Pickleville Philosophy

By Jim Stone, The Pickleville Philosopher

This is kinda a fun story.   I had been saving my tips from guiding my whole life.  I’d wad up my tips in a sock and never touch them.  I would just try to live on my wage.

I had an old Jeep and loved to come and fish and hunt in Bear Lake.  I always came to the Pickleville Country Store when I came to the lake.  I loved the owners,  C.R.  and Marilyn Mathews.  C.R. was totally a big character, Marilyn was the business woman, she really knew how to have everything that everyone in Bear Lake needed.  C.R. was old school, he wore an old jumpsuit.  He must have had a bunch of them.  I still have one of them that he left here.  They were all blue.  That’s my favorite color.

I bonded with C.R., he was a fisherman, he handcrafted homemade lures to fish Bear Lake.  He took a lot of pride in his homemade lures to catch a big fish on Bear Lake.

One day I pulled into the Pickleville store and I was running on fumes.  I was out of gas and to boot I didn’t have my wallet.  I filled up my tank and I had no money.  

Well, C.R. wanted my gun, which was my grandfather's and father’s gun, for collateral to make sure he got paid for my gas.  I left the gun and ran back to Logan to get in my sock of tips and turned right back around to come back to pay my bill and get my grandad’s gun back. I came back and paid my bill.

I talked to C.R. and Marilyn and found out that they wanted to sell the store.  My socks were pretty full of tip money so I made an offer to them and they carried the loan.  That’s how I became the owner of the Pickleville Country Store.

C.R. has passed on now, but I have found some of his treasures. I had some water issues. Down under the building which was built in the late thirties or early forties,  I found a gold coin, some silver dollars, and an old ring with fourteen stones in it.  The real treasure was these old comic books. 

I took them all up to the bank today to put them in a safety box.  This old store has so much history in Bear Lake, Utah.  It makes me really wonder if there might be some buried treasure somewhere in this little old store.