AN OLD BIRTHDAY PARTY & DIXIE CUPS.......right here in my home town....

Here's a post I've always wanted to do starting off with my 10th birthday photograph.  All the kids will be named....then I'll explain about the post.

 

This was taken in my back yard on my 10th birthday.

Left to right - Meyer Toole, Rick Joseph, with round glasses Randy Lang, with a bit of his head showing is Bobby Evens, the tall guy is Mitch Taddo, in front of him is Nancy Baker, the two little blonde girls in front are Sharon Harrison, and Laura Kellough, the red circled head is yours truly and to my left is Bruce Lees, the taller girl with straight hair is Darryl Wheatley and the far right is Kathryn Coppard.

Now.....as you can see in the next little "photo cutout" of the above photo is Rick Joseph and Randy Lang holding something I circled in yellow.  They are Dixie Cup lids with movie stars on them....so the next thing you should read is the story on the collage below this photo.

The title says Dixie Cup lids were our link to Hollywood....Be sure to click once and twice on all the photos for enlargements.

Here is how the top of the lid looked from Kellough Bros. Dairy (Port Arthur-Fort William), and if you pealed off a little onion skin cover from the inside, it would reveal a movie star photo, and as noted in the collage above, you would bring 10 lids to Kellough's Dairy to receive an official movie star poster.  You could even purchase a viewer to see these lids in 3D.  This was a time when you couldn't go down to your five and dime store and buy a movie star poster....they weren't just around unless you knew someone in the Movie Theatre business here in Fort William and Port Arthur.
The poster would look exactly like the ones below.

 

 

BETTY GRABLE - the beautiful war time gal
with Million Dollar legs!

FRED MACMURRAY - who played the father
in the popular TV series "My Three Sons" in the
1950's

 

The next few photos are of Kellough Brothers Dairy where all this took place!

This is the first Kellough Brother's Dairy building located on the corner of Brunswick and Cummings street in Fort William, Ontario, Canada

This is the dairy where we fed the horses up until the mid 1950's.  They were the last known in-town business to deliver with horse and wagon.  Here the handsome uniformed drivers are showing off their new early 1950's Ford delivery trucks. 

Now....this is the place where we would cash in our Dixie Cup lids for the posters.  It was located on the North/West corner of Victoria Ave and Selkirk street.....kitty corner from my grade school St. Mary's.

 To the left is a typical Kellough Bros. Dairy book or magazine ad for Fort William and Port Arthur Ontario, and to the right is a half pint Kellough Bros bottle from my collection.  The half pint bottles were quite common in the 1950's, as the dairy's would sell white, chocolate and cherry milk in them and were distributed to and sold by corner stores around the Fort William and Port Arthur Ontario area.  Your home distribution with the same silk screen painted bottles were delivered via delivery trucks above in pint and quart bottles.  The bottle were always returned to the dairy for refund and refill.  Finally to the left is a typical milk lid.

This was one of their large refrigerated delivery trucks with a photo taken a bit earlier than the ones in the photo further above.  The truck looks like a Diamond T, but I'm not totally sure.

Finally...this is what the horse drawn delivery wagon looked like from Kellough's Dairy.  The horses were kept and looked after right behind the Kellough building shown in the truck photo above.  I fondly remember going to the dairy after school to feed the horses and of course picking up my movie star poster by handing in 10 Dixie Cup lids....but....I actually have 4 in my collection today that I was glad I didn't cash in.....THOSE WERE THE DAYS.

Hoped you liked the post....Dave

Winter Memories of our home towns of Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario plus a few other tidbits......

With the accumulation of snow this year, it brought back an abundance of winter childhood memories.  At our coffee/gearhead weekly meetings we talked about the fact that the snow that has fallen with the recent storms is pretty much the same type of weather we remember having in the 1950's and '60's.  

As the streets get narrower around town due to the heavy snowfall, the city has been clearing many of the snow banks on major streets. I remember as a kid seeing these incredibly large snow blowers sucking up the banks around town and in turn blowing the snow into large trucks to be dumped down at the waterfront, either in Fort William and/or Port Arthur.

This is what one would have looked like in the 1930's....and would be a spectacle to watch to the delight of many kids and also adult kids.  Unfortunately this is not a local photo, as Fort William and Port Arthur wouldn't have a snow blower until the late 1940's and early 1950's, as you will see in next photo.

 

This next photo is in fact Fort William's first snow blower dutifully working on south May Street.  You can vividly see the O'Brien and Son's sand and gravel truck hauling the snow to somewhere along the Kam River or the Waterfront.  In those days, the city would contract out these trucks for their need. 

