Utahn keeps store going — for 74 years

STERLING, Sanpete County — If records were kept on the longevity of country storekeepers, Lillie Thomas, 92, would probably hold the Utah title.

Except for three years during World War II, she's been waiting on customers in Sterling, a town of 300 located six miles south of Manti, continuously for 74 years.

She keeps "a goin'," she says, because she needs the income and loves the work.

"I love to work with people. I certainly do. I love to serve if I possibly can," she says. "And every doctor has urged me to go on as long as I could."

Thomas Grocery, a white frame building with a single gas pump out front, is on the west side of U.S. 89 about a half mile into town. She lives in a white cottage next door. The store is open six days per week, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the winter, and 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. during summer when the farmers are working late. Thomas covers most of those hours.

A heart attack, cancer, macular degeneration, a broken hip that required two surgeries, and two hospitalizations in the past five years haven't stopped her. Neither did her husband's sudden death.

Thomas represents the third generation in her family to operate stores in Sterling. Thomas started clerking in her father's store when she was 16. A couple of years later, she married Evan Thomas, her sweetheart since eighth grade. Over the next decade, through the births of three children, she continued working for her father.

Just after Pearl Harbor, the Thomases decided to go "up north" to work. Evan Thomas was among the workers who helped build Hill Air Force Base. The couple also worked nights at a cannery, processing food for the military.

When the war ended, they returned to Sterling, and Lillie's father asked them to take over his business. They took out a loan and built a new building across the street and north of her father's store. (The old store was later torn down.)

They furnished the store with counters out of Lillie's father's store — some of which dated back to the previous owner. "Them counters is way, way over 100 years old, you bet they are," she says of the heavy wooden counters that still dominate the interior of the store.

The country store of the 1940s and 1950s was stocked with 50-gallon kegs of vinegar, 50-pound sacks of flour and 40-pound boxes of bananas from the Pacific Fruit and Produce Co. Thomas Grocery got its eggs from local farmers in trade for groceries.

"On the counter, we had a big, round cheese cutter," she says. "We'd get a big round block of cheese and put it on (the plate), and then we'd go for so many little notches, and we'd pull it (the cutter) down and cut it off, and that's the way we sold cheese." They sold baloney and bacon the same way.

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