I'm posting this a little late today -- changed my babysitting day. So this posting will remain through tomorrow. Thanks, everyone, for your patience.
Canal Fulton doesn't make the news very often. We are a little place, with just over 5,000 people living within the city limits. There are about 8,500 of us living in the 32 square-mile township which wraps around the city.
My husband was on his way home from the Community Center in town after spending a day making ham/bean soup and beef stew for the Yankee Peddler Festival (the Canal Fulton Lions have a booth) at right around 2:00 p.m. and when he got home he mentioned right away that he'd seen thick, black smoke coming from the downtown.
He said it was near where the old feed mill collapsed and burned about three or four years ago. I got that kind of sick feeling, wondering what might have happened. And there were sirens by that time. He said a Jackson Township ladder truck had passed him by too, never a good sign around here. The tallest buildings in town are two stories after all.
So maybe you saw it on the news last night. The Exchange Building burned. It is a total loss apparently. The Exchange Building was built in 1898, just at the turn of the century. It was a very stately, well constructed place that housed the Exchange Bank when I moved to town in 1973. That's where my checking and savings were, and just next to the building is a small parking area with just enough room for the drive-up window that served customers there for years. Including me. My youngest son accompanied me to the bank on many occasions and he knew pretty quickly that they gave out suckers there. The clerk would whisper through the microphone, "Is it all right if he has a sucker?" Well, old big ears would have already heard that so there was virtually NO WAY that I would be able to say, "No thank you," without a huge response from the back seat.
Oh, yes, and the car seat. It was a death trap, but it was up to code for that time. Children weren't restrained much at all, and the only thing keeping them in their seat was a padded bar that came down in front of them. And that bar, let me tell you, was disgusting by the time we got home. It was just coated with sticky sucker juice all across it's curvature, and the little hands that held onto it weren't much better. The webs in between each finger had to be washed carefully and all of the lint that attached itself to the webs too.
But you know what -- thinking about it, I'm so glad that I have that memory now.
But that's not the end of the story. In 1979 when I went to work for The Signal, our weekly newspaper in Canal Fulton, they had a storefront location. The editor in 1979, Dave Burkhart, had his office way in the back. A door in his office opened right up to the Ohio-Erie Canal directly behind our building. When I took over in 1983, the paper's general manager who only came into town maybe once a week, moved his office there, and my desk was moved to the front window where merchandise had been placed when it was a store. I liked it there. Life in a small town personified.
We had a lot of visitors. There were the regulars coming in to pay an ad bill or just those who stopped by for fun. One old guy came by at least once a week, and he loved to insult people. One day he came in and said, "Well, just look at you ladies. You remind me of roses. In January." We dutifully laughed and then he nodded and left, satisfied that he'd done his job for that day.
A local minister liked to stop by on his way to the store to get his weekly six-pack of pop. The police chief always had time for a chat.
Well, then the general manager did a little poking around and found that if we moved to the second floor of the Exchange Building, we could save a boatload of rent. So one weekend all of the desks, the phones, the Xerox machine, and whatever else we had was moved over to the new location just down the street and across the intersection of Canal and Exchange.
Our entrance was a sandstone slab. Just next to it was another sandstone slab where folks went into the first floor post office formerly located in that spot. So many people had passed through that entrance for their mail that the sandstone was worn down from the foot traffic.
There was quite a climb to the second floor, straight up a flight of steps, but the offices were clean and spacious. Our GM had two gilded lettered signs put on the upstairs windows of our offices so customers could find us more easily. My office was comfortable and private but of course, the pace of life wasn't as obvious or interesting.
The day my son ran away from summer camp at a church down on Portage Street (he was four), he was heading for my office. He was mad because his older brother got to go swimming to a big kid's pool and he wasn't allowed. That's where they found him, on Portage, a long way away from "camp" and a lot closer to The Signal offices which is where he told his rescuers that he was going.
In 1985 when I left The Signal for The University of Akron, the GM surprised me with a going-away party, an unusual thing for the company to do. The Signal was owned by Buckeye Publishing Company in Lisbon, Ohio, and they were definitely interested in the profitability of the place on most days.
Another story -- there was an elevator in the Exchange Building, the only place in town with one. The bank president's office was up there. In true small town style, rumors always floated around about people's private lives and the bank was no exception. Somehow, it came to the attention of a friend of mine that the bank president had been linked to three of us as having had an affair with him. He was a handsome guy, don't get me wrong, but I can tell you for absolute certainty that none of the three of us did. BUT, that kind of got us thinking. We made up three signs that read either "Past, present, or future," and when we arrived to take the bank president out for lunch, we carried them inside the lobby. Oh boy, that got things started. The startled clerk called upstairs and told us, with considerable disgust, that we could take the ELEVATOR up to his office. He burst out laughing when he saw the signs and said, "Oh brother, do you have idea what you've started now?"
Then at one point, the Board of Education was in the building. A realtor's office. Then apartments went in upstairs (where my old office was). So many different faces, but the same beautiful red brick building.
And the manger scene put up by the Lions Club in whatever freezing weather was being experienced at that time was always right in front of the Exchange Building.
It will likely be torn down soon. I'll have to stop by on Wednesday when I pick up my granddaughter from school and take some pictures. To remember. To reflect. Maybe I can get a brick to add to the one from the feed mill.
Take care, friends.
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