Riverhead Building Supply, the Calverton-based company the Goodale family has run for three generations, has agreed to buy Contractor Express, the lumber and building materials dealer that has anchored 389 Atlantic Avenue in Oceanside since 1981. The two companies announced the deal this week and expect it to close in September once due diligence wraps up.

For the second time this summer, a Long Island family name is passing to another Long Island family rather than to a chain or an investment firm. King Kullen's pending sale to Giunta's Meat Farms set the pattern earlier this month. This deal repeats it in lumber instead of groceries.

Forty-five years on Atlantic Avenue

The Lucas family opened Contractor Express in 1981, and the yard grew into a full-service dealer with a reach far beyond its Oceanside address: windows, doors, siding, decking, roofing, hardware and kitchen cabinets, delivered everywhere from Manhattan to Montauk. Builders and remodelers across the South Shore and the five boroughs know the name from the sides of its trucks.

Bob Lucas, the company's president, is retiring with the sale, closing out 48 years in the lumber and building materials business. In the joint announcement he pointed to the fit between the two operations, citing the reputation the buyer has built on service and deep inventory. The announcement frames the handoff as an alignment of similar companies rather than an absorption, though it stops short of saying whether the Contractor Express name will stay on the building.

The company that started because a farm got slow in winter

Riverhead Building Supply began in 1948, when Jesse Goodale, his brother Harold and their uncle Percy Ketcham were running a farm supply operation in Riverhead. Farm work thinned out every winter, so the family opened a lumber yard on Ostrander Avenue to fill the cold months, with Jesse running the yard while Harold managed the farm. The yard outgrew the farm.

The second generation, Edgar and Russel Goodale, began expanding the company in 1975, and today five members of the third generation own and work in the business. It now operates 21 lumberyards and two Lakeville Kitchen and Bath showrooms across New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with more than 800 employees, while the corporate offices sit in Calverton.

What changes on the South Shore

Riverhead Building Supply already has a foothold in Oceanside through a roofing and siding location, but the Contractor Express deal gives it a full lumberyard in the heart of Nassau's South Shore, a market its president, John Callahan, said the company has wanted to serve more deeply. The announcement describes the purchase as a way to strengthen delivery and inventory for that market, and says the plan is to bring Contractor Express's employees over rather than start fresh.

That detail matters more than the real estate. A lumberyard's value walks out the door every night: the counter staff who know which contractor takes which trim profile, the drivers who know which Baldwin side streets fit a flatbed. Keeping those people is what keeps a yard useful after the sign changes.

What it means if you are not a contractor

Most Oceanside residents will never buy a pallet of decking, but everyone on the South Shore lives in a house that somebody maintains, and the contractors who do that work depend on yards like this one being close, stocked and staffed by people who know them. The alternative to a deal like this is usually a slow fade or a sale to a distant operator, and the South Shore has watched plenty of both.

Instead, a 45-year-old Oceanside business gets a 78-year-old East End owner with the scale to keep it stocked, its founder gets to retire on his own terms, and the trucks keep rolling. When the deal closes in September, the yard on Atlantic Avenue will belong to a family that has been selling lumber to Long Islanders since Harry Truman was president, which is about as soft a landing as a local institution can ask for.