It’s a common sight nowadays. Drive through nearly any locally-owned business district and you are bound to see a few for lease or sale signs plastered on a window with the lights turned off during hours of commerce – the telltale signs of a business that couldn’t survive our Great Recession.

The story behind those signs is a mystery, but the traditional scenario often times holds true. Someone took a great financial risk to follow their dream, become their own boss, and start their own business. The realities of staying up on bills, family life and keeping a steady stream of customers became too much and that dream had to fold.

The Herald received a letter from one of our readers earlier this month about Murphy’s Paw on 17th Ave S.W. in White Center, a day spa for dogs where the owner, Bonnie Davis, would take care of the grooming or customers could simply come in and use the deluxe dog baths to wash their pet in style for a fair price.

Murphy’s closed up shop on Aug. 31, a sign placed on the door from Bonnie and her daughter Mary. “We will miss all of you and your pets,” it read.

Andy Helman wrote the letter explaining how her dog, Max, “had suffered greatly at the hands of ‘traditional’ medicine.” Bonnie, she said, “led me in a different way. Bonnie knew what the vets couldn’t fathom. In two days, Max had turned the corner.”

Our interest was piqued, so we contacted Bonnie for the rest of the story.

The accidental entrepreneur
It started back in 2007. Bonnie told her husband Floyd she wanted to find a location in White Center to start a thrift store – a dream she had been mulling for some time. The Davis’s were struggling financially, living off of Floyd’s social security check for disability and trying to find a way to bring in extra income. Their financial struggles were borne mostly in health care debt. Floyd had suffered his fifth heart attack and Bonnie was living in constant pain; a victim of fibromyalgia, degenerative disk disease and three crushed vertebrae in her neck from a 2004 car crash. She used to work construction, but Bonnie said the pain was too much to continue on that path. More recently she was taking care of elderly people in their homes, but the pay just wasn’t enough.

They decided to refinance their house, pay off some debt and, if there was enough money left, look into renting a storefront for Bonnie’s thrift store. She went to S&L Realty in White Center and asked if they had any ideas for a spot. They pointed out the window and asked what she thought about the dog wash next door. Murphy’s Paw’s prior owner was selling the business.

“A dog wash? What!?,” Floyd remembered saying when Bonnie came home with a revised plan. She picked up her daughter Mary, who would join her in the business venture, and they drove to Murphy’s to take a look.

Inside they found a self-service dog wash where “you just clean up after people after they wash their dogs and supply them with towels and shampoo,” Bonnie, a woman with kind eyes and a slight frame, said. “My daughter and I look at each other and say, ‘I think we can do this.’”

They bought the business name and equipment from the prior owner, set up a rental agreement with S&L and voila; Bonnie and Mary were in business. At first, Bonnie said things were slow and she took notice of how many people came in hoping for a groomer. She had to turn them away and realized quickly that was a service she needed to provide.

Bonnie learned how to groom, Mary was helping out on a daily basis, Floyd was bringing the old classic cars he works on to Murphy’s parking lot so they could spend their days together, they even started up a little thrift store in the backyard where everything sold for 25 cents. Their clientele was steadily growing.

“I loved it,” Bonnie said. “I never thought I’d own a business in White Center and be part of the business community at all.”

Family struggles
It was right around that time, in 2009, an unimaginable run of family tragedy began. Bonnie had lost her sister in 2008 after a heart transplant caused complications. Still working through the grief of her loss, Bonnie’s brother then died from esphogeal cancer in 2009. They used what little money was left over from the home refinance to help their Dad bury his son. In 2011 she lost her other brother to lymphoma and today her Mom is in the hospital with brain cancer.

“It was such a big hit to the family with so many deaths,” Bonnie said without a shake in her voice, the tremors associated with talking about the death of close ones long since tamed. “It was just one thing after another.”

Somehow, Bonnie and Floyd kept going through the emotional and physical pain they both endured and, as Bonnie put it, “You gotta get out of bed in the morning when you have a business.”

Helping the dogs beyond a haircut and a wash
After losing her first brother in 2009, Bonnie purchased an alkaline water machine when an elderly friend of hers swore it had helped him in his battles with cancer. Bonnie figured it was a scam at first, and the technology is certainly of the alternative variety – claiming to ionize and therefore energize water that, once ingested donates its energy to atoms and helps in health.

She decided to give it a try, but didn’t buy the machine for her family. She bought it for the dogs.

“We saw so many dogs with cancer we thought it could work for them as well,” Bonnie said. Unable to do anything about the loss of people in her life, she was excited about the possibility of helping her customers’ beloved pets.

