The Community Store, as the Astoria Co-op Grocery was known then, had very humble beginnings  at County Commission Chairman Peter Huhtalas house in the early 1970s.

Before there was a co-op, there were several of us who thought Well; we can get together and buy some stuff we use in bulk, said Huhtala, who with about 10 other people started a buying club in 1972.

Huhtala reminisced about taking his van to Portland to buy wheat berry, peppermint and chamomile from the Peoples Food Co-op still in southeast Portland. His nonprofit, the House of Many Waves, provided the seed money to open the Community Stores first location in April 1974 on Marine Drive, one storefront east of the present-day Columbian Cafe. The grand opening came in May of that year.

There wasnt a new thing in there, said fellow founder Stewart Bell about the spontaneous nature in which the store started. Im sure we didnt have a cash register at first. We had a calculator.

Although the furniture was used and the workforce entirely volunteer, the location quickly began to look like a storefront and Bell eventually became its first paid staff member.

I was the first paid person there, a volunteer coordinator, he said. I earned 85 cents per hour in food credit, none of which is particularly legal now.

Volunteers came and went, earning credits to spend at the cooperative. They continued their informal stocking trips to sources like the Portland Community Warehouse, which had started providing a stable source of products by 1977. Bell subsidized his trips to Portland by supplying cooperatives in Rainier and St. Helens.

Many cooperatives along the Columbia River started and faded away within five to 10 years, but the Community Store persisted.

Permanent workforce

In the late 1970s, said Bell, a smaller core of volunteers started managing the store daily.

In 1984, it was my idea to turn the whole thing over to this worker coop we had running the store, said Bell. The main reason is that it would be a better setup for them to borrow money and build the store.

Beth Kandoll, a manager at the Community Store for 15 years starting in 1986, said fellow volunteer Josie Peper asked her to join.

We had three co-managers, and that was the staff, said Kendall, who preceded the current manager Matt Stanley. The game changed by 1989, she said, when the co-op, by then located in the Norblad Building, started loading up station wagons at Columbia Produce, rather than driving to Portland.

The management style of the co-op, said Bell, seemed to change every 10 to 12 years. Around 2000, he added, then board chairman Brad Alstrom helped start the next change from a nonprofit to a true cooperative in May of 2004.

In 2005, it added its first general manager, Victoria Stoppiello. It looked at locations for expansion deeper into downtown, and the nonprofit Friends of the Co-op offered the chance to buy the former Ocean Crest car dealership.

Ultimately, it leased space in the Shark Rock Building at from local developer Paul Caruana. Ironically, a group had purchased the building specifically to house the co-op, but later sold it.

The co-op, still in the Shark Rock Building at 1355 Exchange St., now includes more than 2,800 members, 20 employees and $2.3 million in annual sales. And its not done growing.