O'Neil's Talking Christmas Tree - 1959

Since my last post resulted in several comments about O'Neil's talking Christmas tree, I thought I would post this. It's a full page newspaper ad that ran in the Journal the day before Thanksgiving 1959 promoting the gabby holiday spruce.

Unless my memory is faulty, I remember the talking Christmas tree still being there in the mid-1960's. It was outside in the courtyard that was surrounded by the various stores. My parents had to coax my siblings and me to go up and chat with it. (It did have a friendly, female voice – and asked a lot of questions.)

I remember being puzzled as to how a talking Christmas tree fit in with the whole Christmas legend. Nevertheless, it was a more innocent time, and I'm sure I attributed it to the magic of Christmas, the one time of the year when everything is geared to making little kids happy.

Santa Arrives at O'Neil's - 1959

Remember when it was a big deal that Santa Claus would arrive at all of the various shopping centers and department stores in and around Lorain right after Thanksgiving?

He used to arrive at each one of them, it seemed – preceded by huge ads, sometimes full-page, in the Lorain Journal.

Above is the ad heralding Santa's arrival at the old O'Neil's shopping center (now Centre of Sheffield) in 1959. I like the way O'Neil's ad insinuates that theirs was the real Santa. He must have been, since all of Lorain County was going to welcome him, according to the ad!

Anyway, when it came to Santa showing up at a shopping center while I was growing up, he never seemed to arrive in a sleigh. It was always a helicopter or a fire engine, which seemed kinda suspicious to me.

Nevertheless, since I was pretty gullible, I figured that it must have been one of Santa's army of ubiquitous lookalike 'helpers', hamming it up with the locals.

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A "new breed" Santa – ugh!

Speaking of Santa's helpers, there seems to be a new trend developing. Nowadays, when I see one at a mall with kids on their lap, they always seem to be one of the "new breed" of Santa's with a real beard. The problem is, most of the time the beard is trimmed too short. Plus, these "new breed" Santa's don't seem to wear padding either (too phony, I guess) and they're often fairly scrawny. They look like their day job is peddling herbal tea in a health food store! They have no twinkle in their eye, either; they're just a guy who parlays his white whiskers into some extra cash during the holidays.

Give me a big, fat Santa with a phony beard and a pillow under his coat any day over these guys.

Some Gel-Pak Building History

1968 Lorain Journal Ad

In early November the official groundbreaking event for the conversion of the former Gel-Pak Building at 1205 Broadway into the new home of Lorain County Health & Dentistry took place.

At the time, the online Morning Journal article had a sketchy history of the building. The article (here) said that it was built in the 1920's and "home to a garment company that sewed parachutes during World War II. Then the Gelman family bought it," according to the article.

I did a little research in the Lorain Public Library to find out more about this building. It turns out that quite a few companies called it home.

Here's what I found in the City Directories.

The building's 1205 Broadway address was not listed in the 1921-22 book, but the 1926 book showed that a Richman Brothers store was the tenant. (At that time, the Gelman Brothers fruit business was at 1218 Broadway, where it would remain until the mid-1960's.)

The Richman Brothers store continued at the 1205 Broadway location into the 1930's. Around 1937, a clothing manufacturer called the Goodall Company (apparently associated with Richman Brothers) was listed along with the Richman Brothers as tenants. But by 1940 the building was vacant.

A storage company – National Terminals Corporation – showed up at that address in the 1942 book and would continue to be listed until 1947, when the building went vacant again.

By 1950, another company – Sci-Eff-Ec Laboratories moved in. Their business was connected with chemical engineering and water conditioning. They shared the building with another new tenant: S. Weitz and Company, another clothing manufacturer.

By 1954, S. Weitz and Company was joined in the building by Lorain Screen Process (a sign and card writer).

From 1955 until 1958, S. Weitz shared the building with the Lorain County Board of Elections. (You can see their name painted on the north wall of the building in the photo at left.)

By 1959, S. Weitz was out and another company, Lorain Storage & Warehousing was a tenant along with the Lorain County Board of Elections. These two tenants would share the 1205 Broadway address until around 1963.

By 1964, the building picked up another tenant: Joseph & Feiss (another clothing manufacturer). The Lorain County Board of Elections and Lorain Storage & Warehousing remained. (The warehousing company did have a Gelman connection, as Alvin Gelman was listed as the manager.)

Around 1972, Joseph Feiss was no longer listed with the other two tenants. In 1974, the Board of Elections and the warehousing company were joined by Stillman-Deutsch, as well as the Banana Specialties Division of Gel-Pak.

The Board of Elections seemed to hang on there until around the mid-1970's, when the building became part of a block of buildings solely associated with Gel-Pak. 1143 Broadway, 1145 Broadway and 1205 Broadway were all part of the Gel-Pak empire.

Curiously, by 1987 Joseph & Feiss had apparently returned to share the building with Gel-Pak.

Around 1988, the Gel-Pak name disappeared from the City Directory, replaced by another Gelman family business: Lorain Foods, Inc.

Thus this old building has seen a lot of tenants over the last eighty-some years.

Amish Country Revisited

Deb's Golden Bear in Apple Creek

The day after Thanksgiving, the spouse and I headed back down to Amish Country. (Remember our hijinks with the GPS last time?)

Well, we still managed to get lost this time. Although I printed out a nice MapQuest itinerary showing how to get to Kidron from Berlin, the spouse revealed at the last minute that she wanted to stop at Lehman's Hardware in Kidron first.

