MOORESVILLE When Larry Stone started working part time in Lowe's mailroom in 1969, the 17-year-old boy from Wilkesboro made $1.60 an hour.

Lowe's had only a few dozen small stores. The corporate staff totaled about 70.

"The whole home improvement industry has changed dramatically. When I started, there was no such thing as a big box store, no such thing as all these home improvement shows," said Stone, 59, who's retiring today.

Stone, Lowe's president and chief operating officer, reflected on his role in shaping the company this week in his office on the seventh floor of Lowe's corporate headquarters in Mooresville, a sprawling campus where thousands work overseeing the company's 1,750 stores.

Lowe's, the nation's second-largest home improvement store, rang up nearly $49 billion in sales last year.

Stone was important in driving the Lowe's late-1980s transformation from a regional, old-school retailer focused on serving building professionals into a national chain aggressively pitching do-it-yourself projects in stores averaging more than 100,000 square feet.

"Everything as simple as being in a store and helping a customer to multimillion dollar deals with paint vendors, he had a hand in it," said Theresa Anderson, Lowe's senior vice president of store operations in the Southeast, who has worked with Stone for more than 20 years.

His first assignment was working in the mailroom, where Stone, a teenager with a Pontiac GTO, operated presses that made copies of forms used in the stores.

The stores varied in size, with the smallest of them 5,000-square-foot, Main Street-style storefronts.

They had tiles and carpet and were largely set up as showrooms. Customers picked out what they wanted and a worker retrieved it from a warehouse in the back. Each store had a lumberyard and gravel parking lots.

As a store manager in Cary, Stone was looked up to by his Lowe's employees.

Greg Bridgeford used to hear about Larry the manager all the time from his wife - whom Stone had hired out of college to work in his store.

"She used to just absolutely tell me story after story," said Bridgeford, Lowe's executive vice president of business development.

After finishing his office work in the early afternoon, Stone would spend the rest of the day walking the store with a dust rag in his back pocket, polishing merchandise, chatting with customers and workers and helping with sales.

He'd empty the ashtrays and trash cans himself. That made an impression on everyone: Stone wouldn't ask employees to do something he wasn't willing to do himself.

When Home Depot started dominating with its larger stores in the 1980s, other retailers like Lowe's had to keep up. Consumers began to expect the vast selection and self-service options as do-it-yourself home improvement came of age.

Stone helped Lowe's keep up with its Atlanta-based competitor, opening the first large-format Lowe's, a 46,000-square-foot location in Boone in the late 1980s.

He wasn't happy with some aspects of that store's final appearance, and Stone says the company told him to take a crack at it if he thought he could do better. He was promoted to corporate in the late 1980s, where his first job was planning new stores.

Stone and other executives met with consultants and charted out principles that helped guide Lowe's into its new era: Focus on female shoppers, improve customer service and keep in-store lighting bright. He also emphasized signs and displays that showed products in their finished state to inspire project ideas.

Lowe's recorded $71 million worth of restructuring charges in fiscal 1991 as it closed and sold off its smaller stores to capitalize on the new, super-sized retail format.

"Now, looking back, it's like, 'Wow, we really changed the company,'" Stone said. "It was a big bet."

Stone can still rattle off his initiatives that worked ("Walls of China," large displays of porcelain fixtures stretching to the ceiling) and those that didn't (Custom woodwork departments in each store bombed because of the amount of customer service required; Stone thinks the idea may have been ahead of its time).

Anderson said Stone always tried to keep corporate staff conscious of what was happening in the stores.

"He used to load up vans of us, all the merchants, and say 'Y'all really have to understand the stores,'" she said.

Along the way, he'd play "Name that tune" with the radio turned all the way up. And when they got to the Lowe's, she remembers Stone knew as much or more about in-store operations than the manager, and always had suggestions for tweaking merchandise displays.

In 2003, the company moved from Wilkesboro to its current offices in Mooresville and in 2006, Stone was named president and chief operating officer. Last year, the teenager who made $1.60 an hour in 1969 earned $5.9 million from Lowe's, securities filings show.

He won't be completely retired after today. Stone is a member of the board of directors for Dick's Sporting Goods, a job he'll keep for the time being. But after four decades at Lowe's, Stone said it is time for a change of pace, to slow down and enjoy life.

He and his wife, Diane, have planned trips to visit their sons and grandchildren and spend some time at the beach. Stone is helping add donkeys to the cows at his farm in Wilkesboro, and his 83-year-old mother needs Stone to re-stain her deck.

And where does he plan to buy the stain? "At Lowe's, of course," Stone said. "Where else?"