I Remember Gowanda, 1933-45

By Richard Westlund

     Our family was from Minnesota. My dad worked for a large contracting firm that sent him all over the country on large construction jobs. He was sent to Gowanda when they were building the Helmuth Psychiatric Center, which is now a prison. He wasn't here long when, for whatever reason, he sent for the rest of the family.

     We came here from Minneapolis in 1933. I was going into first grade. Gowanda in those days of youth held all the promise of the future of the world. I mention later the odors of the Cattaraugus, yet in the memory of my days of youth the air never smelled sweeter, the young girls have never been prettier, the smiles of catering adults never friendlier, the friends never truer and adventures never more exciting. I wish that for kids the world over it could always be like it was for me, because I felt like I grew up in the Garden of Eden.

     I grew up in Gowanda, but left for the service upon graduating from high school in 1945. I seldom spent any time here after that, save short visits between service and college. I was employed in Buffalo and lived in Orchard Park and Hamburg most of my adult life. I retired in 1989, and in 1993 my wife and I built a retirement home in Collins near the Gowanda Country Club.

     Gowanda still looks similar to the place I left as a youth, with a few changes, but I don't know what happened to most of the people that made Gowanda what it was in those days. Of course the biggest change is the Cattaraugus Creek. You could usually smell it as soon as you came down Sand Hill. They talk about rivers in a war running red with blood.

     I've seen the Cattaraugus running blood red with chemicals and dyes from the factories upstream. In those days people weren't concerned about pollution.

     Another big change as I remember was that the surrounding countryside was covered with dairy farms. A family could have a small dairy of 15 or 20 cows and make a living. It was not uncommon for some to have even a smaller herd, thus allowing the breadwinner to supplement an income by working outside the farm.

     The Mentley brothers had a grocery store on Main Street where the auto supply store is now, next to Radio Shack (which was Hiller's Clothing then). On Saturday night, the town was bustling with all the farmers who came to town to stock up for the week. The continual line of people carrying grocery bags from Mentley's store was a good people-watching activity.

     It wasn't convenient for people to drive as far as they do today, and consequently, if you lived and worked in the area, there was seldom a need to leave. There were more merchants of every description to satisfy your needs, and they were all local people. Grocery stores that I remember were Nelsons on East Main, which later became Ragona's. Across Main Street from there on the corner was a Market Basket for a while. Porpiglia's was next to it for a long time. They always had quite a display of produce on the sidewalk, which sometimes left watermelons subject to walking away with a young delinquent on a warm summer evening, to be the center of a small party by a bunch of local kids.

     Then of course there were many small corner neighborhood grocery stores. There was Bowen's on Buffalo Street, Malek's in Hidi, Rizzo's on South Water and Chestnut, and Moll's Meat Market on the corner of Main and Buffalo. Gulley's, Ritz's and Armes' drug stores were all on West Main Street. Ritz Drug Store had a soda fountain that gave good competition to Papageorge's ice cream parlor just a few doors away. Armes' also did a good soda fountain business. Men's clothing stores that come to mind were Nagles, Hiller's, and Wallace's, with Whiting's ladies wear and Himelein's department store.

     We had two lumberyards, Forbush on Jamestown Street, and out by the railroad station, The Builders Supply. There were two furniture stores, Bushes and Eatons, and three hardware stores, Carpenter's, Luce's and Dahm's. Imagine two bakeries in Gowanda, Hartman's and Roffe's, one on each side of the creek. Hartman's bakery delivered its good bread all over town.

     I'm not going to tarnish my youthful reputation by trying to name all the saloons that were operating in those days. Most of them left with the factories. There were three practicing dentists that I recall: Dr. Cole, Dr. Glazier and Dr. Muir. Resident doctors I remember were Dr. Livermore, Dr. Allen, Dr. Tschopp, and Dr. Tuttle. The Townsend Hospital was located on Walnut Street as my memory has it, Fred and Herb Sipple ran a tobacco and magazine store across from what was then Walt Ley's garage. They were the distribution center for the Buffalo paper. Every day after school there would be a bunch of bicycles parked in front while the paperboys loaded up for their routes. I suppose most young kids in town had a paper route at one time or another. I had a couple.

     The Buffalo Evening News sold for three cents a copy and the paperboy got nine-tenths of a cent for each delivery. If you had a route of 40 houses, you made 36 cents a day; that was $2.16 a week for only a six-day week.

