Retail Notebook: Lighting Gallery, Belk

April Blizzard has been letting her lights shine for 25 years, and her daughter Kelly has carried on the torch for the past couple of years.

Blizzard and her husband Thomas, a Deep Run native, own The Lighting Gallery a subsidiary of her husbands 55-year business, Blizzards Building Supply.

Kelly Blizzard has worked for her mother at the lighting store since the early 1990s, and has been managing it since her mother took semi-retirement.

April Blizzard said she still works there every other Saturday morning and when shes needed.

She grew up in Idaho and met Thomas in Utah when he was in the U.S. Air Force.

When she graduated with a nursing degree from St. Benedicts Hospital School of Nursing in 1961, she and her husband moved to Kinston where she continued her studies at ECU and taught nursing at Lenoir Memorial Hospitals then-School of Nursing.

Im in my second career now, Blizzard said about the lighting business. In the late 1970s, she worked part-time at her nephews lighting store, The Lamplighter Shop, until a disaster occurred.

There was a fire in 1987 that leveled the whole shopping center, she said, and we were out of business for the whole year.

Blizzards nephew didnt want to start up the business again, so Thomas and his brother rebuilt their building at Village Square Shopping Center and his wife opened The Lighting Gallery in August 1989. Were actually in the same location, she said, but were in the opposite end of The Lamplighter Shop.

Kelly earned a degree in interior design and took a seasonal job in Moorehead City. When she came back to Kinston, she began working in the flooring business next to The Lighting Gallery until a vacancy opened up in her mothers shop.

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Retail Notebook: Lighting Gallery, Belk