Soldiers on camels stare into the office of Neil’s Feed Store. Max Neil points to the photograph and identifies a sergeant, second from the left and a younger version of himself.

“There I was, right up there,” the proprietor says.

The Great Sphinx of Giza stands in the picture’s background, with the Pyramid of Khafre behind that. Mr. Neil and his Army comrades look like the day-tripping soldiers they were, outside Cairo, Egypt, 65 years removed.

Such a black-and-white photograph could serve as a centerpiece of local color were the room not already so full of it. It seems character holds up the walls of one of the last remaining businesses in Fairport, Mo.

The Kent sign has up-to-date prices for sheep feed and salt licks, though everything else in the office seems well worn and keenly disheveled. Mr. Neil shares the old sofa off to one side with his wife, Claire, and a black Dachshund named Belle.

Folks have stopped in to visit on a blustery morning, this a de facto community center. Conversation and an overactive furnace warm the room. The proprietor pulls on a Santa Fe little cigar despite the presence of personal oxygen tanks. They are, to Claire’s relief, shut off. “I have to watch him for that,” she says.

A business operated on this corner since at least the first part of last century. A wooden hotel stood here at the crossroad, then a filling station, now a feed store open in the morning hours. Fairport, never having incorporated, boasts a proud DeKalb County history, and people there celebrated a centennial in 1969.

The observance included a contest for best beard, and Mr. Neil won. “Some people said he looked like Gabby Hayes,” his wife recalls. “I thought he looked like Ernest Hemingway.”

Forty-seven years after taking over a business on this corner, the proprietor still crosses the road from his home and greets customers and friends.

“I’m just a young kid,” Mr. Neil says. “I’m just 93.”

***

Max Neil grew up a bit north of Fairport on land settled by his grandfather, Andrew Jackson Neil. The boy attended school in the Grandview district.

When Max left in his late teens to serve in President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, it proved his first time away from the farm. As the nation struggled through the Depression, he helped build dams and plant trees.

(His brother, Herschel, took a different path, attending the college in Maryville, Mo., becoming an All-American in track and qualifying for the 1936 Olympics. The track at Northwest Missouri State University bears his name.)

Mr. Neil returned to Fairport after his CCC stint and got a draft notice in the spring of 1941. Before year’s end, America went to war. A liberty ship deposited the Northwest Missouri man in North Africa.

He ended up a mess sergeant in the Air Force. After the war, he came home to farm. Meanwhile, a woman named Claire Wallace took a job teaching at Maysville, Mo. The principal was Herschel Neil, who introduced her to his brother.

Max and Claire married in 1948.

Drought years prompted a three-year work stint in Blue Springs, but they eventually made their way back to Fairport, taking over the filling station on New Year’s Day 1962. Max added fertilizer sales to the location.

Roughly three decades later, Mr. Neil decided to retire. “That lasted about three minutes,” says Claire, who retired in 1991 after 30 years as a high school librarian in Plattsburg, Mo. “He didn’t know how to do anything but work.”

***

Wind whistles past the windows of Neil’s Feed Store. Belle raises her head a moment, then lowers it back to the couch. A couple of unnamed cats, one a “mouser” and the other who came in the deal, sit quietly.

Garry Young, who lives nearby and has stopped in to chat, gets up to go. “I’ve got a recliner that needs holding down,” he says.

Mrs. Neil describes her husband as “bombastic” in his earlier years, now helping fill gaps in his memory. She shakes her head when Mr. Neil takes a guest to the storage area, past bags of feed and to a room stacked with family possessions dating back decades.

“It’s just a pile,” she says.

It will stay that way. Her husband says, “I doubt I’ll ever do a damned thing with it.”

Like a picture on the wall, it’s part of the place, at one corner of one small town.

Ken Newton can be reached

at kenn@npgco.com.