Hill's Sporting Goods is a Raleigh icon

RALEIGH -- Hill's Sporting Goods is that dusty fishing and hunting shop your grandfather loved.

It's not just the vast inventory. It's the service.

It's not just the guns. It's the gunsmiths.

It's not just the goods. It's the good conversation.

Those are the lures that have kept customers coming back all these years.

Hill's has been camped out on Capital Boulevard since 1958, owned by the same family since it opened in the late 1930s.

The shop isn't fancy. It has a classic, rustic feel to it, with shelves of lures and cases of gun accessories, racks of guns and all those obscure items needed to be completely outfitted for the field.

There are maps, clothes and ammunition.

And the mounted specimens of largemouth bass, wild boar and wild turkey, among other game, colored by time.

But expertise and character are what set it apart from the big chain stores of the retail world.

"They sell a whole lot of stuff, and it hurts us," said Bobby Simpson, Hill's manager, speaking of the big-box retailers. "But we still have customers that would rather shop here."

John Cope of Fuquay-Varina is one of those customers. He's been a customer for 10 years, one who is into shooting but not hunting.

"They have a good, eclectic selection," Cope said, "... and a wealth of knowledge."

If any retail business can make it through the current economic downturn, Hill's longevity would suggest it would be the one.

Not that the store's bottom line hasn't dipped.

"This has been the hardest time since I've been here," said Simpson, who has managed Hill's since 1972.

"The gas is killing everybody," added Charlie Schweikert, one of Hill's gun specialists.

Like other sectors of the retail industry, outdoors folk just have less money to go on big fishing and hunting trips, leaving less money for the impulse shopping that usually precedes such trips.

But on days such as this past Friday and Saturday, just before the opening day of the North Carolina dove season, customers streamed through the doors.

"The fall time's always better," said Edward M. Hill, 77, the store's owner, who goes by Ed.

There's also a lunch rush on weekdays. (Hill's is closed on Sundays and Mondays.)

On a recent weekday rush hour, the store was filled with something else that sets it apart -- old fish stories.

Former commercial fisherman Harry Stewart of Raleigh was telling a tale

He told of the first blue marlins caught off North Carolina's shores back in the 1950s. The fisherman, he said, got hurt landing the fish.

"They had to give him a bottle of liquor on the way back in to keep him from dying or something like that," Stewart said, drawing a few laughs. "I don't know if it's true or not."

Stewart, 63, said he was a patron of the store back before it moved from its original location on Wilmington Street in downtown Raleigh.

Hill's takes in many used firearms.

Michael Adams had his eyes on a Ruger 10/22 that came in from an estate sale. The gun had a hand-made folding stock, making it very unusual.

"You'll be surprised by what walks through that door," Ed Hill said, laughing.

Adams, a transplant from Missouri, had never been in the store, and he was impressed.

"What a shop," he said, holding the Ruger, which he proceeded to purchase.

Hill operates the store in a white building along Capital's industrial strip inside the Beltline. His father, Edward O. Hill, started the store in 1932.

The building was a furniture factory and showcase room before becoming a store, Simpson said.

The main business area is in the former showcase room. An additional warehouse houses several racks of specialty outdoors clothing. Back rooms also house work areas where the gunsmiths carry out some of the more messy operations, such as putting a new "blued" finish on older, time- and weather-scarred firearms.

Hill's daughter, Heather Hill Watkins, 31, was there shopping recently, looking for outdoors clothing for her two young daughters.

Like her father, she is passing along her hunting and fishing traditions on to her children.

"Those are the things I want them to be a part of," she said.

Ed Hill used to go bird and duck hunting, big-game hunting in the Western U.S. and saltwater fishing.

Hill's daughter used to work at the store when she was a college student, and has fond memories of the place.

Tommy McMillan, 62, of Raleigh worked at Hill's in the 1960s. He knew Ed Hill and his father, his mother and his father's brother, as well as other Hill family members that have worked at the store over the years.

"They were the finest people I've ever worked for," McMillan said. "When you worked for them, you felt like you were family, and you were treated like family."

Ed Hill bought out the rest of his family's stake in the business in 1974.

He said he has no plans to retire.

"I don't know," he said, when asked how much longer he would keep the store going.

"I've got good health," said Hill, sitting in a director's chair near the back counter and smoking a cigarette. "I like what I'm doing. I enjoy talking with the people -- whether they buy anything or not. I enjoy talking with them."

He's proud of the way the store has survived.

"That's the good thing," he said, "it hasn't changed. Good people. Same merchandise. We've always carried the best available."