OXFORD — For some people, it’s the long counter where a person could sit and have eggs and coffee. For others, it was the sign on the roof, the trailer out back, the practical jokes or stock car racing on cable television.

Anyone who spent any time in or around Welchville village remembers Betsey’s Country Store on Route 26, and on Wednesday, those memories were being passed back and forth like small-town gossip.

Betsey Lenberg, former owner and operator of Betsey’s Country Store, died Sunday morning at a Lewiston hospital. She was 72.

For 31 years, Betsey and Butch Lenberg operated the iconic country store, developing a devoted customer base as well as friendships that would last for decades.

“Betsey’s was a place where the folks who came in weren’t just customers,” her obituary reads. “They were friends.”

And what a circle of friends it was, when one considers how many people stopped at the store on their way to or from Oxford Plains Speedway farther north on Route 26.

“I had breakfast there every day for a lot of years,” said Jerry Major of Oxford, a longtime friend and former Oxford Plains Speedway announcer. “They put a lot of work into that store. They put in some wicked, wicked hours.”

Don’t get the idea that it was all work and no play at Betsey’s Country Store, however. Major tells stories of practical jokes that became more and more daring as the years went by.

“They were a team of jokesters behind that counter,” Major said. “We pulled a lot of tricks on each other.”

Like the time someone changed the sign on the roof from “Now Offering Counter Service” to “For sale, got sick, gone south.” That one drew a visit from the county sheriff.

Like the time Betsey and her crew hid Major’s car, or the time they made him scrambled eggs with intact yolks that looked like eyeballs staring up from his breakfast plate.

“Everybody had a good time at the store,” Major said. “Everybody.”

The store was sold in 2001 and razed in 2004. Now it’s The Big Apple store, but try telling that to those who have lived in and around Welchville a while.

“It’s Betsey’s. Never mind The Big Apple,” said Suzanne Hall, a member of a local snowmobile club who lives near the store. “We’ll always call it Betsey’s.”

Not that the newer business is anything like the old. Hall, like so many others, was struck by a flood of memories when she heard the news of Lenberg’s passing.

“They had a counter you could sit right down at,” she recalls. “It was always nice and clean. It was a great place to have a hot dog or an egg sandwich.”

Butch and Betsey were almost always at the store when it was open, friends recalled. Butch was the quiet one, while Betsey was outgoing and vivacious.

“She was a jokester. She liked to joke,” Hall said. “You wouldn’t have guessed she was 72 years old if you had seen her.”

“Betsey had a sparkling personality,” said Paul Hodsdon of Norway, who operated an auto repair shop a few hundred yards from the store. “She was a gem. She just loved life. She loved her customers and they loved her right back.”

It was a close community of people there in Welchville, almost like a family in itself. The Lenbergs sponsored a softball league, helped organize a community hayride and always seemed to be right at the center of things.

And of course they had the store, almost always open before sunrise so that commuters could gas up and have coffee on their way to work.

“Butch would have the store open by 5 a.m. and Betsey was never far behind,” Hodsdon said. “They devoted their whole lives to servicing the public. It was just great to have neighbors like that. I feel very blessed to have had Betsey in my life.”

Elvis has left the building

In the photo that stretches across her Facebook wall, Betsey is seated at the center of a kitchen table, leaning in and smiling brightly. Surrounding her are her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and her husband, every one of them beaming at the camera.

It’s a photograph that’s worth a thousand words.

“Family was her No. 1 thing,” said Albert Roberti, a handyman who has been doing work for Betsey and her family for 30 years. “She is a great lady. I was honored to know her.”

For Roberti, the relationship didn’t end when the store was closed and the Lenbergs moved to Norway. Over the years, he continued to work for the Lenbergs. He plows snow, he mows lawns, he fixes things. But Roberti is convinced that not everything he was hired to do really needed doing.

“Betsey kept me busy for my benefit, not really because she needed things,” Roberti said. “That is Betsey’s way – help me to help you. When I had a problem, Betsey was one of the very first people to show me that anything I needed was possible.

“Betsey was business,” Roberti said, “but the most pleasant business person I ever knew.”

Pleasant and never phony, according to those who knew her.

“Betsey wore her heart on her sleeve,” Hodsdon said. “She would help anyone who needed it. She was very outspoken. You never had to wonder what she meant, it would be obvious. She could give and take with the best of them, and people loved her for it. She was just a doll.”

Major recalls how Betsey and Butch would help out those who were down on their luck by allowing them credit at the store. He remembers the time, in 1977, when Betsey bought tickets to the Elvis Presley concert in Augusta for all the women who worked at the store: a girl’s night out that was thwarted by Presley’s untimely death.

Major’s wife, Judy, used to work at the store and she has plenty of memories of her own. She laughed heartily when she recalled the time Betsey came to work in freshly laundered slacks that had a pair of knee-high nylons stuck to them.

“We let her walk around the store that way for a long time before we told her,” Judy said.

Her obituary describes Lenberg, educated at Harvard Business School, as a woman who preferred simple pleasures — and even household chores — over extravagance.

“… food, a good joke, laughing, reading, watching movies and TV — especially Judge Judy,” the obituary states. “… going out for ice cream or hot dogs with her friend, Dixie; doing laundry (if you can believe it!) and, most of all, spending time with her family, whom she loved with every ounce of her heart.”

That’s the Betsey Lenberg her many mourners remember. That and the nice clean counter where a person could have a hot dog, coffee and neighborhood gossip all in the same place.

“It’s crazy that she’s gone,” Hall said. “It’s the end of an era.”

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