The next picture here is the actual location today, just across May Street from our City Hall, and just south of Blake's funeral chapel.  Blake's can also be seen just to the top left of the above photo.  As usual, click on all the photos for enlargements.

The next winter photo is of myself and my little sister (no I wasn't sleeping) in front of our home on east Arthur Street in Fort William.  The big building is St. Joseph's Boarding School (well...that's what they called it back in the 1950's).  They had huge skating rinks there and welcomed any kid that wanted to come over to play scrub hockey any evening or weekend.  Also, the Canadian National Railway line came down Arthur Street right through the city of Fort William.  The tracks turned east from the main line, came down Arthur, then started to turn north at Mark's Street and continued to the CN station which was just south of the Fort William Gardens along Vicker's Street and finally reconnected to the CN main line at the end of Vickers.  Notably there was ton's of snow back then, pretty much like we have today in Thunder Bay. 

 

This is how the same property looks today...no tracks, no St.

Joseph's Boarding School and not very much front yard anymore

where we lived there on Arthur Street.  Off in the distance on

the left is Pope John Paul school and the tall building on the

right is Arthur Square on the corner of Marks and Arthur.  The
Pope John Paul property was the old St. Patrick High School
property.

 

The following winter photo was taken about the same time as the one above and is my little sister sitting on a small sled.  I posted this photo to show you that every home in those days had a 45 gallon drum incinerator in which we burned (burnable) garbage or discarded building materials or what have you and only placed non burnable garbage items out for the city to pick up.....It was a great way at the time to reduce the buildup at the city landfill site, and you didn't need a permit to do so.  Also, most people still hung their clothes on the line even in the cold weather.  I remember my dad's frozen long johns standing up on their own.

Here is a wonderful picture of the corner of Victoria Avenue and Syndicate Avenue taken in the winter of 1917.  You know that if you stand where this picture is, you would be smack dab in the middle of our favourite indoor mall in our town....the one we love to hate, "Victoriaville".  The building on the left is the north/east corner.  A wonderful Trolley Street Car is headed for a turn south on Syndicate Ave.



Screw Driven Vehicle

The following few photos are not taken locally but are very interesting to say the least.  The first vehicle here is a screw driven sled which would be pretty versatile and very innovative back in the early part of the 20th century.  The little film below shows its concept in 1929.  It's about 4 1/2 minutes long but worth the look.




Propeller Driven.

The mail must go through with this model "T" Ford conversion.

 

 

Finally here, we have the same version of the mail vehicle above, on a Ford Model "A" chassis, taken in Alaska....what a great way to get around on the snow.  I would love to own one today.
HR&J hopes that you enjoyed this and thanks for watching.

BUCKET LIST #1 NOW CHECKED OFF - My Good Friend Dennis Winko and I were in Pomona California Jan 22-30th 2014 for the 65th Annual Grand National Roadster Show.

This post is a little diversion from what I usually do on my blog but feel that it would be nice to share.

To go to an event of this magnitude and to take over 1300 photos, it was extremely difficult to decide which ones to use and which ones to leave out.....so to help things out, I grouped a number of them together which are of common interest, but sadly reducing their clarity.  Be sure to click on each of the photos and groups of photos twice to get a full screen or larger, then you can scroll around to view them all. 
My good friend Dennis Winko and I spent an incredible 8 days in the Los Angeles area, not only to attend the 65th annual Grand National Roadster Show, but to visit some hot rod shops and automotive museums in the area and take in some of the local sights as well.  These photos however are all from the show and taken by myself.
...oh...a little side note "AMBR" means America's Most Beautiful Roadster.

This is the main hall and largest of 9 buildings.  The photo was taken from the center of the building so it only shows half the length of the hall.

We were there on set-up day and these two photos show the contrast of what you could see and everything in between.  That's Dennis beside a very cool deuce roadster barn find and the one on the right is an AMBR contender owned by Ron Goodwin.  Ron's car was one of our first choices to win.

This is a full restoration of Ed Roth's Surfite by Rick Rawlins.....it wouldn't be a California show without a surf mobile!!

 Bizarreness was the order of the day and this "Blitzen Benz" by Bob Burman was a great example.

Love the California "Horseless Carriage" plate

The theme of the show this year was 100 years of Bonneville, and there was a huge representation of Bonneville cars from over the last 100 years.  Heading to Bonneville for speed weeks is another thing we have to do to check off our bucket list.  The only photo that wasn't actually in the show is the Challenger 1.  It actually resides in the Wally Parks Drag Racing Museum just adjacent to the fairgrounds.  We did attend that on Thursday before the show, and felt that it was the best automotive museum that we had seen on this trip including the Peterson Museum.

