WELDA — Cody Pretzer claims he was never a workhorse.
But in the last three months, he’s worked pretty much seven days a week.
“I guess I found my calling,” he said.
Pretzer opened the Old School Flea Market in mid-September in Welda, almost a year after it had been shuttered by previous owner Donna Diebolt.
Two things led to Pretzer’s decision.
He was somewhat at a mid-life crisis.
“I was like I’m 31. Living with my parents. Jobless. In Welda, Kansas, population 149.”
Yeah. That doesn’t sound good. But it wasn’t the whole story.
Turns out running a flea market is right up his alley. Pretzer loves old things. He loves visiting and learning people’s stories. He loves ringing up a cash register.
And, most of all, he loves being his own boss. “That’s pretty awesome,” he said.
What Pretzer doesn’t immediately let on is that he is well-equipped for the job with a business major from Kansas State University and six years working in logistics for large-scale industries.
He’s also a history buff.
When in college, he considered majoring in education with a focus on history, but “I was after a better-paying career than education,” he said, somewhat wistfully.
Computer science seemed the ticket. But his interest waned, and he eventually dropped out of college and took a landscaping job.
Pretzer said his father, Kevin, was a big influence on his pursuing a college degree, perhaps for reasons his dad was unaware.
A former “union carpenter” in Kansas City, Kevin Pretzer “is the hardest worker I know,” Pretzer said of his dad.
But seeing the toll the job took on his dad’s body, “I knew that I didn’t want to do manual labor my whole life,” Pretzer said. “I worked landscaping jobs all through college. But when I began doing it full time, I realized it’s not for me, at least not a whole life of it.”
