To the locals who know him, Frank Cutsforth is ‘Mr. Canby’

Frank Cutsforth today

A hearty welcome and thank you to our newest partner on kerryeggers.com, Cutsforth’s Market.

To the citizens of Canby, Cutsforth’s needs no introduction. Customers have been serviced by the Cutsforths folks for nearly a century.

Today, owners Frank and Kathe Cutsforth run the family-owned, customer-satisfying, community-active Cutsforth’s market that thousands of Canbyites consider their personal store.

It all started in 1928 when Frank T. Cutsforth — Frank grandfather — opened a meat shop in downtown Canby that he called “Cutsforth’s Market,” with lockers. In 1946, Frank’s father — Glenn Cutsforth, who had worked at the shop as a meat cutter — bought out his father and began to run the business with his wife, Elsie. They began to sell groceries, too, calling it “Cutsforth’s Grocery Store and Meat Market.” By this time, they had 400 frozen food lockers at the store, building to 1,000 over the years.

From left, three generations of Cutsforth’s Market owners spanning 94 years: Frank D. Cutsforth, Glenn Cutsforth, Frank T. Cutsforth (courtesy Cutsforth’s)

The store became Cutsforth’s Thriftway after a major remodel in 1967. It maintained its Thriftway affiliation until a few years ago. Now it is back to “Cutsforth’s Market,” offering much more than grocery items.

“It’s been a wonderful life,” says Frank, 79. “We have gotten every bit as much as we have given.”

That’s an awful lot. We’ll get into that more in a minute.

But first, some history.

Elsie Cutsforth’s grandfather settled in the Canby area in 1876. Frank’s paternal side of the family came along later, but they have been around for longer than anyone can remember, too.

Frank has fond memories of his boyhood years at the store, long before the market was moved to its current location at 2025 NE 2nd Avenue in 1974.

“I was six or seven years old when I started going to the store with my parents,” he says. “There was a railroad trestle right next to our shop. I remember sitting on a bench across the tracks and watching steam engines go by.”

Frank T. Cutsforth died at age 52 in 1952, when grandson Frank was only nine.

“My grandpa was a man about town,” Frank says. “People in commercial business in small towns look out for the community. He was one of half a dozen to 10 guys in town who made sure people got meals if they needed them.”

Frank is the oldest of three children to Glenn and Elsie. Sisters Cathy McCollum and Cindy Clark now live in Bend and Ashland, respectively. Frank, born in the midst of World War II, enjoyed his childhood in Canby.

“I did all the stuff that young boys did,” he says. “I loved sports. It was a simpler world then. We’d go to the park and play work-up baseball or flag football. We’d shoot a few hoops, though basketball wasn’t as big as it is today.

“I had a Little League coach when I was 12, Earl Gipe, who was a taskmaster. He had been a frogman in the Navy. He was a tough guy, but he made good players out of us. He made us do stuff the right way. We learned discipline. That carried over for me. You have to have discipline in your life to get where you want to go.”

Frank learned some of it from his mother, whose maiden name was Elsie Egli. She was born in Canby in 1918, one of 11 children of Jake and Ida Egli. Jake worked at various sawmills in the area for a number of years. He died in a tractor accident in 1930, when Elsie was 12. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, and it left Ida with a double whammy, trying to raise her Mennonite family as a single parent through troubling times.

All the children held jobs to help make ends meet. They rented a house on a farm for $10 a month, raising cows, chickens and pigs and maintaining a vegetable garden to provide food. Ida made bed sheets out of flour sacks. “We were about the poorest people in Canby,” Elsie said a book about her life published in 2007 entitled, “A Life of Canby.”

Life was not easy, but the Eglis made do and received help from generous neighbors. And through it came a fortuitous meeting. Local Boy Scouts delivered food baskets to needy families one Christmas. Glenn Cutsforth — 15 years old — was tasked with dropping a basket at the Eglis’ house. It was his first meeting with Elsie, then 12.

A few years later, Elsie worked at a bakery located next door to Cutsforth’s Market. She found that she liked Glenn, who worked there. And vice versa. They wed in 1937. They were married for nearly 66 years. Elsie died at 85 in 2003. Frank died at 89 in 2005.

Glenn and Elsie Cutsforth celebrating 65 years of marriage in 2002 (courtesy Cutsforth’s)

“I learned a lot of lessons in life through them and who they were,” Frank says.

Elsie learned the meat business, having been trained by none other than Frank T. Cutsforth before he sold the business to Glenn. Elsie and Glenn took the market to another level. She worked as a meat cutter with Glenn for seven years, then took over the books and the buying for the store.

