Photos From Back When

[chris]

Does this look familiar ?

[Clipper]

Pelletieri Joes. Didn't make it there this trip. We DID make it to O'Scuinizzo's though, and Bobbiez brought Patio Drive-in chili for the hot dogs when we had our cookout. Bought lots of goodies at Chanatry's meat counter, and had haddock fish fries not once, but twice. We like to go to Joe's and order a couple plates of peppers, both hot and sweet, an order of sausages or meatballs, and a bucket of soda. They bring all that crusty Italian bread and we put the peppers and meatballs on a slice or two of bread and pig out. Sometimes it takes two or three orders of peppers and more than one plate piled high with bread to satisfy our appetites.

[dave]

I have no idea where the name came from, but everyone I knew ... outside of Mom's hearing ... called it Scabby Joe's. Honest.

[Clipper]

My goodness Dave. I don't know either. I never noted the owner or any waitstaff or cooks with running sores or large ugly scabs. lol

The place is no palace but I have always found it to be a clean and acceptable spot. Definitely without frills. Old tables, an odd assortment of chairs, and old walls and floors. They have put their efforts into the food and drink rather than making it a Mediterranean movie set. I have never been in the cellar where much of the heavy cooking takes place, but I HAVE read the health department write ups and they don't get any horrid reviews noting roaches or rodent infestation.

If I were to find a guy named Joe, picking his scabs while making meatballs I would probably take my business elsewhere, lol.

[dave]

But we went there all the time and it was considered a treat. My brothers and I loved their meatball sandwiches. My grandmother always went with us and she liked the lasagna, while my parents always had the spaghetti. I really don't know where the name came from. And you're right, it was as clean a place as any.

[dave]

Oh, and this endeared them to my older brother and I. Aside from Nofri's in Whitesboro, they were the only restaurant we knew in Utica at that time to have Bill Haley and The Comets on their juke box.

(I'll bet Duane Allman got his idea for repetitive background riffs from songs such as this. Haley did this often with his songs for The Comets.)


Compare to Allman Brothers,

[Clipper]

The place always had specials every day. I remember that one of them was lamb and on the day that it was prepared, the fans flocked in for supper. Everything I ever had there was good. I didn't find their sauce to be anything extraordinary but it was good and the prices were right. I don't ever remember leaving there hungry. It was a reasonably priced place to take a family for a supper out. When I was young enough to tolerate the burn, I loved their long hots and would eat them along with sweet peppers on slices of the fresh bread. I loved the idea that you could order meatballs, sausages, peppers, or anything else all by themselves and make your own combinations of whatever your favorites were. Another family oriented and favorite Italian place was Pescatore's on Albany Street. Mom and dad would order a fish fry and us kids would get spaghetti.

There were a couple of other places that I liked to go to grab lunch or a quick bite. Donalty's had the greatest sandwiches, beans, and limburger of anyone in the city, and the best draft beer to wash it down with. Kozar's had the best perogi and galobki in the city at the time. Any ethnic specialty could be found in a little out of the way corner place. We lived quite well without Pizza Hut and Olive Garden.

[dave]

"We lived quite well without Pizza Hut and Olive Garden. "

That is for certain. I remember one uncle and my father taking us to Donalty's late on a summer evening after watching the 20th Century Limited fly down the platform at Utica's Union Station. We weren't ordinarily allowed on that platform when the 20th came through, but another uncle got us up the stairs past his office under the tracks where he was the railroad plumber.

At Donalty's we'd pull up to the curb and the men would go in and bring out ham sandwiches with beers for themselves.

Re Joe's, I remember the signs along the walls for the various specials. Sitting in the back room where it was rather subdued, but not too much, you could always hear the roar coming down the hall from the front of the place. Before leaving we used the bathrooms and followed my father to the front where he paid the bill. The front was alive with people eating, drinking, talking, shouting, laughing ... the life of East Utica.

I seem to remember Joe's most when we'd come down in the evening from Whitesboro where we lived one fall while Dad tried out (and rejected) a National Home built among others in some far flung corn field up Woods Road. I think my father missed the life of the city. We soon returned to live in a flat in West Utica and then on Cornhill by 1957. He'd been brought up on Mohawk Street down by Bleecker and was steeped in Utica. He wound up in living out his life in the Steinhorst Apartments behind Chicago market. Practically in his old neighborhood.

My ode to our short life in Whitesboro (where my grandparents came from, by the way) I entitled "Nowhere."
www.windsweptpress.com/nowhere.pdf

[Clipper]

My favorite at Donalty's was a liverwurst sandwich with a slice of onion and hot mustard. I also liked the sliced limburger cheese served on a plate. I would drizzle cider vinegar over it and sprinkle it with pepper and eat it with a fork. Yep! Mouthwash for lovers for sure, haha. Of course limburger is also good in a sandwich with onion and mustard. My mom used to make dad and I keep our limburger in a coffee can in the cellar way or garage. It made it very soft and spreadable, but also intensified the offensive odor.

I know the National Homes you are speaking of on Woods Road. Bob Morris ( who later owned the NH Shopping Center) owned a company called Savage Homes. They put up those prefabricated National Homes all over the area. We lived in one on Jamestown Ave, off Keyes Road. They sold for $9999, no money down for veterans. They were not very well constructed. The studs were 2x3's and the sheetrock was thin. The furnace was in the hallway and blew from vents there at the furnace, with the exception of one vent under the kickboard of the kitchen cabinets. If you closed the bedroom door at night you would freeze. My sister once slipped on the tile floor while coming out of the bathroom in her socks. She put her foot right through both layers of sheetrock and her foot was sticking out in the bedroom. lol. They served a very good purpose for first time home buyers and young couples looking for affordable housing. When the sun rose in the morning, there would be a line of tractor trailers on Keyes Road. By that evening there would be a half dozen more homes standing, awaiting the final inside work.

