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HALIFAX, N.S. —

When Craig Sievert told me Tuesday that the tobacco store bearing his family name is just about the same today as it was when he started working there full time nearly 40 years ago, he meant the elegant pressed tin ceiling overhead.

He meant the building, the oldest wooden structure on Barrington Street, which was already more than 60 years old when the family firm moved there in 1906.

He meant the original.

Morris-Ireland safe in the back where his father, grandfather and, even, great-grandfather — a baker from Prussia, who is said to have created the first hot-cross bun for the old Moirs company — deposited the daily profits from selling the cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco and other sundry goods they’ve peddled for all those years.

“It’s a comfortable place,” said Sievert, 63, who can never remember when he wasn’t helping his dad in the store. “To me it always has been.”

Which, perhaps, is why he seems to be hedging about precisely when he will close the doors for the last time on a business that may be the oldest commercial enterprise in downtown Halifax.

The decision, you see, has been made.

“End of September, start of October,” Sievert says when I try to pin him down on a precise date.

But, before that happens he has a store full of merchandise to peddle. Therefore the only thing truly certain is that when Sievert Tobacco closes, over 100 years of history closes with it.

So you can understand the hesitation, you really can.

His great-grandfather, fleeing war-torn, late 19th-century Europe, started out with a store on Jacob Street, where Scotia Square now stands, in 1870.

Julius Sievert was a go-getter: he brought in Cuban women to hand-roll cigars at a factory on Hollis Street. For a time he had one tobacco store on Hollis and another on Barrington Street across from the Grand Parade.

Later, when the shop moved further south on Barrington, along with the usual tobacco products he made and sold his own fly-fishing rods, as well as fishing gear, raw furs and even beer.

His son, Luckwald, may have just been getting his start when the family business moved into the current building, 11 years before the Halifax Explosion shattered the shop’s windows and ignited a fire in the building’s basement.

A trio of Sievert family friends stand amidst the wreckage inside the Sievert tobacco store after the celebration marking tte Allied victory in Europe got out of hand. - Contributed

One thing’s certain, L.E. as he was known, was home on Sunday, May 8, 1945, when he got word that the celebration to mark the Allied victory in Europe had gotten out of hand.

Tuesday his grandson stepped into the store’s back room for a minute. When Sievert emerged he held a photograph, the same one he is holding in the picture that goes with this column.

Squint hard and you can see the glass from the shattered front windows and the display cases, the merchandise racks, emptied of the cigarettes and tobacco during the looting, the stunned expressions of the family friends and owners of other businesses on Barrington Street still reeling from what had happened.

L.E.’s son Ted was away at King’s Collegiate in Windsor when the rioting happened. But soon he would become part of the family business, which he ran until 1996.

The last 16 of those years were with his son Craig, who had worked in the magazine retail business before deciding he wanted to be his own boss.

Now it is time for him to retire too because Sievert has been working since he left high school and his only son has no interest in running the business. And also because, with all the regulatory changes in the tobacco business, “the government’s agenda” is different than his.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he admitted from behind the counter where four generations of Sieverts have exchanged cash for tobacco products. “All of my memories are in here.”

Tuesday business was steady: regulars getting smokes and lottery tickets; construction workers looking for bottles of water; a guy from Massachusetts in a Harley Davidson vest, on the hunt for Cuban cigars banned in his home country.

When he finally closes the doors, he’ll miss the people Sievert tells me: the customers who he wants to thank for their long decades of patronage, the suppliers of cigars, cigarettes and tobacco he’s known seemingly forever, along with the new acquaintances who bring the razors, balm and shaving gear and the tourist-oriented stuff that makes up an increasingly large share of the business.

Sievert will miss other things too; how could he not after all this time in this room so redolent of tobacco and history where he worked side-by-side with his late father for all those years, and where, more recently, he has been ably assisted by his sister’s husband.

When I ask him if what his favourite part of the workday was he joked, “well, six o’clock is always good.”

Then he told me about Sundays, when the shop is closed for the day, just as it was in the days of VE Day riots.

Sievert comes in anyway. He cleans up a bit. He loads the humidor. He fiddles with the awning.

“I guess it just gives me an excuse,” he says.

I see him missing that too.

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