Of Railroad Days, ice cream and old coins

At one of the first Canaan Railroad Days around 1966, Billy Majewski and I had a stand on Main Street in front of Hart’s Five & Ten. We were about 12 years old and our wares were pottery and trinkets from the Chinchilla Ranch on Route 7, where Mountainside is now. Our table was under the awning that many stores in town still used in those days.

It was a Saturday and the streets were crowded. With four clothing stores, two drug stores, two jewelers, two banks, two package stores, two barber shops, the movie theater with Saturday matinees, Jack’s market, DeBarberie’s produce, Rogers’ shoe store, Marshall’s Furniture and Toyland, Trant’s garden center, the delicatessen, diner, bakery, post office, garages and supermarkets all in the center of town, it was always busy. 

With his infectious laugh, Billy would exhort everybody to buy something. Many people stopped, others smiled and kept walking, but we didn’t care either way. We were no longer just school kids but merchants, an important cog in the commerce of North Canaan, and we did a land-office business that day. Billy made a sign for our table which said, “You break it, you bought it,” which was the funniest thing I had ever seen.

 Among the crowds were many of North Canaan’s worthies from Injun Joe in his headdress to Freddie Julian on his bicycle and Earl Smedick in uniform, directing traffic in the intersection where the light is now. 

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We may have seen the nature writer Hal Borland, who came over from Taconic to get his paper at Kauttu’s drug store. In one of his essays, Borland wrote about a happy kid he saw whistling on the streets of North Canaan. Could have been one of us, or any of our friends.

Whenever we made a sale, we would run down to Kauttu’s and buy popsicles or ice cream bars at 10 cents apiece. Kauttu’s and Phair’s pharmacy across the street still had their lunch counters at that time. The high school girls who worked there seemed so grown up and glamorous, like movie stars. We ate about 12 popsicles and ice creams apiece that day, which cut seriously into the ranch’s profits and tried the patience of the high school girls, but it was hot work and we had to do it.

At that time in the 1960s it was still common to find Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters and Walking Liberty half dollars in your change. They were beautiful coins and mostly silver. We were coin collectors and we checked all the change we took in that day, not that we kept every good one we found. I remember a 1917 Mercury dime going for an ice cream sandwich at one point. We regretted it later. Did I mention it was hot out there?

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Everyone in town seemed to have the coin-collecting bug. Many people saved the new Kennedy half dollars that came out in 1964 after the president was assassinated. Our classmates Tommy Mullen and Steve Marshall were collectors, as were Barry and Duffer Hunter and their father Bill. Stanley Segalla, husband of our seventh-grade teacher, Carmella, kept rolls of Barber coins, Liberty nickels and even gold pieces in his desk at Bianchi’s, and Mrs. Dunham, who lived up the hill from us and worked at the movie theater, saved old nickels and pennies for me out of the candy counter change. My father let me go through his change every night, and once he surprised me with an Indian Head penny he had found at the gas station across from the Doughboy.

 At the bank we would buy rolls of coins, remove the older ones we needed and replace them with newer ones. Then we would initial the rolls before turning them back in to let other collectors know they had already been searched.

One day at the bank Billy pulled a squirt gun on one of the tellers, old Harlan Tracy, and demanded all the money. I still remember Billy’s laugh and Harlan’s startled look, and his suggestion that this wasn’t a very funny joke. 

But the bank didn’t press charges and Earl Smedick didn’t have to arrest us.

 Mark Godburn lives in North Canaan and is an antiquarian bookseller whose book, “Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets,” has just been published in England and America.