Eljo’s was originally opened by Ell and Jo Hyman, two brothers from Baltimore who attended the University of Virginia in the 1940s. “Jo graduated in ’49, Ell dropped out and they started the business on the Corner in 1950,” Myles Thurston recalled.
The brothers promised to teach him the business, and they did. He became a partner in 1974 and bought the business in 1984. Although Myles Thurston didn’t attend UVA, he made lifelong friends and customers on Grounds, many of whom were his age when he started at the store.
“Back in those days, I was single and had a nice car and took people to girls’ schools down the roads sometimes three, four nights a week,” he said. “I’m still friends with a lot of those people.”
Although the store is colored with UVA history, the business no longer relies on Hoos for much of its business, half of which is custom-ordered clothing like sports coats, suits and shirts rarely spotted on Grounds these days. Seventy percent of the store’s customers don’t live in Charlottesville, although many went to UVA or are related to alumni.
They source all their fabrics from England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy, and have items made in Montreal by a 106-year-old family shop called Empire. According to Trent, they sell about 600 custom sport coats a year, each with a price tag at about $1,200. Coats are made of wool or a blend of wool and cotton or silk.
“The kind of clothes that we sell are not for everybody, and we’ve known that a long time,” Trent Thurston said. “We have a curated selection that works for us and has enabled us to stay in business for 74 years, which is a pretty long time because the world has changed in clothing.”
Charlottesville has changed, too. When Eljo’s opened in 1950, it was the fourth men’s store on the Corner, with another three or four downtown, Trent Thurston said.
“Then, every little town around here had stores. Orange had a store. Harrisonburg had a store,” he said. “Every little boarding school town had a store that supplied clothes for students.”
Clothes are expensive and can be a barrier socially and academically. “When you’re young, starting out and you need a professional wardrobe, it’s hard,” Trent Thurston said. “We used to finance clothes for guys with no interest charge and say, ‘Just pay us back when you can.’”
Young law or business students at the time needed three or four suits or three or four sport coats, and many could not afford that. As UVA diversified and more first-generation students started to attend, many relied on financing from Eljo’s. And many of those students became lifelong customers, “because when someone takes care of you and helps you, you remember that, especially when you’re at a time of need,” Trent Thurston said.
Then, the University community all lived in very close proximity to the Corner and there were drug stores, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and places to eat there. Nowadays, people that work at UVA live all over central Virginia, and many shop closer to their homes and online.
As Charlottesville and UVA grew, national retailers came to town and more local stores on the Corner went out of business. The internet came along and really changed the way people shop.
But even with those changes, Eljo’s is not failing. The Thurstons say business is doing “really well.” They are closing because the lockdown during the pandemic helped Trent Thurston realize that, after more than 40 years of working at the store almost every day, it was time for him to move on to something else, yet to be discovered.
“Having the store closed for 2 months in 2020, I realized that I needed a change before I’m much older. And, it’s time for my father to retire,” Trent Thurston said. “Hopefully, we can get the business sold to someone who has the same kind of morals and ideals and values that we do.”
They say they have several people interested and hope to sell by the end of the year. The plan is for Myles Thurston to stay on part-time and help the new owners learn to run the store.
If they don’t sell it, they’ll close by New Year’s, have a big retirement sale and see all their customers one more time.
Trent Thurston calls the transition “a mixed blessing. It’s sad in some ways, but every story has an ending, and this is the end for us, because it is time.”
