Paul and his children always made you feel welcome at Machias Hardware.  They had a quiet friendliness that you always looked forward to and savored anytime you stopped in, plus of course Paul had preserved a lot of the quaint "old school" trimmings that he and his father Curtis had originally installed in the store many decades earlier.  Just like Don's Exxon, going there really "took you back" to the simpler friendlier times of the '60's and '70's, and made you feel like not all of Machias's business district had been impersonally commercialized.