     I'll always remember August Wilkie, one of my customers. I delivered the late news that came to town at 6:30 p.m. Mr. Wilkie lived just across the railroad tracks in Hidi. At three cents a copy I would collect 18 cents a week from my customers for a six-day delivery. Mr. Wilkie never failed to give me a quarter and always waved off the change. Nobody else ever tipped like that. He is also the only customer I remember.

     We didn't have traffic lights in those days. Gib Harris was the police chief when our family came to Gowanda in 1933. Nort Fluker became the chief sometime later. They used to stand in the center of the town square when the tannery, the glue factory, or school let out and controlled the traffic.

     The school has also seen quite a change. I presume a lot of the change is the result of the federal government taking over the role of the board of education and mandating things we never dreamed of. My graduating class in 1945 had 75 seniors. I suspect that number is not very short of today's classes, yet everyone from kindergarten through high school went to the school on Center Street, except for the elementary grades in the outlying areas. These outlying towns all had primary schools so the younger kids didn't come to Gowanda until they reach high school, or eighth grade.

     I went to second grade in a one-room school just one mile out of the village on Zoar Road in what was called Rosenberg. The cemetery on that corner was behind the school. The teacher, Miss Gladys Rogers, who became Mrs. R. Degenfelder, was a real gem. She had quite a mix of students in that one room from grades one to six, but I recall her as one of my most influential teachers.

     A coal stove in the center of the room heated the school. The stovepipe went up to the ceiling and then, suspended by wires, it traversed to the rear of the room to exit on the back wall. I remember one day the pipe running across the ceiling blew apart and pieces were all dangling on the supporting wires with a cloud of soot hanging in the air.

     When we kids went out front for recess, we used to see Johnny Reid or Carl Capella come by on their motorcycles and show off by standing upright on the seat with both arms extended out to the side. They used to have motorcycle races and hill-climbing contests in Capella's pasture on the farm on Quaker Street.

     Johnny Reid's enthusiasm for motorcycles led him to establish the Harley-Davidson outlet that's still on Zoar Road today.

     In Gowanda, at the Center Street School, we had a principal and an assistant principal. The assistant principal also taught classes. I don't recall if one or two secretaries worked in the principal's office (I didn't spend much time there).

     When I was in first grade I lived on Buffalo Street across from Palm Gardens and walked to school every day, as all did the kids from Hidi. The school buses only ran for kids who lived in Perrysburg, Dayton, Collins or Versailles, etc.

     The parking lot behind where Radio Shack is today was not paved, and was rarely used. In the spring during the lunch hour, that lot would be full of kids drawing circles in the dirt for their marble games. One day going home from school at about 10 years of age, some of us were going through a bunch of boxes discarded behind what was then the Riviera, a saloon behind Armes' drug store on Walnut Street. I found a dollar! What a day! With 75 cents I bought myself a pair of denim overall pants at Hiller's, the kind with brass rivets at the corner of the pockets. Then my older brother and I each had a Mexican Sundae at Ritz's drug store for 10 cents each, and with the remaining five cents I bought a Mounds candy bar, which came in two pieces so my older brother could more easily share it with me. Older brothers can often give excellent advice.

     I always lived on the Erie County side of town. At the far end of Erie Avenue was Armes' pond. When it froze over in winter, it was a center of activity for kids' ice-skating and hockey games. Later in time the village would build an artificial rink in St. John's Park. The artificial ice was never as good to skate on. It had a much finer grain, and not the crystal formation of the natural ice.

     If you stand on the bridge downtown and look at the side of the building of Reitz's Liquor Store, about haIfway down to the water you can see where a doorway has been cemented over. There were stairs that went from the bridge, down the side of the building to what we called "The Rat Hole." It was an aptly named pool hall where many Gowanda youth frittered away their talents in gloomy weather.

     The Gowanda Glen occupied the woods and ravine around Grannis Brook, which comes to town between Cemetery Hill Road and Zoar Road. It's still there, but in those days it was full of well-worn paths where kids on the east side of town developed the calluses on the bottoms of their bare feet. We used to take our blankets and sleep there many nights in summer. There were two long log bridges at critical places on the creek that made a hike upstream possible without getting your feet wet. When I came back to town in '93, I had to take a hike up the creek just, to reminisce and to see if Horseshoe Falls was still there.

