Click on image to enlarge
The restaurant is down the street on the left, near where Fardella's Fruit Market stood. Stover's Restaurant is currently occupied by Insight Optical.
In the image above, Stover's Store (not restaurant) is now occupied by the Buttermilk Cafe.
Once upon a time, until the late 60s, Cobourg permitted signs to overhang the sidewalk.
Click on the ad above to enlarge and note the prices.
Think saddle shoes, Gidget, Tammy, shotgun marriages.
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6 comments:
After catching up on the latest entries to this blog, about Stover's and the Pave dances in the 60s I must say I have enjoyed them very much. Thanks Wally for putting this together.
Don't know if it's turning 60 this year that has caused me to become more reflective than usual, but I find myself consumed with memories of this old town in my growing up years.
Sometimes the images in my mind hardly qualify as memories, they are so brief they just slip in and then out of my head in an instant. People, places, so many of them gone now, it can be a sad reverie sometimes, although that's no reason to stop thinking about our common past.
Again, thank you Wally, I'm sure many people would join me in saying more please!
More to come Deb. The 60s were a gas growing up in this town. In all my travels in and out of other countries over decades, I have come to learn that every trip affirms that my growing up in Cobourg, in spite of being brought up in an economically poor family, I was rich beyond comparison. I had white skin, male genitals, blue eyes, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, Canadian, the world was my oyster, and I enjoyed every advantage I had to the hilt.
There was a great cohesion and sense of generational community in the 60s. So many of us experiencing so many elements of the cultural revolution at the same time.
I think the word to describe it is EXHILERATING.
For anyone looking in, I have an irregular mailing notifying Cobourgers in Cobourg or abroad of new postings into this blog. I send out the e-mail as BCC (Blind Carbon Copy), which means the email addresses are no visible.
Just send me an email at poetburo@hotmail.com requesting and the deed is done.
More Mischief to follow
Now that Wally has most politely acknowledged my posting, I am encouraged to share more memories.
Years ago, in the early days of working at the Help Centre, a lovely fellow used to come in just to chat. He was Jack Dawe, brother to the immortal Sleepy Dawe, local baseball player extraordinaire and my first hero.
Jack and I would compare our memories of Coboug in days gone by, and because he was a few years older than me he could remember downtown better than me. Places like the Sun restaurant, which morphed into Hoo Lee Gardens; Ewart's Smoke Shop where I bought all my records and remember that when I first started to go in there, the 45s were just beginning to crowd out the 78s.
It was a great game that we both enjoyed. He's gone now, but I think of him when a memory is just beyond reach, and I know he could fill in the blanks for me.
Some of my most vivid recollections are the ice man delivering huge blocks of ice to people who didn't have electric fridges; he drove a horse drawn wagon in downtown Cobourg in the early 1950s!
I remember using our telephone for the first time and the operator - a real person, not an automated voice - asked me what number I wanted to call! There were only 3 digits then, as you can see from Stover's Restaurant poster that Wally posted the other day. It
would be "Franklin 123" or whatever. Don't know where the Franklin came from, maybe someone else does.
Another event I remember happened along James Street East and seems unbelievable to me now. That's the wholesale shooting by townspeople of starlings in the trees along that street. Don't know if that happened more than once or if it included Chapel Street, but I think it did, and I seem to recall much excitement about this, certainly it was thrilling to me! I assume there were too many of the birds and in those days, people just did the logical thing and got rid of them. We didn't study the problem for a year or two first, and nobody raised a chorus of protest wanting to protect nature's innocent creatures. Damn nuisances!
Like Wally, I consider it a real privilege to have grown up here in the times that I did. While I was very eager to leave in my late teens, and did so for some time, I have always come back, and I chose to raise my kids here too.
So who's next with their memories? I have lots more but this is enough for now.
The Ice-Man Cometh, as often as delivery from Satterley"s Bakery. I went to the source of the ice, a large warehouse building north of the tracks on the west side of Division Street. The blocks were covered in hay. I loved chopping off a fist-sized chunk for licking.
The starling shoot was also along Chapel Street. The sidewalk was slick with shit from the starlings. Although supervised by the local constabulary, citizens with shotguns were welcome for the shoot-fest.
It didn't do much to get rid of the starlings; we couldn;t have a shoot-out every night after night to be effective. The starlings came back.
Eventually, the plan was to shoot to wound a bird then record its death cries, which were then played back over a speaker system along Chapel Street, especially at College Street every night for a summer. This proved quite effective.
I was eight or 9 or ten years old. Me and a couple other guys still had some "cannon crackers" left over from Victoria Day, and shoved them down the throats of dead starlings along the street and blew them up. What fun that was!
(Yes, I'm appalled by it now. The horror, the horror)
I have a feeling this is going to be great fun for all us old fogies in town. Who knows, maybe it will lead to a reunion for some of us, those who are still alive and kicking in spite of our experiments with the counter culture and love generation.
Really enjoyed Wally filling in the blanks about the starling shoot, that was cool. I knew he'd remember it because he lived on Chapel Street.
Satterly's Bakery, oh yes, Mom would send me there for bread all the time. We lived on Ball Street in a big yellow building that I am told was once an early Cobourg school; torn down years ago for one of our first condo buildings.
It was dark in Satterly's and the smell was sooo enticing. I remember watching the big bread slicer do its magic on my purchase, then sneaking a piece of bread or two before I got it home.
One feature of those early days that makes me shake my head now is how free we kids were to do whatever we wanted. We'd go over to Spring Street and wait to see a train coming, then we'd carefully place a penny on the tracks for it to come along and flatten.
No adult was ever supervising this adventure, telling us how the penny could fly off the track and put an eye out or anything like that. We just did it, time after time. It was exciting and fun.
And I remember walking from Ball St. all the way over to my grand parents on James Street just east of Division, all by myself, pre school age, so I could watch the Saturday morning cartoons. We didn't have TV at home but they did, and man I loved the Cisco Kid, the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, and of course, Mighty Mouse and Sky King.
I can see now I was destined to be a tombody from those early days on. I couldn't care less about dolls and tea parties, and I thought the other girls were dead boring. I was out with the boys playing Cowboys and Indians. The fact that I was always relegated to be the Indian princess captured by the cowboys didn't bother me at first but eventually I could see the limitations in that role for one as eager for action as I was.
Unfortunately the boys refused to allow me to be a cowgirl, insisting there was no such creature in their version of the Old West. As we all got older they changed their minds about female participation, although the activities they had in mind this time were definitely not make-believe cowboys and Indians. That, however, is another topic all by itself, and we'll save that good stuff for now.
Love & Peace and all that jazz!
The CBC archives have some wonderful stuff regarding the telephone.
http://castroller.com/podcasts/CbcRadioRewind/1031071
Franklin is just a mnemonic for "FR" - or "37"
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