Yep, he's even got a kitchen sink

FARR WEST, Weber County — To be honest, the store comes off as slightly schizophrenic. OK, more than slightly. There are new clothes for sale in one corner, and shoes and sporting goods and saddles in another, and old used army stuff in yet another, and snack food and gas masks and rifles and rat poison, and over there in housewares you can buy the kitchen sink. Outside, war surplus inventory is spread out over several acres.

It's like it can't make up its mind want it wants to be when it grows up: Target, Walmart, Shopko, Kmart, Dick's Sporting Goods, Cabela's, Home Depot?

But oh yeah, it's been around longer than any of them.

In the evolutionary food chain of big box retail, this very well could be where life began. Smith & Edwards, aka "The Country Boys Store."

It's out here north of Ogden and south of Brigham City in the middle of nowhere — a chain of one. And its motto is the dead opposite of "You can do it, We can help."

To wit:

"We have anything you want … If we can find it."

On paper, should this work?

But it does work, and has been working for well more than half a century — ever since a guy named Smith went halfway around the world and met a guy from his hometown named Edwards.

Here's the history: During World War II, two Ogden boys, Bert Smith and Lawrence Edwards, joined the Marines and went off to fight in the Pacific. They hadn't known each other growing up, but both, as it turned out, were stationed in Guam when the war ended, where they met and found themselves watching as the U.S. military chucked perfectly good war materials into the Pacific Ocean just to get it out of their hair.

Smith turned to Lawrence and said, "We can sell that stuff when we get home.'"

And so they did. Once back in Ogden, Smith and Edwards made their way to the auctions at the Army Depot in Tooele to bid for the war surplus stockpiled there.

They'd purchase an old half-track truck and trailer, load canvas, tarps, tire chains, ropes, empty missile casings, you name it, on top, and Edwards would start driving north. By the time he got to Idaho, everything would be gone except the truck, which he'd then sell and catch the bus back to Ogden.

Smith: "Lawrence was an old Fuller Brush salesman, he could sell anything."

Smith, on the other hand, could buy anything. It was his purchase of 13,418 buoys from the U.S. Navy in 1962 that finally ended the partnership.