[dave]

National Homes were never built well, not any I ever saw. However, there was a development of them in the town I lived in up north that were a bit better built than those off Woods Road.

That's right, the basic house was $9.999 in 1952, plus a thousand or so for a separate garage. No heating vents and the oil furnace was a pot burner (not a gun burner). 2x3 studs exterior and interior. National finished one house each day. We were gone by the end of December. All I remember is how cold it was. I can't imagine what January and February were like.

[Clipper]

In later years when ours was built ( around 1960) they had improved a little bit. They had an attached garage and a gas forced air furnace. The insulation was not good. Our roof was always almost bare in winter or else we had ice dams along the eaves that my dad had to climb up and remediate. I was never one to wear house slippers, but those houses on a concrete slab with the poor system of heating forced me to wear them. Our bedroom was like a walk in cooler. If we kept the door shut we could have hung swinging sides of beef in there in winter, haha. The heat was as bad as the cold when summer rolled around. Three inch walls and masonite siding were not very energy efficient.

We lived in ours for about 3 years before moving to Newport. It was a stepping stone when we returned to NY from Arizona when dad lost his machinist job in Phoenix. He actually drove a Hathaway Bread Truck until he was able to get into Chicago Pneumatic and later into UNIVAC when he finished his degree in engineering. Anything to feed his family.

[dave]

I often think about the things we did to get educated, keep up an income to feed self and family, play the game of life. It seems ... I don't know how true it is, but it SEEMS ... we did a lot more for ourselves than some in the current generation of young people. Mrs. Dave and I lived in a house trailer while I went to school and she worked in a shopping center. The trailer measured 10 by 32 feet and had no interior doors. When the west wind whipped up across the hill today known as Fairmont, the rear wall of the trailer popped like the top of a tin can. Water seeped into the closet during the winter and froze our shoes to the floor. I had two part time jobs in addition, one at my former employer and the other nights and weekends at Daws Drugs. I learned to fix my car because I couldn't afford to take it to a garage. I remember going to a dentist with a toothache two weeks after our son was born while I was still a student and trying to pay him, but he fixed my tooth for free. And when we had to move, our 15 pounds of hamburger got misplaced and spoiled and we had to go without meat until I told the story to a fellow employee as a joke on myself. He told our manager and the man insisted I borrow $20 from him to buy food for my family.

And absolutely none of that seemed like the end of the world. Not when we were young. Except for the time the main drain in the trailer stopped up and I had no idea how to fix it after trying with various snakes. I finally gave up. I had no money, but I was considering asking my Dad for a small loan so I could call Roto Rooter. When I called Rooter to check on how much they would charge, they told me they did not work on trailers because the T's in the drains often somehow ruined their equipment. I remember sitting there in the kitchen, my pregnant wife at work that evening, feeling the full weight of facing a problem I could not solve. Tears of frustration may have begun to wet my eyes as I kept trying to think of a solution. The phone rang and it happened to be my brother in law in Atlanta calling to say hello. He also had a solution ( a longer, thinner snake I didn't know existed, and where to rent one cheap.)

We knew we'd get through it, that someday I'd get a good job and we'd have two cars, a dog, two kids, a house and all that stuff. We just needed to keep ourselves from going into debt.

That's what saved us. Never taking on any debt. Driving a car with the fenders falling off, suffering the looks of people we parked next to in parking lots, stretching our clothes till they were threadbare and finding our furniture at garage sales. So that when the money began to come in we could apply it to items we needed rather than use it to pay off loans taken out on things we didn't need. That was called basic money sense by our parents and those before them. Worked for us.

[Deleted]

Jul 20, 2015 12:08:43 GMT -5 Clipper said:

My favorite at Donalty's was a liverwurst sandwich with a slice of onion and hot mustard. I also liked the sliced limburger cheese served on a plate. I would drizzle cider vinegar over it and sprinkle it with pepper and eat it with a fork. Yep! Mouthwash for lovers for sure, haha. Of course limburger is also good in a sandwich with onion and mustard. My mom used to make dad and I keep our limburger in a coffee can in the cellar way or garage. It made it very soft and spreadable, but also intensified the offensive odor.

I know the National Homes you are speaking of on Woods Road. Bob Morris ( who later owned the NH Shopping Center) owned a company called Savage Homes. They put up those prefabricated National Homes all over the area. We lived in one on Jamestown Ave, off Keyes Road. They sold for $9999, no money down for veterans. They were not very well constructed. The studs were 2x3's and the sheetrock was thin. The furnace was in the hallway and blew from vents there at the furnace, with the exception of one vent under the kickboard of the kitchen cabinets. If you closed the bedroom door at night you would freeze. My sister once slipped on the tile floor while coming out of the bathroom in her socks. She put her foot right through both layers of sheetrock and her foot was sticking out in the bedroom. lol. They served a very good purpose for first time home buyers and young couples looking for affordable housing. When the sun rose in the morning, there would be a line of tractor trailers on Keyes Road. By that evening there would be a half dozen more homes standing, awaiting the final inside work.

My grandparents used to hang at Donalty's. They also were lovers of limburger cheese and liverwurst.  Father also hung out at Donalty's and we always had to call in the evening to tell him the evening meal was ready. Then he's come stumbling home and tumble through the back door into the house. He tumbled through because he would always trip on our skates we would place there just after we called to the bar. That is why we always loved late Autumn and winter because it was pitch dark back there that time of year. Too busy drinking to install that light he bought a few years back!