Being thankful for friends

At Thanksgiving, we have dinner with our family or friends. We usually offer thanks for our families and the meal we are having and wish our friends goodwill.

The Manitook Hotel was Granby’s “in place”

From 1929 to 1935, the Manitook Hotel, and guest cottages on the west shore of the lake, was a thriving, bustling place. Tourists from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and many other states visited to canoe, swim, play tennis, fish, hunt, and enjoy a vacation in Granby.

School custodians are silent heroes

August 30 was the first day of school in Granby and many kids were excited to get back to school to see their friends. The kids saw a clean school, a school that looks almost new, because of the silent workers—the school custodians who worked hard all summer preparing for the new school year.

Ethel Linnell, first SBHS curator

In its first 75 years, the Salmon Brook Historical Society has had three amazing curators. I have written about Eva Dewey saving Granby history when she stored most of the files, genealogical files, and artifacts in her house while the SBHS was first renovating its campus. I also have written about how Carol Laun helped transform the society as we know it today and became our town historian and educator. Both Eva and Carol followed in the footsteps of our first curator, Ethel Linnell.

High school history lesson

On graduation day, high school seniors receive their diplomas and head off to college or the workforce. Each high school diploma has three signatures: the superintendent, the principal and the chairperson of the Board of Education. For some Granby graduates, those signatures will look familiar because many had a parent serve as the chairperson of the board, including myself.

What it was like: A child’s perspective of a natural disaster

On Sept. 21, 1938, a major hurricane wreaked havoc along the eastern seaboard, especially in New England. Connecticut lost over 680 lives from this storm and Hartford was flooded so badly that the Park River was buried under the city so such an occurrence would not happen again. After the 1938 hurricane, the Granby school district, along with many others, had students record what they remembered from the storm. Below are excerpts of how students who attended the one-room schools in Granby described the 1938 hurricane.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it!

The Neighborhood News was a weekly Granby newspaper, which ran from 1939 to 1943. It was produced by two children, Buddy Pendleton and Mary Teale. Buddy, age 6, was the editor, and Mary, age 6, the assistant editor, although sometimes her older sister, Christine, age 11, would fill in for her.

Norwood T. Case, Granby’s weather prophet

Although spring is in the near future, we can almost certainly expect another winter storm in late February or March. There is always the possibility of an April Fool’s Day blizzard as we had in 1997. While we have television and radio meteorologists as well as the National Weather Service to alert us to incoming storms, that was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century.