Lyme
“I didn’t know that wasn’t normal,” Pippin Carey said. “It’s definitely a rarity.”
That’s what her parents, Tony and Pat Pippin, have been doing for the more than 50 years they’ve spent operating general stores in the Upper Valley.
The Pippins didn’t set out to be store owners. In 1966, the couple were approached about purchasing the Oak Hill Store in Hanover. After a few years, they moved their business to Lyme Road and then in 1987 to Main Street in Lyme. For a time, they also operated a store inside Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
“We always wanted to own our own business,” Pat Pippin said on a recent weekday morning at the Lyme Country Store.
Prior to owning stores, Pat Pippin worked as a registered nurse and Tony Pippin managed the Gateway Motors service department. About four years into their marriage, they were approached about taking over the Oak Hill Store.
“They knew nothing about the store business,” Pippin Carey said.
But they learned, cultivating a customer base that has followed them to each location and developing a business that is a mainstay in the community.
“One year turned into the next,” Tony Pippin said.
The Lyme Country Store isn’t just a business where people come to pick up the milk they forgot to buy at one of the bigger grocery stores in the area. It’s a place where people gather to exchange community news as well as order homemade breakfast sandwiches and where stopping in for a quick cup of coffee turns into a 20-minute conversation speculating about the upcoming winter.
At the center of it all are Pat, 77, and Tony Pippin, 80, who, at ages when most would be well into retirement, still show up every morning to serve every customer who walks through the store’s front door.
“We both enjoy it very much,” Tony Pippin said. “There’s that old saying that you need a reason to get out of bed every morning.”
The first wave of business usually starts around 8 a.m., when people are on their way to work. On a recent weekday morning, one customer discussed road conditions with Tony Pippin while another regular brought him up to speed on his cancer treatment.
“People need a place sometimes just to vent,” Tony Pippin said while staffing the register, beside which was a stand with locally made maple candy and a donation jar to fund the ice skating rink on the town common.
Thetford Police Chief Michael Evans stopped by, greeting Pat Pippin with a hug.
“Things are well across the river?” Tony Pippin asked, and Evans nodded.
“We’ve known him since he was a pup,” Tony Pippin said. “That happens with a lot of people.”
Evans met the Pippins sometime during his first few months as an officer with the Hanover Police Department in 1991. The officers would often stop by the Lyme Road store for sandwiches. One weekend, Evans got his first taste of Tony Pippin’s sense of humor.
“Tony, in his classic Tony Pippin way, said ‘Can I help you?’ ” Evans recalled. He then asked for a sandwich, which prompted Tony Pippin to reply: “ ‘What’re your (expletive) hands broken? Go back and make it yourself.’ ”
“It’s the same sort of banter every time you go in,” Evans said with a laugh. “He’s going to rib me or give me grief for something.”
This month, Evans was helping to direct traffic after a farmhouse caught fire in Lyme when the Pippins stopped by.
“They’d loaded up their little delivery van and they stopped and made sure I had a sandwich to eat,” Evans said.
The couple were on their way to bring food to the first responders battling the blaze, something the Pippins do regularly.
“That’s the custom,” Evans said.
Behind the register where Tony Pippin usually is found are photographs of family members, including the couple’s three children, many grandchildren and first great-grandchild, and large black-and-white photographs of moments in Dartmouth College sports history that feature some of the athletes who worked at the store over the years.
Bob Gaudet, the current men’s ice hockey coach and a 1981 graduate of the college, never worked for the store, but conceded that it often appeared that way. “I’d go in there all the time and hang out,” Gaudet said. The couple provided food for the hockey team back when Gaudet played for the Big Green and again once he became the coach.
“Pat and Tony have been part of the family of Dartmouth hockey, and really my family,” Gaudet said. “They’re such great people, great role models for our kids.
“They’re just good people. I think that’s a big part of running a business.”
When asked about their success over the last five decades, the couple immediately point to their children as playing a huge role. Each of the three — Pippin Carey, Tony Pippin Jr. and J.J. Pippin — still work at the store.
“I don’t think we could’ve done it without them,” Pat Pippin said.
The family lived above the Lyme Road Store when the children were young, and each have memories of growing up and working in the store.
Pippin Carey said she learned multiplication by pricing and stacking soup on the shelves. J.J. Pippin said she likely knew how to use the register and count change back to customers by the time she was in kindergarten.
Pat Pippin acknowledges that “it would be pretty hectic” working the store every day while also raising three children, and that their lives often resembled a fishbowl. “You have to be on your best behavior all the time.”
That was easily outweighed by the daily lessons the children learned about being part of the community.
“My parents have always gone out of their way to get something special for someone,” J.J. Pippin said. She recalled a doctor who moved to the area from Poland in the 1970s to work at Dartmouth. “Mom went out of her way — though she wouldn’t think of it as that — to get this special ham he had in Poland.”
On a return visit years after leaving the area, the doctor stopped by the store to thank Pat Pippin for her kindness.
“I just love that it’s always been a social place,” J.J. Pippin said. Her parents have made the effort throughout the years to make sure the store contains “that warm feeling of having a place to go that you’re always welcome.”
The couple met when Pat Pippin, then 20 and living in Wilder, had just finished nursing school and Tony Pippin, then 23 and living in Lebanon, had just gotten out of the Air Force. They have now been married for more than 54 years.
“It’s something … it’s not tangible,” Tony Pippin said of his relationship with his wife. “We just have, I don’t know how you say it, it’s a nice feeling.”
“There’s a huge understanding. We really do depend on each other,” Pat Pippin said.
Throughout the years, the couple and their business have weathered tough times — “it’s not always peaches and cream,” Tony Pippin said — but “that’s life,” he added.
The couple have learned that every situation can be resolved.
“Talk it out,” Tony Pippin said. “It’s a big thing to me and it’s worked very well for my life.”
The customers who visit the Lyme Country Store seem to appreciate the Pippins’ ability to let them do just that.
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