     One of the big community events, at least as far as preteens were concerned, was on Christmas Eve. They always had a huge Christmas tree in the center of town where the traffic light is now. On Christmas Eve, Santa would come to town in his sleigh, sit on a throne on the steps of what then was the Bank of Gowanda (town hall now) and hear the pleas and promises of the village kids. There would always be a crowd there of parents and spectators, and they would have a community carol sing. What a nice community Christmas Eve it was.

     The large white mansion on the northwest side of the intersection of Chapel and West Main streets (now Weyand Law Offices) was the home of the Wilhelms. They owned the glue factory. What is now known as Chang-Hu Park was then a private garden of the Wilhelms'. It was surrounded and protected by a six-foot chain-link fence.

     Bobby Tuttle was a kid my age with whom I often played. He was the son of Dr. Tuttle. They lived kitty-corner across the street from Wilhelms in that large steep-roofed red brick house. As pre-teens, one day Bobby and I climbed the chain-link fence to play in the garden. It was a beautiful place, and we ran along the paths between the flowerbeds as though we were on galloping steeds, our imaginations filled with glorious deeds in this romantic atmosphere.

     Alas, too soon we found how easily the succulent stems in the tulip garden gave way to our little wooden swords, beheading the tulips. We felt like errant knights on a mission for the king, beheading his rivals with quick dispatch as we galloped across the battlefield. We certainly never thought about how destructive we were being. We were carried away in the glory of the moment much to the sad plight of the tulip bed. Bobby later heard about our deeds from his father. I don't know if I was ever identified. It was only in hindsight that we realized the reality of what we had done. In later years as an adolescent, I took care of the lawns and shrubs of Walter Wilhelm who lived directly across the street in the big red brick house. He paid me 15 cents an hour, which was pretty standard for teenage garden work in those days.

     There was a swimming hole in the Cattaraugus Creek just up above the tannery. It was reasonably isolated, and swimsuits were rarely worn there Consequently it was called "Boys." I usually swam at other places that were closer to my home but I was there the day Stan Nidgewicki took his dive.

     There was a rather high bank that the kids would jump from into the current. My memory of how high it was may be affected by the fact that I was smaller then, but I would guess it must have been at least between 15-20 feet. Stan had never had the nerve to jump from there. This day he was determined to overcome his fear.

     It was necessary to get a run in the field so you could jump out far enough to clear the shallow water near the shore. I watched Stan as he took several runs across the field, but each time he stopped as he approached the edge. On about the third time, he stopped at the edge. He just stood there and looked down, trying to build up his courage. Then suddenly, right there from a standstill, he launched himself into a dive. Without the run, he landed near the shore in shallow water. He was out of sight for a few minutes, then we saw his back bob to the surface floating downstream, face down in the water.

     Several of us scrambled down the bank to get him out of the water. I helped carry him up the bank. He was unconscious and his face was distorted from the blow. It looked as if when his head hit the bottom and stopped forward motion, his lower jaw kept going into his nose. We laid Stan on the grass and told one of the younger kids to get help. One of them jumped on his bike and rode for help, while we waited with Stan. A few minutes later the kid came back saying, "I forgot my bathing suit." He grabbed his suit and then again went for help. Talk about mixed priorities. When help came with a car, we loaded Stan in the back seat and they took him away. I was quite surprised when I saw him again, a few months later, to see his face looked normal.

     Joe Rupp was the scoutmaster of Gowanda Troop 41. His assistant was Howard Hamilton. The big motivation that lured us kids into joining the Boy Scouts when we reached the qualifying age of 12 was that every winter the Scouts would take a trip into the Buffalo Consistory on Delaware Avenue for a January swim in their huge indoor pool. What a thrill that was. It was the first time I ever saw an indoor pool.

     Mr. Rupp, and I call him that reverently, was a wonderful man. He was a dedicated soul who took the responsibility of shepherding the town's youth very seriously. Another big treat was on summer campouts when another assistant, Charlie Spires, would cook pancakes over a campfire. Howard Hamilton also was quite dedicated. I recall him accompanying me on a hike in the woods on a rainy day just so I could try passing the test for a campfire-lighting merit badge. You had to light the fire with no more than two matches.

