GOSHEN — Except for about three years when he served in the Air Force at the end of World War II, businessman Lamar Paflas has spent his whole life in Goshen.

His father, Nick, came to America at age 15, he said, and his cousin, Pete Angelo, came here in 1939 to join the family candy business. (Pete later owned and operated Pete’s Bar a couple doors from the Olympia.)

The son of a Greek immigrant, Lamar grew up in the Olympia Candy Kitchen. His mother carried him in when he was a baby and placed him on a counter as she worked. She was a Jefferson Township girl and was also a school teacher at Indian Creek School, north of town, he said.  

And although he is now 88, he still enjoys going into the store early in the morning to make potato salad, even before the business opens. Health issues have kept him from his three-days-a-week task the past few months, but he is getting stronger and looks forward to getting back to the store.

Lamar explains that his grandson, Kare Andersen Jr., now runs the business.

After graduating from Goshen High School, Lamar said he attended Notre Dame for one year and was on the freshman football team. Instead of returning to school, he joined the Air Force with a friend, Bill Stose, who later became president of Salem Bank.

Lamar was in the States two years and then served in the South Pacific for the last year of the war. He explained that his job was to load ammunition in P-47s.

“Each wing had four 50-caliber guns on it,” Lamar said. “Each gun held 800 rounds.

He and his crew flew for a time as left wing with the Inola Gay, which dropped the atom bomb on Japan, but did not go on that entire mission.

One day of excitement he had while on Iwa Shima was when a typhoon hit Sept. 17, 1945, packing 150-mph winds. He said he took cover in a foxhole but was up to his neck in water.

“I was not gung ho in the service,” he said, “but I did my job. I wanted to get back home.”

He returned home and bummed around for about a week before his father asked him “Don’t you think you should get to work?” Lamar took that suggestion and started work at the store.

He and his first wife, Margaret, raised a son, Dan, and daughter, Kathy. They lost Dan 12 years ago.

The Paflases were friends for many years with another Goshen couple, Dick and Peg Simpson. After Peg lost Dick in 1972 and Margaret Paflas died two years later, Peg and Lamar got together in 1976.

“We’ve been married 37 years,” Lamar said.

Peg had gone to school with Margaret since kindergarten. She and Dick had two daughters, Ginger and Shelly, who both live nearby.

Together they have 23 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren, including three sets of twins in the family.

“They are scattered all over, but we get together once in awhile,” Peg said. One such get-together is the annual peppermint stick making at Thanksgiving.

“Do you want to hear a love story?” Peg asks. “When I was a freshman at my locker I saw a senior and asked ‘Who is that?’ It was Dick. I said I am going to marry him,” she said.  

Peg explained that she and Dick built their house on Gra-Roy Drive in the early 1940s. It took a whole year to build while working at other jobs.

“I think it was one of the last houses that had the foundation dug out by the Amish,” she said. The workers used horse-drawn scoops to drag the dirt out for the basement. Gra-Roy was not even a street, she said, just a path back then.

Dick started the Simpson Nursing Home on Sixth Street north of Madison and they worked together there for 17 years. Peg did the grocery shopping and was the Sunday cook.

“I learned to appreciate older people,” she said, as she helped feed and care for them.

Dick served 12 years as county assessor and Peg said she enjoyed working in that county office, helping the assessor staff.  

Peg pointed out that Lamar is good working with wood, having made the deck and their pier into the millrace canal.

“He has made shelves and put a lot of things together,” she said.

Peg explained that she has painted over the years and recently began making paper dolls for her granddaughters.

Both declare they love living in Goshen. Peg said they are both born-again Christians.

Lamar said they have traveled across the country, visiting the West Coast.

“I always liked it out west. Yellowstone Park, Death Valley and Las Vegas,” he said. They also have enjoyed a place at Baldwin Lake.

Both Peg and Lamar declare that they have each had two great spouses over the years.

And Lamar declares Peggy is still a beautiful woman.