Here are a few things I wrote about years ago:

As I filled my modern humidifier that I purchased at Hale’s Hardware, it made me remember what the Gills had for a way to put some moisture in the house years ago.

It was our big, old aluminum tea kettle on top of our big coal stove in our living room.

Remember back in the 1930s, before the artificial trees came, just about every Dowagiac household had a fresh-cut local natural one.

Remember after the holidays as you drove down the streets there were lots of them stuck in the snow at curbside waiting for city trucks to pick them up.

I remember at one time they put them in the piles of banked snow around the old Oak Street tennis courts.

A friend once told me that the Boys Scouts at Christmas time fastened them to each of our parking meters (which we don’t have anymore, do we?).

I wonder how many of these trees that were wired to the meters disappeared before Christmas with a tree “burglar.”

How many remember the big advertising billboards next to the tracks and the streets on West Railroad in the area between Telegraph and Prairie Ronde streets?

I barely recall these signs were across from Hank Luthringer’s house. These were like the ones we see on our highways these days.

A mistake in my 1938 Dowagiac city directory says the Dowagiac Police Department was at 110 S. Front, but there is no 110 S. Front. Sounds like Judge Wilson made a mistake in his printing, huh?

I do remember when it was on Dowagiac’s shortest street, which was one block long.

As this was on the hill that ran from the corner of Orchard Street and Penn Avenue corner up to Front Street, I remember how the west end of the police department building had to be jacked up on cement blocks to make it level.

My neighbor, Oscar Burch, was the chief at the time, in the 1930s.

I once had a little bank from Lee State Bank. It looked like a little leather-bound book (sure wish I still had it).

Does anyone remember in 1935 the Chat and Chew restaurant and where it was located?

There used to be a Little League baseball park at the corner of Prairie Ronde and Lowe streets — the corner where the Army tank now stands.

Gosh, I remember how in the evening a big bunch of swallows circled the old Century Theatre chimney in the evening and dropped out of sight as they swooped down into it.

Boy, Dowagiac sure didn’t have the many kids activities, like these days.

Back in the 1930s, we only had varsity and junior varsity football teams — no freshmen or below, like these days.

And “whoop-de-do” if we had a six-footer on our basketball team, we were in “hog heaven.”

 

“Cardinal Charlie” Gill writes a nostalgic weekly column about growing up in the Grand Old City.

Email him at cardinalcharlie@hotmail.com.