Saturday, September 6, 2008

Trains and cheap gas


Two more photos of Flint in the fifties by Mary Fisher via Grumkin.





11 comments:

  1. Ah, yes, I recall the aroma of cheap gas. Not the 50s, but in the early 70s, I remember paying 19.9 cents per gallon at the Sears gas island pump at the Valley. And since I was an employee of SR&Co., I got my 10% discount off that.

    Now, in that regard, those really were the good old days!

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  2. Yes, that was East Side Buick on S. Dort Highway south of Robert T. Longway Blvd. It was later subdivided with the now-closed Koerts Glass & Paint taking up the most visible space.

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  3. hey Church Guy-
    what year and what dept. did You work at in Sears? I was employed there in '73-'74, right after highschool, in the janitorial dept.. Myself and a fellow Southwesterner named Dan Crawford worked together.He bore a scary resemblance to John Denver...

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  4. What was in the "plaza" next to the current Sal Army. Was that a Yankee store. It looks "retail" and I do recal going to a store there sometime in the late 70s...

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  5. I thought so. Mom had a gorgeous black '61 Deuce and a Quarter that came from Downtown Buick, but was always serviced at East Side.

    Gosh, that car looked majestic on the end of a tow truck.

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  6. hey bustdup,

    I started in the old Sears building at the time they were closing that store and making the move to the Valley. I worked taking apart shelving...oh, the dirt, oh, the dust, oh, the humanity!

    At the new store, I worked on the loading dock for a short while and then moved into the display department. We may have just missed each other, because I was promoted to assistant display manager and transferred to the Frandor store in East Lansing. That probably would have been in '73.

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  7. ChurchGuy-
    probably just as well, as I was 'let go', as was Dan Crawford. 4a.m. one morning I look up from pushin' de broom, and there comes Dan dancing around the shelves, wearing a lifesize Winnie the Pooh costume. in between laughing my ass off, he started singing the theme. It degenerated to a bb gun fight, along w/pounds of bridgemix being thrown at each other. Just one of those things, ya know? never enough sleep, working a couple jobs, going to school...don't know what ever happened to Dan.

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  8. Bustup,

    Sounds like a lot of fun, and worth getting fired for. It reminds me of a friend, who shall remain nameless, who worked at the mall in Ann Arbor one summer tending to the indoor vegetation. He'd come in at about 4:30 every morning, sit alone in the mall, and meditate. Naked. (Don't ask; it would take forever to explain.) This worked out fine until somebody came in early and discovered him sitting among the plants near the food court with no clothes on.

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  9. lol...

    We used to have staple gun fights back in the display department. That was good sport!

    I'm convinced that 80%+ of the U.S. population worked at Sears at some time or another.

    Used to be, one could work on the loading dock and retire a millionaire with Sears profit-sharing plan. Not so, no mo'. My, oh, my, how the times have changed.

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  10. what a grin! naked food court yogis, staple gun shootouts...I'm convinced that half this country's problems are due to lack of humor anymore. Yeah Church, I haven't met anyone yet who hasn't worked at sears in some way or fashion, from taking baby pictures to pushing Brach's bridge mix and bras to the masses. My creative writing teacher at Southwestern, Mr. Plourde, always harped at us to keep our sense of humor while writing."2/3's of a pun is p-u", he'd say. God knows the human race gives us material to work with, myself being a prime...

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.