Robert “Bob” Morey, whose father started Morey’s Music Store in 1924–in Long Beach–is dead at age 80, the Press-Telegram reports.

“He was a human computer when it came to music,” Martha Morey, his wife of 56 years, told reporter Brenda Duran. Not at first, though.

One of six Morey sons, Bob Morey came to work in his father’s Music Store “After a brief stint in World War II … ,” Duran reports.

“Classical music became his forte,” his son Art Morey told the P-T. “He admired Mozart and Richard Strauss.”

And music became Bob Morey’s business for life. He never left–not even when Morey’s left Long Beach for Lakewood.

Morey’s Music Store–where you could buy records, sheet music, even musical instruments–was just one of the many businesses Long Beach pushed out of its historic downtown in the 1970s to make way for Long Beach Plaza.

And Long Beach Plaza was the florescent-lit, ill-performing mall we had before we had City Place.

Morey’s was one of the little stores in its way, before the city scraped the ground and it moved to larger digs way out at Woodruff Avenue and Del Amo Boulevard in Lakewood–at an intersection which probably didn’t even exist in 1924.

It’s still there today.

Tags: Art Morey, Brenda Duran, California, City Place, lakewood, Long Beach, Long Beach Plaza, Long Beach redevelopment, Martha Morey, Morey's Music Store, Robert "Bob" Morey, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas