Growing Up On Cedar-THE NEW MORROWS

Downtown Cedar Street! Wow, it was exciting to grow up during some of the great eras of Wallace. It wasn't "Historic Wallace" back then, We weren't historic, infamous, yes, but historic? Nope. History was one of my loves in subject matter, and to me, history was about Rome, Greece, the East Coast, San Francisco, and Lewis/Clark, but not little old Wallace, Idaho. Nope, Wallace was simply a hard-working town where the good folks worked and played hard, really hard.

Amazingly, Wallace, for being such a small city, was gifted with a downtown core more like one would find in a much larger place, like Spokane or Seattle. Each one of these fine merchants was very individualized unlike the box trap stores of today. Last week, I talked about Gene's Radio Shop, which was one of my favorite stores, especially around Christmas time. Today, I want to start a few days of stories about different businesses in Wallace.

 Our family home was 218 Cedar, and so, we were just a few blocks away from the downtown core of business, Now some of these were establishments that well, let's just say, my mother did not approve of some of them, but most of them were just good, hard-working merchants trying to make a living.

Walking towards downtown from my home on Cedar, the first real business that one came to was the fine department store, THE NEW MORROWS. Yes, Wallace had a department store, and it was a very good one. Morrows was owned at that time by a husband and wife team, the Thompsons, Gus and Minn.

My first real job was in Morrows, but more about that later. I know that it must be hard to believe for those young people growing up today in Wallace, or for those transplants who moved to Wallace in recent years, that Wallace was a real town, but it was. Morrows actually had three floors of shopping for a while and included Anthony's, a fine jewelry store, and  Morrow's Lunch Counter.

There was a men's wear department, full of ties, dress shirts, work shirts, work pants, dress pants, boots, tennis shoes, dress shoes, and mining boots. It had everything a man or young man could need. There was also a women's clothing department, a lingerie department, an infant's department, suitcases, bags, accessories, and of course fabrics and sewing items. Upstairs there was a really nice women's dress department, and the accounting and business office. It was quite a nice department store and one that I remember very fondly. I wish that it was still there.

I TOLD YOU THAT THEY LAST FOREVER

You’re probably not going eat that fruitcake, but instead of using it as a doorstop or throwing it away, just shove it in your closet — it might pay for a lot of Christmas presents one day.
An Arizona man shelled out $525 for a 70-year-old fruitcake in an online auction Thursday. The proceeds of the sale in Ohio will go to helping the homeless.
The cake was made by The Kroger Co. in 1941 and sold at a Cincinnati area store, and returned by its original owner unopened, complete with an explanatory note, to a Kroger shop 30 years later.
The manager of the store kept it in his home until this year, when he decided to auction it off through the Elite Estate Group in Cincinnati.
"The cake is still in its original tin, never been opened and has the original label on the box," Larry Chaney, owner of auction house, told ABC News.
The auction site advertised the cake as "one of those items everyone talks about and now you can own."
An even older Christmas cake just celebrated its 100th birthday in Minnesota. Baked in 1911 and discovered in a closet in 1992, the spice cake's frosting had disintegrated and the nuts sprinkled on top had become petrified, the Star Tribune reported.
Both cakes were most likely soaked in brandy or rum, which helped preserve them.
With News Wire Services

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fruit-cake-sells-auction-525-article-1.996456#ixzz1hZicZ91Q

Some Picutres from my past Christmas blogs.

Merry Christmas, Everyone. Enjoy the most wonderful day of the year. Be kind to each other.

Traditions

A daughter was watching her mom prepare the turkey for their Thanksgiving dinner. The daughter noticed that her mom had cut one of the turkey’s legs off before placing it in the oven…when the daughter examined the turkey leg, it seemingly looked normal. This was something that her mom did every year, and always puzzled the daughter…so this time the daughter asked her mom, “why do you always cut off the turkey leg? is there something wrong with it?”  The mom responded, “Actually, I’m not sure…it was something that my mother always did, and I guess it just stuck with me. Why don’t you ask grandma later tonight”. So that is what the daughter did. When her grandma arrived later that evening she asked her, “Grandma, why do you cut off the turkey leg before placing it in the oven?”, but she got the exact same answer, the grandma did not know why and told her she should ask her great grandma once she got here. So when her great-grandmother arrived she asked her, ”great grandma? why do you cut the turkey leg off of the turkey before placing it in the oven? Both mom and grandma do it too, but they don’t know why…”, the great-grandmother chuckled and said, “honey, I cut it off because our oven was too small to fit the entire turkey inside”.

Now, that is another way traditions get started. This is an old story, first told in Jewish traditions, but very applicable to all walks of life.

Remembering Christmas and Gene's Radio Shop in Wallace

I was reading an obituary the other day about the passing of a Wallace lady whom I remember quite well as a clerk in several Wallace retail shops. One of the shops was Gene's Radio, later on it became a Gambles. When I reflect on Christmas memories of my childhood, Gene's Radio Shop is always the first store to come to mind.

Gene's was first located up by the Wilma Theater, and was not much more than a hole in the wall, but it was stocked full of wonderful merchandise. My brother and I bought our first  airplane models to put together from Gene's Radio. Then, expansion came, and Gene's Radio moved down Cedar Street to the middle of town. It was here that my more vivid  memories take shape. For, it was here, that the latest 45 and 33 1/3 PRM albums could be found.Gene's Gambles, as it was now called, was very well stocked with records for being in a small town like Wallace.

