"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.

After a few years in business, they started selling Western wear — Justin, Nacoma and Red Wing boots, fur felt and straw cowboy hats, and shirts and pants from Miller's Western Wear in Denver.

When the store was at its peak, it took both Lillie and Evan Thomas to run it. "It wasn't help yourself, then," she says. "You waited on everybody. You got them what they wanted."

But the store provided a good living by rural standards. "We was able to do just fine," she says.

Hard challenges

The arrival of supermarkets, especially the Ephraim Wal-Mart, has forced a lot of changes. Produce and Western wear have given way to soda pop and a hot-dog machine. "There's no way a little independent store can compete in prices with such a place as Wal-Mart," she says. "So that's changed everything a lot."

In 1975, 30 years after Thomas Grocery opened, Evan Thomas died at 63 of a massive heart attack. Lillie still gets a twinge in her voice when she talks about it.

At first, she didn't think she could go on, she says. Then she realized the vegetables in the store were spoiling. "I had no choice, only to go back," she says. "I'd wait on people, and I'd cry. I'd wait on people, and I'd cry. And they was willing to put up with me."

A year later, in her early 60s, macular degeneration set in, and she started losing her eyesight. She now uses a special light from an eye doctor if she really needs to read something. But reading a whole page is out of the question.

"But do you know something," she says, "the people here have been so danged good to me." Even though she has to put her face within inches of the cash register to ring up a sale, "they've been perfectly willing to still come in and buy, and don't think I'm not mighty thankful to 'em."

In 1980, she had breast-cancer surgery and in 1985 a minor heart attack. But her biggest trial began on July 24, Pioneer Day, in 1987. She had watered her sheep and was rushing back to the store when she caught her foot in a tangle of morning-glory vines, fell and broke her hip.

She underwent surgery, but the bones never knit back together. A year later, she had hip-replacement surgery, but the incision became infected, and she spent a month in two hospitals.

Since then, she's had to use a walker. A pair of railings runs between the back of her house and the store. She uses a walker to get to her back door, holds onto the railings to walk the equivalent of a half block to the store, and picks up another walker at the back door of the store.