POCATELLO - The ghosts of old opera performers and movie stars have long been supplanted by a half-acre or so of sofas, chairs and related home furnishings. And before long, the venerable building at 237 East Center Street will no longer be known as Southeast Furniture.

Dave and Kathy John, owners of the store since 1982, are retiring to spend more time with grandkids, or in Dave's case, bowling.

Their building, which has survived at least two fires and several incarnations, surprisingly is in excellent condition, though its three levels are somewhat less than when it was plotted in city records in 1889 as the Pocatello Opera House. Damaged by fire around 1900, it was restored as the Auditorium Theater, boasting the first electric lighting in the state.

It was host to touring companies, with some basement dressing rooms still adorned by signatures on the walls of some performers. It served as a venue for more than dramatic productions, with boxing matches featuring such local luminaries as Spug Myers and Hammie Ball among the attractions.

The history of Southeast Furniture harks back to at least 1934, when Kathy John's grandfather John Stirling founded stores on South Main Street, and then on East Center Street before yet another fire ("I think around 1938") heavily damaged the Auditorium building, then known as the Roxy Theater. It was empty until 1946, when Bud Reynolds, Kathy John's father, salvaged bricks and rebuilt the present Southeast Furniture.

Stirling, an emigrant from Scotland who first failed as a sheep rancher and later came to Pocatello to operate a coal company, was a "pure capitalist," according to Dave John.

"He devised a means of handling coal with an oil treatment to hold down the dust, a process which was copied nationwide," John says. "He got his stake in Pocatello from a Mr. Bistline, unloading cars of coal. He had four sons and a daughter, and he needed jobs for them, so he got into the furniture business."

At Southeast Furniture, Stirling had a national impact when he began selling three-room groupings of furniture. "He sold carloads," John says.

Bud Reynolds took over the business in 1962, and ceded it to Dave and Kathy in 1882. Much has changed since that time.

"We probably sold more than 10,000 waterbeds when they were popular," Dave says, including one to a customer whose dog promptly destroyed it, apparently bothered by the wave action of the mattress.

"We opted to focus on the medium to high end of the market," he says, and that philosophy has been profitable, though he says nearly all merchandise now is manufactured in China or other Asian countries, including Vietnam where he served during that war. One innovation was a "vision system" employed by the Charles company, enabling customers here to design the style and fabric they preferred for chairs and sofas.

"Our retirement sale will be real," he says, unlike so-called going-out-of-business sales of other stores. "We hope to sell down to the bare walls in less than a couple of months. Then Southeast Furniture will be no more after 75 years and three generations."