     There was a song about Gowanda I remember from school that I believe was written by one of the teachers. I recall most of the melody but only a few of the lyrics. It started with the words, "If you've seen home-lights, starring the valley" and it went on to mention the glen and many nostalgic things about Gowanda. I always wanted to get a copy of it and bring it to life, at least in my memory. At one of our high school reunions, I mentioned it to a classmate, Phyllis (Robbins) Hebner. She said she had a copy of it and would let me copy it, but I never followed up on it. It would be a great song to resurrect for the village.

     Louis Gerbek was the chief of police after Gibb Harris and before Nort Fluker. I must have been 17 and was negotiating the purchase of my first car.

     Nelson's Diner was a dining car-type eatery, located where the Jubilee market is now. A young man who worked there also sold cars from a used car lot in Eden. He had brought this little Willys to town to show me. We were sitting in it in front of the restaurant after a brief test drive. On the steering column, where some cars have a shifting lever, this car had a similar lever, not for shifing, but supporting a button on the end which was the horn. As we discussed our affair, I absentmindedly put my hand on the lever as to shift the car and was surprised to hear the horn beep. A few minutes later, again occupied with our negotiation, it happened again.

     Just about that time there stood Police Chief Gerbek leering at me through the side window. I opened it and received a chewing out for disturbing the peace, and a ticket. My pleas of absentminded innocence were ignored. The next day when I was downtown strolling across the bridge, at about the halfway point Chief Gerbek once again confronted me. "Do you have that ticket I gave you last night?" he asked. I flimbled in my wallet and handed it to him. He took it, tore it to pieces, threw it into the creek and walked away without another word. He must have felt the judge would be more sympathetic to me than he had been. That ended my first and last run-in with the law.

     In my early teens, I got my first rifle. It was a small Winchester, single shot 22. My friend, Kenny Loomis, and I were deep into the woods of the Glen, just wandering around when we met Louie Keoppen. The Keoppen boys were all older, and in my mind were true woodsmen and hunters. At one time, one of them had even bagged a bear in Zoar Valley.

     Louie used to work in Walt Cain's gun shop out on Zoar Road. At this meeting, Louie was carrying a magnificent rifle of larger caliber, equipped with a large scope, and obviously capable of sniping at great distances. I stared bragging to Louie about what a great rifle I had and how straight I could shoot with it. Louie was a man of few words. He took about as much of this as he could stand from a kid, then took a matchstick out of his pocket, wedged it into the bark of a tree and said, "If you can shoot so straight, let's see you light that match with a bullet."

     With all the confidence of untried youth, I stepped back a ways, leaned against a tree for support, aimed and fired. The match lit in a most glorious flame! Louie muttered to himself a kind of "Well I'll be" and wandered off. My friend, Kenny, and I spent the rest of the afternoon and our remaining ammunition trying to do it again, but alas, reality set in, and we could not repeat the performance.

     I worked for a short period at the famed glue factory in Gowanda; I believe it was known as the Peter Cooper Corporation. Local legend was that it was the largest glue processing plant in the world. They started out with raw materials in the form of animal products and turned out large sacks of dry glue to be further refined and packaged for sale. After college, I was looking for work in my chosen field of radio and television broadcasting. I got a job in the glue factory on the evening shift from four to midnight, which gave me time to spend my days combing the various broadcasting facilities of Western New York for a position.

     I worked as a stacker. Finished glue came off a conveyor belt with the consistency of Jell-O, as a large ribbon about three feet wide and a half-inch thick. As it came off the belt, it was cut in lengths of about six feet and spread on the wire screen of a frame. My job was stacking these frames on a cart to be delivered to the drying room. When it came from the drying room, it was very brittle. The men who really worked, because they were on piece work, usually wore sneakers and ran all night taking these frames of dried glue over to a large trough with another conveyor at the bottom, and beating them with a stick, knocking all the brittle glue onto the conveyor below. I never saw a group of men anywhere that worked like football players or boxers in training. They were all in excellent shape. Their dedicatio~ to beating one another with their totals was almost like a game.

     Back when I was growing up in the '30s and '40s, there was no such thing as television. Consequently, there was no such thing as nationally celebrated professional football. Without television, one couldn't generate a big enough audience to support the type of professional sports they have today.

