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Prime Times Weekly publication of the Mail Tribune , Medford, Oregon Photos from AP Everette Dunagan is at home inside Dunagan's Grocery & Supply in Mill Springs, Ky. After serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he told his father he wanted nothing more than to come home and work in the store. The country store may be a thing of the past, but it still survives in ... DUNAGAN'S DOMAIN By TIM WHITMIRE The Associated Press It was 1946. World War II was over, and 20-year-old Everette Dunagan was about to be mustered out of the Army Air Force. From Europe, Dunagan wrote a letter home to Kentucky. He told his father he wanted nothing more than to return and help run the family business, a general store at a fork in Kentucky Route 1275, near the bank of the Cumberland River, just north of the Tennessee border. Dunagan's Grocery & Supply was painted by Everette Dunagan in 1955, but he never got around to painting it again. The building has housed a retail store since 1890. More than a half-century later, sitting behind the counter in the dark interior of Dunagan's Grocery and Supply near Mill Springs, Everette Dunagan has no regrets. After all, he says, the only two things he does well are eat and talk. And that's made owning a country store the perfect job. "Other people might've made more money than me, but they haven't been as happy as me," says Dunagan, who married a schoolteacher and raised two children in Mill Springs. "It's not a place to make money. It's a place to be contented." Crammed with goods and memorabilia, Dunagan's domain is a throwback to a time before mega-supermarkets, Wal-Marts and retail strips clogged with cars. Those things are all just a short drive away, but the people of Mill Springs continue to come here, parking next to an ancient delivery van that sits on metal wheel hubs beside the store's sagging, unpainted wooden frame. "It's a community center, I guess you could say," Dunagan concedes. Through the door with a rusty screen and the slogan "Rainbo is good bread," narrow aisles are lined with shelves piled helter-skelter with a tossed salad of American consumerism: cereal, Spam, onions, potatoes, Jell-O, pinto beans, canned vegetables, smokeless tobacco, key chains, hardware supplies, soft drinks, potato chips, old coffee cans, assorted antiques. Dunagan never likes to throw anything away, which is one reason for the clutter. Another is retailing common sense: "I figure, if I don't got it, somebody else might, so I might as well have it." That philosophy has kept customers coming, with confidence that its owner will be able to supply even the most obscure item. "They'll try to stump you," Dunagan says, recalling one man who asked for old-fashioned glass-celled telephone batteries. He never returned. But, says Dunagan, "I've got 'em now, if he ever comes back." The building has been home to a retail store since 1890. Dunagan's father, James E. Dunagan, bought the store in 1935 and, pulled on a log skid by a pair of mules, moved it 100 yards. In the wired world of 1999, subdivided by marketers into thinner and thinner slices of a demographic pie, Dunagan appreciates the anachronism -- a locally owned store that offers something for everyone, even some dusty but authentic nostalgia. "A lot of people come in," he says, "and they come back to a time in life when they went to a store like this with their grandfathers." One secret of survival? Dunagan's willingness to change it in small ways while maintaining its larger mission as a general store. Over the years, the store has been a polling station, a barber shop, a place to buy shoes and clothing. It still is home to the Mill Springs post office, the county's first branch of the main P.O. in Monticello. Two decades ago, perceiving the appeal of nostalgia, Dunagan got rid of shoes and clothes and began selling antiques from the vacated space. These days, business is heaviest from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., when people come for sandwiches and a bag of chips and a drink, a surge augmented in summer by tourists visiting the Civil War battle site at nearby Mill Springs Park. Most of the time, it's just Dunagan, longtime regular Cat Wilson and whoever stops by for a Coca-Cola (10 cents for a glass bottle out of the machine, plus 50 cents at the counter) and stays for a chat near the gas furnace, just a few feet from the counter where Dunagan sits at his cash register. The talk is routine, but addictive: who died, who crushed his knee, who got a job driving a big rig out to California. Men are heard to say, "Well, I've got to go," at least three or four times before tearing themselves from the cluster and the conversation. Dunagan doesn't yet know what he'll do when he's ready to retire, perhaps as early as next year. His children are grown and moved away, and he won't be handing down the business to them. He's talked about donating the store to the local historical society, or maybe holding the ultimate clearance: "I guess I'm building up for a big sale someday," he admits. For now, though, it's hard to imagine giving up a life's work. "This has provided me my livelihood for the last 53 years, and I can't find too much fault with that," he says. "It's survived the times, or maybe it's the two of us -- me and it survived the times." Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA