A woman wandered hopefully through the front door of the Clarkston News? office a few weeks back, explaining that she was eager to find a picture of a mom and her little girl, a photo that had run in our paper back in the early ?90s.
She was the mom, and the little girl was her daughter, returning from summer camp for the first time. The pictue, she said, showed the two locked in a giant hug as the girl stepped off the school bus.
‘No problemo,? I told her. ‘I can relate.?
I, too, once squeezed the stuffing out of my own returning camper. A photo would be priceless.
This woman was making a memory book for her now-grown daughter, and I made it my mission to help (I’m going to get organized enough to make a memory book for Christy one of these days. Really, I am).
Well, after looking through the June issues of six years? worth of the Clarkston News, we found the photo. I was happy. Leafing through those hulking volumes that line several shelves in our office, though, I also stumbled across all kinds of interesting information, and hence, I had a new pastime.
Getting to know my beat, I sat down recently and read about the history of Clarkston, the Clarkston Police Department, and Independence and Springfield townships in the old issues archived in those books.
I’ve come across things that make me chuckle, things that make me sad, things that make me say, ‘Hey you guys, listen to this!?
So guess what I found out?
There really was a guy named Rudy, and in 1933 he opened Rudy’s Market in downtown Clarkston. He’d sell you a pound of mixed nuts for a quarter in 1941, and while you were there you could pick up a one-pound roll of butter for 37 cents, or a two-pound loaf of cheese ? Kraft cheese, mind you ? for 59 cents.
And yes, the ad said a ‘roll of butter? and a ‘loaf of cheese.? I can prove it.
Three packages of assorted Kremel were going for 11 cents, which seems like a good deal, but, well, what’s Kremel?
Fast forward 20 years, and Rudy was still passing out pork chops for 29 cents a pound.
When Rudy died in 1992, the Clarkston News remembered him as a man with a fondness for children, dogs and pigeons. Which might explain a thing or two, come to think of it, to the folks who wonder why Rudy’s flock of feathered friends thumb their beaks at the fake owls on the roof across the street.
And there’s more: anyone remember the hundred-car pile-up on I-75 near Dixie highway on a blustery February day in 1990?
What about when the residents of Middle Lake Road wanted to secede the union ? I mean the city ? after Clarkston’s charter passed by only 12 votes?
But one particular story grabbed my attention in a big way.
What ever became of young Jimmy Territo, the 8-year-old Clarkston boy who was selected in 1987 to sing for Pope John Paul II in Hart Plaza?
Jimmy said he wanted to be the first American Pope, and after he sang for the pontiff, Jimmy told the News this: ‘I never had such a good experience in my life. It was one of the best things in my life, other than my First Communion.?
You ought to see the kid’s picture; he’s got the face of an angel, and I just keep wondering: Where’s Jimmy Territo now?