Records were not the only types of merchandise that Gene's carried. Gene's Gambles was loaded with toys, furniture, washer and dryers, televisions, model trains, and thousands of other items. I loved going into that store during the Christmas shopping season. Most of the gifts, other than clothes, that I got in my early years came from that store.

One of the coolest things about Gene's was that on New Year's Day, Gene would open the store up so that the locals could come in and watch the Rose Bowel on color television. What a treat that was! My brother and I would had down there every year to watch a game in "living color".

Well, this was not an exciting blog today, but I just wanted to share my memories of Gene's Radio Shop. I wish that it was still there.

Weapon of Mass Destruction Found at local Post Office.

This weapon of mass destruction was found in my post office box yesterday. It is being investigated by the proper authorities.

Authorities say that  this is truly frightening, and said that they tried to blow it up, but, it appears to be constructed to last hundreds of years. endangering future generations.

Deer Oh Deer

I never get tired of seeing them no irregardless of how many that I have seen over the years. Growing up in Wallace we were certainly not strangers to deer. However, it is different now,and I have never been more in awe.

This morning at 6:20 as I was taking my wife to work, we rounded the corner from our apartment, and standing right in the middle of the street was a beautiful, fully grown doe. I stopped the car as the doe did the deer thing of freezing in the head lights. After giving us the once over, she gracefully moved over to the side of  the street , and we proceeded on our way.This is the third such incident this Fall.

One of our favorite thing to so is to drive over to Fernan Village in middle of the afternoon and drive around the circle of houses, and most of the time, we will see four to five deer in the yards. Last weekend we drove over there to see the Christmas lights, and even at a much later hour, we passed a house that had two deer sleeping in the yard. 

We do, though, miss seeing elk here. Since we moved to CDA, we have not seen even one elk, At my parents home in Osburn, we saw elk all of the time. However, we are content to see the deer for now, and we still marvel about how blessed we are to live where animals roam so freely.

DId I Say Something Wrong?

 I was invited to a pot-luck dinner the other day, and when I was asked what I was going to bring to it I said "a bong I guess". They withdrew the invitation. Did I  say something wrong?

Several days ago I was eating in a restaurant ad the waitress asked if I wanted my order a la carte,and I told her, "no thank you, just put it on the table."She thought I was being a smart aleck.Did I say someting wrong?

I have some food allergies, and one thing will send me to the hospital is to eat sesame seeds. So many hamburger buns have seeds on them, that I must always be careful t check it out before I order a hamburger in a restaurant, So, the other day, I asked the server if she had sesame seeds on her buns. She slapped me . Did I say something wrong?

Wow, people are just too sensitive.

How To Make A Christmas Dinner to Remember

Don't stress about making Christmas dinner for the ten guests that you have invited for dinner. Go to your favorite box store that has a "Mart" the name, and for only .98 per dinner, that is only $9.80 for all ten guests, you can serve a dinner that your guests will remember for a life time. It is a dinner chalked full of , well, it it chocked full of something, and there will be very little of that dreaded kitchen mess afterwards.Dessert included.

This post is dedicated to Go Figure

An Alaska man survived on nothing but frozen cans of Coors Light for three days when his car got stuck in a snowdrift in a remote part of the state.
Clifton Vial, 52, found himself stranded in his Toyota Tacoma more than 40 miles outside the city of Nome on Nov. 28, with no cell phone service, limited layers for warmth and no food.
"I made an attempt at digging myself out and realized how badly I was stuck," said Vial, who was only wearing tennis shoes, jeans and a cheap jacket.
“I would have been frost-bit before I ever got the thing out of there."
Temperatures fluctuated from minus 12 to minus 17, according to the National Weather Service.
Vial scoured his car for food and found only a few cans of Coors Light, which were frozen solid.
“I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife,” he told the Anchorage Daily News.
Vial used a fleece sleeping bag liner to stay warm and wrapped a bath towel around his feet and another over his knees and thighs.
He stuffed rags in his clothes and jammed tissue paper around his feet.
He occasionally turned on the truck to use the heater and listen to the radio but when the low-gas light came on, he limited himself to once a day.
"I felt really p----- at myself," Vial told the Anchorage Daily News.
“When I was just sitting there in my coat in the sleeping bag liner, I would pull my arms inside my T-shirt to try and utilize my body heat as much as I could," he added.
“That worked fine for some time, as far as keeping my torso warm and my arms. But my legs and feet where getting pretty cold."
When he failed to show up for his operator mechanic job at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 29, alarm bells were raised.
"He's a very punctual employee," his boss, John Handeland, said.
“By 4 o'clock, we figured something was wrong.”
Vial’s coworkers began to patrol the town, and the police, fire department and troopers were mobilized the following day, dispatching teams on the ground and in planes and helicopters.
Vial’s 60-hour ordeal ended Thursday morning when rescuers finally found him.
The first thing they gave him was a Snickers bar and orange soda.
When he got on the scale, he had lost 16 pounds
but was otherwise healthy.
“I shouldn't have been out there by myself unprepared for what I knew was possible,” he said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/clifton-vial-survives-coors-light-3-days-stuck-alaska-snowdrift-article-1.987044#ixzz1flzpVP5D

Now, The perfect Santa

My Grandson.

Yes, it it that time of the year again.

 

Hm, careful, we don't know where that thumb has been.