ByJudith Trice / Special to The Citizen

AURELIUS - The first store to open in the brand new Fingerlakes Mall in 1980 was J.C. Penney Co. - and Anne Mosley remembers the day.

"I started working for Penny's in February 1980, before the store was even finished, building merchandise racks and stocking them in preparation for the opening," Mosley said at the mall's 25th anniversary celebration Saturday. "The mall was still under construction. We had our opening in April of 1980 and the rest of the Mall opened in May."

Two years later, on Feb. 2, 1982, Joan Crane rang up the very first transaction on the very first day that Sears Roebuck and Co. opened its doors in the mall. "I was so scared," Crane said. "I had just started working for Sears, and I wondered whether I was doing it right."

She must have been, since she has been a Sears cashier ever since and has also trained new employees for Sears over the years.

Susan Burtless, a human resources leader for Sears, also remembers her first day at the store.

"It was my first day on the job and my husband had to go to the hospital for emergency surgery. They told me to just go and be with my husband and not to worry about it," Burtless said. "Maybe this is why there are so many 23-year employees at Sears. The store is very family-oriented."

Mosley, Crane and Burtless were three of more than 25 employees of the mall's two original anchor stores who were honored at the celebration for service of 15 years or more. After a reception featuring desserts supplied by Riverbend, the mall's new chocolate and coffee emporium, the employees were presented with certificates of appreciation by Gina Speno, the mall's general manager.

Speno said the anniversary event was planned as a birthday celebration for the community, with prizes and gifts for those in attendance, and as a way to pay tribute to these long-term retail employees.

In addition to the awards ceremony, the mall's management put together a "mural" of photographs of the mall over the past 25 years, which included pictures of it under construction, old events and even some storefronts that have since disappeared, such as K-Mart, Peebles and Chappell's. A 1980 news article on display near the mural contained an interview with Alfred Dal Pos, whose Skaneateles firm originally designed the mall using the "Cafe Square" concept, a retail mall model that includes restaurants and theaters to provide a "gathering place for people, which rivals the old town center."

Things have changed at the mall over the past 25 years, and some of the changes are the result of new technology.

"The biggest change in our store has been computerization," said Mosley, an auditor at Penney's. "We used to have manual cash registers, and I spent 35 to 40 hours every week auditing. Now it only takes 25 minutes, once a week. It's freed us up to be more customer-service oriented."

According to Diane La Rue, a public relations representative of the mall, new technology is also reflected in the eight flat-screen televisions that surround the recently remodeled food court. La Rue said the mall is now a "wi-fi hotspot," offering its shoppers free wireless Internet access.

Other changes reflect the changing economic climate.

In her remarks at the awards ceremony, La Rue observed that 20 new stores have opened at the Mall since 2004. "Announcements of more new store openings, including a 119-room, four story hotel to open on the site, will soon follow," she said.

The mall's management team is proud their shopping center has survived a quarter century.

"The biggest thing we have to celebrate today is that we're still here after all these years," Speno said. "So many other malls around us have disappeared, but we are moving forward and expanding."