NATCHEZ — If the Natchez appliance business had a face, it was Audley Case.

For more than five decades, he’s been selling appliances to families looking to upgrade a dishwasher or do an emergency replacement of a washing machine that had washed its last load.

But at 3 p.m. Friday, Case walked out of Home Hardware for the last time, entering what is technically his second retirement.

Case started selling appliances at the now-gone Sears location in Tracetown in 1960, but his work in sales began even before that.

“When I was about 12 years old, I was working out in my daddy’s parking lot at Feeder’s Service Company running illegal parkers out, but when I was 14 I started standing on an apple crate and checking the groceries manually,” Case said.

It was during those years he started learning customer service, learning to value customers first.

“My father would come in where I was working, hide and listen to me and then criticize me and tell me what I should have done differently,” Case said.

After college and marriage, Case started work at the sears store, and was the No. 1 salesman there 25 of the 26 and a half years he worked there. When the company decided to do a major downsize at the Natchez store, he was forced into retirement.

“I was going to take a little time off, but they found me a job after a week,” Case said. “So for that retirement I got a week’s vacation before I went back to work.”

Case started his new job at Johnson Hardware, which was eventually absorbed into Home Hardware.

“I’ve been lucky to have good bosses at every place I have worked,” he said.

But more than bosses, what Case has enjoyed through the years has been the customers.

“I like the customers I have had — there are only three customers that I didn’t like to wait on,” he said. “All in all, I have always tried to remember that the commission off of a $300 sale in my pocket was almost nothing, but if I spent $300 on something, it would be major, so I always wanted to treat people that way.

“No one is coming in to buy a new washing machine because they were happy with it, but when I have to spend my money, I at least want to feel good about it, and I try to do that for them — I have always done my best not to oversell.”

Through the years, Case has seen children coming in with their parents grow up, raise children of their own and then see those children grow up and buy appliances from him.

“Now days, I am probably selling to the fifth generation of some people,” he said. “I know people by sight, I see them all the time. I recognize the children coming in, and there’s one little boy who used to come in and I would joke with him, threatening to lock him in the freezer — he’s a grown man, and he’d die if I told you his name.”

Through the years, Case has seen prices quadruple and appliances go through a trend rainbow of being turquoise, Coppertone, avocado, gold, stainless steel, black, white and many others. When he goes into someone’s store or house, he knows what their appliance cost, and he’s even had someone pull up in his yard and talk about the refrigerator he sold them.

But now, he said, it’s time to learn something new.

“I am 76 years young, my mother lived to 99 and my father to 97, and I plan to outlive both of their ages,” he said.