SWAN PLAIN, Sask. – Michael Wasylyniuk is 89 years old, walks slowly on sore legs and admits his eyesight is waning.
But every morning, he and his wife, Olga, open the doors to their grocery store in the small community of Swan Plain in northeastern Saskatchewan.
Wasylyniuk Groceries and Confections has been a fixture in Swan Plain for more than five decades since it was built in 1958, filling a niche for a growing rural area north of Norquay.
Wasylyniuk built the store at the same time Highway 8 was forging north toward Hudson Bay, Sask. The highway was completed in 1960, pushing the black top to the edge of the forest.
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The Wasylyniuks operate seven days a week, with the doors opening early and many nights not locked again until 11 p.m.
“We didn’t go for a holiday for a day,” Wasylyniuk said.
Despite long hours spent at the store, the couple, who married in 1951, found time to raise a family of seven.
But the store was like an eighth child, one the Wasylyniuks watched grow up and grow old.
In the years after the store was built, Swan Plain also grew. At one time the community had three stores selling groceries, another handling mostly hardware, two gas stations and a post office.
“There was about 15 families living here,” Wasylyniuk said.
Business was brisk for years.
“We used to get semis coming here bringing stuff,” Olga said, sometimes delivering loads of 100 pound bags of flour and sugar.
She said families were larger in the 1960s and it wasn’t unusual for some to bake dozens of loaves of bread a week.
“A hundred lb. of sugar then probably cost the same as 10 kilograms of sugar now,” she said.
“We had a warehouse full of stuff.”
While Wasylyniuk’s Groceries and Confections was mainly a grocery store, it often adapted to meet local need and demand.
The store sold poly twine for balers when it first became available.
“Nobody else was selling poly twine out here,” said Michael, adding it made sense to handle it.
“We sold lots of it too.”
There was also a kit to adapt balers from sisal to the new poly twine.
“We still have one of those left,” he said.
Today’s sparsely stocked shelves still feature items from an earlier time that never sold and still sit on the shelves, such as washing bluing that was added to laundry water to keep white sheets white.
A can of cream separator oil sells for 69 cents.
Michael said some items were popular for a time and then grew out of fashion, such as a large shelf of VHS tapes behind the counter that he called dead stock.
When the store started renting the taped movies, there were weekends when every tape was out for viewing. Then satellite dishes and DVDs ended interest.
The store evolved over the years and has lately reduced the amount of merchandise it has for sale.
The back of the store is now family storage, but there was a time when it was the heart of social activity in Swan Plain.
“In the back we had a pool room,” said Olga, which with its jukebox was popular with the area’s young people.
Michael said they took the tables out as interest waned, in part because people became more mobile and started driving further for their entertainment.
“And the town was going down, too,” he said.
Included in the decline was the closure of a rural school just west of Swan Plain, although the store once again became a gathering place of sorts as children began being bused to Norquay.
“The kids gathered up here, and the bus would pick them up,” Michael said.
Added Olga: “(In winter) they all came in the store to warm up before the bus came.”
The coffee bar, where people would gather to talk for hours, is closed because of a lack of customers.
The store is now Swan Plain’s only business and is a store of convenience in a community with only five active residences.
“We only get emergency calls,” Olga said. “Someone is baking and runs out of sugar, they come here. They’re not going to drive to Norquay.”
Some items remain popular, with cigarettes and hunting licenses leading the way.
Michael said salesmen used to stop at the store to take orders because the volume of business warranted their interest. Now the couple have to travel to Yorkton or Regina to buy supplies and haul them back to Swan Plain themselves.
Declining business means no one is likely to want to operate the store once the Wasylyniuks retire.
“If any of the kids wanted to take over, they couldn’t do it,” Olga said.
Not that Michael is eager to quit.
“I don’t know when I’ll retire,” he said.
Added Olga: “Maybe it’s a good thing he keeps himself busy, otherwise it would be a boring life.”
Work is all Wasylyniuk has known since he was born in Swan Plain.
“I was born on this quarter. As a small boy I played on a little hill out there,” he said, indicating the highway out the store’s front door.
“They removed the hill when they were building the highway. My mom and dad, they lived on the homestead a mile west and half-mile north.”
In 1917, his father bought the land on which the store would one day be built. Michael was initially a farmer, but saw the store as a way to diversify his income long before it became a common practice.
“I didn’t quit farming until I was 65, when I turned it over to my son,” he said.
