Riverside City History
Family Businesses and Hometown Companies

Fata Grocery
During the 1930s and 1940s, Fata Grocery was the epitome of an old fashioned family business. Jim Fata, Sr. founded his grocery and "general store" in 1934. Operated by Jim and his family, Fata Grocery was located east of the present Red-X store. Fata Grocery exhibited the kind of good-natured humor and warmth that small businesses are known for. Many customers still recall the sign near the old-fashioned cash register: "In God We Trust— but you pay cash." Jim Fata, Jr., recalled recently that the business also involved delivery of ice and coal throughout the area. The coal was used to heat many area homes and the ice (chopped from area creeks during the winter) was used in early refrigerators and iceboxes. It was definitely a family business. "We lived behind there and all of us worked— mom, dad and four children," Jim Fata, Jr. now recalls. In the 1950s, E.H. "Ed" Young of Red-X fame purchased the business, but not before it had left its mark on Riverside. "It was great because we knew all of our customers and they knew us," Fata recalled. "It was a real family store."

Beverly Lumber
One of the earliest businesses in Riverside was actually here before the foundation of the city. It was founded by Frank McKnight with his brother-in-law Bill Dowd as manager of the first yard. In 1947 the company purchased the A.J. Higgins Lumber Company of Tracy, later moving it to Platte City. In April of 1949, the firm purchased the White Lumber Company in Riverside.

The Riverside location was made the headquarters. Locations were later started in Leavenworth and Atchison, Kansas. The company has basically remained a family business with McKnight's two daughters as owners and three of Dowd's sons as president and managers of the two largest yards - Riverside and Leavenworth. Walt Dowd is president of the company. Over the years the company has been hit by floods and fires, but has survived and prospered. The company had a store in St. Joseph in the late 1940s, and was planning to close it when it was destroyed by fire. The Riverside store has been flooded several times, including the years 1947, 1951 and 1952. The worst flood took place in 1993 when the water was eight feet high at the Riverside headquarters, and it took three months to clean up the damage. Today the company prospers and has approximately 38 employees.

Chevy Duty Pickup Parts
One of Riverside's most unique businesses also has one of the most unique histories of any firm operating in the city. Chevy Duty Pickup Parts may at first sound like an unlikely success story. To say the least, owner Mark Jansen's operation is specialized. Chevy Duty Pickup Parts sells only parts for Chevy pickup trucks built between 1947-1972. "People just can't believe I do that for a living," the young owner admitted. "Every time I tell that to somebody, they say, 'How do you make a living at that?' But we've been doing fairly well and we've been growing steadily for years." The firm is located in a 37,000-square-foot structure in a Riverside office complex near 9 Highway. Jansen had been located at 4319 NW Gateway in a building that seven years ago replaced the second of two home operations. Jansen conceived of his company when he became interested in restoring pickups. "I had an old truck I needed parts for," he recalled. "I was buying them from a company in California and I decided I could probably do what he's doing. It started out part-time in the evening, but it grew into a full time business."

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