Something to read while you wait for your lunch to heat in the microwave...

Businesses that made house calls
By Bob Cudmore

Johnstown baker Harold Bell used to bang a bell to alert the neighborhood when he was on the street with bread for sale. There was a Gloversville door-to-door baker named Peter Knapp.

Julia Hull has memories of home deliveries in both Johnstown and Gloversville. She lived on Miller Street in Johnstown and also on Bloomingdale Avenue in Gloversville during her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s.

The iceman was closer to home: her stepfather Frank Sparks who operated Sparkles Natural Ice.

He would grab a block of ice with a pair of tongs and put it on top of his shoulder, Hull recalled, On his shoulder was kind of a leather cape so he didn't get all wet.

Refrigerators replaced iceboxes in the 1930s and 1940s, although people who owned summer camps held onto their iceboxes longer than city people, according to Hull. By 1950, though, Sparks the iceman had concluded that the refrigerator was here to stay, and he got a job at Lee Dye in Johnstown.

In Amsterdam the Sweet Ice Company hung on in the frozen water business until the late 1960s.

According to Sweet family descendants Debra Baranello and Karin Hetrik, Waterman Sweet, Senior, started Dealers In Ice in Fort Johnson in 1919 and originally may have cut ice from the Mohawk River. By 1936 the business had moved to a garage in the rear of 270 Division Street and the name was changed to the W. Sweet Ice Company.

I remember in the 1960s that people would come here to get ice on the way to the lake, Baranello said. And we would have to go out and help. And they'd tell you if they wanted 25 pounds or 50 pounds and you would have to chop it.

Their grandfather John Sweet died in 1966 and there was nobody to take over the company.
The sisters started an antiques business in 2005 on Division Street called the Sweet Ice Company Antique Shop.

Another well-known door-to-door business in Amsterdam was Harry Demsky the rag man, the father of actor Kirk Douglas.

In his autobiography The Ragman's Son, Douglas wrote that his father left their Eagle Street home every day with his horse-drawn wagon, traveling the streets of Amsterdam yelling, Rags, any rags! The rags collected were sold to what we would call a recycling company.

Douglas wrote, I'd help my father stuff the rags into burlap bags. I'd jab four holes in the top of the bag, lace a woman's discarded stocking through the holes, knot it, and add it to the pile of bags. I got to be quite good at stuffing ragbags, I don't think I'd have any trouble doing it today.

SNOW PLOW ON THE TROLLEY TRACKS

In a section called East End Notes in the December 11, 1915 edition of the Amsterdam Recorder, coverage was given to efforts to clear the trolley tracks on upper Vrooman Avenue with what was called an electric snow plow.

The plow, going up the steep hill, ran into a cap covering the water main shut off that had been installed between the rails at the corner of Hibbard Street.

The Recorder wrote, The water cap had the advantage of position in the field of conflict being on the uphill side of the advancing plow, but in the brief struggle that ensued the plow came off victorious. The cap came off, too, and about a foot of attached casing with it.

Evidently the snowplow is in condition to cope with anything old Boreas hands us this season. Boreas is the Greek god of the north wind.

Friday, March 29, 2024-Episode 418-Bruce Dearstyne is encouraging New Yorkers to celebrate April 20 as the birthday of the Empire State.  The first New York State constitution was adopted April 20, 1777 during the Revolutionary War.  Bruce Dearstyne was formerly on the staff of the Office of State History and the State Archives.  He has written extrnsively on New York State history.

Bruce W. Dearstyne has published several books, including Railroads and Railroad Regulations in New York State, 1900–1913. He is co-author of New York: Yesterday and Today. He served as a program director at the New York State Archives and on the staff of the Office of State History. He has taught New York State history at the University at Albany, State University of New York, Russell Sage College, and the State University of New York at Potsdam. Dr. Dearstyne was also a professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies where he directed the HiLS (History/Information Science) joint degree program. He continues to teach there as an adjunct professor. He resides in Guilderland, New York