IF ever there was an honest definition of a family business, it was the Beard family's history with Playtime and Discount Jeans.
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Now past the 60-year milestone of operating in Mount Isa, the store has been handed down a generation and is still run by the family who originally started it.
Current chief executive officer of the chain, which includes Playtime, Discount Jeans and Salt 66 stores in Mount Isa and Townsville, Phillip Beard has a lifetime worth of stories to tell about the city's history, owning a business and keeping it thriving through the hard times.
Mr Beard's mother Margaret opened the shop in 1950, no simple feat with a toddler, a newborn and two more children to come later.
"It was an amazing thing for her to do, my father was working in the mines at the time and he eventually came across to help out too," he said.
Mr Beard was born a few years after Playtime had opened, meaning the family business was all he ever knew.
"It was something we always heard about over the kitchen table, if I was sitting there doing my homework at school, they'd be doing the banking," he said. "My father would always keep the banking wrapped in newspaper in the freezer - his theory was if we were ever broken into nobody would look there."
He said now with his father having passed on, his mother in a nursing home and his brothers and sister pursuing other careers, the pressure was on him to keep the legacy alive.
"It's the same as any family business, I want to be able to honour my father's memory and make my mother proud, she started this business such a long time ago and I'm not saying she loved it more than us but definitely just as much," he joked.
"Now my nephew works for one of our stores in Townsville and I want to be able to hand it over one day and say 'here, I didn't break it', I've always had a fear of breaking this thing that meant so much to my family."
Mr Beard said growing up, he had always worked in the store without choice, and any troubles with the economy or community filtered down to the kids as well.
"We were here for the strikes in the 1960s where almost the whole town closed down, it was catastrophic," he said.
"It affected us terribly with the business, but it's a credit to my parents we stayed open and working amidst the tension in the town, I wouldn't want to go through that again in a million years."
Mr Beard said given the city's 90th birthday was being celebrated this week, it was a time to look back, see how far we've come and celebrate our roots.
He said his father and his family had arrived in the city in the 1930s as children, so nobody could doubt whether or not the family was local.
"My father was quite a young boy when he got here and he always told us how rough it was back in those days, sleeping in tents and those kinds of things," he said.
"The funniest story we most often heard was about my Uncle Teddy - when the family first got to town he turned around to his parents and said 'are we there yet', but they had been living there a few days by then, he just couldn't understand it."
Mr Beard said growing up in Mount Isa there would always be a different lifestyle to living on the coast, but it was something he enjoyed coming back to even though he no longer lived here.
"Mount Isa provides opportunities different to most places and it's either something you embrace or you don't," Mr Beard said.
"We recently flew one of our workers Julie Lowe to Townsville with a few of the other girls to celebrate 38 years service to Playtime.
"We had a big party for her because she had started work for us as a young girl, left to have her children and is now back as a casual and I really think that is typical of Mount Isa, there are people who are loyal and here for a long time."
He said Mrs Lowe wasn't the only similar case, as a woman his mother had first employed in the shop still went to visit her in the nursing home and see how she was doing.
"I think it's because we're a family business, my mother always understood that and taught me that, that people will go away and have babies and you need to be flexible like that," he said.
He said as for the fashion sides of things, it was hard to pinpoint a mark he had left on the chain, as the way the operation worked was now vastly different from when his parents had control.
"They would travel to Brisbane every month or so to buy the stock themselves but now we can do that on the internet, and if you see Kim Kardashian wearing something one day, we could have a very similar piece in store within weeks," he said.
"Retail is just so different now and fashion is so continual, if we don't have a size seven for someone for example, we can quickly check the stock levels in our computer for the other stores and have it here overnight.
"It's not to say the way it was operated in the past wasn't working but it's just that everything is relative and they worked with what resources they had then but things have expanded and technology has advanced."
Mr Beard is now based in Townsville but still travels to Mount Isa every month to check on his stores and meet with staff.