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Obituary

She built family in family grocery

She spent her life in a grocery, first in her parents', then in her own.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published August 4, 2006

WEST TAMPA - In the days before convenience stores and supermarkets, generations of West Tampa residents bought their groceries from Lillie V. Mirabole.

Mrs. Mirabole grew up working in her parents' grocery on Tampa Bay Boulevard. After she married, she and her husband, Frank, opened the Armenia Avenue Grocery Store, just south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Mrs. Mirabole ran the store for more than 40 years until she sold it in the 1970s.

Mrs. Mirabole died July 27 after several months of declining health. She was 89.

For years, the grocery business was Mrs. Mirabole's life. She was raised in an apartment above her parents' grocery, and she raised her own son and daughter in an apartment adjacent to the Armenia Avenue Grocery Store. She worked seven days a week and almost never took a vacation. She took a rare day off and closed the store to attend her son's college graduation.

In fact, in all those years, she usually didn't even stop for meals. Mrs. Mirabole cooked for her family in a kitchen behind the store so she could be available for customers.

But she loved the work and the people, her son said.

"With that kind of store, your customers are kind of like your family," Andrew Mirabole said. "In those days we were open until 8 or 9 at night, and half a day on Sunday. Even after we were closed, people would come and knock o\n the door because they needed to buy some milk."

Her husband, who also had grown up in a family grocery business, worked in the store but had other duties, including tending to the 5-acre farm next to the store where the family grew some of the vegetables sold at the grocery. The Mirabole children helped in the store after school.

"My mother was really the store manger," her son said. "She was the one who did all the ordering and all that."

After her husband died in 1961, she ran the store by herself.

Mrs. Mirabole didn't have much formal education; she left school after the eighth grade. But she became an expert in the grocery business, having worked in her parents' store and managed her own for so long.

The changing nature of grocery stores in the 1960s and 1970s caused her business to decline, but by then Mrs. Mirabole was ready for retirement.

"The convenience stores did us in," her son said. "All the mom-and-pop groceries went out of business. The ones that survived did it by becoming specialty stores."

That's what happened to the Armenia Avenue Grocery Store. Mrs. Mirabole sold it to another family who turned it into a Cuban grocery. Mrs. Mirabole worked at the store for a few years then retired.

She spent her remaining years relaxing, a luxury she had not known since she was a child.

"She finally got her vacation," her son said.

Besides her son, Mrs. Mirabole is survived by her daughter, Mary Cardinale, a granddaughter and five great-grandchildren.

[Last modified August 2, 2006, 12:59:23]