‘An amazing woman’ is ready for the next 95

If you ask Theresa M. Serle, she'll tell you she's led a pretty good life. A wife, a mother, a grandmother, and for the last 26 years, an employee at the greatest shop around.

But that's just the first 95 years.

Now, finally retiring, she's ready to start on the next 95.
 Serle, of Hempstead, last month gave up her beloved job as a clerk at the Arnold Baker’s Thrift Shop, at 759 Foxhurst Rd., in

Baldwin. A recent fainting spell, and her daughters' insistence, prompted the change.


To celebrate her retirement, her boss at the shop threw her a party at NOVI New Old Venice Inn on Merrick Road. "She was like a mother to me," said Donald Hubbard, who has owned the store for 32 years. "She makes a cake for me for my birthday. She's an amazing woman."


Serle is the other half of their mutual admiration society. "Don, he’s the best. I said, he’s the son I never had," she said. "He’s so nice. Never gets excited. Just the opposite of me. I’m loud and fast."


Serle remembered well when she started working for Hubbard in 1989. "A friend of mine was working for Donald. He was looking for someone else to work there," she said. "This friend asked me, and I said I’d love that. I like talking to people."

Hubbard asked her to come down to the store. "I spoke to him about three minutes, and he said, 'You’re hired,'" she said. That was at the first store, "right by the train tracks," she said. “I loved it. Then we moved around the corner." 
 An inveterate talker, "I came to know everybody there," Serle said. "A guy down the street used to bring me pizza.” Eventually, the thrift shop moved to Foxhurst.


When she started at the shop, she wasn't employed. Her husband, Bill, was a field account engineer for Western Electric Co. That's where they met. "I was working there for a couple of years," she said. "He came in, and we started going to lunch." Bill had a girlfriend, but he

took Serle on a date, and they started going together.
 Bill died eight years ago, after 64 years and 8 months of marriage. "It broke my heart when he died," Serle said.