Chester “Chet” Large successfully ran Mechanicsburg’s largest grocery store for more than five decades, but his employees and family members said he will best be remembered for the daily interactions he had with his customers and staff members.

Large, a Navy veteran who owned Chet’s IGA Market for 51 years, died Dec.9at Grant Medical Center in Columbus. He was 88.

A Circleville native, he worked his way up in the grocery business in Columbus. When a business partnership began to falter, he risked most of his savings to purchase a small store in Mechanicsburg, said Ryan Love, Large’s grandson.

Although he was initially worried the business wouldn’t last, it thrived while others in the village slowly went out of business. The reason, Love said, was the way Large treated his staff and customers.

“The customers were more than customers,” Love said. “We were friends and I know he looked at it that way.”

Friends said the thing they remember most about him were the small gestures that showed he cared. Whenever there was a death in the village, Large made a point to send flowers to the funeral home, even in the rare cases in which he did not know the family well, said Barbara Edwards, who worked as a cashier and bookkeeper for the store for nearly 40 years.

During a blizzard in the 1970s, the grocery was working with a skeleton crew, Edwards said. Despite the storm, Large drove to Springfield to make sure the business had enough groceries in stock. He then delivered groceries to snowbound customers at no charge.

If employees couldn’t afford groceries, he often loaned them cash and trusted them to pay him back when they could, Love said.

“I saw him pull money out of his pocket and loan it to people so they could get some food,” Love said.

He also treated his employees like family. When Edwards took the job, she was raising young children. Large arranged her work schedule to make sure either she or her husband could take care of their children.

“He wasn’t really a boss,” Edwards said. “Chet treated all his employees like family. When we stocked shelves he would be down there with us. He worked harder than any of us.”

Long after he retired, Large still made time to stop by and chat because he loved the interaction, Edwards said.

“He understood it was a small-town store and he knew everybody,” Edwards said. “If they didn’t when they came in, they did when they left.”