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Owner, operator and tireless champion of Buck's Stove Palace (6803 SE Foster Road., 503-771-3374, stoves.com), Robert "Buck" Froman has spent more than 40 years fanning the flames of American history as seen through home and—more importantly—hearth.
"The stoves that you see in Edgefield, Kennedy School and so forth are antiques that I've sold," says Froman. "I supplied all the stoves for Grimm. I supplied stoves for Hallmark, a lot of different movies, and the Portland Opera. I'm the stove guy!"
Froman's Foster Road storefront—a former wallpaper shop built in 1907—displays around 100 antebellum models dating from as early as 1830. He's the sort of traditionalist one might suspect of avoiding e-commerce altogether, but Froman does maintain a tentative online presence itself somewhat historic—Buck's Stove Palace can be found at, simply, stoves.com.
"Thirty years ago, a friend of mine called me up and said he was buying domain names," Froman says. "He'd sell my name for $300, and I needed to buy. He just pressured me, and I said OK."
Though it sports a throwback GeoCities-trending aesthetic, stoves.com seems a perfectly decent website for any septuagenarian tradesman's labor of love—especially compared to an official store Facebook page not updated since 2011.
"I understand, with the social media being what it is, the internet has helped the business," Froman says, "but I've never utilized [more than] maybe 10 or 20 percent of its capacity. I have only a few employees. You can't get too big too fast. Otherwise, things get away from you."
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