‘Those were the days’ ...
Volume V
by Julia Cocoa
The Leo Klancer, Sr. family prided itself on their large family. Mrs. Klancer, morning and evening, after milking her cow, led that tethered cow to a pasture on Hill Street in the area behind the Gowanda Electronics. After we moved to the farm on Broadway Road, once a year we saw Mr. Klancer lead that tethered cow up Broadway to a farm, there to be bred. Their son Louis, “Looch,” graduated college and for years held an important position at the Moench Tannery. He was a virtuoso on the button box, the chromatic, and the piano accordions. The youngest, I will write about later.
On my way to church, I took a shortcut across from the end of Broadway Road on Palmer Street just outside the glue factory fence. I proceeded along the Cattaraugus Creek bank through Masser’s front yard on the creek bank, over the Erie Railroad trestle, along the railroad tracks, down Erie Avenue to the Catholic Church, a wood building long since demolished. Masser’s house was later moved to Foundry Street to prevent it from falling into the creek because the creek had nibbled away much of their front yard.
On Palmer Street in winter before cutting off at the end of Broadway, I usually met young Ernie Palcic delivering the Sunday Courier Express. Ernie had contracted polio when very young. In winter, a box on seat attached to a sled was filled with newspapers. He gripped the bars of the seat for support as he rested his lame leg on the rear of the sled and propelled it with his good leg. As an adult, he became the steward of the Gowanda State Hospital.
Another Slovene, Frances Belek, who lived on Aldrich Street, also contracted polio at that time and used crutches all her life. She too worked at Gowanda State Hospital as a secretary for the superintendent. Her sister, Mary, became a nurse and worked for many years at Tri-County Hospital, and brother Joe was a fine football player. Then there was the Pavlin family whose only child, a son, was lost and never returned from World War II. I think he was named Mirko. What a terrible loss for those two parents who wondered, all these years, just where their son was sleeping!
Sometime in the mid-1920s, Slovenes built the Slovenian Hall on Palmer Street next to the Palcic residence. Then they rented the Mentley Grove for their picnics. There they erected a dance floor and a couple of sheds for the beer and the food. A button boxer provided dance music. Sometimes Frank Bozich or Looch Klancer played the polkas and the waltzes for the whirling dancers.
A Mrs. Kengott, who lived in the brick house on Broadway below Crandal Hill, ran a taxi service at the time of few cars. She sold the lots of her farm upon which the houses on Frederick have been built, many owned today by Slovenes and Polish people.
Sometime in those years preceding 1926, my father ordered a machine through an ad in Glas Naroda (Voice of the Nation), a Slovenian newspaper published in New York City and mailed daily. This was a machine to make tamped, concrete blocks, one at a time. With Mr. Gutekunst’s permission, my father set this machine up in the yard behind the Vinegar Works. I recall visiting him there after his day job in the plant was over, watching him work until sunset. Then we walked home, hand in hand.
That block-making machine did not satisfy my father. The tamped blocks were not strong because the concrete had the consistency of wet meal. It could not be poured; it could only be tamped, whereas the mixture for poured blocks had the consistency of slurry and could be poured. Father wanted the more durable blocks. He then ordered three metal trollies about 4’x9’ that moved on steel wheels. Each made 30 blocks: six rows of five each, 90 all told. He built tracks to move them from the concrete mixer to the yard to cure.
The next day when the concrete was sufficiently cured, but still relatively fragile, he disassembled the trollies and laid all 90 blocks out on a platform to cure further. Then he oiled all the plates, some flat surfaced and others rock faced, reassembled the trollies, and started the process over again. When rain threatened, he covered them with tarps if they were still in the trollies or out on the curing platform.
Much later, he erected a long open shed. Cold weather and winter suspended the operation.
He soon found buyers for these building blocks. Often he was hired to lay up those buildings with his blocks. He built a garage for Mr. Gutekunst on Buffalo Street where the Kwik Fill garage now stands.
His son operated the garage. In addition, my father built a garage on Jamestown Street on what today is Burger King’s parking lot. Both of these succumbed to new businesses. He built the large block house on Beech Street. It served as a home and a grocery store for some time. Joe Zelnik, who in his youth worked for Mr. Mentley, in his later years purchased that house and continued the grocery business.