{"id":2855,"date":"2009-08-30T16:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-30T20:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2009\/08\/old-home-week\/"},"modified":"2010-12-30T12:00:56","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T17:00:56","slug":"old-home-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2009\/08\/old-home-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Home Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pierce-Arrow<\/a><\/p>\n

One neat thing about the internet is the way it can put you in touch with friends you haven’t seen for many years. Not too long ago I heard from Midge Frueh Cortesi, whose father<\/a> I used to work for in my Farmall era<\/a>. We were able to share our memories of Falls Village<\/a>, the northwest Connecticut hamlet where we grew up. Her sister, Lauriann Cardinali alerted me to a Falls Village automotive artifact on eBay, the photo<\/a> that heads this feature.<\/p>\n

Many of you will recognize it from its headlights<\/a> as a Pierce-Arrow Model 33<\/a> from the early 1920s. It has been converted to a wrecker – you can see how it was cut down from a sedan in order to mount the wrecker boom<\/a>. This was the fate of many old prestige cars in the 1930s – they were cheap, sturdy and powerful, well-suited to towing disabled cars or disentangling wrecks.<\/p>\n

I remember Schreiber’s Garage<\/a>. We used to buy gas there, and have our car repaired. The Pierce wrecker was gone by the time we moved to town, replaced by a purpose-built 1935 Ford. I wondered, then, just when the photo was taken, so I began to look at it carefully.<\/p>\n

The wrecker is parked in front of a small store on Main Street. The garage<\/a> can be seen at the extreme right. The windows are open, so it must be a warm summer day. We can just see a car behind the wrecker, and on the car is a dealer plate<\/a> (plates for new car dealers in Connecticut, then and now, start with X). Schreiber’s was a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer<\/a>, so not surprisingly the car is a Plymouth, a 1938 model<\/a>, judging by the bumper guards. It looks pretty new and shiny, so perhaps the photo was taken that summer.<\/p>\n

But there are other clues, in the shop window behind. The most obvious isn’t much help. It advertises dry cleaning<\/a>. But on the other side is a movie poster, from the Stuart Theater<\/a> in nearby Lakeville. There’s another one from the Colonial Theater<\/a> in Canaan, the next town to the north. The Stuart burned on Christmas Day in 1958, but the Colonial is still standing – and operating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the posters, we can just make out the titles of two coming attractions, Lady of the Tropics<\/a> and The Wizard of Oz<\/a>. The extremely helpful Internet Movie Data Base<\/a> tells us that Lady, starring Robert Taylor<\/a> and Hedy Lamarr<\/a>, opened on August 11, 1939. Wizard, starring Judy Garland<\/a>, Frank Morgan<\/a>, Ray Bolger and <\/a> Bert Lahr<\/a>, came two weeks later, on the 25th. So it is indeed a summer picture, taken at the end of July or beginning of August 1939.<\/p>\n

Schreiber’s closed around 1955. The owner had died, and his widow sold up and moved away. The building was later occupied by John Fitch & Co.<\/a>, headed by the renowned racing driver<\/a> who built his Sprint<\/a> conversions for Corvairs there, and developed the stillborn Phoenix by Fitch<\/a> in 1966. It was later a grocery store. The building survives as 100 Main Street, home to Flying West Music<\/a>, the studio of composer Joshua Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So you can<\/i> go home again, and the internet can take you there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One neat thing about the internet is the way it can put you in touch with friends you haven’t seen for many years. Not too long ago I heard from Midge Frueh Cortesi, whose father I used to work for in my Farmall era. We were able to share our memories of Falls Village, the….<\/span>
Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3219,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions\/3219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}