LYNN — There was once a time when the practice of enjoying a cigarette or cigar with the newspaper was as common a morning routine as coffee and cereal for breakfast.
As smokers in this country become, quite literally, a dying breed, and fewer individuals rely on print media to stay informed and entertained, old-school news shops seem to vanish as fast as their clientele.
Cal’s News Store, however, is still alive and well in Lynn.
Having first opened as a news stand on Central Avenue in 1937, Cal’s News is the city’s oldest family-owned news retailer and tobacconist.
“We’re the last of a dying breed,” said Cal’s News Owner Paul Calvani.
Calvani’s father, Ralph Calvani, started selling newspapers on the sidewalk outside 53 Central Ave. when he was 12 years old.
In 1964, Paul Calvani, at the age of 22, sold newspapers with his father in the Olympia Theater building on Washington Street. Paul said that his father bought their current Central Avenue location after the Olympia Theater closed in the early 1950s.
“When they tore that down (Olympia Theater), we moved next door, and here we are — we own the building. That’s why we can survive. If we had to pay rent, it would be a no-go,” Paul Calvani said.
Paul and his son, Barry Calvani, now run the store together, selling a variety of newspapers and magazines, and a selection of cigars and cigarettes that includes blasts from the past like soft-pack Camels and unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Paul said rising cigarette prices and tobacco sale restrictions pushed the business to rely heavily on lottery sales.
“Lottery is the glue. If you’ve got a lottery business, you’ll be able to maintain a backbone. A lot of people still smoke, even though the state’s tobacco restrictions pushes all that business up North to New Hampshire,” Paul Calvani said. “It’s (Massachusetts is) the only state in the country to ban menthols — Newports were the biggest seller of all. That’s gone. They’ve done everything to hurt us, not much to help us.”
Paul added that print news sales, too, dwindled to about five percent of their peak in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the store sold approximately 250 newspaper copies daily. He said that the decrease in sales began with the advent of the internet in the 2000s.
“In the 2000s, when the internet really started taking off, we lost our young folks. The older generation is probably 90 percent of my business. As kids get older, they’ve taken over and they don’t do newspapers,” Paul Calvani said. “Us old timers, we like to hold the newspaper in our hands, the way people did it when we were kids.”
Barry Calvani, 54, said that he started working with his father when he was six years old, folding newspapers on Sundays. He said that while newspaper and magazine sales have decreased significantly, the 30 or 40 loyal customers still come in each day to buy a newspaper.
“Newspapers have always been a part of my life, it’s afforded three generations to make a living,” Barry Calvani said. “People still come to us because we’re like the “Cheers” of newspapers — you walk in here and everybody knows your name. We always prided ourselves on getting to know our customers, rather than have them whisked in and out the door.”
Customer loyalty aside, Barry said, he thinks he will see the business’s final years, although he does not have any immediate plans to sell the business.
“It would end with me — I have two daughters, and neither of them are gonna have anything to do with the place. One’s going to be a nurse, and the other one is at a marketing firm in Charlestown, so that’s it,” he said. “The successful blueprint for this kind of business has now moved into international money transfers, check cashing, things like that. I’ll leave that for the next guy.”
