As she built the Brookline antiques business she would run for nearly 50 years, Sonia Paine was often called upon to simultaneously be a saleswoman, appraiser, and grief counselor.
Estate sales could be emotional, especially when she visited those who were mourning the deaths of loved ones. She knew her hosts felt the painful tug of memories while taking a last look at items she might purchase. And sometimes the sales were conducted by families who had fallen on hard times. Mrs. Paine handled each encounter as expertly and delicately as she would a century-old vase.
“You had to be very aware and concerned with their feelings,” her son Stanley, who began working with his mother in 1990, said of the families they visited. “It’s really more than just a discussion about the sale. It’s dealing with their loss.”
Mrs. Paine, who kept making house calls even after age made stairs the most challenging part of each trip, died Sunday in her Chestnut Hill home. She was 95 and her health had been declining.
Estate sales weren’t the only excuse to step away from her shop’s museum-quality finery. Clients sometimes sought Mrs. Paine’s guidance about which antiques would best suit their homes, or particular rooms, or a specific table.
After customers walked through the door of her store, Mrs. Paine “would find out what their interests were and try to lead them in the right direction,” Stanley said. “Oftentimes they would take her to their home for her decorative expertise. She never charged for that – it was always to make sure that they got the right items. Her taste was excellent. She could move a piece of furniture and change the look of a whole room.”
She also attended auctions to find antiques she later sold. On occasion, she’d buy two or three very similar items. If friends questioned the wisdom of scooping up duplicates, “she’d say, ‘You don’t sell from an empty shelf. If I sell this one, I’ll sell another,’ ” her son said. “She was a go-getter. She bought stuff and created markets.”
Her zeal for finding the best antiques made her a popular buyer. “When my mother wanted something, she was the auctioneer’s delight because her hand never went down,” Stanley said. “I’d say, ‘Ma, put your hand down.’ She didn’t care. If she wanted it, she bought it. And my mother didn’t mind sitting in the front row where other people could see her bid.”
That no-nonsense approach was on display in 1995, when a gun-wielding robber slipped into her Brookline shop. He was 78 and had twice been on the FBI’s most wanted list. She was 73 and, well, an antiques dealer. It wasn’t an even match.
Nick George Montos tied up Mrs. Paine and was trying to break into her safe when he incurred her ire by insulting her wares and cutting one too many phone lines. Slipping free, she subdued him with a baseball bat. The incident landed her on the front page of the Globe and led to TV appearances. “Let me tell you something, honey, no one is going to come in my store and take what I worked all my life for,” she told a Globe reporter a few hours after Montos was arrested.
Montos spent the rest of his life in jail and died nine years ago, at 92. Though Mrs. Paine was already well-known for her antiques expertise, the publicity from the attack provided national celebrity. She was on the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” which featured her in a packet of baseball cards that commemorated the show’s role in tracking down fugitives. “Sonia’s a natural for the cards, not because of the baseball bat, but because she’s such a gutsy woman,” the show’s publicist told the Globe in 1996.
In a Globe interview six months after the attempted robbery, Mrs. Paine said the incident “changed my life. There has been such a great outpouring of love from people. People still come in and want to shake my hand. If this happened tomorrow, I’d do the same thing.”
An only child, Sonia P. Listic was born in Poland, the daughter of Sam Listic and the former Klara Kopernikov. Her father was a restaurant owner, a barber, and president of his temple. She was 17 when her family fled Poland in early 1939, during the rise of Nazism and just months before Germany invaded their homeland.
“They arrived here with basically a couple of wicker suitcases,” Stanley said. “She went right to work.”
After her family settled in Dorchester, her father resumed working as a barber and she was hired by a furrier. In 1944, she married Sidney James Paine, who was in the Coast Guard when they met. He became a newspaper typesetter by night and a publisher of magazines by day.
When their three sons were nearing college age, Mrs. Paine wanted to bring in more money to help finance their educations, so she opened an antiques shop in Brookline in 1968. She moved through a succession of larger shops until the current location for Sonia Paine Antiques opened on Route 9.
Her husband died in 1984, and a few years later she asked Stanley, who lives in Newton, to join the business. At that time, Mrs. Paine had been buying estates, keeping the antiques, and calling other dealers to sell items such as fine art and rugs. Stanley became a licensed auctioneer and opened a warehouse for the nonantique items.
“My mother was a saleswoman. The sale would be over, and she would still be selling,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of selling antiques. You have to know what you’re selling. She was very well-respected in the industry.”
In addition to Stanley, Mrs. Paine leaves two other sons, Herbert of Phoenix and Mitchell of Hingham; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
A graveside service — like the one the family had 33 years ago for her husband — was held Tuesday in Woburn Hebrew Cemetery, where she was buried next to Sidney.
Because World War II interrupted her education, Mrs. Paine was a dedicated student when she began selling antiques. “She was always reading, always learning,” Stanley said.
“One of the reasons she went to auctions was to inspect the merchandise,” he added. “She felt she needed to touch and feel it, not just look at a picture of it.”
And sometimes items she sold found their way back to her store. Customers who bought antiques from Mrs. Paine early in her half-century tenure grew old and sold them to her years later when they gave up their homes. Such experiences turned her shop into an antiques version of a lending library, of sorts.
“We bought many items back 25, 30 years later,” Stanley said. “And my mother always paid them more than they had paid for them, so they basically had those items in their homes all those years for nothing.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.