A nearly 120-year-old newsstand and stationery store will say goodbye to the community later this year in the Lehigh Valley.
Bray’s News Agency will close Dec. 31 at 36 Broadway in Bangor, owner Patti Bray told The Morning Call.
The store offers newspapers, magazines, lottery tickets, cigarettes, candies and bill payment. The newspaper circulation will move across the street to the Bangor General Store, Bray said.
Harry Bray’s uncle ran a newsstand and stationery store at 44 S. Main St. from 1909 to 1926, when Harry bought the business.
Harry worked with his son Earl until Earl joined the armed forces in 1943. When he returned, Earl worked with Harry and Earl’s mother Lillian, and inherited the business after their deaths.
In 1992, after his wife and fellow co-owner Pauline died in 1991, Earl moved the store to 36 Broadway, where he ran it until shortly before his death in 2000.
Patti, Earl’s daughter-in-law, has worked at the store since the late 1970s, and took over after Earl’s death.
Over 25 years later and at 70 years old herself, “it’s just time for me to move on,” she said.
Aside from the occasional help from her children, Bray’s News Agency is a one-person operation. She gets up at 4:30 a.m. every day to ready the newspapers, the lottery machine and the bill payment.
Closing the store will let her sleep in later, she said, but she also wants to spend more time with family and have more of a full life.
Bray also acknowledged that the business isn’t what it used to be, and a store like hers is rare in the Lehigh Valleyy. It once sold things like toys, school supplies, typewriter ribbons and baseball cards. That changed as stores such as Walmart opened and people’s interest went elsewhere.
The sense of community, however, and knowing customers is part of what distinguishes Bray’s, Bray said.
“I’ve made really good friends with people here, and I’ll miss the community of the downtown,” she said. “I can come visit them. I don’t live that far, so I’ll still be around here, but I won’t be working.”