighbors.

“Maybe that sounds crazy in a town this small, that you wouldn’t know your neighbors well. But you know how it goes. You see everybody every day, but how often do you do anything but give a wave and a shout? You keep telling yourself you’ll eventually stop over and have a good visit with them, but it just never seems to get done. Now, we all see each other in the store, almost every day, and people are sitting down here and really getting to know each other.”

That statement will be music to the ears of Morgan Cline, who in an interview 18 months ago told me what he wanted the Exline store to be.

“It will be a nice little social kind of place,” he said then. “It’s important for a little town like this to have a place where people can gather.”

And now they do.

Presiding daily is store manager Penny Sharp, 43, a native of the county who had several years experience managing the bustling Kum & Go convenience stores in Centerville and Chariton.

“I saw the ad in late August that they were looking for a manager here, and I jumped at it,” Sharp said. “It’s my kind of business, for sure. And it’s so unique. I’ve always liked country. I’ve always liked antiques. I’ve always liked old-fashioned. My daughter looked at it and said, ‘Mom, this job is perfect for you!’ ”

She went to work September 1 and oversaw the final interior construction and the installation of all the equipment, furniture and eventually the merchandise.


The store's 4,000 square feet of retail space includes groceries, snacks, antiques, some housewares, some hardware, some local memorabilia, a restaurant and a loafing area called the ''Sit & Spit Corner'' featuring a wood-burning stove. In nice weather, 18 rocking chairs are waiting for you on the store's wide front porch.

Typical of Morgan Cline projects, no corners were cut that would compromise quality.
Bill Burch, 41, the overseer of all of Cline’s Iowa projects, points out that the boss’ constant refrain is, “Do it right.”

There are many special touches. The top of the sales counter was made from re-finished floor joists taken out of an old Exline home. Wooden pews purchased from an old church in Albia were brought in, cut in half, refinished and now serve as the benches for the booths in the dining area. The floor is concrete, but it was stamped with a wood-grain pattern, and then specially-colored, so you’d swear you’re walking on wood bridge planks.

There’s an old phonograph that you crank to start. In a perfect match for it, there are two 78-rpm records now framed under glass and displayed on one wall – recordings of a young Morgan Cline singing “When You Were Sweet 16” and “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes.” (I’m hereby launching a campaign to get those old 78s played on that hand-cranked phonograph on my next visit.)

Someone in town had saved the old weigh scale used on the sales counter at the general store that once occupied this same corner.

That earlier store was operated by Morgan’s uncle Charles E. Cline, but it closed decades ago. Morgan’s brother Gary Cline and his wife Micki, who still live in the area, recalled seeing some old banners from that store, rolled up and stashed in a great accumulation of family memorabilia. They found two of those old thick-paper banners, and had them hung inside the new store as a surprise to Morgan. Says one: “Here You Are – Novelties of all kinds! Chas. E. Cline.” Another: “Lemonade and Cold Drinks of all kinds! Cheese & Ham Sandwiches, Hamburgers, Weines,” and yes, that last item is spelled just that way.

The closer the store got to opening, the more excited local people became.

Manager Sharp said that retired Postmaster Wayne Exline, his last name the same as the town’s, “started coming in every morning the last two weeks before we opened, and he spent all day every day here, volunteering to do whatever we needed done. Now he still comes in every day at 7 a.m. and starts the fire in the wood-burning stove in the Sit & Spit Corner. Then he drops back in several times a day, and he’ll throw another log on the fire to keep it going. He’s the sweetest man in the whole world.”


You can always find a checkers game in the ''Sit & Spit Corner'' at the Exline Old Country Store & Antique Exchange. Darb McElderry (left) and Eldon Hurley, both of Exline, are among the many locals who are sure they can whup you.

A total of six employees now work at the store.

Morgan Cline was here for the grand opening in October, and he was back again at Christmas time, spending several hours a day visiting with customers at the store.

He visits the area three or four times per year, traveling from his homes in Middletown, N.J., which is just outside New York City, and Palm Beach, Fla. He usually spends a long weekend, checking on his projects, renewing old friendships and relaxing.

You look around Exline now, and you wonder what it must’ve been like, back in the 1930s and ’40s when Cline was growing up here. And you wonder whether anyone here would have predicted all he’s done and is doing in life.

Well, there is kind of an answer to that hanging on one wall of the store. It’s a poem which Cline’s childhood pal Charles J. Conger, now retired pastor of the Plano Christian Church, wrote and recited at the grand opening:

“The Amazing Morgan Cline”

We walked along the country road,
School kids, south of Exline,
We laughed and played along the way,
Young and feeling fine.

We did not know that in our midst,
One was destined for fame.
He truly has surprised us all,
Morgan Cline is his name.

…

From an humble beginning at Exline,
To the realm of luxury and wealth,
We stand appalled at such success,
And the causes he has helped.

Rev. Conger’s poem brings to mind what Cline told me in that conversation I had with him in the fall of 2002.

“As I was getting toward the end of my career, I began thinking about how I’d made a lot of money,” Cline said then. “I never married, so I had no wife or children. I started thinking that I wanted something good to come from the money.

“Some people go through life and, when they’re gone, never even leave a foot print,” he said. “I didn’t want that to happen to me.”