     Most towns, including Gowanda, had their own football teams that played against other nearby towns. I always thought these games generated more excitement than the pro games because the players were all people you knew. You could always get a good seat to see the action, but didn't worry much about partying. The players were your local heroes and their loyalty to the team was as strong as yours. Some of their names I remember, but not necessarily their proper spelling, were "Shovel" Stibil, Tommy Hart, Premo Gelia and of course Louie Scrabek, who was killed on his first wedding anniversary playing football on the town team. They didn't have as efficient protection from their gear in those days.

     I also recall one of the town's outstanding athletes was Johnny Batchen. I don't recall if he was on the football team or not, but he was certainly an MVP on the town's baseball team. They used to play the baseball games on a diamond at Anckner's, the present site of the VFW. Anckner's had an indoor roller-skating rink that consumed a lot of time from the local kids, and I'm sure replaced much of what might otherwise have been idle time spent in mischief. We certainly got into enough of that.

     I remember my first big money job. When I was just 16, I got a summer job on a construction crew and was making wages that a married man supported a family on, not in luxury mind you, but it was a typical income for many families. The Holmes and Murphy construction company out of Orchard Park was building a bridge and highway just south of Leon on Route 62. Every morning as they came through Gowanda on their way there, they would stop on Buffalo Street and pick up a group of locals and take us with them. I recall Bill Muir, Don Moreland, and Dominic Porpiglia and Ken Loomis were part of our group. It was hard work but we were well paid. I was getting 85 cents an hour, which came to $34 a week for 40 hours. As I recall after Uncle Sam took his bit for whatever, I cleared about $29 a week.

     On my first day, they were pouring concrete pavement. They had a big mixer with a large scoop on it. A truck would drive up and dump a load of gravel on the scoop, then a gent on a big flatbed truck loaded with bags of cement would toss about three or four bags onto the pile of gravel. They would burst open when they hit and my job was to run in, grab the bags and shake them free of remaining cement and get them out of the way. Then the scoop would raise up and dump the whole business in the mixer for another batch of concrete. When I got home that night, my face, arms and clothing were coated with cement. That gave new meaning to the phrase "to crack a smile."

     When I was about 14, we lived on Buffalo Street. I had asked for ice skates for Christmas and my wish was granted. Our family always opened our gifts on Christmas Eve. With five kids, it allowed our parents to be more involved with us without getting up so early. I remember I was so excited to try out my new skates, I couldn't wait till morning, so I just put them on and went out front and skated up and down on Buffalo street. Of course, it wasn't salted in those days, and was covered with a layer of hard-packed snow that was practically ice, and there was little if any traffic. People put chains on their rear tires to get traction.

     Until we kids were grown, my parents always rented and consequently we moved around a bit as opportunities for more desirable housing came up. When I was 7, we lived a couple miles out out on Zoar Road. One Sunday morning the family was in the car on our way to church. About the time we arrived in Gowanda, my parents realized they had left something behind that they needed for the service. They immediately turned around and headed back home to get it. As we sped out Zoar Road trying to make good time, my mother said to my father, "You'd better hurry dad, or we're going to be late." "I know," answered my dad "but gee mom, I'm going 40 now!"

     Speaking of speed demons, I used to help Irv Parkinson, a farmer about four or five miles out on Zoar Road near where Vail Road comes back to Zoar Road. He would hire me to help him bring in the hay, etc. in summer. He never had a hay loader, but did everything by hand. He didn't like to drive in the congested traffic of beautiful downtown Gowanda, so he would stop at the top of Armes' hill and wait for me to meet him there. In driving back to his farm, I never saw him exceed 15 mph. When he put his car away, he always covered it with a large cloth sheet.

     One day while bringing in hay, we were both stung by a bee. He didn't say much. He just walked over to the lawn, picked a few leaves of broad leaf plantain, which grows everywhere, and started squashing it. He gave me some of the juice he squeezed out to put on my sting, and within five minutes I couldn't tell where I was stung. I've used that remedy all my life. I don't know why no one seems to know about it. I've often thought someone could make a fortune bottling it up. The only person I knew who it didn't work on was a pharmaceutical salesman who really didn't want it to work. He never really squeezed the leaves enough to get the juice and made only a half-hearted attempt, as though to shame his profession if it worked.

Correction - January 26, 2003

Editor's Note: In Richard Westlund's first excerpt about growing up in Gowanda, two mistakes have been discovered. The Riviera Restaurant was located on North Water Street, not Walnut Street. Townsend Hospital was located on Chestnut Street, not Walnut Street.