Random Stuff

This would have been “Miscellaneous Shit, Part 13,” but you know how I am about the number 13. Also, now I’m hearing from readers that my swearing, especially in the titles of my posts, is excluding potential readers who would be turned off by such language. 

So now it’s Random Stuff. Much less offensive, right? If you don’t like it, fuuuuck yoooouuuu!

Above are the ruins of Russell’s restaurant on Boston Road. It closed in 2005, a victim of the chain restaurants like Chili’s etc. The Russell family also took a bath in owning 60 Minute Photo on Summer, Riverdale etc. after the digital photo revolution, so there was no way they were going to sink any more money into Russell’s. 

The building was eventually torn down and the site is still a vacant lot. I wonder what happened to the iconic sign? Sold for scrap metal, I suppose.

The Russell family’s other restaurant, Thirty Somethin’ at the corner of Boston Road and Stony Hill in Wilbraham, bit the dust around the same time as well. The owner, Ed Russell, was killed in a snowmobile accident in Vermont in 2003, and the family pretty much pulled out of the restaurant business after that tragedy.

Remember when they allowed smoking in restaurants but were phasing it out? Once we walked into Russell’s and saw there were two parties standing ahead of us. But we were seated right away—the others were waiting for open booths in the “smoking section.”

Beer and a biting: I was stunned when I saw the old neon Pot Belly’s bar sign in Indian Orchard renovated. I didn’t think they’d bother. It’s not neon anymore, but Andy Capp is still there. You gotta love a bar that has a famous cartoon wife-beating alcoholic—as Homer Simpson called him—holding a foamy cold one on its sign. 

A little off the subject, but little did I know upon further reading that in 2012 Andy Capp flirted with healthy living and cutting down on the boozing:

Here is the former deteriorating sign:

Pot Belly’s gained some notoriety back in 2015 when a woman bit off the finger of an employee during a brawl. Before that she made unwanted advances to several chicks there and then struck a pregnant woman in the face several times. Three strikes and you’re out!

I was eating breakfast on a sidewalk table at Angel’s 1376 restaurant in Palmer when I noticed a decaying restaurant sign down North Main Street. I vowed to get a photo of this after my meal with my wife.

There was also a faded “Forest Lake Dairy” sign, as well as what remained of a soda fountain service sign above the door. It looks like it was last used as an antiques store.

Here is the same block in 1910:

The Forest Lake dairy bar must have been a happening place when Palmer had seen better days. I could find virtually nothing about the restaurant or the dairy online, except an old milk bottle, drink lids, a calendar, the logo on the side of the old dairy, which was once on River Street, and a refrigerator the restaurant was selling—probably when it was going out of business:

A guy named Addison Moore started the Forest Lake Dairy in 1911, and Robert Bishop ran it after Moore got out of the ice cream business. That’s all I knew. I am fully aware this was in Palmer, not the Sixteen Acres area, but this business has somehow grabbed my interest! So I started asking my friends and acquaintances: do any of you know anything about the dairy or the restaurant? When did they close?

Well, this being a small world, I eventually ran into Robert Bishop’s daughter, who remembered her dad’s business kind of waning in the 1960s when the mom and pop markets were put out of business by supermarkets, and her dad ran out of stores to deliver milk to. 

She mentioned the 1970 closing of the “Wire Mill,” or formally known as the CF & I Plant, as the big blow to the town as workers moved elsewhere. More than 700 people lost their jobs. 

But Bishop’s daughter thought that the Forest Lake Dairy closed even before that—most likely the 1960s. She can’t remember.

It is almost inconceivable to me that the ruins of the Forest Lake dairy store storefront would stay frozen in time—like in a ghost town—for more than 50 years (possibly even 60 years), as if there were a nuclear holocaust and the survivors happened upon Palmer’s Depot Village in a movie. I mean, the old signs remain there, fading away for that long? Really? Wow. I know that the Playland sign in downtown Springfield stayed up there for decades after it closed, but Jeez.

Storrowton drew in performers and audiences to its Big E tent from 1959 to 1978. As far as singers, there were some big names over the years—Judy Garland, Ray Charles, Perry Como, Robert Goulet and Liberace to name a few. And the top comedians came, including Milton Berle, Victor Borge, Pat Cooper, George Goebel, and Phyllis Diller.

Wow, I thought Lee Remick was pretty hot in The Omen in 1976, when she was the mother of the antichrist, but she was REALLY something in 1965! There is a great record online of the who’s who in stage at Storrowton because people saved their programs.

The weather proved to be a challenge for the venue—crooners had to belt it out to drown out the rain. Often the heat was incredibly oppressive. The stage lights attracted moths. Milton Berle made catching them a part of his act. Once a moth flew into Judy Garland’s mouth. Ever the professional, she laughed it off. What a good sport! Did she spit it out or swallow? I always heard that she swallowed. Okay, that joke sucked. Literally. Man, I should quit when I’m aHEAD.

I remember seeing Fiddler on the Roof there as a kid, in 1971.

But by the 1970s Storrowton was seen by entertainers as being sent to Siberia. West Springfield was certainly a far cry from playing Vegas. In the third week of August, 1978, the theater was facing a deficit of $125,000 and owners pulled the plug before the final two shows, which would have set them back an additional $90,000. In fact, shows in the 1978 summer season filled 25 to 30 percent of the 2,437 seats. Abbey Road, a Beatles cover act, drew only 450 people, so the curtain came down for good at Storrowton.

I’m no mathematician, but the original tent in 1959 seated about 600, which meant Abbey Road would have drawn a near-capacity crowd. Then again, I’m no theatre investor either, and the tent must have been expanded in the nearly two decades of its existence to earn a profit. At Fiddler on the Roof, I remember the music being good, but I was far away enough from the stage to not really know what was going on, plot-wise.

Gone but not forgotten: the Cedarhurst Pool. When I was a kid, after a hot, humid Saturday at Look Park, for some reason we had blown off the swimming pool there and we were driving in Southampton when we saw a sign for Cedarhurst Pool. “Let’s go!” my brother and I demanded. There was no air conditioning in the car. “Why not?” answered my father. 

Wow! Three diving boards (high, higher, and highest)! A slide! It was basically an outdoor pool and a pond—we had never seen anything like it.

Preston Brown and his wife Janet owned the spring-fed pool for 25 years before closing it in 1986. I had heard that insurance costs made it too expensive to run, but I’m not sure. He told the Hampshire Gazette that the pool/pond was not a money-making venture, but it was for the good of the community and was “a good use of the property.”

The pool, which had picnic tables, was in a seven-acre reservation near Center Cemetery on College Highway (Route 10).

But is it really gone? A Google Maps look reveals the same floatation barrier as the one in the old photo, on the bottom right. I guess SOMEONE is still enjoying this place on private property:

Hangar One used to be THE band nightclub in the Amherst-Northampton area before Pearl Street opened and the Calvin Theater had concerts. Stevie Ray Vaughan played at Hangar One before anyone knew who he was.

The place on Route 9 in Hadley never housed planes—it was a World War II military surplus Quonset hut built in 1946. Hangar One then served as a big Polka club in the 1950s and ‘60s, a disco, band venue, and in its final days the Hadley Tire Barn.

You couldn’t miss Hangar One with its plane sticking out of the roof as if it crashed. Ironically, in 1984, the owner, Green B. Williams, died in an Air Force Jet crash in Alabama. So a plane crash ended its incarnation as Hangar One—it was soon auctioned off to a law firm, housed tires for 10 years, and was demolished in 1997.

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