1972 St. Patrick’s Day Themed Ads

St. Patrick’s Day is tomorrow, so I’ll start the festivities today here on the blog with a few ads from 1972 with that theme. 

First up is an ad for Avon Lake’s Ben Lupe Chevrolet at Miller and Walker Roads. It ran in the Journal back on March 17, 1972. Perhaps you know one of the dealership’s salesmen, which included Ben Lupe, Gary Lupe, Joe Duber, Joe Martin and Joe Komives.

I’m not sure who the attractive women is in the ad, but I’m guessing she must have been featured in a Chevy commercial or print ad, much like Jill Wagner in those Mercury commercials in the early 2000s.

I either bought a Chevy at Lupe Chevrolet or had one serviced regularly at the location across from the Ohio Truck Plant. It was one of those 1980s Novas that was really a Toyota in disguise.

Next up is an ad for the well-remembered Pick-n-Pay grocery chain. It ran in the Journal on March 12, 1972, giving its customers time to stock up on corned beef and cabbage – or stewing chickens, as the case may be.

Three days later on March 15, 1971 Pick-n-Pay ran this ad (below). There’s plenty of beef in this ad, so apparently beef was ‘what’s for dinner’ even back then. There’s also a few nods to St. Patrick’s Day, which was just two days away. The blonde lassie doesn’t look very Irish to me, though.

Tomorrow: where to go out on St. Patrick’s Day 1972

Avon & Avon Lake Flooding – March 1952

Flooding after heavy rains seems to happen a lot in recent years in Lorain County. I’m not sure if it’s because of inadequate, aging storm sewers, or the so-called 500-year storms that seem to happen every year, but it's a problem.

It was a problem for Avon and Avon Lake seventy years ago as well, as the article below from the March 11, 1952 edition of the Lorain Journal shows. (I’m sorry I didn’t grab the continuation of the article.)

As the article notes, “Hip boots and rowboats, regarded in most circles as something to be used by anglers, apparently are going to become standard equipment in the Conrad Road area between Miller and Moore Roads, near Avon.

“Every time a heavy dew comes along, approximately a third of a mile of road is flooded there; basements fill up with water; cars get stuck; and residents don their water wings.

“And last night a steady rain sent water over the roads, over lawns, into basements and in general played havoc with daily life near the Cleveland Electric Illuminating plant at Stop 65.

“"There’s water over the motor on our oil burner, over our washer, there’s no heat in the house and the water’s clear up to our barn doors,” reported Mrs. C. J. Heinebrodt at Avon today.

“With no heat in the house, Mrs. Heinebrodt was finding it hard to keep her daughter-in-law’s four-month-old baby warm.

****

I wasn’t able to find Conrad Road on a map. But on the 1912 Avon Township map, there were a lot of Conrad properties and farms on both sides of today's Ohio Route 611 between Miller and Moore Road. Perhaps Conrad Road led to one of them. Anybody know for sure?

Just Plane Unusual

Although you don’t hear about it too often any more, the Bermuda Triangle used to be a hot topic, a mysterious place where planes disappeared  – with the popular notion that they might reappear decades later from a sort of time warp.

I was reminded about all that a week ago Saturday around noon, when I had a rather unusual experience. 

I was driving south on Leavitt Road around noon, with the intention to get my car washed at Zappy’s (located just north of the 7/11). Unfortunately with my Mr. Magoo-like tendencies, I turned too soon and drove onto the P. C. Campana property.

Suddenly, I saw something out of the corner of my eye in the sky. I looked up and saw what resembled a huge military transport plane, coming in for a landing from the south. I thought it might be about to crash, so I sped up and got out of the way. I watched as the pilot cleared the treetops just beyond the Dollar General, and swerved to head west.

I wondered: what did I just see? 

There wasn’t a lot of time to wonder, because a second one then came out of nowhere, following the same flight path. Both of them made a long, wide curve to turn around and head south.

The aircraft reminded me of the transport plane that John Wayne was piloting when he had to make a forced landing in the frozen woods in Island in the Sky.

People in another car in the parking lot had witnessed the whole thing as well, and I rolled down my window to hear what they had to say about it. “That was scary,” said the other driver.

“Maybe the pilots were looking for the airport,” I joked, although I got the impression that neither the driver of the other vehicle nor her passenger were aware that an airport was once located on the spot where they were driving.

Anyway, I tried to find out if there was some sort of an airshow going on, or something, but couldn’t find anything on the internet. So I called the Lorain County Airport.

“That must have been those C-130s from Mansfield,” said the staff member who answered the phone there. “They were doing some training.”

I asked him if anyone else had called about them.

“We got a lot of calls about them,” he confirmed. “People were concerned.”

Small wonder, with everything going on over in the Ukraine.

My older brother Ken (who was in the Army) thought it was interesting that there were C-130s flying over Lorain. “Those things are huge,” he commented.

I’m just glad that there wasn’t a tear in the fabric of time, or break in the space time continuum.

“Hey, where’s the airport? My brand new 1952 map
says there’s supposed to be an airport here!"

****

Mansfield is the home of Mansfield Lahm Air National Guard Base.

