<![CDATA[TURNER REALTY OF LONGMONT

There may have been a conspiracy or aliens may have been involved, but Longmont should be aware that no one is allowed to live in the 500 & 600 block of Judson Street, or for that matter on Sunset, Sumner or Vivian and Francis Street. By some magic, as you drive down these streets, the addresses jump from 400 to 700 in the blink of an eye. How can this be? What happened to the missing addresses? Was this a plot? No, it wasn’t. Apparently what happened when they laid out the City of Longmont’s original square mile, they had to curve 3rd Ave North to keep it on top of the hill. Apparently the folks who could afford the big expensive lots on the south side of 3rd Ave were just as excited about walk-out basements then as we are now. So, 3rd Ave nearly touches 4th avenue when it hits Bowen Street and consequently, when the Butlers addition, Terrell’s addition and Grandview’s addition were platted by the City of Longmont, I think in the 1900’s, those streets that intersected with 3rd avenue extended, starting the addresses as 300. However, 1 block North, 6th avenue came in so all of the addresses has to be adjusted stating with those 300 blocks adjacent to 3rd Ave. So somehow this eliminated any 500 and 600 addresses when the streets intersected with Long’s Peak, they started again at 700, 800, etc.

In our map of Longmont, dated 1909, the streets do not have any names, but are called N1, N2, N3, so on and so forth. Sometime from then to now, the street names have changed. Does anyone know why?

If you follow the river bottom and the bluff above, you can see how the it dictated for 3rd Ave to stay on top of the hill as 3rd Avenue jogs north and at the same point, the river jogs north towards Lyons.

A friend of mine recently read my blog about early grocery stores in Longmont and reminded me of something I had forgotten. In the mid 50’s and early 60’s, competing grocery stores gave you green stamps that were redeemable for all kinds of things like lamps, curtains, appliances – anything you wanted! You could redeem stamp books, kind of like bonus points you get on credit cards today.

I believe Safeway issued Gold Morevalue stamps and the Associated Grocers used the S&H Green Stamps. I have no clue what S&H stamps stood for until I Googled it and found that is stood for Sperry & Hutchinson – a company founded in 1896. I do remember helping Mom paste stamps in booklets and going to the store near Francis Street shopping Center to shop for our prizes. I guess families that had a lot of kids and bought lots of groceries could make quite a dent in their décor by using the stamps to buy lamps, tables, chairs, etc.

These days, I assume the same discount function is provided by taking advantage of a “buy one get one free” deal and by couponing. Both stamps tasted horrible and my mother never redeemed her stamps for anything I really wanted, only practical things that she needed as a working mother. Unlike many moms’ in the 50’s and 60’s, my mother did not stay home and take care of this kid. She first worked running our motel and trailer park called The Bungalow Court at 1402 N. Main and also working at the Gould Filter Factory on E 9th Ave. Later, she got her real estate license in 1958 and sold real estate.

Most of the time when I was not in school, a series of elderly women who lived in the mobile park and who I was instructed to call “Grandma so and so” were paid to babysit me until Mom and Dad came home. These old ladies needed the extra income and we provided one another with love and attention. They were great cooks and spoiled me rotten! I don’t ever remember feeling under privileged that my mother worked rather I felt entitled as I had no grandmother of my own and they let me do nearly whatever I wanted. These days, working mothers are the norm, rather than the exception and I have always felt that my mother was a trendsetter, being one of the first, if not the first licensed woman real estate agent in Longmont and possibly the state. Women’s lib was a waste of time for my Mom. She never wanted to be equal to men, she didn’t think want to lower herself to that standard!

I miss her every day.

A recent planning department buzzword is “Neighborhood Commercial”, which means these days: a 7-11, nail salon and a donut store within walking distance of your rabbit warren. When I was a kid, and I am going to say this a lot in the blog - which we will reduce to “WIWAK”, it had an entirely different connotation. The early 1950’s was the demise of true neighborhood commercial and the rise of what could be called the "cookie cutter" approach to neighborhood commercial where every town in the country looks exactly the same.

Included with this blog are pictures of what were the genuine "mom and pop" neighborhood grocery stores that existed throughout Longmont. Many of them were still operating "WIWAK" in the late 50’s. Most had been reduced from genuine full service stores (you could charge your groceries by the month!), to odd specialty shops and kid’s candy stores. To those of you who are my age, you may remember these stores with the weirdest candy – jawbreakers, cinnamon flavored toothpicks, bubble gum of all flavors including Bazooka gum with cartoons and even small various shaped bottles of paraffin wax. The bottles contained fruit flavored sugar water which you drank, and then you got to enjoy chewing on the wax bottle. Recent legislation has chastised cigarette companies for making products appeal to young kids with cartoons but they sold us candy cigarettes in Lucky Strike and Camel boxes so we could "be just like Dad".

The people and their stores, where they worked in the front and lived in the back, were rapidly aging and truly were on their way out. Safeway which was the original big corporate store in town "back in the good old days”, was located on the NE corner of Longs Peak and Main Street, which is now the Mister Money. It brought corporate competition when prior to that date, home town, locally owned grocery stores ruled the roost. As Safeway killed off the mom and pop grocery stores and Longmont grew, Safeway expanded until it opened a fabulous new store on 15th and Main Street in 1959. Though my father worked for Ideal Markets, a locally owned chain of stores owned by Clair Smith, my mother could not resist going to this new slick and shiny corporate store. They were giving away porcelain piggy banks, and I know it was 1959 because my piggy bank says so on its bottom. Safeway’s motto at the time was a small cartoon character on ads pushing a grocery cart with a narrow tie, slicked back hair with a caption that read “I like saving money. Money is my hobby. My wife is out saving money shopping at Safeway”. Local grocers did their best to compete with corporate giants by making bigger stores and changing the names, such as Food Giant, which was located on 9th and Coffman, which is now home to Ares Thrift Store, or the new Corner Pantry on Francis Street, which was one the last and biggest of Clair Smith’s Ideal markets. But eventually, they all passed away as did their supplier, Associate Grocers.

Before my mother and father started Turner Realty in 1962, dad worked for Mr. Smith as the manager of the meat department at the S. Main Ideal grocery store, which is now El Vaquero Western Wear. "WIWAK", the thriving market was across the street from Longmont’s lively livestock auction that all the farmers from all around attended each Saturday. While farms bought and sold cattle, pigs and sheep, their wives and children shopped at Ideal Market.

I don’t miss the old days (much) but it’s helpful to look back and remember how good we have it now. I don’t believe these stores had a produce department and it seems the fruits and vegetables were locally grown, rarely in stores and completely seasonal. That is a far cry from the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables available now in every grocery store. Anytime you wanted to buy fruits and vegetables you could do so in the 50’s, but it was either canned, dried or frozen. I don’t remember big frozen food sections in the stores either, so canned was mostly what you got. Take a look in your local grocery store next time and see how small the canned fruit and vegetable department has become.

Bakeries were also one per community, not one per store, and if you wanted motor oil or antifreeze, you went to a garage or an auto parts store. There was no such thing as self-check out, which I refuse to use and so should you because it took away some persons job. Traditionally, a young person’s job was to start out as a bagger, then get promoted to a checker and maybe to a manager. Some even worked their entire lives in the grocery store where they started working as teenagers.