113-119 Leith St., 234 Park St., Destroying Vintage Cars? and The Powder Puff Girls in our Home Towns of Fort William and Port Arthur

I am off to a great start in the last few days doing posts for my own facebook page and the Canadian Lakehead Exhibition Memories facebook page, but MOST importantly my premier site HR&J desperately needed this post that I have been working on for quite awhile....it is fairly lengthy but interesting with 25 photos.

The first photo here is extremely interesting.  The photo actually came from Richard Mark's FB page and as soon as I saw it I instantly knew what it was.  Sellers and Jones was an automotive dealership back in the late 1910's and into the 1920's.  I vaguely remember my father telling me a bit about the history of the original Kam Motors Limited building on Leith St., and the words Sellers and Jones had come to mind.  Incredibly the tall part of this building still exists to this very day, and through the years it was doubled in size by getting rid of the Sellers and Jones old wood tire store structure and adding an identical structure to the west of the original, making the address 113-119 Leith St.  That address is the same today.  The cars you see in the photos are likely 1918 Studebakers, or maybe Essex, or maybe Willys-Knight....it is truly very difficult to tell as many looked so much the same near the end of the Brass era.

However, before this became Kam Motors Limited, it went through another era from which there are no photographs or at least none found as yet.  I do have a few old invoices that tell their own stories as you will see.

Caption: 113-119 Leith Street, Fort William Ontario.  At the very end was a large Elevator and where the street lights are is Simpson St.

This is how the modern building looks recently and you can still count 6 large windows across the structure, and 3 across the old photo above, because as I mentioned, the building was doubled in size.  The only difference in the new photo to an actual today photo would be that the old Palace confectionery building still stands down at the corner of Leith and Simpson St.  That spot is a Used Truck dealer now.

OK...here we go...If you click on this 1927 Grain Port Motors Limited "Ford" Dealership invoice it oddly reads 113-119 Leith St. as a Fort William address with a phone number of S.1000.  Therefore Grain Port Motors occupied this space for awhile in and around 1927.

Grain Port Motors claim to fame was that it was likely a sponsor of sorts in the day for the famed local race car "The King's Special" a story about this car was written on these pages some time ago.

Below is a close-up of whats called a Moto Meter and sometimes called a Motor Meter, vividly displaying Grain Port Motors, Fort William and Port Arthur.
The photo next to it is none other than Frank Colosimo driving the "King's Special" here in the 1920's, sporting the Moto Meter shown below from the restored Kings Special.

So here is a pretty fuzzy photo of what Kam Motors looked like after Grain Port Motors short lived time there.  The building of course, as mentioned above is the Sellers and Jones building when it was doubled in size, but taken from a different angle.  It lived to be Kam Motors Limited owned by the Hubert Badanai family for well over half a century until the family decided to close the Kam Motors and Port Arthur Motors and open a new establishment on Memorial Ave. called Badanai Motors.  The very rear portion of the building today houses the Badanai Motors Auto Body Shop.
The Kam Motors Building still stands today even with part of the original signage and original wall on the east side of the building still showing as seen in the photo to the right.  It's still 113-119 Leith Street, and owned by Diamond Taxi.

My father gave Kam Motors Limited 33 years of his life as the Body Shop Manager.  The body shop was originally upstairs and there used to be a huge automobile elevator to bring the cars to the top level.  You can imagine dragging a total wreck onto the elevator and having to drag it back off once upstairs.  Kam also sold thousands of Chevrolet's Oldsmobile's and Cadillac's, but actually once sold Fords in the beginning and Hudson and Essex cars before General Motors cars were sold.  Kam also sponsored and built a Jalopy, or stock car which was driven by a few different guys in the day such as Canary Trevisan and Bill Chepil.  My father even raced it a couple of times.  In the photo to the right note the large doors that were for repairing large trucks, which you can see in the photo with the #34 Chevrolet 6 cylinder powered Jalopy below.

Here's a photo of my father taken in the brand new body shop which was built behind the main Kam building with none other than and Oldsmobile Tornado in the background.  My dad always wore a hat and a tie while at work managing the shop.











OK...here we go again...what was at 234 Park Street in Port Arthur.  From the following invoice it says Campbell Motor Company of Port Arthur, Limited....Central Garage.  The Invoice was made out to Pigeon Timber or in long terms it should say Pigeon River Timber, as in Pigeon River Minnesota.....or at least named after that.  Campbell Motor Company did reside at 234 Park Street as mentioned which is now the North parking lot for our Casino.  You can click on all these items to enlarge and see them better.

This is the logo for Pigeon River Timber...the client shown on the invoices.

Here is another invoice for Campbell Motor Company on 234 Park Street and shows that they sell Dodge Brothers Motor Cars and Graham Brothers Trucks.

Here are two advertising pieces that would have been in Campbell Motors Showroom in the day, as of course they sold these vehicles.  Check on the above invoice for this data.

.....and this is what 234 Park Street looks like today

Stock Cars:  In the early days of racing here especially the 1950's, so many possible hot rod projects got destroyed on the race track such as '32 Fords, '40 Fords and many old Chevrolet's, Chrysler products etc, but in the day that was only considered junk in someone's back yard.  When I started racing at Riverview raceways, the junk in the back yards were '55 to '57 Chevrolet's, Pontiac's early '50's Fords etc., and we destroyed those vehicles then just as they did in the '50's.  I destroyed 3 '55/'56 Pontiac 2-door sedans, one of which was so nice, I drove it home before we proceeded to tear it down for a race car and weld in roll bars.  I also did that to a '66 Dodge Charger in the early 1970's to race at Riverview.......here are the examples.  Now everyone wants these cars....the cycle will never end....BUT, what cars from today will people want in 20 or 25 years.  They all look the same just as they did in the 1910's....funny how history repeats itself.

Finally:  A subject in this post that I always wanted to bring up...that is, The Powder Puff Gals from the 1950's.  The promoters from our Canadian Lakehead Exhibition race track always wanted to please the fans....they never wanted fans to get bored just watching the same old thing, so they promoted events such as stock car drivers staging fights in front of the old grandstand that sometimes turned into the real thing or grudge racing between two rivals...and it kept the fans coming in and proof in the pudding was that there were many race days with five to six thousand fans in the 1950's.
One of my favorite promoted events was Powder Puff Racing.  Some brave young women, some being wives or even mothers of the drivers there at the CLE would take to the track in their sons or husbands cars in all out daredevil competition.  I was great to see but in the mind site of the car owners and drivers they were sitting on tacks hoping that their cars wouldn't be destroyed before the race was over, as they had to continue racing the same day.  Eventually they would race last on race days so that if there was ever an accident, the car could at least be repaired for the next race day.
The first photo series is actually a page out of the 1953 racing program at the CLE showing those brave gals putting the pedal to the metal in those Jalopies...click to enlarge.

The second one here is a newspaper cut out showing a nice photo of the winner of the day Leona Baarup.  Another newspaper group photo is shown below.
How I miss those simpler times and days and many times wishing they could still be around....but thank goodness many photographers took pictures and many writers for the newspaper wrote incredible re-caps of the racing days back in the times of Hotrods and Jalopies.

The writers of these articles were fabulous.....you can see in the top corner here July 9/1953

Hope you enjoyed this post......let us know if you did, and join blogger so you don't miss any posts.  Thanks, Dave