LAKE CHARLES, La. (KLFY) The patriarch of a major Southwest Louisiana business has died.

J.W. Stine, a WWII veteran who started what would eventually become Stine Home & Yard, passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 102, surrounded by family, KPLC reports.

Stine was a B-26 pilot in the Mediterranean theater. He completed forty missions bombing France and Germany during World War Two.

He and his friend J.C. Carlin took the little bit of money they earned during the war and invested it into the Starlin subdivision in Sulphur.

The two men needed materials for those homes, so they created Starlin Lumber Company in the early fifties. Eventually Stine’s six boys worked there.

“They worked for the lumber yard for their spending money and college,” he says.  “When they graduated, that’s all they knew, so they stayed there working there. “

Stine operates 11 stores across Louisiana and Mississippi.