Sweet sounds always have seemed to follow John Kiefer.

As a youngster, he would sit outside the famed jazz clubs of the 18th and Vine district of Kansas City. Too young to enter, he would hear the sounds of legends like Charlie Parker coming from inside, while watching legends like Satchel Paige come and go.

Sure, not all the sounds were sweet. At 4 years old he was told the news his father had died. Soon thereafter his mother and siblings moved to the area near 18th and Vine, and he became one of the few white kids in a black neighborhood.

John Kiefer, who has owned Kief's Audio/Video for 54 years, is retiring. Kiefer holds a popular LP that helped establish his record and electronics store in the early 1960s. A photograph of the first store that was located in The Malls Shopping Center, at 23rd and Louisiana streets, is displayed over a TV screen in one of the home audio rooms at the current Kief's Audio/Video Inc. at 2429 Iowa St.

And there were times that the sounds didn’t sound so sweet, at first. Like when Kiefer, who suffers from dyslexia, was told by his college adviser that a career in engineering wasn’t going to be in the cards. Having just dropped out of classes at Kansas University, Kiefer was looking for a sound that would soothe.

“I went down to the music store in downtown Lawrence and asked for a Miles Davis album,” Kiefer recalls of the late 1950s day. “The clerk told me the store didn’t carry ‘that kind of music.’ She said ‘those people steal.'”

Certainly doesn’t sound like too sweet of a sound. But the bell that it set off inside Kiefer’s head has produced a nice tone for more than a half-century now.

“I thought,” Kiefer says, “maybe I should get into the music business.”

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Kiefer opened Kief’s Records in 1959. It carried Miles Davis, then the superstars from the Motown era that would follow.

“While other stores were trying to sell Andy Williams, I had the music the young girls wanted,” Kiefer says. “It gave me the hottest music in town for the entire 1960s.”

The store, now known as Kief’s Audio/Video, still exists along south Iowa Street. But all tunes have their final measure, and Kiefer is in his. He’s announced that he’s retiring from the business, and Kief’s plans to downsize its retail operations as John’s son Rob takes over and focuses on custom installations and other ventures.

With more than a half-century under his belt, Kiefer is one of the longer-serving retailers in the city. So, forgive us if we reminiscence for a moment.

Kief’s started in business at The Malls Shopping Center at 23rd and Louisiana. It may look a little different than it does now. The parking lot was gravel, and the view was of cattle that graze where the Ford dealership is today.

There were times that you could count the day’s sales on one hand, and that’s the way it was for a lot of businesses in the community, Kiefer says. If you think Lawrence slows down in the summer now, you should have seen it in the 1960s.

Kiefer estimates the town shrunk to about 12,000 people when school was out. One summer, Kiefer and his lone employee decided they wanted to go fishing. So, they put paper on the windows and hung a sign that said “Closed for Remodeling.” Two weeks later, they returned, needing to figure out what their remodeling project was going to be.

“We scrubbed the floor,” Kiefer recalls. “That was the grand remodeling.”

Eventually, Kiefer would figure out a thing or two about marketing, an art he likens to chess. He would send a popular law school student up to the sorority houses with a basket full of records to play. While Kiefer was selling “approximately $9 at the store,” the student would sell $200 at the houses. Kiefer would travel around to the hottest hangouts in town — back then that included the old TeePee Junction — to deliver a new 45 record for the jukebox and give the manager a roll of quarters to play it all day.

But most of all, Kiefer says, he would try to learn something new. He remembers hearing some college kids who had traveled overseas talk about a hot new British band. “We were selling Beatles records before the Beatles ever showed up on TV in America,” Kiefer said. “That’s probably one of the more important things I’ve learned from this business: If you look out the front windshield, you see a lot better than if you look out the rear-view mirror.”

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“Kief Baby!” may as well have been the title of a hit song in the 1960s because it was heard often around Lawrence. Kiefer, 82, remembers the days when the retail world was full of volume — not sales volume — but noise from enthusiastic customers walking in the door.

They would call him “Kief Baby!” as they walked in the door, and then they would talk about turntables, or hi-fi or the concert tickets the store sold by the hundreds.

“There were certain customers who would walk in, and the volume of the store would go up by 80 degrees,” Kiefer says.

It’s different now.

“They’re not coming in the door anymore,” Kiefer says.

Consumers today go online, do their research, and think they have all the answers. Kiefer isn’t sure what the view is out the front windshield anymore.

“I love and hate the Internet,” Kiefer says.

Kief’s does a lot of business online. It is a dealer for several electronics brands, so it sells products to Internet sites that then resell them to the public. It is business that goes through the “back door,” Kiefer says. The back door, however, isn’t nearly as fun as the front door. And not every business has a back door, and that worries Kiefer.

He already thinks the majority of Lawrence residents use local retailers “like a quick shop instead of a shopping center.” Buy your toilet paper and bananas here in town, but when you need to make a more substantial purchase, you go to Kansas City or online.

“Today, the industry as I knew it is gone,” Kiefer says.

Indeed, that is the tune these days, and Kiefer is ready to let someone else figure out its new beat. But don’t think that Kiefer is walking away discouraged. That’s the thing about music: A great tune can stay with you forever.

“I will be walking downtown and hear a big booming voice yell ‘Kief Baby,'” Kiefer says. “I’ll know who it is even before I turn around. It will be one of my customers from early on. Kief Baby! It is still a thrill.”