Store stocked with history can’t seem to escape its past

Granny Rosell works 12 hours a day, seven days a week, earning almost nothing.

She’s not complaining.

Rosell owns and operates the Colbert Trading Co., also known as Granny’s Place, an old-fashioned general store dating to 1885. It is just east of U.S. Highway 2 off Colbert Road in north Spokane County.

A walk through the place is like a flashback. The porch and wooden steps are worn from time. The front latch and lock are original. There’s an old Pepsi bottle opener on the wall. A vintage ice cream freezer sits next to the beer coolers in a space once occupied by the town post office. Walls and shelves are decorated with old photos and memorabilia.

One customer called the store “cute as heck.”

Alethia “Granny” Rosell arrived in 1993 as an employee and has since taken over the operation. She knows many of the stories of Colbert’s former sawmills, saloons and personalities. She wants to preserve the history.

As for profit, she takes $20 a week to pay for gas for her daily commute from her home in north Spokane. She gives her great-granddaughter $35 a week for gas and school lunch money. The rest of her gross receipts are used to buy stock and to pay bills. She lives on $584 in monthly Social Security benefits.

Rosell said of her business, “I think it could be a nice place. I like all the people. It keeps me busy.”

There’s no hint in her of the notoriety that befell The Colbert Trading Co. a couple of years ago.

Its former owner, Randy L. Freeland, was busted for selling drugs out of a back room in 2002. He was sentenced to prison last year. Two of his convictions were for drugs. The third was for money laundering. He is serving time at the Airway Heights Corrections Center with an earliest release date of Dec. 12, according to a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections.

Rosell worked for Freeland for nine years. He fired her in a disagreement shortly before the drug bust.

“He used to take people in the back room when they came in,” she said. “I never saw nothing. I never saw anything about what he was doing.”

“He told me people owed him money, and the people didn’t want me to know they owed him,” she said.

Rosell, 76, said she has never used an illegal drug in her life. “I couldn’t believe it. How could he do this under my nose?” she said.

She doesn’t even drink, although she is a smoker. “I think when my son got married I drank a glass of beer,” she said.

After the drug bust, Freeland put the store up for sale. Rosell’s daughter and son-in-law in California knew how much she enjoyed working there, so they put down $80,000 to buy it for her. Then they helped her buy stock for the shelves. Among the items for sale are purses and hand-painted glasses made by a granddaughter.

Rosell said her business has suffered because of the drug bust. Some of her old customers stopped coming in, and parents have been reluctant to let their kids go to the store to buy candy, she said. Daily sales are suffering. She took in just $120 one day last week.

Monica White, a neighbor who helps Rosell with the chores, said the drug bust “didn’t set well in a small town.”

Rosell, who marked her first anniversary as proprietor Wednesday, is asking her old customers to come back. It’s not so much the money, she said, although she could use more business. She enjoys seeing them.

Rosell was born in Philadelphia and came to Spokane in 1988. Over the years she has known hardship and a measure of fame.

In 1950 she was chosen Queen for a Day by a popular national radio show of the era. She and her husband were living in Kirkwood, N.J, at the time. Her husband had lost his work and they were evicted from their home. They had three children and she was pregnant with a fourth. She wrote to the Hollywood show, asking for a tent. She got a trip to Hollywood and a 16-by-16-foot tent, plus other gifts. The family lived in the tent that summer until her husband could finish building a small concrete block house.

She divorced in 1967 and paid her bills by cleaning other people’s houses. She moved to Spokane in 1988. “I just made it on my own,” she said. “One time I won $3,750 at bingo.”

Along with her six children, Rosell has 14 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. She lives with one of her daughters and a great-granddaughter.

You don’t have to tell Granny to say no to drugs. She believes in honest work. Besides, she said, she knows what drugs can do. “Some people only have to take them one time, and it destroys their brains,” she said.