Happy Easter!

Here's wishing all of you a Joyous and Happy Easter!

Above is the Brady traditional Lakeview Easter Basket photo, circa 1960. Mom's holding me (I was only a little over a year old) while my older siblings are watching something off in the distance.

Two years later, my Dad's still behind the camera – and the gang's all here. This time it's my younger brother who's only about a year old and held by Mom. Considering that Mom was the photographer 99% of the time, Dad didn't do too badly. By the way, my siblings and I still talk about that mural on the wall; I used to stare at that thing and get lost in its little world. It was gone when Mom and went through the house in 2006 when it was for sale by the same family we sold it to.

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As is the usual custom on the blog, here's the full-page sponsored ad that ran in the Lorain Journal in honor of the holiday back on April 4, 1953. It's a short line-up of advertisers, and most (if not all) of the companies listed live on today through successor companies.

Lorain Banking Company merged with National Bank of Lorain to form Lorain National Bank (now Northwest); the Ohio Fuel Gas Company became part of Columbia Gas; the Lorain Telephone Company went through a variety of acquisitions and name changes to become CenturyLink and eventually today's Brightspeed; and Central Bank Company merged with City Bank in the early 1980s but I can't quite figure out which bank (PNC or Huntington) its remains became part of.

But it's a pretty good mirror of what happened nationally with regards to banking and utilities, with most of the locally named institutions being merged with or absorbed into faceless, generically-named entities.