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Post by dave on Jan 11, 2015 19:02:34 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Jan 11, 2015 19:11:07 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Jan 12, 2015 8:28:25 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Jan 12, 2015 8:33:25 GMT -5
This looks like some kind of payment book, probably where the customer or salesman entered a weekly payment and the salesman or his manager signed it. I remember my parents had or possibly my grandparents had such a payment for life insurance in the early fifties. Although I think my father paid by mail as soon as that option was available, the life insurance agent came around weekly or monthly for his premium. His compensation was to keep part of the premium.  |
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Post by Clipper on Jan 12, 2015 11:09:23 GMT -5
Thanks for posting the pictures Dave. I love looking back at things like these photos. I remember many of the things pictured. We still have a set of 8 of the water glasses with the leaf patterns. They are tucked away in the china closet for use only on special occasions. They were Kathy's mother's. Sealtest Ice Cream signs were quite prevalent around the area when I was a kid. Diners and the local mom and pop grocery stores often had a Sealtest sign with the name of their business on it. ( and a Bond Bread screen door guard on the entrance door)
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Post by kit on Jan 13, 2015 13:34:35 GMT -5
Ahh... the good ol' days. I remember all of the offerings except I never had a 5-year diary. Most of my actions in the early days weren't fit to be written down.
Could the accounting book possibly have been a bank-book like we had in grammar school? Mine looked a lot like that. Periodically there'd be a day that we'd bank however much we'd been able to save up since the last banking day. Good idea, but mine didn't amount to much when I cashed it in. Of course that was many years ago.
And Topo Gigio... I remember him well. He used to sit on Ed Sullivan's shoulder at say, "Kiss me goodnight, Eddie."
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Post by Clipper on Jan 13, 2015 14:06:05 GMT -5
I remember banking in school. The Gold Dome on the cover of the book, the little ledger inside. I put away money I earned babysitting, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and working on the farm. I actually put enough away in that account over a few years to purchase a riding lawn mower when we moved to Newport. Bought it at National Auto on Oriskany Street, and gave it to my dad for Father's day. He and I used to both take part in mowing the larger lawn we had in Newport. After I bought HIM the riding mower, I usually mowed with it and did the whole lawn, allowing him to discontinue his lawn mowing duties until I left for the Navy. Yes, there was a certain ulterior motive involved in the decision to give him that particular gift. haha. I also had enough in that little savings account to rent my tux for my prom and to pay for flowers and a dinner out for my date and I. I think I closed that account when I was a senior in high school and moved the remaining small balance to a new account at Oneida National in Middleville. When I closed out that Savings Bank account, I remember going to the main office on Genessee Street and speaking to Ruth Auert, a very nice old maid that rode the bus from Herkimer Rd every day and was a member of the Auert family so famous in Deerfield and N Utica history. I can still picture her flaming red hair done up in a bun or twist on the back of her head, that was usually topped by a fashionable hat of one sort or another.
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Post by kit on Jan 13, 2015 15:53:39 GMT -5
Oh gosh... I remember Ruth Auert. I think she also worked at the Utica Public Library but I could be wrong. Just a wisp of a lady, but so nice to young whipper-snappers like me. And yes, her hair was always pulled back into a bun, and not one hair out of place. As I recall, she had a rather large forehead which I always assumed to indicate that she was extremely intelligent.
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Post by dave on Feb 2, 2015 9:39:40 GMT -5
I may be wrong, but I think somewhere I have a photo of Ruth AuertI, an interior of The Savings Bank in the dead of winter in the 40's. I'll keep looking for it. It may be a shot I copied from that Utica site of pdf pages. Do you remember where that is? I lost my Bookmarks here.
