Miscellaneous Shit, Part 7

I miss Wilbraham 10 Pin. One time my brother, Rick Riccardi, and I bowled there when we were kids and when we went to pig out at the snack bar some asshole secretly bowled a game in our alley. The guy at the counter insisted that we pay for it, but we didn’t have enough money!

Finally, when my father picked us up, he said he knew Wilbraham selectmen and he would mention this to them—ripping off kids—and the dude finally relented.

Whip’s Sporting Goods was named after Jim Whipple. That’s right, Mr. Whipple.

Wow, did anyone think back then that TV’s Mr. Whipple was kind of pervy? I did.

Whip’s is on Page Boulevard now.

Lift the Latch went from a bar to a church. So…Springfield.

Wow, I haven’t seen this pic before: the sign for the old Sundown “Rundown” Drive-In Theatre in Westfield.

And I also found a photo of not only the screen, but a speaker, and a T-shirt they’re making these days! Read all about the Rundown and the other local drive-ins.

Here is an interesting comment from someone who lived next to the place and enjoyed free movies:

“When I was in High School back in the mid-‘70’s a couple of my brothers and I worked on a farm that had one field that bordered on the Sundown , the owner of the drive-in and the farmer we worked for were friends and they set up a bench with speakers where we could go watch movies any time we wanted. It was placed outside the regular area so we were allowed to have some beers and get kinda crazy without bothering anyone. My older brother Steve who is also on this forum somewhere, was attacked by a crazy lady while he lived in an A-frame on the farm property…..good times. The Sundown was torn down and is now a defunct mini-mall….it only has a bad Chinese restaurant open, everything else is out of business, what a waste of a drive-in.”

There’s been a proposal to tear down the inoperable Putnam’s Puddle dam, which held in our beloved man-made pond from 1938 until the winter of 1982, when the spillways at the top of the dam clogged with ice. This blockage forced the water flow to push through the bottom of the structure, emptying the pond forever.

Well, we didn’t think it was forever. Back then, we believed the city would repair the dam and restore the pond. Nope.

In 2016, Jennifer Mackey Burke, a water resources engineer, applied for a grant for a Restoration and Revitalization Projects Nomination for the Massachusetts Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration. Her “Breckwood Pond Restoration Project” would involve the “removal of partially breached dam, stream channel restoration, and dredging/restoration to affected downstream resource,” according to her proposal.

The dam was in pretty bad shape in the mid-1950s and the pond water level was pretty low, but it was evidently repaired—probably by neighborhood volunteers. In the 1960s, Rich and Ron Lagasse, who lived on the corner of Granger Street and Sunrise Terrace, fixed the dam with cement and the help of neighborhood kids.

I know the dam was fixed in the mid-1970s because that was when my friends and I discovered the wet cement and were putting our initials in it when some older “Other Siders” (folks from the North Brook Road side) caught us and told us to scram. They claimed that they had repaired the dam so they could cross it safely to get to school, and we were “fucking it up.” God did we hate those Other Siders! But they saved the dam.

In 1979, the state declared that the dam needed repairs, but nothing was done. Then came the big hole—30 square feet—in 1983, and the pond was history. I guess I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the dam removal, because nothing ever gets done with this damn dam!

In 1992, hundreds of thousands of dollars were set aside for city dam projects at Mill Pond and Putnam’s Puddle, but nothing was ever accomplished at the latter. In 1996 Springfield was supposed to receive state funding to restore Putnam’s Puddle through a state Open Space Bond Bill. Does anyone have any idea what happened to the money?

The 1980s and 1990s would have been the time to repair or replace the dam and dredge the pond before it became filled with vegetation. That was when there was the biggest neighborhood outcry was to do something. But inaction caused Breckwood Pond to be silted over and become a mud hole—the Putnam’s Puddle dam stopped a lot of sediment and debris from flowing downstream.

In 1992 the Parks Department focused on repairing the Mill Pond dam, but department planners were “not certain what should be done” at Putnam’s Puddle. “We would like to save it before we lose it,” said then-Parks Superintendent Lawrence J. Dowd.

Um…37 years later, I guess you can see we lost it. In 2020, there is no real demand to replace the dam and the pond. On the contrary, the national trend, with many aging dams these days, is to remove them and let the waterways flow freely. But since this proposal is from 2016,  I doubt the City of Springfield will get off its ass and pull down the dam. So it will continue to stand as a reminder of a pond where I spent half my childhood. However, if they do remove it, I WANT A SOUVENIR PIECE!!!

When pre-showcase had only two theaters on Riverdale “Road.” This was 1965.

Haven’t published this one of Snowball in the blog, I believe. Pre-bullet-in-the head wound days. Read all about her.

Don’t remember where I got this pic of this OLSH team. Somewhere on Facebook. Then I posted it on the Hell’s Acres Facebook page. Didn’t know I had a Facebook page? Well here it is. Check it out!

Looks like the North Branch (Mary Lynch) School field? Looks like the bottom of the sledding hill on the right. Recognize anyone? Fran Doyle is the coach to the left. His son Tim is in the second row, third one from the left. I remember Tim Doyle was being scouted by the Yankees in the mid-’80s, and he played some minor league ball for them, right around the time I worked with him for the Longmeadow DPW one autumn sucking up leaves in the streets.

See you next month here, or see you on Facebook!