Town seeks clues

LAKEVILLE — Once upon a time, children in Salisbury went to see Santa Claus, who came to Bill Barnett’s five-and-dime store on Sharon Road in Lakeville, where the Patco is today.The second floor of the long-gone building was given over to toys during the Christmas shopping season, said Cynthia Smith, Barnett’s daughter.“It was toyland on the second floor, starting around the first of December.”And Bill Rainsford, a contractor who worked out of the small building across the street next to the old firehouse, set up shop as Santa Claus.“He was a big, fat, jolly man” and thus ideal for the part, Smith remembered.The kids came and told Santa what they wanted for Christmas, and Santa noted it all down in what have since become known as the Santa Claus ledgers.Parents could then check with Santa to see what their offspring were yearning for.Rainsford kept his dual identity going for about 20 years, Smith estimated, from the post-war 1940s to the mid-1960s. Nobody knows what happened to the ledgers, however.Smith said Darwin Miller bought the store from her father in the late 1970s, and ran it for a few years until the building was demolished around 1980.Smith said her father almost certainly passed the ledgers on to Miller, who expressed an interest in continuing the Santa Claus tradition.But that is where the trail ends.Jean McMullen said her efforts to track the ledgers down have resulted in frustration. The Scoville Library doesn’t have them, nor does the Salisbury Association Historical Society.The last time The Lakeville Journal ran a piece about Christmas, Santa Claus and the Barnett store (Dec. 6, 2007) it was in the hope of identifying some of the children in a photo from Smith’s archives. So perhaps someone has an idea of what happened to the Santa Claus ledgers, as kept by Bill Rainsford — and a unique record of a bygone era.