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Toliver’s Pawn and Jewelry located on Manchester’s historic downtown square recently celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month.

Owner Mike Bass said the longtime business was founded by Lyndon Toliver in 1974.

“He liked buying, selling and trading,” Bass said from behind the counter at Toliver’s. “He used to travel all over the United States and buy coins and knives and things like that and then resell them.”

After settling down, Toliver decided it was time to quit traveling so much and opened the shop. While it was a pawn shop, Bass said Toliver was very selective about the items purchased and sold.

Bass himself is celebrating his 40th year in the business this year, purchasing the gun shop in Manchester in 1984.

“I started working full-time in the gun business and then started taking generalized pawn, pretty much everything at that point and became more of a traditional pawn shop,” Bass said.

Bass said the pawn shop moved to its current location from a few doors down in the early 1990s.

Now four decades later, Bass said no two days have been the same.

“You don’t really get bored,” he said. “I enjoy talking to the public and that is probably the biggest thing, just to be able to interact with the public on a daily basis and build relationships.”

With 50 years of business, and 40 years as owner, Bass said he regularly sees second and third generation customers coming into the store located at 110 N. Spring St.

When it comes to the secret to operating a successful business for so many years, Bass said a lot of it comes down to good customer service.

“We have had a great customer base, and we have great employees,” he said. “J.D. that works with me here, he started in the early 1990s as did Mason, it was started more or less as a family business, honestly.”

“I attribute a lot of our success to that,” Bass added.

Today, Toliver’s customers can choose from an array of jewelry, guns, musical instruments, tools, electronics and lawn equipment, Bass said the popularity of certain items have ebbed and flowed throughout the years.

“When I started here we were mostly, because Lyndon’s store was a jewelry based store, we sold more jewelry than anything, but now as we have expanded into different things and I opened the gun shop, then guns became a big portion of ours and now as far as sales, guns probably surpass any other item,” he said.

Bass said after a period of decline, jewelry is also a very popular item at the shop.

“In the last few years jewelry sales have picked back up, they were really big when I first started in the 1980s and 1990s,” he said. “As gold went up in about 2007-2008, jewelry sales suffered because people were used to buying jewelry for a certain price and then when the gold went up so high it got too expensive for them at that time.”

“As far as our profitability, jewelry is probably neck and neck and neck with guns,” Bass added.

While Toliver’s does still do an active pawn business, Bass said with the price of gold and silver being so high, many people are opting to sell their broken or unused jewelry to the store instead of pawning it.

“You can get a substantial amount of money for something that is not very significant,” he said.

Reflecting on 50 years as a business and 40 years of ownership, Bass said he knows he is not that far off from retirement age, but he doesn’t plan on retiring any time soon.

“I think it is not really good for a person to just completely retire,” he said. “It is just trying to find a leader amongst us that would continue. We have two great guys now, but they are almost my age, so I have to look to someone to keep it rolling.”