Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/author/todd-vibert/page/5/)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On Monday, Feb. 14, more than 151 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent to and received from husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers and significant others across the country.
Had kids been selling newspapers in Granby in 1906, as they did in the major cities such as New York or Boston, that February they would have been yelling “Read all about it! White Cappers drag Willis Griffin out of town!”
When I was in the sixth grade at Kelly Lane, I had Mrs. Cowper for English. However, months later, her husband accepted a job transfer to Baltimore and they moved away.
In the June edition of the Granby Drummer, I wrote about Eva Dewey, the curator and archivist for the Salmon Brook Historical Society from 1959 to 1986, who saved much of Granby’s history. In her final nine years she had an invaluable assistant in the archives—Carol Laun, who would go on to transform the Salmon Brook Historical Society into what it is today.