Revered local businessman Tom Best dies at 83

The man who made possible the saying, “If Tom Best doesn’t have it, you don’t need it,” died Sunday, Dec. 20. Thomas Best was 83.

Those who are relatively new to the Cape Region only know of Tom Best through Best Ace Hardware stores in Five Points, Harrington, Milford, and Milton.

But the seeds of Best’s entrepreneurial wisdom were planted in 1932 when his father, whose name was also Thomas Best, opened Thomas Best and Sons in Nassau.

“He had a work ethic that’s very, very rare to find today. He would bend over backward, drop everything, do anything, to help someone – day or night,” said Andrew Best, Tom’s grandson and executive vice president of Best Ace Hardware.

Andrew Best said his grandfather had lived in his own home, near Lewes, until his death. “He was very happy at home,” Best said.

Tom Best was also happy in the store he continued to grow.

“We brought him up here last Wednesday. He came in for a visit, got to see everybody and have a good time,” Andrew said of Tom’s last time in the Five Points store. Until a couple years ago, Tom Best could still be found in the hardware store – stocking shelves, sorting through drawers of nuts and bolts and never too busy to ask customers, “Can I help you find something?”

“Service and helping people were really the core – the foundation – of his heart. It was really what drove him,” Andrew Best said.

He said if his grandfather had been physically capable of doing so, he would have been in the store daily.

Tom Best first hired Don Polite in 1966, and after college and military service, hired him again in 1971. Polite said he worked in the first Best store, which was in Nassau on Route 14. That was before construction of the Route 1 Nassau Bridge.

“All the traffic went by there – that’s how he did his business. Everything that came down this way had to go by him,” said Polite, who is floor manager of the Best Ace Hardware store at Five Points. Polite said when the road was changed, Best adjusted, buying the present location at auction and moving the store a little farther south.

“He single-handedly built the business from nothing,” said Polite. The general store had groceries, dry goods, hardware, a garden center and sporting goods.

Best’s original Five Points store, which had four aisles of mostly standard grocery items, also had just about everything else. Frying pans and stove pipe. Shotguns and shovels. Crab traps and rain suits. Sump pumps and stove black. BBs and matches. Thus the saying, “If Tom Best doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.” And if it was in the store, Best was the master magician who could find it.

“On this side wall, there used to be cabinets up there,” says Polite, pointing to the hardware store’s south wall. “That’s where he kept all the weird stuff – all the stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else.

“When someone would ask him for something, he’d open that cabinet, reach his hand in the back somewhere, pull it out, and there it was.

“It was amazing because it didn’t seem organized, but in his mind, he knew where everything was,” Polite said.

Polite said in 1993-94, the Five Points store changed to an all-hardware operation as competition in the grocery business intensified with the growth of national chain grocery stores in the area.

“He just couldn’t carry the grocery variety in this 10,000-square-foot building,” Polite said.

To not work, he said, wasn’t part of Best’s character.

“He’d come in at 6:30, open the store up at 7:00, then he’d be here until 11:00 at night or 1:00 in the morning doing book work or something like that. Then he’d go home and be back here at 5 in the morning. That’s the way he did it – and he did it for years,” he said.

Polite said Best later reduced his hours, taking three hours off every Tuesday evening, and four hours off every Sunday afternoon.

“He was one of a kind,” Polite said.