But there was much more to Elsie Cutsforth.

“My mom was the visionary of a lot of things in Canby,” Frank says. “She made a lot of good decisions in her life.”

Elsie served on the city of Canby planning commission for 28 years (1957-85), helping decide on street names, working with land development decisions among other duties. She won many awards for community service.

As the Cutsforths grew more financially secure, Elsie acquired pieces of property in the Canby area. Eventually she chose the plot of land upon which Cutsforth’s Market sits today.

“It had been a wrecking yard,” Franks says with a chuckle. “People asked, ‘What are you doing, buying wrecking yard property?’ And, ‘You’re too far away from downtown.’ We were two blocks away.”

The Cutsforth couple kept very busy. Glenn was a volunteer fireman in Canby for 25 years. Elsie, a member of the Business and Professional Women’s Organization of Canby, ran the Bus Depot Cafe for almost 10 years in the 1960s, in no small part to help maintain bus service in Canby.

Through the years, Cutsforth’s delivered free of charge to the elderly and allowed regular customers to buy on credit. Store employees joined to give money to St. Vincent de Paul. Many times, Glenn and Elsie hosted visiting students from Japan and Sweden. All this in addition to working 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the market through the week.

Frank, meanwhile, developed into an athlete in high school. At 5-8, he was a starter in baseball — most of the time at second base — for 2 1/2 seasons.

“Baseball was my game,” Frank says. “When I was a sophomore, I missed the JV bus before a road game. The varsity coach, Charlie Driggers, saw me at school and asked what happened. When I told him, he said since I couldn’t play in the JV game, he’d give me a varsity uniform for the game at home that day. He started me in left field. I got three hits. From that point on, I was a varsity player.”

(This is a ploy, I would suggest, that shouldn’t be passed on to future young athletes. Don’t miss the JV bus hoping to get a call-up to varsity, kids. But I digress.)

The Cougars were 1-A state runners-up his junior year.

“We had a better team my senior year,” says Frank, who also played on the varsity basketball team that season. “We lost in the league playoffs to Serra Catholic. They walked to the state title, so we thought we were the second-best team in the state.”

After graduation, Frank attended the University of Oregon for a year, then transferred to Portland State. He lasted only a year there, too.

“I found it was pretty tough for a country kid to go to a big school and focus on what I wanted to do,” he says. “I enjoyed it, but I’d have been better off going to a smaller school. After my year at Portland State, I took a timeout and thought, ‘What am I doing?’ ”

Frank returned to Canby and began to work for his parents, first as produce manager, in 1964.

“Some Italian guys came out and trained me,” he says.

Wait a minute, Frank. Mafia?

“Kinda,” he says with a grin.

Frank’s sisters weren’t interested in the grocery business.

“They saw how hard Mom and Dad worked, as hard as dairy farmers,” he says. “I hung in there.”

A few years later, Frank met Kathe when she came into the store as a customer. They were wed in 1970 and will soon celebrate their 52nd anniversary. For years, she handled the store’s financial books.

Frank and Kathe have five children. All still live in the Portland metro area. Four of them work for Cutsforth’s Market.

Brooks, a Willamette grad, is Cutsforth’s property manager.

Christian, also a Willamette grad, owns a pottery business in Portland. He worked at Cutsforth’s for nearly a decade.

Joel, who attended Western Oregon before graduating from Montana, runs Cutsforth’s wine and natural food departments.

Kelsey Cordill, a Linfield grad, is Cutsforth’s CFO.

Frank Cutsforth with granddaughter Bellamy, 9, and daughter Kelsey Cordill

Tanner, who attended Concordia before graduating from Azuza Pacific, is Cutsforth’s marketing manager.

Tanner took after his father with athletic pursuits. He was an all-league midfielder in soccer and centerfielder in baseball at Canby High and later went on to play two years on Concordia’s soccer team.

The athletic genes are being passed on. Christian’s oldest daughter, Callie Cutsforth, is a 13-year-old in North Marion who is one of the region’s top distance runners, with a 1,500 best of 4:51.15.

“She has already run faster than the high school record,” a proud grandfather says.

Cutsforth’s moved to its current location in 1974, starting at 20,000 square feet. Through four remodels, it has grown to 45,000 square feet. There is a meeting room upstairs that plays host to organizations such as Rotary, Kiwanis and the Chamber of Commerce as well as parties, weddings and wedding receptions.

