HAZLETON — Robert Tarone said his father had a motto for the family grocery store.

“Take care of the customers, and you’ll survive,” Tarone said.

The advice sustained Tarone’s Market through its 85th anniversary, which the family store celebrated last week.

A third generation of the store’s founders hopes to continue the business at least through its 100th anniversary.

Tarone’s has always been at 16th and Alter streets where brothers Joseph and Dominic Tarone bought land and built the store that opened on March 10, 1941.

Soon after, Joseph Tarone entered the Army so Dominic Tarone and their sister, Edith Tarone, developed the business until he returned home after being in the Battle of the Bulge.

“He was the happiest person to be alive,” Robert Tarone said of his father, who gave customers food on credit without worrying too much whether they could repay him. “He was helping people.”

Robert Tarone remembers driving with his father to help a woman who called the store and said her turkey was too heavy for her to lift out of the oven. His dad retrieved the turkey, and they returned to work.

His father kept working until around Thanksgiving in 1998 when he suffered a stroke in the store. He and siblings Dominic and Edith died within months of each other in 1999.

Robert Tarone took over the market with his sisters, Cynthia Kilner and Bina Tarone.

Kilner said as a girl she stamped prices on cans and ran around the store with her cousins.

The Tarones had a large family.

Joseph and Dominic were two of 10 children born to Josephine and Louis Tarone, who mmigrated from Italy. Many of the siblings helped make sausage, stock shelves and deliver orders, especially after they retired from other jobs.

“That’s why we are where we are,” said Kilner, whose husband, Bill, also has worked in the store on and off.

“She not only married me; she hired me,” he said.

A mural above a shelf depicts Joseph and Dominic Tarone. They worked at Genetti’s Market before deciding to open their store across the street.

The Genettis didn’t mind the competition. They even gave a recipe for Tyrolean sausage that Tarone’s Market still follows.

Tarone’s Market also sells its own kielbasa, Italian sausage and pepperoni, Cynthia Kilmer said.

Leading the way to the meat counter with stuffed pork chops and steaks cut as thick as the customer desires displayed behind the glass, she pointed out cubes of meat on on wooden skewers — another store-made specialty called city chicken.

Customers fry the cubes after coating them in bread crumbs; but they’re pork and veal, not chicken.

While Robert Tarone was sweeping floors at the store by age 6 or 7, he didn’t always want to continue the family business.

After graduating from Wilkes College in 1965 with a business degree he asked about opening a sporting goods shop.

“Over my dead body,” his father told him.

Robert Tarone, who liked sports, is glad he listened to his father because he doesn’t think a sporting goods store could have survived until now against larger competitors, a problem that also the family grocery store also faces.

Tarone’s Market, nevertheless, sponsored sports teams in softball, Babe Ruth Baseball and bowling leagues.

While Robert Tarone and Donna Zola are the only full-time employees, Cynthia Kilner and Bina Tarone help out most days.

Kilner’s daughters, Nicole Rochon and Ashleigh Kilner, and Robert’s children, Taylor Sefchik and Nicholas Tarone, have other jobs but are part of the store’s crew.

On Thursday, as they mingled over cake and coffee with members of city council and Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce who stopped by to celebrate the anniversary, they pointed out other relatives: Rochon’s husband, Jared, who is the market’s unofficial handyman, and a cousin, Peter Lombardo, who cuts meat.

“We all work holidays,” Ashleigh Kilner said while thinking ahead to the Easter rush when customers buy hams and ingredients for pies. Then be busy through summer as customers stock up for cookouts.

And they all hope to be around in 15 years to celebrate a century at Tarone’s Market.