MADAWASKA LAKE – The day of the 10-cent cup of coffee may be gone forever with the closing of the door last Sunday of Stan’s Grocery on Madawaska Lake in Township 16 Range 4.

Friday morning Stan Thomas, 69, and two friends were cleaning out the store, storing or selling stock left over after a monthlong sale and the memorabilia collected over a 40-year run.

“Ten-cent coffee on Madawaska Lake has probably gone down the tubes,” Thomas said Friday. “I have no idea what the next party will do here. No idea.”

The stout, jovial man with a full salt-and-pepper beard said it was time to retire, but it wasn’t easy for him. He choked up a few times while talking about the past, whether it was the locals who came every day to start their routines with coffee, breakfast and stories or the one-timers from all over the country who stopped by to check out the yarns they heard about the place.

Stan’s is one of those places – it’s 100 years old and has gone through four owners – that has a bit of everything. If the grocery doesn’t have it, you may not need it, or Stan may know where to get it, or he may have something else that will get you out of the bind you’re in.

Just off Route 161 on the shore of Madawaska Lake, the building is dilapidated, droopping in several directions. Its shingles are weathered, windows are covered with plastic, and if you look closely, you can see outside through some of the cracks. It was the character of the man who ran it and of those who came here daily that made Stan’s the kind of place that people will miss.

Stan’s Grocery has been featured in numerous newspaper articles, on television and in several magazines, including Down East and Yankee. The Caribou Technology Center, a high school age program, produced a video featuring Stan’s. It was selected the best of 166 entries in the New England High School Video Competition in 2000.

“I could help out most anyone in a tumble,” he said.

Stan’s was more than a store or a place to get a cheap cup of coffee. It was also the region’s post office: About 30 small boxes are out front, and if packages didn’t fit in there, Stan took them in the store. It was the region’s voting place. A blue tarp around one table, it was a restaurant. And, of course, it was a Saturday night entertainment center where people listened to music, talked and sang.

Stan boasted of having the best freshwater tackle shop north of Bangor, probably even farther than that.

In northern Maine’s Swedish colony where traditions and history run deep, some people wonder how they will continue without Stan’s.

“I’m calling it quits after a little more than 40 years,” he said, his voice filled with emotion Friday morning. “I guess some local folks call it a tragic thing.

“I’m retiring, and I may have reached a point in my life where it’s my lesser of two evils,” he said while sitting at one of the few tables left overlooking Madawaska Lake. “Sometimes I feel like I didn’t really want to go, but that’s how things are, and that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

The place has not closed since he purchased the business nearly 40 years ago. It’s open every day, sometimes 18 to 20 hours. It was open even when he was away on vacation, which seldom happened, or when he was in a hospital, which happened several times from 1996 to 2000. He’s seen weeks when he put in 145 to 150 hours in the store.

“It’s called burning the candle at both ends,” he said, chuckling, his fingers twitching. “Despite all that, it’s been a pretty good life. People used me well.”

A ruptured hernia and circulation problems struck Stan in 1999, and his father died in 2000. He spent 16 weeks in the hospital from 1996 to 2000. That was a low time in his life; the idea of retirement kindled in his mind.

The only vacations he has taken were two weeks in California in 1982 and one week in the fall to hunt with friends, but that hasn’t happened since 1996.

Stan has sold or given away a lot of the memorabilia that he gathered over four decades. A lot of it is in storage. Some of it was packed for people to pick up.

“I gave out stuff to many people,” he said. “If someone wanted something specific, I gave it to them so they would have something to remember this place by. One guy wanted the menu board on the wall, and I gave it to him.”

The crookedness of the floor seemed to be even more prominent Friday with so much of the merchandise and memorabilia gone. A World Cup Biathlon poster still hung on the wall, VHS tapes still filled a shelf, and candy and other things were in different stages of being packed. There was a deer’s head on the back wall, old signs here and there, and a mounted fish in back of the counter.

“A taxidermist from Houlton asked me if I would hang that in here,” he said, “and when it was thrown on the counter, I had to catch it or it would have fallen on the floor.”

He didn’t know who snagged the beautiful fish that’s been hanging in his store for seven years or so, but “Corey Kinney of Houlton, the best fish taxidermist I know, mounted it,” he said.

“I have mixed feelings. Bound to, I suppose,” he said. “There have been bad times over the years, but the good times far outweigh the bad.”

Stan hasn’t decided what he will do. He has a farm in Woodland that has not seen much of him, a woodworking shop he bought 25 years ago and has never had the time to set up, thousands of feet of pine lumber he’s never done anything with, and 12 to 15 antique autos he hasn’t had the chance to touch in a long time.

“I have enough to keep busy,” he said.

Never married, Stan said he’s been “married to the store.”

Local reaction

Some locals look at the closing as a funeral of sorts.

“This is a terrible loss to the community. We are losing part of the character of our village,” said Brenda Jepson, a local resident and historian. “We feel as if we are losing our best friend. It’s so bleak now.

“Stan’s family is part of the woodwork at the lake. His father died right there in the store. It’s the end of an era for us. It’s a sad, sad time.”

Jepson, who went to the store every day, remembers Stan’s father reciting poems to the customers, paintings of the place done by different people hanging on the wall, a piano against the back wall, a spoon collection belonging to Stan’s father, the Saturday night singalongs, and the stuffed salmon behind the counter.

“Everyone is waiting to see what will happen with the place,” Jepson said. “He has never closed for one day. What are we going to do?”

New owners

CSS Development of Caribou bought Stan’s Grocery and its 2.5 acres of land that stretches from the shore of Madawaska Lake back to Route 161. A member of the group would not discuss specific plans, but he sent an e-mail about their general intentions.

CSS Development wants to continue the current use and atmosphere of Stan’s. CSS is looking for an operator to continue the tradition of having a public meeting place and restaurant for the lake community. There are no immediate plans to make any substantive changes to Stan’s other than maintenance required by any potential operator. CSS wants Stan’s to remain accessible to the public, as it has been for decades.