Damn, did I go down a rabbit hole with these old photos of my grandfather’s stores. He had three stores starting with this one at 312 North Street, right where Hudson Avenue splits off. “The first blazer from Main Street corner,” as my grandfather describes it in his memoir. He opened a much larger store in 1935 at 634 South Avenue.
Before my father died he made one of his infamous charts plotting the Tierney Markets timeline against Harts Grocery and Wegmans and he showed the second store at “639” South Avenue which would have put it across Hickory Street on the wrong side of South Avenue. Peggi used her Newspapers.com subscription to track down a front page story about the 1939 fire which forced my grandfather to move to his final location, 999 South Clinton. I mention the discrepancy because I am finding out how easy it is to make a leap based on someone else’s hunch or typo. Some of the dates on the original photos have question marks next to them. I made a few leaps myself in identifying the photos on my Tierney Markets page.
My mom’s cousin brought some photos to a family reunion years ago and I scanned them. Her photos all had identifications on them. My father left all these old family photos on his computer and I’m still sorting those out. I had list of questions for my aunt, the youngest daughter of the man pictured above, but I found out last night that she had been taken to the hospital with Pneumonia. She will be tested for Coronavirus.
After I rounded up my Bloomington photos, a few weeks back, I sent the link to our old friends. Joe emailed back that if he had all those old photos he would wallow in them. Isn’t that what old people do? I think might have to do with how fast time moves as we get older. Too fast for you to savor the moment.
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