By Staff
In talking to Dick Sifford a while back, he asked me if I remembered the drinking fountains Dowagiac used to have downtown. I told him I had written about the one that was at the corner of Penn and Commercial next to the Savings and Loan building, which is now Standard Federal, also the one that was on Front street in front of the Howard Goodsell's hardware store. These two were little white porcelain ones. There was also one at the corner of Front and Main, It was located in the Veterans Memorial and you had to walk up steps to get a drink. Then there was another on the corner in front of our old fire station on Division street. Well Dick has a better memory that Cardinal Charlie, as he said at the bottom of the one at the fire station was a bowl like basin that caught the over flow and was for dogs to drink out of. Boy it makes me wonder if my memory will be as good as Dicks when I am his age.
A lot of old housewives in their golden years like my child bride wife, hate to hear four letter words, including, wash, iron, dust and cook. Something I read the other day, do you realize that in about 40 years we will have thousands of "old" ladies running around with tattoos. I bet there aren't many other houses in Dowagiac like mine that have a front door, a back door and an entry door on each side of the house. Remember how us kids used to get our right pant leg cuff caught in between the chain and front sprocket. This happened if your bike didn't have a chain guard. Boy it was always a major struggle to free your cuff it was sometimes ripped. Ladies earrings used to be called " ear-bobs" and your living room was the "parlor". Years ago when I was out at the airport one time a plane landed and it was Kim Zigler, who was either the Governor of Michigan or had been, I'm not sure of which. I don't recall why he set down in Dowagiac, but I do remember reading sometime later he crashed into a TV tower and was killed. I think it was due to fog, but I don't recall the year and where it happened. My first remote control for a TV was a long thin wire that ran from my VCR to my chair and was connected to the remote. This was a long time before the hand held ones we have now.