In the late 1970‘s there were three health food stores in Tucson, Arizona.  Ms. Belle Drake was a clerk at one of those stores. I use to shop there and built a friendship with her over the years.  She was a wonderful woman and very patient when people would complain to her that the owner was not stocking the items they wanted to purchase, myself included.  I remember her telling me "Genezie, why don‘t you build your own health food store if you don‘t like this one?" and I told her that I would only do that "if she came along".  She told me that she would but "would only work for us for 20 years!".

New Life sought out a location and found 1200 square feet located at 4841 E. Speedway.  That was our first store and is now our largest store at just under 7,000 square feet.  We negotiated a lease, took all the money we had, constructed the store, and purchased as much merchandise as we could on very limited financial resources that we had.  There is no way we could do today what we did then.  In fact, the first cash register we had was a real clunker.  It weighed more than all of the staff put together.

Click Here for the Rest of the Story of how New Life Health Centers came into being.