We tried using the MapQuest instructions in reverse to get to Berlin, but we still got lost and ended up in Apple Creek. Three maps that we had didn't help either, as none of them seemed to have the obscure numbered road we happened to be on!

While turning around in Apple Creek, I happened to notice this cute little ice cream stand called Deb's Golden Bear drive-in. It looked like it was shuttered for the season, which is fine since I didn't need ice cream after my usual Thanksgiving overeating.

Lehman's Hardware in Kidron is a great place if you are into nostalgia. Besides carrying tons of old-fashioned merchandise, the whole place is decorated with antiques. We only spend a couple of hours there, but you could easily spend the day there exploring every nook and cranny.

Along with our other purchases, we picked up a couple of bottles of hard-to-find root beer: Dog N Suds and Frostop. (Do you remember that the Berardi's in Huron used to be a Frostop drive-in with the huge rotating root beer mug on top?)

Lehman's also had dozens of other rare soda pops, including Kickapoo Joy Juice.

After our usual trip to Berlin, we stopped at the Everything Rubbermaid store in downtown Wooster on the way home. The store is located right on the square in a four-story historic building with wooden floors. It's crammed with great Rubbermaid products (lots of close-outs) so we stocked up. What did I buy? A manly Rubbermaid mini-cooler to replace my (ugh) soft fabric purse-like First Federal Savings of Lorain lunch bag.

As usual, instead of dinner at Der Dutchman or some other Amish restaurant, we headed over to our favorite Perkins on US 250 in Ashland to have a nice supper with the locals, and even got our favorite server (April) again.

I still think that Perkins outlet is the best one we've ever been to in Northern or Central Ohio. We saw the same manager hustling around again as usual; he's always there every time we go. The service and food is always great and April even sent us home with coffee to go for our one hour drive back to Sheffield Lake.

All in all, a great day trip – and we did it without the GPS!

Sisters Chicken Then and Now

The weather is getting crummy, making it tough to take good photographs. So I gotta squeeze in some final 'Then and Nows' while I still can, before it snows!

Here's another one of those 1986 Lorain shots that were on Ebay for a while. This one shows the former Sisters Chicken & Biscuit restaurant that was located at the corner of Fifth Street and Reid. (Prior to that, the location was City Parking Lot Number 4.)

Sisters Chicken & Biscuits was a subsidiary of Wendy's beginning in the early 1980's. Apparently, the chain never quite clicked with the public and was sold off by Wendy's to its largest franchise owner in 1987.

Coincidentally, this Lorain restaurant at 221 Fifth Street first appeared in the city directory in 1987. (There was also an outlet at 940 N. Leavitt Road near the intersection with Cooper Foster Park Road.) Unfortunately, the Lorain restaurant didn't make it and the building was vacant by 1993. Another restaurant (Chello's) moved in later, before the building became vacant again.

Today the site is the home of the Social Security Administration building. Here is the link to the Morning Journal's account of the relocation of the Lorain office.

That brick box is really crammed onto that property!

Christmas Giants in Lorain

After crossing the Bascule Bridge heading west on Saturday morning, my bleary eyes came upon this odd site: a giant Santa Claus in Veterans Park who seems to be yelling across the street to an equally gigantic (and toothy) Nutcracker who seemed to be guarding the fortress known as Lorain City Hall.

Last year, the menacing nutcracker with fists clenched (I still think that nutcrackers are a dubious Christmas icon at best) was positioned at the bridge approach at the intersection of Broadway and West Erie just a hundred feet away. I like that this year the Light Up Lorain committee installed the non-threatening tin soldier (holding a candy cane) there instead.

According to the Morning Journal, this year's Light Up Lorain was a big success.

Santa must have vanquished his nutcracker foe. This morning I drove through the area again; Santa was still standing tall, and the nutcracker was a pile of deflated fabric.

The Day After Thanksgiving

Nowadays, the day after Thanksgiving means only one thing: Black Friday.

Which to me seems like a ridiculous name. It certainly isn't similar to Black Tuesday – October 29, 1929 – when the stock market crashed. It's a good day – heck, even a great day – for shoppers and a retailers alike. So why is it Black?

Anyway, to a lot of Baby Boomers like me, the day after Thanksgiving used to mean one thing: special cartoon programming for kids who had the day off from school.

Since my memory isn't always the greatest, I went back to the newspaper microfilms to see just what was on the day after Thanksgiving from the mid-1960's to the early 1970's. As it turns out, there really was just one TV network that did this: ABC. And more often than not, it was a wholesale rehash of the Saturday morning cartoons from that period.

The website www.tvparty.com confirms my suspicion with a description of ABC's traditional day-after-Thanksgiving cartoon block which you can read here.

1967 seemed to be a banner year as far as I'm concerned. The day started off early with Bullwinkle at 9:30, followed by Milton the Monster, Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Fantastic Four, Spider Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, King Kong, The Beatles and George of the Jungle last at 1:30.

Here's the TV listing for Thanksgiving 1967 with the next day's listing under it. (Give it a click so you can read it.) It sure is weird remembering how stations signed off back then – and how some of them signed on with a Farm Report!

1967 Thanksgiving Day TV Listing

Here's ABC's animated turkey (remember him?) promoting the 1972 cartoon festival. By then, I must not have been watching; I don't remember any of those cartoons!