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Post by dave on Feb 2, 2015 9:58:44 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Feb 2, 2015 11:12:39 GMT -5
 This photo brings back memories. When Bill Flynn bought my house the year I was born, 1943, from a local real estate agent's wife, she was fire-sale-ing property her husband had accumulated before he got on a train and slipped out of town to Florida ahead of IRS agents. The property was never encumbered and Bill went on to ply his truly terrible skills at home renovation.  He had nowhere to go but up. Nothing had been done to the house since someone put asbestos siding on it in the 1930's. Inside, things were much the same as they were when my old neighbor Artie's sister had been born on the kitchen table in nineteen teens. The cellar floor was dirt. There was no electricity, no plumbing, no closets. There was a well with a hand pump outside down the hill in back. There was a tar sink in the kitchen with a pump mounted on it. A pipe ran from it down through the floor to the cellar and into a cistern that filled when it rained. The gloom of rainy days was offset by the convenience of not having to walk down the hill to the outside pump for water.  Come forward from 1943 almost 35 years to 1977 when I bought the place and what Bill had wrought by then was plumbing and a modern submersible well pump, a not very high quality poured concrete cellar floor, an oil furnace in the cellar.to replace the two wood or probably coal stoves that had always heated the house, a cook stove located in the kitchen and a parlor stove at the other end of the house. Also, armored cable house wiring that ran to ceiling fixtures and wall outlets downstairs and pull-chain ceiling fixtures only upstairs. No outlets up there. We had to buy wind-up clocks for the bedrooms. Still no closets, we used Bill's homemade "wardrobes" with shower curtains on the fronts. But anyway, those glass fuses, 15 amps each. There was a small box in cellar where the power coming in from the pole out on the road was split into no more than four circuits, each through a glass fuse similar to the photo above. Just 4 fifteen amp fuses for the old place. 1. for the modern submersible well pump that provided our water. 2. for the oil furnace. 3. a circuit in the basement for the washing machine, etc. 4. the entire upstairs two floors. One of our first projects was to break up circuits and install a panel with 30 breakers. And we kept working on the place., adding a library in 1991 and completely re-doing the interior and exterior. Until we had wrought a velvet prison that was hard to leave.  But every year the mail lady would bring hard proof on paper that told us leaving was getting close. A letter from the assessor's office increasing our taxes. Seriously, that was only part of the reason we left. We had a good time there for 35 years and enjoyed our stay. I could have continued to pay the taxes. But when I considered ten more years there would cost me, from $100K to $150K in taxes (let alone energy) leaving got a whole lot easier. (The next ten years here will bring tax bills totaling about 5 or 6 thousand dollars.) And besides, you can't stay anywhere forever. Those who have moved themselves to another state in retirement will know what I mean when I say that there comes a point when you know it's time to leave. That a place ... a house, a town, is no longer as important as living the rest of your life with less encumbrance. We're still having fun. |
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Post by dave on Feb 28, 2015 21:45:50 GMT -5
Oh gosh... I remember Ruth Auert. I think she also worked at the Utica Public Library but I could be wrong. Just a wisp of a lady, but so nice to young whipper-snappers like me. I may be wrong, but I think somewhere I have a photo of Ruth AuertI, an interior of The Savings Bank in the dead of winter in the 40's. Here's the photo. It was right under my nose. I had included it in the Around Town work and forgotten about it until I came across it this evening. At her desk in the Gold Dome Savings Bank on a cold winter day, January 22, 1941.. If I were sitting there, you can bet I'd be wearing long underwear. I remember those desks in the 1950s and they were quite close to the front doors.  |
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Post by Clipper on Feb 28, 2015 22:22:40 GMT -5
I would imagine that the entire lobby of that bank was cold in the winter. With the high ceiling it seems that it would be hard to keep the heat down around one's feet as they sat with the draft sweeping across terrazo floors every time the door opened.
That photo was from the forties, and in the sixties she didn't look much different. She aged well. Always with the bun hair do and always with a hat when she was outside. She used to wear a little pill box hat in winter. Very nice lady and always very pleasant to speak with on the bus.
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Post by chris on Mar 22, 2015 14:57:12 GMT -5
Holy Moly I remember lots of those things (does that mean I'm old?) I remember Ruth Auert...well not so much remember but when you wrote the name it sounded familiar and then the face in the picture does too. Hmmm.
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Post by dave on Jun 21, 2015 19:24:36 GMT -5
Here are 12more photos of old stuff.           |
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