Facing Saluda Avenue about midway between Starbuck’s and Wachovia, 2Gs has its own identity. Besides, just what do the two Gs stand for, anyway?

Randy Dennis started 2Gs almost five years ago, as he was moving his business back to Columbia from Sumter. He put together a clothing operation in Sumter 25 years earlier. But that’s another story.

Dennis grew up in Sumter and graduated from Edmunds High School in 1965. As a baseball player, he showed a lot of promise, enough to make the team at Spartanburg Methodist. After two years, he transferred to USC and the KA house.

He was a marketing major, but he actually transferred more hours in economics, his minor. In the late ’60s, the Selective Service was always breathing down young men’s necks, always waiting to see if the major subject hours were behind schedule. Dennis graduated as a marketing major, but at one strategic and tight moment he allowed his economics hours to carry him into the next semester to delay his military service. If the draft board had wanted to see a blue suit, Dennis would have turned on a blue light. Which is an apt illustration of where Dennis’s career track was heading.

Randy Dennis with his dog, Lulu, who stands on guard at the 2Gs every day. In his two years at USC, Dennis would hustle a few extra bucks as a trunk–lid jobber.

He’d go directly to the mills in the Upstate (Klear Knit Mills in Clover for example) and buy shirts in bulk. Out of the trunk of his automobile in the parking lot of the Twilight Lounge on Rosewood Drive, Dennis learned his trade and earned his tuition.

He finished USC in August of 1969, and went on active military duty that November in the Army Reserves for six months. Once he attained the status of a weekend warrior, Dennis married and started a haberdashery business, both in the summer of 1970. His business was called “The Haberdashery.”

He located in the “Mug–Walk Mall,” as DJ Terry Mode termed it. It was a commercially converted duplex on the west side of Sumter Street between Pendleton and College. Budget Tapes and Records took the other half. Actually, it was owned by Columbia’s Murray Lide, career tile man, who grew up next door. WCOS–FM DJs Mode and Woody Windham had their studio on the other side in the Cornell Arms, where they ran local radio’s underground for a few years, later supplanted by C&W.

Dennis deserted Mug–Walk Mall in 1974 and moved everything to Washington Street to the old Equitable Savings & Loan space and called it “R.G. Dennis.”

Within the year, 1975, he left Washington Street in his partner’s hands and moved on to Sumter, SC. Dennis’s new shop was called “Deals,” where deals, in fact, were made. Dennis had the catalog business down, and he knew how anxious catalog operators were to unload each season. Dennis learned to take advantage of the catalog operators’ poor planning, and his customers learned to share the advantage.

He expanded with a Deals store on Bay Street in Beaufort in 1984. The Beaufort shop fared well, and Dennis sold it for a good return in 1989 so he could return full–time to Columbia. For some of the years while he had shops in both Sumter and Beaufort, Dennis also had a Deals shop on Devine Street next door to Goatfeathers. By 2001, Dennis was set to move back to Columbia full–time to focus on one store, 2Gs on Saluda Avenue.

Dennis opened 2Gs with the help of Grady, his older son. Grady mastered the trade and moved to NYC to run Spooly D’s at #51 Bleecker Street – a vintage clothier close to the Bleecker Street Cinema, film fans. Dennis’s younger son Grant finished USC and went to work for the SC Banker’s Association. Now he’s talking law and taking the LSAT.

Grady and Grant: 2Gs.

All this while Dennis’s wife, Patricia, stayed with her education field. She taught for ten years at Heathwood Hall, where she opened the Learning Center. She shifted to Summit Middle School and became its resource teacher.

Randy Dennis, haberdasher, invites the readers to visit him at 2Gs on the west side of Saluda Avenue. After all, he started selling shirts almost 40 years ago. He knows the business.

Randy Dennis