Check out this film of Mickey Thompson breaking the 400 MPG Speed Barrier.  This is the same car we saw in the Wally Parks Museum.

Next we have Ron Main and his Flatfire engine and Streamliner.  Dennis was in his glory talking to Ron about flatheads and I just stood there and tried to take it all in.....one's never to old to learn something new.  Read this poster about his very fast flathead Ford.

The following group of photos are vintage drag cars, and we had a nice chat with Bill Corbett (originally from Victoria B. C.) who owns and restored the purple 1948 Fiat Topolino shown in the following photo group....the car is also the cover car for this months Rodder's Journal.

Exotic engines and actually mostly flathead Fords were the trend here in California.  Chrysler Hemi, Studebaker, Cadillac, Buick, Ford 4cyl and Flathead Fords were the most popular engines seen in cars at the show, many of which had McCullough Superchargers.   There were very few Chevrolet V8's, especially in hot rods and if there were they were nicely disguised as something else.

Next, you could buy a pair of deuces here....beautifully done real steel replicas.  The one from Sweden was interesting at $15,000. US dollars and we felt left a lot to be desired in detail.  The real deal as far as we were concerned was sold by SoCal and was extremely nice looking, more like an original body, but the price tag was near $28,000. and that was just for a body shell.....way over my head!!  I've had my own deuce back when but now I'll stick to the much more reasonable model "A", and having just as much fun as they are.

The one from Sweden is on the left and the already chopped SoCal one is on the right.

Next, we have some hot rods and custom cars scattered around the buildings and some even outside the buildings on drive-in day which was Saturday.  The body work and paint schemes were absolutely incredible....giving any gear-head some great custom ideas.

Next, we have some hot rods and custom cars mostly from the "Suede Palace".  My own car would have fit nicely along side some of these.  The vehicles in the "Suede Palace" had their own judging and awards program.  Some of the most interesting ones were the original barn finds of cars built back in the '50's or '60's which have survived the test of time and left in their patina state.  The one we liked the most was Greg Hopkins '31 model "A" roadster of unknown origin shown top left below.

We couldn't pass up the trophy girl contest that was held in the Suede Palace on Saturday night.  It was very interesting to say the least.  A few good Rockabilly and Blues bands also graced the stage there through the weekend.

One of the things I had planned to do was to get my friend Shaun Hopkins here in Thunder Bay to paint my glove box door from my custom '41 Chevy dashboard that I'm using in my next project a nice gloss black and bring it with me to have it pinstriped and autographed by George Barris and Gene Winfield.  The pinstripers would volunteer their work and you would then make a donation to Ronald McDonald House.  Other pieces of art by the stripers were auctioned off.

Well as you can see by the photos below that it all came to fruition.  Two pinstripe artists did a great job and George and Gene did sign it as well as the artists and "Deuce of Spades" film maker Faith Granger.  Thank you Shaun for painted it for me and getting this plan started.

Top left is myself with George and his grandson, top right is Gene signing the piece, bottom left is Gene with Dennis, center is Gene shaking hands, and bottom right is the artist Ric Malicoat.

Here are a few more pictures pretty much self explanatory!

They gave away 100's of trophy's and awards and we were very fortunate to have great seats for the awards and closing ceremonies.  Even though we didn't agree with the judges on their final pick for AMBR, all the cars were incredibly beautiful, and I could never afford one damn one....but Dennis and I still have tons of fun with our Model "A" Fords.

Dennis and I were very fortunate to have been able to attend The 65th Grand National Roadster Show, an event I've wanted to attend since I was in my teens.  Hey Den, aren't you glad I waited until you retired...Dennis is a great travel companion.  We had a fabulous time that we'll talk about for years.  Also thank you to my old friend Bryan Howland who was our tour guide for a day to the Peterson Museum and throughout the Hollywood area.  Bryan is a childhood friend of mine and lives in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles suburb and we've only seen each other 3 times since 1958, but talk often and email often....great time!

Dave and Dennis in the Suede Palace.

This final group of pictures reminded me of the old Fort William Gardens car shows....at the end of the show you would stand outside to see the guys coming out of the Gardens and rapping their pipes and smoking their tires.....wonderful memories.

I hope you enjoyed this sort of unusual post on this blog !!  Thanks for watching...D.