JOE LAHOUT sleeps in the bedroom where he was born in 1922 above his father’s grocery and dry-goods store on the corner of Union and Pine streets in the gristmill village of Littleton, New Hampshire, the United States.

    “I’m still here,” Lahout said on a brisk November morning. So is the family business, which is now known as America’s oldest ski shop, thanks to the 93-year-old World War II veteran with glacier-blue eyes.

    “I had to fight like hell to maintain our prestige and our name,” he said.

    Today, the Lahout’s shop remains a sacred waypoint among skiers who journey to the White Mountains and a New Hampshire institution for politicians on the early-state campaign trail. Jeb Bush dropped by in July, as did Mitt Romney during his first presidential run. Both Republican candidates signed the shop’s door frame near the Sharpie scrawl left by gold medal Olympian Bode Miller, who grew up local to Lahout’s.

    In the age of chain stores and Internet commerce, the bricks-and-mortar shop has lasted for nine decades and four generations of Lahout stewardship, a testament to the family’s North Country grit and good fortune. Now the Lahout name is instantly recognizable among skiers nationwide.

    “I’m in Newport Beach, California, and a cop pulls me over,” said Ron Lahout, one of Joe’s three sons.

    “He goes, ‘Lahout? My God, I bought my first pair of skis there,’” he said, noting that the police officer let him go.

    The store was founded in 1920 by Herbert Lahout, who arrived in the United States from the northeastern mountains of Lebanon in 1898, unable to speak English — or read or write. Yet he rose from grime-stained railway worker to prosperous shop owner in the span of two decades. When Herbert died in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, his only son, Joseph, inherited the store.

    As a boy, Joe Lahout learned to sky by hiking nearby Cannon Mountain — elevation 1,243 meters — and careening down the steeps. After Army service in World War II, Lahout returned to Littleton to run the family business and decided to use savings from his military paychecks to expand the shop inventory to include Northland skis made of maple.

    For years Lahout’s had served as an outfitter for locals who skied, selling sweaters, flannel shirts and rubber boots. Under Joe Lahout, the store’s focus on winter sports spurred the business to flourish, partly because of his marketing ingenuity, sales acumen and customer service.

    (SD-Agencies)