“That was Mom’s idea,” Frank says. “(In 1974), we were framing in the main building and Mom said, ‘I want you to frame that upstairs, too. I have an idea that might work.’ ”

Cutsforth’s is an institution in Canby, but Frank and his employees don’t rest on their laurels. Mike DiPari, the store director the past 4 1/2 years, oversees a staff decked with veteran employees and also a number of youngsters, mostly on a part-time basis.

“In recent years, Mike has done most of the hiring,” Frank says. “I let him do his job, and he does it well.”

DiPari worked for a couple of independent grocers in the Portland area before landing at Cutsforth’s.

“It’s been a great move for me,” he says. “It didn’t take me long to learn that community is our No. 1 priority here. We take care of most everybody we can in one way or another.”

Besides a bakery, deli, meat and floral sections, Cutsforth’s boast full-service catering, run by Tom Kerr.

“We have always done catering, but Tom took us to another label after he joined us two years ago,” Frank says. “He is a machine, that guy. So many people know about him.”

Frank goes down the line, complimenting the managers of each of his departments.

“I don’t like to brag, but they’re all crazy good,” he says. “They care about the community. They care about us as a team and as a company. They drive a lot of business for us.”

Cutsforth’s works hard to stay current. The pizza section, which was profitable, has been replaced by a sushi bar. Five years ago, Kelsey took ownership of a “gifts” section, with candles, wrapping paper, stuffed animals, toys, house plants and many other non-food items. It fills the void, she says, of the closure of Parsons Pharmacy.

“As a shopper, I want to be able to go to a spot and grab some gifts,” she says. “I asked Dad if I can have some space for a gifts department. Now I have this whole section. It’s been really successful. I get a lot of compliments.”

In some ways, Cutsforth’s has the feel of an old-time country market. In one entry to the store are wooden drop boxes to pay utility bills or contribute to school fund-raisers. Next to that are tables for customers of the deli section, or just those who want to hang out by the vintage car somehow lodged inside the building.

“It’s kind of a hub for people,” Frank says. “We have a niche. Certain people want to shop with us. They know who we are. We’re local.”

Tanner came aboard in 2011, “when the store was struggling a little bit,” he says. He launched a digital rewards program that is still in place today.

“On-line promotions, emails, text message, digital coupons,” Tanner says. “We send them out weekly. It’s been good for us.

“I love our employees and the family atmosphere at the store. We have great customers and we’re in a great community. Our best year ever was 2020, and we’ve even beaten that the last two years. We’re doing really good. It’s been fun giving to the high school sports programs and making sure Canby stays unique.”

Indeed, Cutsforth’s patriarch has been good to the local teams.

“I met this morning with the new Canby High basketball coach, Matt Taylor,” Frank says. “We had a good conversation. I want to support him. I’m friends with Canby’s baseball coach, J.J. Stolsig, who got his team into the 6A state championship game this spring.”

Frank is also friends with Randy Brack, the long-time baseball coach in nearby North Marion who has won more than 600 games in his 35 seasons. Cutsforth’s has donated to the program and helped Bob Brack Stadium — named after the coach’s father — remain as probably the state’s premier prep diamond.

“We support youth activities,” Frank says. “We sponsor high school sports as much as we can. We helped out with the (Canby High graduation) all-night part. I support these things because I believe in the next generation. I want our community to stay strong.”

Cars of the antique and unique variety have also been a focus. There is “First Thursday Car Shows” at Cutsforth’s, held monthly in the market parking lot from May to October.

Even bigger is the 28th annual Cutsforth “Cruise Inn” car show, set for from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, August 27, at Wait Park, with food, music, prizes and some impressive automobiles. It’s free admission to the public and a nominal entry fee for car owners. Proceeds support local non-profits.

“Running a market is about marketing and sales,” Frank says. “You try to do different promotions to make things go. In 1995, I said, ‘Let’s have a car show with some music outside in the parking lot.’ ”

The first year, 30 cars were displayed. This year at Wait Park, 700 to 800 car owners are expected to participate.

“We have a network of people who like to show off their cars,” Frank says. “Some are antique, but we have a huge variety. Some are imports, but they’re most American-made cars.”

If there is something worthy of involvement in Canby, Frank Cutsforth is likely in the middle of it.

“Frank is an awesome guy,” says DiPari, whose wife, Erica, is a full-time manager at Cutsforth’s, working with deli and catering. “I like his loyalty, his honesty and wisdom. You’ll never meet a nicer man.

“We love working for the Cutsforths. I only wish I could have started with them sooner.”

Frank has been a role model for many, including his kids.

“He is a hard one to follow,” Tanner Cutsforth says. “Everyone loves him. He is Mr. Canby. He is always there for the community, willing to do anything for anyone.”

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