One of the original shops in the last phase of the new Brockton Arcade was Gillette’s Records, a teen hangout and music mecca in Riverside for about 25 years. For those who remember, its owner was very much a kid-at-heart.
Gillette’s Records opened April 11, 1962, along with five other stores. The owner of Gillette’s was Doug Gillette, who, at age 53, could not be considered a “youth.” However, he wanted to connect to the youth of the day, and the way he figured he’d do that was through operating a record store that catered to the under-30 crowd – just modern music, no classical or “adult” genres.
Gillette was born May 19, 1909 in Central Village, Connecticut. Sports played a big part in his early life, and for a while, he was actually a minor-league pitcher for a team that fed into the St. Louis Cardinals. He showed promise until he blew out his elbow and his professional baseball hopes came to an end. He then worked for a coal company in Pennsylvania until WWII, when he enlisted in the Army and was a maintenance mechanic in the motor pool and saw combat in Normandy.
After the war, he returned to Pennsylvania before moving to San Bernardino, where he opened a few record shops in the area. The Brockton Arcade record store was the last in a series he owned.
He was briefly married early in life, but had no children of his own. Instead, he adopted the youth of Riverside. In an article in The Press-Enterprise from 1972, he said, “‘They take care of me,’ he says of Riverside’s younger generation. ‘These are all my kids. It’s something I truly value – an ‘old guy’ like me. They let me move around with them.’”
To keep up with the youth, Gillette began a monthly magazine called “Now.” He paid for all publication costs, and at one point gave away some 5,000 copies a month. He also made at least 20 trips each week to high school and college campuses in the area, talking to student leaders and principals, and listening to youth – “the whole scene” as he called it.
The record store, though, was Gillette’s lifeline and connection to the younger generation. Later in life, he became an avid bicycler. When I knew him in the early 1980s, he would bicycle to Los Angeles each weekend to pick up records ordered throughout the week.
In the 1980s, when he thought he’d retire, along came CDs and he was enthralled. He did deal in CDs for a bit, but by around 1990, Gillette’s age was catching up to him and he decided to retire and move to Arizona. It was there, in his home in Lake Havasu City, that he died on May 16, 1995, just a few days shy of his 86th birthday. But many people still fondly remember Doug Gillette and Gillette’s Records, a mainstay in the Brockton Arcade for nearly 30 years.
If you have an idea for a future Back in the Day column about a local historic person, place or event, contact Steve Lech and Kim Jarrell Johnson at backinthedaype@gmail.com.
