DeLuca Bakery Opens on Oberlin Ave. – Dec. 1965

Lorain’s west side was exploding with new residents in the 50s and 60s as former farms gave way to new housing developments. Thus many of the iconic Lorain west side family businesses that we grew up with – including Whalen Drugs, Willow Hardware, Meyer Goldberg’s, and Steve's Shoe Repair – were new back then, located there specifically to serve that growing population.

Another of those businesses was the well-remembered branch store of DeLuca Bakery at W. 38th Street and Oberlin Avenue. Its Grand Opening ad shown above ran in the Lorain Journal on December 2, 1965.

(I wrote about my DeLuca Bakery Memories, complete with a collection of vintage ads, in a three-part series here, here and here.)

Like many westsiders, we grew up on DeLuca bread (although Mom did patronize the Nickles outlet store too, with its Hillbilly Bread).

But it was pretty nice to have a family bakery located so close. In fact, just about everything a west side family needed was only a few minutes away on Oberlin Avenue, where all of Lorain's perfectly perpendicular numbered streets emptied out.

Today, just about all of those family businesses on Oberlin Avenue are gone, except for Yala’s Pizza. And all of the new west side businesses in Lorain are on Leavitt Road and Oak Point Road, near the new housing developments.

The cycle continues, I guess.