On her way home from work Tuesday at Anne Arundel County Public Schools, Crystal Webb got a call from her husband, asking her to pick up hot dogs.

Webb didn’t think twice about where to stop: what used to be Angel’s Food Market. After more than half a century on Mountain Road in Pasadena, Angel’s was sold recently and reopened March 15 as the fourth location of Green Valley Marketplace. The new owners say they are committed to sustaining Angel’s legacy — and its homemade salads.

Webb browsed a selection of potato salad and coleslaw made with a recipe that predates Angel’s. Her grandmother once prepared these salads in the kitchen here and her father did side jobs for the family that owned the store since 1960. Webb paused for a moment to consider what Angel’s meant to her and the community.

“It’s a part of my family and it’s a part of Pasadena,” Webb said.

Long before it could be described as a grocery store, Angel’s started as a roadside refreshment stand.

Beginning in 1922, the Angel family sold beverages and snacks from their porch. A nickel bought a bottle of homemade root beer, ginger ale or mead, which they stored in a hole in the ground filled with block ice and covered with sawdust, burlap and a sheet of tin, Marie Angel Durner reminisced in a first-person article in The Baltimore Sun Magazine in 1973.

“In 1928, sections of Mountain Road were rerouted, supposedly to straighten it,” Durner wrote. “It left our store cut off from the traffic. Daddy bought an acre on the new road and built a new store, with an attached apartment for us.”

Andrew Goodwin bought that store, then a small brick building in still rural Pasadena, from the Angels in 1960 after splitting from his family’s wholesale seafood business in Baltimore, according to Walt Clocker, Goodwin’s grandson and, more recently, the co-owner of Angel’s in charge of day-to-day operations.

“During that period, there were waves of residential development,” said Dan Nataf, director of Anne Arundel Community College’s Center for the Study of Local Issues. “You saw a working class evolution of lots of communities, some of them waterfront, some of them not, of basically small, modest houses.”

Goodwin added some parking and a new entrance, transforming the business into a “more full-service” grocery with meat and seafood, Clocker said. They also had a liquor license and began selling homemade salads created from recipes passed down in Goodwin’s wife Hallie’s family.

Tom Clocker continued that tradition when he bought the business from his father-in-law in 1970, running it for the next 50-plus years with his wife, Joyce, and three sons.

“It wouldn’t be unusual where you’d go to the back of the store, have my father cut you a steak, wrap it up in the white paper and mark it with a grease pencil, walk it to the front of the store, ring you out and take it to your car,” Walt Clocker said.

The Clockers took pride not only in their product but in their community, sponsoring local little league teams and contributing to civic clubs, churches and schools. By Walt Clocker’s estimation, they offered first jobs to hundreds of young people in the area. They hosted food drives or needy families and allowed local scouts to raise money at the storefront.

“They were always more than kind and generous,” said Cathy King, secretary at Galilee Lutheran Church, less than a quarter mile away, where the Clockers were congregants. “And I think they were like that throughout the community, to be honest with you. … If people needed anything, they were more than willing to put their hand out and help."

As the community changed, Angel’s was constant. The market was there when Anne Arundel built Bodkin Elementary School in 1970 and later turned it into a complex featuring Chesapeake High and Middle schools, and when the county purchased what was once a Baltimore tobacco trader’s summer estate, opening Downs Park there in 1982.

“Over time … you got the influx of more white collar workers, people who worked on NSA or the gold coast there, the west side of the county, who wanted more affordable houses,” Nataf said. “There was still plenty of land to develop.”

Angel’s persevered through changes and challenges. After a fire burned it to the ground, it reopened in spring of 1977. The Clockers expanded the store in the ’80s, ’90s and in 2008, to its current 26,559 square feet. Its offerings evolved, too, to meet a changing clientele, with gourmet foods and fine wines to go alongside the traditional salads, soups and fried chicken.

The customer service never wavered.

Chip Snyder, the athletic director at Chesapeake High for 20 years, preferred Angel’s to the nearby Giant and Safeway for catering sports events. Catering at Angel’s is run by General Manager Kim Ward’s two adult daughters, both of whom Snyder taught.

“When you walk into Angel’s, you feel like you’re at home,” he said. “They know who you are. They address you by name. They try to help you out. If they don’t have it, they try to get it in the future. It’s like your perfect, you-feel-like-you-belong, grocery store.”

Much of that is thanks to longtime employees like Ward, who has been at Angel’s for 24 years and describes the store as her and her daughters’ “second home.” She can often be heard greeting regulars with a “Hey, baby!” or “Hey, trouble.”

“It’s our people. It’s our community down there,” Ward said. “They like to feel like Angel’s, now Green Valley, is their grocery store.”

But charm only goes so far in paying the bills, and Clocker said he began exploring a sale before the coronavirus pandemic. A resurgence because of the closure of restaurants and bars only delayed the challenges of running an independent grocery store. Most customers, he said, only worry about how much the milk costs.

“My cost of product is literally higher than someone else’s because the wholesalers have different pricing levels based on the volume you’re buying,” Clocker said.

The liquor license helped keep the business running — it was a convenient one-stop shop — but shelves became sparser, refrigerators faltered, dirt accumulated on the floors.

Thankfully, Clocker said, Green Valley, a local, family-owned business dating to 1915, emerged as a potential buyer. During negotiations, he said, “They made sure I was providing them with all the churches and schools and teams that we supported because they wanted to continue to do that.”

“We were very fortunate that that type of buyer was out there and we were definitely happy they wanted to buy us, as opposed to, say, a foreign mega chain that might be less service oriented,” Clocker said.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed. Nearly all of Angel’s 45 employees are staying on with Green Valley.

In a statement, Green Valley CEO Rick Rodgers said Angel’s “built a remarkable legacy in Pasadena, and we are committed to preserving its community-driven spirit while introducing new features that enhance the shopping experience.”

The county liquor board agreed to transfer Angel’s liquor license to Green Valley. The store closed March 13 and reopened under its new name March 15.

Snyder went to check it out the next day.

“The place looks fabulous,” he said. “The shelves are stocked. They’re making a conscious effort of updating the facilities. No shame to what they had before, but everything is cleaner, supply is better.”

Margaret Rankin, who’s been shopping at Angel’s since 1991, walked into a rejuvenated store two days after Snyder.

“I’m sorry to see Angel’s go,” she said, “but this is beautiful.”

Editor’s Note: Banner reporter Alex Mann worked at Angel’s stocking shelves for several months in 2012.