GOOD OLD DAYS:

Driving by the worn, wood-paneled Old West-style facade of the Grant Boys gun, outdoor supply and clothing shop on Newport Boulevard, it’s hard to imagine that the family-owned business — which has become a Costa Mesa icon — has not gone away by now.

When Edward “Buddy” Grant came down from Los Angeles to start the business 60 years ago, Costa Mesa was a one-horse town with less than 4,000 people — far from the upper-middle class suburb of more than 100,000 that it is today. The business started as Grant’s War Surplus in 1949, selling a motley assortment of goods that the military would get rid of at rock-bottom prices (World War II had just ended and there was a lot of excess stuff).

“The original store has very little in common with what the store sells today,” recalls Mike Grant, Buddy’s oldest son, in a short retrospective he recently started to write. “People would buy surplus parachutes to cover their cars. We would cut the lines off them and sell them as nylon rope. We sold a lot of paint, garden hose, work boots, but no Levi’s.”

It’s precisely the store’s ability to change with the times, while staying solidly grounded in its identity, that has allowed the business to survive and prosper in a market filled with chain camping and outdoor sports stores. Over the years, the Grant family has capitalized on countless opportunities.

Buddy didn’t care for guns or hunting at all, according to Randy Garell, who took over the store in the ’70s with his wife, Alexa, Buddy’s daughter. Before opening the Grant Boys, Buddy had a ladies dress shop in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

Since then, the store has gone through countless phases. In the early 1950s, men working on the construction of the 5 Freeway and Disneyland all wore jeans and Georgia steel-toed boots, so Grant’s started carrying them and business boomed. At one point the shop was among the top 10 Levi’s dealers in the country, according to Mike.

Then in the early ’60s, when surf culture blew up in the area, Grant’s started carrying Hang Ten T-shirts, which, in the height of their popularity, were often plucked straight off the delivery truck before they ever made it into the store.

“We carved out a niche business for ourselves, and we can turn on a dime,” Randy said.

Even in the last decade, Alexa saw the Ugg boot craze coming. The store stocked up in 2000 and this past December, the shop sold one pair of the fur-lined, leather shoes every 12 minutes. Exceedingly popular in ladies fashion, the boots are not exactly what you would expect to find in a store specializing in guns and hunting equipment, yet they have become a staple of the company’s business.

“The average Newport Beach housewife is not ordinarily going to walk into what she thinks is a gun store,” Randy said, but now they are part of Grants’ demographic.

Randy says gun sales have also increased because of fears brought about by the Y2K scare, the crashing economy and the election of President Obama, who some gun enthusiasts fear will crack down on the industry.

“Business is better than ever,” Alexa said.

Even as the store morphs to meet the demands of an ever-changing population, it retains its homely character. Randy and Alexa have worked there since they were teenagers, and they’re not the only ones who have stuck with the store for decades.

Jack Carver, who joined the staff in his teens emptying garbage cans more than 40 years ago, is now in charge of buying the store’s guns and hunting and fishing equipment.

So while the Grant Boys might look odd among square-framed strip malls and impeccably clean mega chains of Costa Mesa, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine the store still being around 60 years from now, with its hokey Western-themed building that will be just as out of place as it was the day it went up.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].