LEWISTON – All his store needed to survive, Carroll Poulin Jr. said, was a good Christmas. That’s what he told his co-owner and wife, Colleen.

They didn’t get it.

“He kept telling me that a big Christmas would bail us out,” Colleen said. “We’ve had Christmas before where you’re going nonstop, customer to customer. But when we looked at the numbers on Dec. 31, we knew. We cried, and we knew.”

Carroll’s Music Center will shut down operation within the next couple of months, after 64 years in Lewiston-Auburn and 22 years on the same corner of Canal Street.

They won’t be getting any more inventory – no new pianos, guitars, accessories or sheet music. What they have is what they have, until it’s all been sold. The music school will close at the end of March, with the stable of teachers having to fend for themselves. And the Poulins’ repair business will simply go away.

“For years, that’s what kept us going, having all three S’s – sales, service and school – under one roof,” Colleen said. “We were the big guys in this part of Maine. We had customers come down from Augusta and Berlin, N.H.”

Carroll Poulin’s father started the business in 1945 out of a Knox Street apartment building. They moved to Auburn Hall on Court Street in 1963 and Carroll Jr. joined the operation in 1967.

He and Colleen took over ownership in 1982. When they lost their lease in 1987, they scrambled to find a new place, and settled on Canal Street.

“We lost our house then, kind of had to pull ourselves back up by our boots,” Colleen said. “But we did it.”

That was the best time for the business, the 1980s and early ’90s. They had plenty of customers and good credit, a thriving business.

There are many causes for their current situation. Part of it is the worldwide economic slump. Nobody is buying musical instruments, which means the manufacturers are hurting. Since nobody’s buying, there’s no credit available – they lost their line of credit to purchase inventory in the fall. Smaller inventory means fewer customers, and the cycle repeats.

They also find themselves competing with unlikely retailers, big-box stores such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Kohl’s. Those stores can sell inexpensive instruments – basically toys, Colleen said – at prices Carroll’s can’t match.

Their customer base is gone.

“I blame it on costs and taxes and rent and heating, customers that have no loyalty, and the economy,” Colleen said. They hadn’t set a date for closing the retail portion, saying they needed to clear out as much of their inventory as possible, and quickly.

It’s going to be a sad day for salesman Paul Mercier. He’s been a fixture in the store for 22 years, almost since the day the Poulins moved to Lewiston. Time was, they had their showroom stocked with new pianos. They’d trek around to home shows with their goods in tow.

“There was a time when you could count on selling four or five pianos each week, but not anymore,” Mercier said. “I mean, these are pianos. If you sell one, the family’s not going to be back in a week to buy another.”

The school officially stops operating on March 31. Some of the teachers are banding together, trying to rent space on Main Street in Auburn to continue teaching. Drum teacher Dick Demers will move his operation to a private studio at his home. He plans to be moved out by Saturday.

“It’s going to work out for me because I have a study and a waiting room, but I’ll miss that atmosphere,” Demers said. “When you’re in your own studio, you don’t hear the bass or guitar playing in the other room or the squeak of the clarinet. So it won’t ever be quite the same.”