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Country Ace owners retire

Lance Maggart
lmaggart@skyhidailynews.com
The Country Ace Hardware building has transformed significantly over the decade and a half Tom and Kathy McConathy owned the business.
Courtesy Photo |

This weekend the Granby community will say goodbye to local merchants Tom and Kathy McConathy as the couple holds a retirement celebration at the County Ace Hardware store in Granby.

The McConathy’s owned and operated County Ace Hardware in Granby for over a decade and have passed the business on to their daughter Amy Kaplanis who recently purchased the establishment from her parents as they transitioned into retirement. The McConathy’s retirement party will be held on Saturday Feb. 6 at County Ace Hardware in Granby from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The party is open to the public.

“We invite everybody to stop by and say hello and have a piece of cake,” said Tom McConathy. “We really want to thank everybody for supporting us for the last fifteen years, making our business as successful as it was, we really do appreciate all the patrons.”



Tom and Kathy McConathy have lived in Colorado for going on two decades but their family history stretches from one end of the continent to the other. The couple are former high school sweethearts from Lincoln Neb. Tom spent many years working as a Chief Financial Officer for various corporations and their family moved often.

“When I graduated from the University of Nebraska I went to work for Ford. We moved to St. Louis and then moved to the Detroit area.” Eventually Tom went to work for the Black and Decker Corporation. “That involved moving from Detroit to Memphis, to Texas, to California, to Toronto Canada to Connecticut and to Baltimore.”



After living in Baltimore for a time Tom was hired as CFO for a company based in Aurora. Tom and Kathy’s daughter Amy, current owner of Country Ace Hardware, was born in St. Louis while the family lived in Missouri. After reaching adulthood and striking out on her own Amy headed to the high country. “We thought we would like to move to Colorado, Amy was already living here.”

Tom continued working as CFO for several years for the Aurora based company and retired from corporate America not long before the start of the new millennium.

“One New Year’s Day we were looking through the newspaper and saw that business (County Ace Hardware) was for sale,” Tom said. “A friend said we should look into it.” The McConathy’s finalized their purchase of Granby’s Ace store in Aug. 2001.

The McConathy’s plan on relaxing and enjoying life in retirement. “We want to do some traveling,” Tom said. “Just kind of slow down a little bit and do the things we have been wanting to do for a long time.”


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