It was a simple remodeling sort of idea but it has turned into a full scale daily Home Depot run. Home owners call it “project creep.” Contractors have different terms for it but the sound effect is the same. Ca-ching! Our spare time, every minute of it, has been devoted to bringing the cost of these improvements down so we’ve been setting the alarm and working like dogs until we collapse.
Our home was built in the late forties but we found a newspaper from July 18th, 1964 in one of the walls, a sign of a previous owner’s improvement efforts. This issue of Rochester’s evening paper, “The Times Union,” was so brittle it came out in tiny fragments. We got pieces of a story about some fellow who won the bid to paint all 2000 of the City’s fire hydrants. He was quoted as saying it’s really like painting 4000 hydrants because he had to do two coats. From Ruth Chamberlain’s society column, “Around the Town,” It’s a Merry “Marry-Go-Round For Miss Dunn. Pretty Gaylord Allen Dunn, daughter of Mrs. Arthur S. Van Brocklin of South Main Street, Pittsford, and Howard M. Dunn of Ambassador Drive is on a gay, happy merry-go-round for the remaining days before her marriage to Navy Ensign Stuart Dudley Hallagan Jr. on Friday next.”
Midtown Plaza, the nations first indoor shopping mall (pictured today as a pit, above), had just opened. A human interest story on 1B talks of the friendly competition between Nick Sarantis’s Soda Spa Restaurant and George Slathes General Sweet Shoppe, which sat next door to one another at 492 and 494 W. Main for thirty years.
“Armory Floor “Fix” Up Again. State officials are trying to get funds to fix the sagging floor of Rochester’s Main Street Armory. The 40,000 square foot floor has been condemned for public purposes since 1960.” Apparently they got the money because my nephew recently saw Slayer perform there. “Fire Damages Schaller’s Drive-In.” “Bicyclist Grabs $27. A teenager riding a bicycle snatched $27 form a man as the latter was about to buy a newspaper at State Street and Main Street East about 12:30 AM today. Police said the victim was Aaron Jacob, 23, of 70 Troup Street.
And from page 10B, “He’s Not Sorry He Got Involved”.” A Rochester truck driver who fatally shot a man while going to the aid of a woman in distress said today that the fear of ‘getting involved’ is mostly unjustified. ‘My experience should show people in New York City that you can get involved and feel good about it later,’ Roy Coffey, 32, of 62 Sullivan Street said. Coffey said it isn’t just a case of fear that that prevents many people form giving assistance to others. ‘A lot of people are are simply concerned about the legal technicalities,’ he said.”
I feel it is our duty to leave a newspaper from 2012 in this wall before we seal it up.
2 Comments
I agree about your ‘duty’.
It’ll be great 50 yrs from now when the next owners open the wall and say “What the hell is this???”
From Ruth Chamberlain’s society column, “Around the Town,” It’s a Merry “Marry-Go-Round For Miss Dunn. Pretty Gaylord Allen Dunn, daughter of Mrs. Arthur S. Van Brocklin of South Main Street, Pittsford, and Howard M. Dunn of Ambassador Drive is on a gay, happy merry-go-round for the remaining days before her marriage to Navy Ensign Stuart Dudley Hallagan Jr. on Friday next.”
I believe Mr. and Mrs. Hallagan are currently living in Rhode Island proximate to several other relatives. He was marshal of the 4th of July parade in Bristol a few years back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoO1LFzrrjU
It is rather bittersweet reading about all that. By 1971, Mr. and Mrs. Van Brocklin had died and the Hallagans had taken in Mrs. Hallagan’s younger siblings in addition to their own children. Rather more sadness and responsibility than I imagine she bargained for on that day in 1964 (though it appears to have worked out satisfactorily).