Island Profile: The family behind Bliss’ Department Store
The small department store on the north side of Bridge Street has been in business continuously since 1927, and in all of that time, it has been owned by only two families.
Len Bliss bought the business from the Basile family in 1973 and he, in turn, sold it to his daughter and son-in-law, Peggy and Walter Johnson, in 1983, who continue as owners today.
As Peggy recently put it, “We go back a long way.” She recalled how her father, after viewing the Island from the Greenport side on a fishing trip, brought his family out for a closer look.
Then, in the middle of the winter of 1954, he moved his wife and five small children here “for a better life. My mother did not like it out here at all, she felt like she had fallen off the face of the earth. She was really a city girl but this was what he wanted to do.
Back then women didn’t drive, so she had never driven a car and she was out here in this house and really didn’t know anyone. But she moved ahead, little by little, and made very good friends. One of them, Al Kilb’s mother, Karoline, taught her to drive. Eventually she loved it here, but it took her a while. It always does.”
Her dad had his own printing business in the barn behind their house on Congdon Road, and served as town supervisor from 1975 to 1979.
Peggy grew up and went to school on the Island, then went on to Cobleskill College and Albany State for a teaching degree, which she’s never actually used, events leading her in other directions. She met her husband, Walt, a Navy man from Nassau County, on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend in the Navy. He visited her on the Island on many weekends, “and that was it.” They married in 1973 and moved upstate to the Finger Lakes region, where they lived for the next 10 years near Canandaigua Lake.
In 1983, Peggy’s mother died suddenly and her dad “kind of had had enough and wanted to make a change. He asked all five of his children” if they were interested in buying the business “and no one seemed to be.
“We had just bought a house so we weren’t really ready to move,” she said. But they thought it through and finally decided to go for it. “We had a three-year old, we were getting more serious about schools, and the opportunity was there and it might not have been three years later.” Walt had always loved the Island and, although he liked his job upstate working as an inspector in the county conservation department, he and Peggy missed the water. And so the next chapter of their life began.
They’ve run the store together ever since. “You know, when you’re in business for yourselves,” she said, “you don’t do just one thing all day. It’s like whatever needs to be done then, that’s what you need to do, and we’ve always done that. You can’t make it out here unless you’re working it yourself. We’ve been doing it for almost 30 years now, but you have to keep at it, change with the times, alter the merchandise. Every business is different and you have to be flexible.”
In their first decade and more, “Things were more year-round,” she said. “In the summer, things rose a little but not as drastically as they do now, and the winters were more consistent, but now the summer is unbelievably demanding and the winter is very, very quiet.”
They’ve adapted. They have a home in Florida and close up the store for the winter. Island people open it for them only for long three-day weekends or major holidays off-season.
The couples’ two sons are grown now. Both boys graduated from the Shelter Island High School. Adam, 34, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and lives in West Palm Beach. He has been working at the Four Seasons resort there as the chef for the past 10 years. He just married a year ago.
Matt, 31, is a chef too. A graduate of Johnson and Wales University in Providence, he is here for the summer working as a chef in Hampton Bays. Does that mean Peggy doesn’t have to cook this summer? “That’s exactly what it means,” she answered.
Asked about their sons taking over the business, they both thought it was too soon to know. Even if their sons are not particularly interested now, the Johnsons know from their own experience that things change. Their youngest son just became engaged and Peggy thinks that when “females enter the picture, things change, too.”