Downtown Bradford

When we arrived in Bradford, Vermont in 1967 (during the troubled waning years of the LBJ presidency), I remarked to Mrs. Dr. M., "this "downtown" looks like it hasn't changed a bit since the 1920s." The downtown was one block long then; it's no more extensive now, forty-four years later. And not much different.

We sat in the window of the Local Buzz, one of our newer enterprises (real coffee comes to Bradford, at last!) and watched the folks go by. Couples, the guy way too skinny and the lady way too fat. Young blonde guys, tattooed, trying desperately to grow their scruffy beards. An occasional suit -- a lawyer or insurance agent. Tourists in campers, looking mighty skeptical. An occasional gaggle of bicyclists, coming from somewhere, going elsewhere, all a-helmeted and bespandexed. But very few guys in "farmer greens."    

Nor have there been any new buildings to compromise the 1920s time-capsule. Stores have changed owners and purposes, of course. Gove (pronounced as in rove, not as in glove) and Bancroft was an independent pharmacy (the kind of place that had big old colored bottles in the window) that disappeared must be a quarter of a century ago and has been superseded by the new Kinney's out at the four corners (where also resides Orange County's only four-way traffic light). Similarly, Gove and Morrill, an independent hardware store, has been replaced with a shiny new Aubuchon (a northeastern chain). The old Gove and Morrill, three decades dead, was a great place of a young fellow to purchase his hardware needs. Lester Wakefield and Bart Morrill knew everything and gladly would they teach. They also had a bit of a machine shop in the basement and would drill out that rusted part for you, no charge. Their shop was a shrine of Yankee frugality. The Aubuchon employs what looks like minimum wage help -- the kids know how to run the Visa through the slot, but they know little else, so you're pretty much on your own. I'm sure that Kinney's and Aubuchon make a better profit than the stores that they replaced.

And speaking of chains, we now have a Subway, which, I must be the most impoverished looking Subway in existence. Other eateries: Chan's House (the poorest, least authentic Chinese restaurant in the entire occident).  And another house, the House of Pizza, which replaced, many years ago, The Chimes (a semi-glorified diner). In between the Chimes and the pizza place, there was for a few controversial years at that corner location a breakfast shop that was run by very very young, robotic Stepford girls, reputed to be members of the harem of some charismatic off-brand far right Christian cultist. The food was marvelously inexpensive but the place was o so creepy.  

There's a second-hand bookshop, Booked Solid, that is loaded with romances and "genre" paperbacks; trade books that find their way to the shelves are accidental tourists.

Two banks where there used to be just one.

The Paradise Cafe, Bradford's first venture into culinary artistry, lasted a year or two but then devolved into the Richardson Insurance Agency, though it is my impression that Kermit Richardson himself has long since collected on his policy. Taylor-Palmer insurance is  still in the same white clapboard house that it inhabited half a century ago, and Hod Palmer, after a brief foray into gourmet cooking, has been restored to the world of his fathers. The Colatina, an out-of-the-can red-sauce Italian restaurant, is still in business, still enticing those Dartmouth boys to drive half an hour for some north of Hanover pizza. Perry Oil, which dominates its side of the street, is still going strong, still filling those propane tanks, and still run by genuine Perrys. Hill's, a kind of old-fashioned notion shop, like a Woolworth's  -- how come it hasn't been obliterated by a Target or a K-Mart? The Bradford Public Library, now reroofed, is a handsome Victorian Gothic building, but lacks books.   

"All is flux," Heraclitus used to say. But then he'd never been to downtown Bradford.    

Comments

[Michael Walker]

So did you meet up with Cindy?

There is a good photo of the Gove and Morrill Hardware
taken by Arnold Eagle in April of 1947, and reproduced in Daniel Okrent's wonderful book, "The Way We Were:
New England Then, New England Now". I think you would really enjoy this book, published in 1989 by Grove Weidenfeld Press.

Bart Morrill died suddently of a heart attack in the seventies and his 22 year old son took over and ran the store until around 1988. I see that the son died in 2011.

When I look at the photos in Okrent's book, I want to go back in time and live in the New England of the late 40's through the early seventies. I lived in rural CT in 1970-71, and truly enjoyed it. In those days, one could still go to tag sales and find treasures for a few dollars or less. One could pick up the monthly Yankee Magazine and find a lovely old "House For Sale" with 40 acres and a barn for $17,000. Now many of those old farms have disappeared to developers who have ruined the beauty of the countryside.

I would meet with you for a cup of coffee at the Local Buzz, but I live too far away now, and besides I am not allowed caffeine.

[Cindy]

Dear Dr. Metablog:

I want to meet you! I moved to Bradford five years ago and I completely identify with your characterizations. In fact, I could add a few of my own!

I've read several of your other blogs and think that you are very amusing. You sound like my kind of guy, and I think you will find that we have alot in common.

I hope that you write to me and unveil yourself! Not all of us in Bradford are stuck in the 1920s...