It was a slow process, but Bonnie offered the alkaline water for free to her customers and started building a following (the dogs could drink the water or even bathe in it to help heal external wounds). This was the secret “Bonnie knew but the vets couldn’t fathom” that Andy Helman mentioned in her letter to the Herald.

“That (machine) fought cancer and diabetes and all kinds of illnesses and the dogs’ metabolism soaked it up like 100 times faster than we do,” Bonnie said. “One day you would have a dog coming in here that could hardly walk, three months later they were like a puppy.”

“Some of the dogs survived a long time and their tumors reduced drinking that water … it was kind of miraculous,” Floyd chimed in, a Vietnam veteran with a barrel chest and gray beard who only speaks when he sees fit.

“That was one of our deals for helping the community,” Bonnie said. “We did help a lot of dogs.”

The economy hits
Standing now behind the for sale sign in the darkness of a business fallen victim to the recession, Bonnie looks around Murphy’s Paw – the walls covered with pictures of every dog that had been a customer (it was a tradition from the original owner she continued), illuminated only by natural light as the power had been turned off.

In their prime, Bonnie and Floyd said they were getting about 15 customers a day. Then, in 2010, things changed.

“Boom,” Bonnie said, “the stocks crashed, the banks crashed … and the gas prices hit four bucks a gallon and we trickled down to two dogs a day.”

Struggling to make payments on the equipment leases they had taken over from the previous owner, rent and everything else, they went to the banks to inquire about small business loans to help stay afloat. The banks told them their modest revenue didn’t justify a loan.

There were spikes in business around holidays, but, as Floyd said, “This is a luxury and people can’t afford it,” when gas prices are so high and the economy so low. In a last ditch effort they spent several thousand dollars on an advertisement mailer promoting the 25 cent thrift store, but the mailer turned out wrong, proclaiming everything was 25 cents off instead of 25 cents.

The final hit came in August when Bonnie’s step-brother (and Floyd’s brother) was dying from lymphoma. They had to make a decision between being by his side in his final chapter of his life and being at Murphy’s Paw for grooming appointments. For the Davis’s the choice was obvious: they cancelled appointments to be with their brother.

Dealing with debt, but focusing on what matters
“I’m actually surprised we kept it going for three years,” Bonnie said.

After closing up shop in August, Bonnie figures she is about $10,000 in debt.

“If someone came in today and bought the name of Murphy’s Paw (and their equipment) for $10,000 then I could get out of having to file for bankruptcy,” she said. She even hopes someone might want to take over the building (managed by S&L Realty) and revive the pet groom and wash so she could come back and just work as an employee.

While they wait to see what pans out in between trips to visit Bonnie’s mother battling brain cancer in Eastern Washington, it has become a time of reflection.

“I do miss it,” she said, “I miss the dogs, I miss my customers. You have to love what you do with any job because if you put pride in your work you enjoy it that much more.

“It was a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. I enjoyed it and it was fun while it lasted and like I said, for not knowing what the hell I was doing I’m surprised we made it this long. With all the good that came out of this shop, I couldn’t be more proud of what I did accomplish.”

Bonnie has started taking photos of the dogs she cared for off the walls, compiling them into photo albums as a record of her journey as a small business owner.

Stepping out of the darkness of a closed Murphy’s Paw, Bonnie tells the story of how Floyd and she met. It was 1992 and Bonnie had left her first husband. “He wanted me hooked on crack (cocaine) forever,” she said, now nearly two decades clean. “I went to treatment three times and every time I got out he would just put (crack) in my face.”

Floyd came into her life at just the right time. “He was the first guy I met that never did drugs,” she said. “I met Floyd and he changed my life.”

They married in 1999.

A few weeks after Murphy’s Paw closed this summer someone broke in and stole all the copper pipes and plumbing fixtures. Forgotten by the Davis’s, the burglars also found a bottle of champagne in one of the cabinets. It was the bottle a friend gave them in celebration of taking over Murphy’s Paw. The thieves, in their haste, dropped the bottle behind the business and, after police swabbed it for fingerprints, the Davis's got it back.

Floyd has never been a drinker but Bonnie decided to pop the cork; a last hurrah.

“It wasn’t very good champagne anyways,” Floyd said as the couple broke into laughter, “but Bonnie enjoyed it.”

“I’m just glad I still have my husband after five heart attacks,” Bonnie said.

Bonnie Davis wished to thank a customer turned “great friend” who gave her a healthy sum of money along the way to help out, and Liz Giba for donating an article in the Jubilee Days paper.