An historic place to me!

[horrorhunter]

     I made the rounds to all the dime stores and newsstands in my home town like everyone else. I grew up in the '60s/early '70s so I picked up lots of toys, models, comics, and monster mags when I could scrounge up the dough. When I first started buying comics they were 12 cents, and a really big candy bar was 5 cents. Sodas in a GLASS bottle were a dime. I could get an Ice Cream Sandwich for a dime. I remember opening up the floor cooler with the sliding glass top to get cold goodies and the glass always fogged up in summer since there was little or no air conditioning, only fans. I could take a buck and buy a Dr. Pepper, a Fifth Avenue candy bar, and a whole stack of comics, and still have money left.
     My family used to go on vacation to Florida every year. We always went through St. Petersburg and stayed for a couple of days because my Dad was stationed down there at Drew Field during World War II. We would always go to an awesome bookstore called Haslams. That store was huge, like a maze. They had new and used books, as well as comics and monster mags. I always loaded up on cool reading material for the rest of the trip. Many of the hardback monster movie tomes in my collection were purchased off the bargain tables at Haslams Books. As far as I know Haslams is still there. I was there about 8 years ago and bought Walking With Dinosaurs (book), Charles Addams' Mother Goose, and three Conan paperbacks from the '70s. That is one cool bookstore.

[Dr. Madd]

Got my first monster, second hand. a switchable head grim reaper.

[Hepcat]

Huh?! Do you mean an MPC Pop-Top? Where and when?

 

[Hepcat]

I found some really good pictures of the London, Ontario of my formative years. The only thing they lack is me!

Here's a picture of the Arena Dairy Bar on York Street sometime in the early fifties:



Sadly I have no memory of this old time dairy bar but it must have been located right by the old London Arena a few blocks away from our house. I have really fond memories of going to the London Arena for the Labatt Brewing Company's employee Xmas party with cake, ice cream, cookies, a magician and finally Santa Claus with a specially wrapped present for each and every kid in attendance!



The London Arena also featured roller skating and wrestling with grapplers such as Whipper Billy Watson, Johnny Valentine, D ick "The Bulldog" Brower and Sweet Daddy Siki in the fifties and sixties. I also attended a concert by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention in the London Arena in 1973 the day after partying with my buddies in Toronto the previous evening prior to the 1973 Grey Cup tilt between the Edmonton Eskimos and the Ottawa Rough Riders.

Robb's Dairy Bar was located two very short blocks away from where my card collecting buddy Tony lived. Drat, but it closed sometime in 1958(?) and I don't remember ever noticing it.



One of the things that I do remember from those early years and sorely miss is milk delivery in returnable refillable bottles!

 

I remember Borden's, Silverwood Dairy, London Pure Milk Company and Mark Ayres Dairy delivery vehicles prowling London's leafy streets:

 

 

My home town dairy, Silverwood, grew by acquisition to become the largest dairy in Canada by the late sixties and still provided home delivery service in certain markets well into the seventies(eighties?).

Both Silverwood Dairy and the London Pure Milk Company still had horse drawn milk wagons wending their way along London streets until sometime in the mid-sixties. It was back in 1963-64 that my mother and I saw that the train car being backed into the Labatt Breweries plant had somehow collided with a Silverwood's horse much to the detriment of the latter. Her uncharitable comment at the time was that Labatt didn't want people to drink milk.

Here are a couple of pictures of Silverwood's milk wagons:

 

 

Here's a picture of a more modern sixties state-of-the-art London Pure Milk Company wagon:

 

We also had home bread delivery from London's own Lewis Bakeries for a while when we lived in Manor Park on the edge of London in the fifties. Many a housewife's household budget was blown succumbing to the pastry temptations proferred that day by the bread man! Best of all though my buddy Dave had a job helping the Jackson's Bakeries bread man make his deliveries Saturday mornings. Talk about a marriage made in heaven! All the delivery man had to do was drive since he had a young boy doing most of the work for him, and Dave got to ride around in a very cool bread delivery truck and run to each house on the route carrying bread in a basket! I'll have to ask Dave whether he received anything more than free tarts and other pastries for his efforts....

I also have a hazy memory of having journeyed to the beach with my mother and sister on the London & Port Stanley Railway one summer day in 1957(?). It would have been on an interurban car like this beautifully restored one that's part of the collection of the Halton County Radial Railway Museum:

 

 

Here's a picture of the main Richmond Street and Dundas Street intersection of London from the late fifties. I bought many of my comics in the United Cigar Store which was on the southeast corner of that intersection.

 

Here's a great view of the north side of Dundas Street shot from just slightly to the east of that corner:



Here's a good picture circa late fifties of the Kresge store on the north side of Dundas Street just west of Richmond Street:

 

That was the store where I first saw a Marx Great Garloo in 1961 and discovered the Aurora monster model kits a year or so later. Just beyond it the Metropolitan(Met) store can be seen. The Met's lunch counter did such a thriving business that they had a satellite take-out counter at the front of the store where office workers could quickly grab a hamburger, hot dog, French fries, coffee, donut, etc. to go. Across the street to the left in the picture was a Woolworth store. The Zellers store was directly to the right of the camera man.

My mother used to take me in tow and haunt them all. I lived for hitting her up for a steel bowl of ice cream at one of the lunch counters after she was fully shopped out. I remember the ice cream being served in a stainless steel dish with a cardboard insert. 

And here's a picture from the fifties of Cowan Hardware on Dundas basically across the street from the Metropolitan store. I used to visit Cowan's to admire toys and model kits.



Cowan's was also where I raced my Monogram Ferrari slot cars after a slot car track was installed upstairs in 1965(?). Good times! Just out of the picture was the Ontario Conservatory of Music where I lugged my accordion on the bus for my weekly lessons. Not entirely good times.

Look at the riot of neon in this picture looking west along Dundas Street circa 1962!



Finally from downtown here's a great shot of the Victoria Theater circa 1956 which was just off Dundas on a side street.



The Victoria was a classic grindhouse with a balcony from which kids would fling flattened popcorn boxes onto the poor unfortunates below. This of course would prompt warnings from chagrined ushers that throwing objects from the balcony was strictly forbidden.

The Hyland was my neighbourhood theatre on Wharncliffe Road just down from Ken's Variety where in the early sixties I used to take in Saturday matinee double features with a cartoon for $0.20:



Here it is these days:

[Hepcat]

Any more recollections of your home town from back in the day?

 

[Hepcat]

I found this photo today while cleaning up my studio. It was taken circa 1978-79. I was taking a photography class in college and we had to do an "environmental piece", showing someone in their environment. The bookstore to the left in this photo is where I got the majority of my Famous Monsters and Castle of Frankensteins fresh off the news stand. It was located in a strip mall in north Dayton, right in front of the apartment complex where my Grandma lived. We would drive across town to see her, and it was my one shot at getting a monster mag. For whatever reason the drug stores where we lived didn't carry monster mags. So it was a good thing to go see Grandma. I enjoyed seeing her and enjoyed getting a new issue of FM. I had to have a bag when I purchased anything because if my folks saw it they would inevitably find it and throw it away. I rescued a few issues from the trash.

The shop itself was one of those stores just *crammed* to the walls with newspapers, paperbacks, magazines, maps, etc. There wasn't room for many customers all at once at any given time. Luckily whenever I went there they weren't busy. That store was very important to this monster kid, and I'm glad I took the photo when I did!

Here's an unobscured picture of that north Dayton newsstand:



 

[Mike Scott]

Here's an unobscured picture:

Looks the same, to me.

[Hepcat]

No longer! I went the extra mile.