Jay’s IGA Food Liner Opens – March 5, 1952

Two page spread from the Lorain Journal, March 6, 1952

Seventy years ago this month, Frank Jursinski opened Jay’s IGA Food Liner at the corner of Oberlin Avenue and Meister Road. An Open House was held on March 5, 1952.

According to an article in the Lorain Journal on that day, “Jay’s Food Liner is the newest Lorain member of the IGA – the Independent Grocer’s Alliance. Established in 1926, the IGA is one of America’s foremost groups of independently owned and operated food stores.

“Owner of the IGA - Supervised market is Frank Jursinski, 809 West 14th Street. Jursinski, who served five years in World War II and was discharged with the rank of captain, is married and has two sons, Kenneth and Kevin.

“For the past six years, he had operated a store at 1404 Long Avenue.

“Jursinski entered the Army as a private in the engineers in 1941. While serving with the First Army in France, he was wounded near Versailles and received a citation from the Belgian government.

“Following his discharge he first went into the real estate business and then opened the market at Long Avenue and 14th Street.”

Jursinski’s store appears to be the original building in the strip which for many years included Whalen Drug and Willow Hardware.

In April 1955, Jursinski moved his grocery store to a larger space within the same shopping center. Jay’s Food Center was located in the space that would later be home to Willow Hardware.

Finally, in 1962 Jursinski relocated his store, now called Jay’s Sparkle Market, to a new building further south on Oberlin Avenue that would later become the longtime home of Meyer Goldberg.

****

I covered some of this history before, but it’s of special interest to me because it is the specific area in Lorain where I grew up. Click here to read my post about the Oberlin Avenue Commercial Strip Pioneers, including Frank Jursinski. And Hank Kozlowski of the Journal wrote this great story (in two parts, here and here) about how Oberlin Avenue went from farmland to a busy commercial center.

Harry Albacker’s Magic Touch – Part 3

Readers of this blog with a good memory might remember I did a two-part series on Lorain magician Harry Albacker (beginning back here). The initial focus of the posts was the fact that Harry had contributed a gag to the well-known newspaper comic panel entitled  There Oughta Be a Law! It ran on February 9, 1952.

On my post, I observed that I had been unable to determine if the comic even ran in the Journal. I also was unable to find any sort of article mentioning Harry’s achievement in the time frame before and after the panel ran nationally.

Well, it took a while but I finally did. On February 25, 1952 the photo and short article below ran in the Journal. 

It noted, “Harry Albacker, 1728 E. 32nd Street, Lorain magician, is shown with an original cartoon, one of the series regularly carried by The Journal.

“The cartoon is one of the “There Oughta Be a Law” features. Albacker, who noticed that persons at a party always urge a magician to perform then find they can’t stop him, sent the idea to the cartoon originators. Al Fagaly and Harry Shorten twisted the idea slightly but gave the credit to Albacker in the cartoon which went all over the country.

“Fagaly autographed the original for Albacker. The latter had been reading the feature in The Journal and  decided to try his luck with the idea – which paid off with the black and white cartoon.”

****

There’s some Harry Albacker promotional material on eBay right now.

Lorain Telephone Company Ad – March 7, 1972

“We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it.”

That’s the closing line in this ad for the Lorain Telephone Company, which ran in the Lorain Journal on March 7, 1972.

Fifty years later, the Lorain Telephone Company is no longer in town. In fact, it’s not on this plane of existence. 

It’s a quaint ad, promoting the availability of telephone service representatives who were happy to help you choose a color of a Starlight phone, suggest where to put an extension phone or answer questions about your bill. 

I’m sure many of these concepts would seem bizarre to today’s youth. Cell phones are often the only kind of phone they've ever known.

Who could have possibly predicted fifty years ago what phones would evolve into today: a portable computer in your pocket that is arguably your most important possession? You need it for just about everything you do, and that’s the way Apple likes it. (I’m a Tracfone guy myself.)

Anyway, I’m not sure what goes on in the CenturyLink building on W. 9th Street these days, or if there is even a human body working there. There’s no helpful telephone service representative there, that’s for sure. 

I’m one of the few idiots people still with a land line with CenturyLink. I’m in the phone book (just like Steve Martin in The Jerk). 

But for some reason, although my Vermilion phone number is correct, CenturyLink prefers to publish the address from when I last lived in Lorain more than three years ago. 

Midway Plaza Ad – March 3, 1971

For my third straight post about the happenings at Midway Mall back in the early 1970s, here’s an ad for Midway Plaza. The advertisement announcing that the office complex was now leasing ran in the Journal back on March 3, 1971.

Midway Plaza, “In the Heart of Midway Mall” according to the ad, is one of the buildings across from the aging shopping mall that I never really paid any attention to. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure if it was still there until I drove out there to take a picture (at right).

The buildings’s developer might have anticipated that the Midway Mall area, so close to the Ohio Turnpike and the relocated State Route 2, would become an important new center of commerce for Lorain and Elyria. But today, the whole area is in a slow decline, which probably explains why the lonely building is not only still leasing, there’s a For Sale sign in front of the building. Perhaps the recently announced plan to convert part of the Mall into medical facilities will increase Midway Plaza’s chances of a sale.

However, it’s still a very attractive office building. It was built in roughly the same time period as the monstrous Lorain City Hall, but is aging much better.

Courtesy Cresco Real Estate