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Obituary

Businesswoman was a visionary

By MARTY CLEAR
Published July 7, 2006

GOLFVIEW - Beverly Gray was known as woman with a strong work ethic, an innate business sense, and a greeting card for any occasion.

Ms. Gray is considered a pioneer in Tampa's business community.

She opened Tampa's first greeting card store on Franklin Street in the early 1960s. Beverly's Card Shop has been in operation ever since, making it the oldest retail business in downtown Tampa.

She also opened card shops in Town 'N Country and on S Dale Mabry, but those have since closed.

She passed away June 17 of natural causes after several months of declining health.

She was 78.

She still owned Beverly's Card Shop at the time of her death but hadn't been actively involved with its daily operations since she suffered some small strokes. Until just a few years ago, she was at the shop five days a week, never taking a vacation.

"What would I do?" Ms. Gray said to a Times reporter three years ago. "I like to get up in the morning and come here and say 'Hi' to people and do a little work."

Even after her health put an end to the daily work ritual, she kept coming up with ideas for the shop.

"Even in the past couple of months, when her mind was clear, she was thinking about the business," said her daughter, Gretchen Hall.

"I'd go to see her and she'd say, 'Did you see they're building all these condos downtown? We should stay open later.' "

The store went through ups and downs over the years, enduring recessions, changing tastes and a generally lackluster downtown retail environment.

The shop was often deserted in the early mornings and late afternoons. But when office workers took their lunch breaks, they would stop by Beverly's.

"She loved to say that the shop had 15 hours of business a week, from 11 to 2 Monday through Friday," Hall said.

Ms. Gray came into her retail career relatively late in life, after she had already established a nursing career and started to raise two children.

She was born in Atlanta but moved with her family to South Tampa as a child. She graduated from Plant High School and attended Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University).

"She hated it there," her daughter said. "She said she spat on the floor when she left."

She returned to Tampa without graduating from college. She worked in a doctor's office for a while and liked the work.

She decided to return to school, earning her bachelor's degree in nursing in 1952.

She practiced in Birmingham, Ala., briefly. She married there and soon moved back to South Tampa with her husband, William Gray. She worked as a recovery room nurse at Tampa General Hospital.

"Then she got pregnant with me and she stopped working because she got too large to fit between the stretchers," her daughter said.

She spent a few years as a full-time homemaker and mother to her two children. In 1962, Walt Touchton, who owned several drugstores around Tampa, suggested they buy a greeting card store together.

They were partners but the shop was called Beverly's, partly because Touchton thought a woman's name suited the business better. Touchton dropped out of the business a few years later.

In 1969, Ms. Gray and her husband divorced but remained good friends.

The Town 'N Country store never quite took off, but the shop on Dale Mabry Highway at Neptune Street was a huge success for 20 years, closing in the 1990s when Publix, which owned the building, remodeled and eliminated the space where her shop had been.

But the store that bears her name, and which her children now own, continues to cater to lunch-time shoppers on Franklin Street.

"She was a very disciplined business woman, but she was also a very devoted mother and grandmother," her daughter said.

"Just a month ago she got to meet her grandson for the first time. She just held him in her arms saying 'This is my grandson?' She was so happy."

Ms. Gray is survived by her daughter and her son, Bradley, two granddaughters and one grandson.

[Last modified July 6, 2006, 12:29:27]