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I have heard from many people through my website at www.savemattoon.org . Many of which share their stories and memories of their time in Mattoon. Most of them are former residents, others just visitors. Here are some of the comments I’ve received over the last 18 months. Maybe you will recognize some of the people. Maybe their comments will bring back memories of times gone by. Phyllis Buesking Behrend of Tomball, TX writes: Kids used to go over to Bridges Drug store from the Jr. High on Western Avenue and get cherry cokes; then in high school and after getting a drivers license doing the cruising down Broadway and out through Gill's. After I graduated from high school I worked at Mattoon National Bank on Broadway when they moved to the new Bank on Charleston Ave. Small town atmosphere has stuck with me because we are in a small hometown here in TX. (Tomball, named after a man Tom Ball). The only difference, we are a suburb of Houston. (City life) The Alliance church was St. John Lutheran Church before they moved out on Charleston Ave. I attended this church as a little girl and went to vacation Bible school here. They used to go across the street to the Meadow Gold plant and get ice cream for our snacks. My husband was baptized and confirmed in this building. I have very fond memories of singing in the youth choir back in the 50's. Roni Wyld on Central School: My aunt and uncle, Gene and Betty Theisen, owned Wright's Ice Cream across Western Avenue from the high school. I think it was from 1954 to 1964, I can check with my cousin. Anyway I remember going with my mom so she could help my aunt serve lunches to the high school kids. My cousin and I had to stay in the back so we weren't underfoot while the "big kids" were in the store. They served hot dogs, hamburgers, sloppy joes and ham salad sandwiches, cokes (in the small bottles), chips and hostess cakes and of course homemade ice cream. And as if the ice cream weren't good enough they had a jukebox that was played all through the lunch hour! It was the most fun a four yr old could have! When the new high school was built my aunt and uncle bought "The Little Store" which was just about a block away and continued to serve lunches to the high school kids. My mom and aunt made all the sandwiches and hot food at Wright's and then took them to the little store for the lunch hour. I don't remember when but not too long after the HS opening, the school district made a policy that no high school or junior high students could go off campus for lunch. End of the Little Store. I went to St. Mary and St. Joe's Catholic schools and then to Central for ninth grade. Other than regular first yr of high school memories and mortifications, all I remember is that I saw the Harlem Globe Trotters play there, they had a donkey basketball game once and when I was in sixth grade all the girls had to go with our moms to the public school gym for a sex talk. Yikes! I figured we had to go there because they couldn't talk about that kind of stuff in the Catholic school. Pretty naive back then. Steve Gillett of Tulsa, OK: One of my favorite memories of Mattoon was riding bikes out to the big swimming pool at Lytle Park. There were two mandatory stops. On the way out, stop at the ice house on Marshall, just west of 18th street to get ice slivers to suck on (the IC railroad was still operating ice reefers in those days.) And on the way back, stop at Icenogles grocery on west Marshall to get jawbreakers for the ride home. There were two good places to buy baseball cards back then, Icenogles and Sullivan Dairy on 14th and DeWitt. --- The old Central Community Church. was HOT. No air conditioning! Schilling and Mitchell-Jerden Funeral homes printed up paper fans on wooden sticks with a religious picture on one side and advertising for the funeral home on the other. These were placed in the pews along with the hymnals and got a lot of use. It wasn’t unusual for someone to pass out from the heat during Sunday services. This happened to my grandmother when she was in her late 70’s. They laid her down in the pew and cooled her off with water. My parents attended the Methodist church, diagonally across the street. One of the Central Community Church ushers ran over to our church to get my Mom and Dad so they could take Grandma out. --- During the Centennial celebration in 1955, most of the townsmen grew beards. Those seen sans beard were subject to “arrest” and detention in a special “jail” downtown. It was easy to have someone arrested, just make an appropriate donation to the Centennial fund and your nemesis could find himself detained for an hour or so. 50 years ago, watching TV was a fairly simple process. With rabbit ears, it was easy to get channel 3, WCIA, out of Champaign and, if the weather was right, we could get channel 10 out of Terre Haute. In order to watch programs on NBC, you had to have a 50’ or higher antennae with a rotor on top. Needless to say, we watched channel 3 a lot. Channel 3 had its own version of American Bandstand called the Hop. Many of the Mattoon high school kids would drive up to Champaign to be on the show. --- I noticed on the Mattoon web site that Jefferson Junior High on 9th Street has a different name, mascot, etc. The school opened in 1959 as the first full class of baby-boomers (those born in 1946-7) became 7th graders. We had a series of votes, decided to call ourselves the Jefferson Jets, picked blue and white as our colors, and adopted a fight song to the tune of “Up we go into the wild, blue yonder.” Mattoon was a great town in which to be a kid. We could get anywhere in town on our bike and be back by mealtime. It was safe and our parents never had to worry about us because where ever we might be, someone in town knew us. Sally Dehner reminisces: I remember that Aunt Pearl took my cousin and her minister as well as me, his wife and his daughter to dinner at the U.S. Grant Hotel and in their dining room was my first experience with a finger bowl! I think maybe I remember the Dinner Bell restaurant also. Another rather interesting memory was that of my cousin and I attending a matinee at the movie theater by ourselves. Aunt Pearl dropped us off and we thought it would be fun to sit in the balcony. That was probably the late '50's. Although my uncle walked to work everyday I don't remember my Aunt Pearl or us kids ever walking anywhere. She drove us everywhere. In fact she was the only one of her sisters to ever get a driver's license and she always drove a big car, usually a Buick or Oldsmobile. Among other memories I have: I remember going swimming every summer at Lytle Park. The first summer I came to visit Mattoon my aunt (Pearl Bennett) gave me a beach towel embroidered with my name. I still have that towel (I guess it's an "antique" now since it's from the late 1950's.) I remember changing my clothes and putting them in a locker and then safety pinning the locker key to my swimsuit. My aunt didn't swim so she sat outside the fence and just watched me. My summers in Mattoon are some of my happiest childhood memories. Jan Havlick from California: I was born in Mattoon in the old Memorial hospital the one with the large beautiful staircase. I trained to be a nurse and worked in the new and old Memorial Hospital and took care of patients in Pediatrics and Geriatrics in the old hospital part. I remember to this day the antique floors and fixtures. The porch area called the sun porch was originally for TB patients as it was thought that sun cured TB back then.... When I was assigned patients in that area of the hospital even though TB was long since cured with the invention of antibiotics, the beds were numbered sun porch one two three and four as there were four patients in that one large room now used to provide much needed bed space for a crowded hospital. Dad went to the old Hawthorne grade school. I registered in the old school but it was torn down and I was one of the first to attend the "new" Hawthorne built on the same location. My Dad graduated from the Mattoon High School on Western Ave and I attended Jr. High there and went to nurses training in the brick nursing school building (now gone) just adjacent to the gym. Another of the buildings is the Presbyterian Church on Western. Mom and Dad were married there. We attended Church there and I have many fond memories of Vacation Bible School there. I toured Sally Ann Bakery while in Kindergarten I smelled its fragrance on summer evenings sitting on my front steps just a block away. There is nothing like it in the entire world. Gwena Zike comments on the Calvary Baptist Church (Presbyterian): I attended the church from roughly 1984 until 2003. It was still in use until at least late summer of 1998. I remember taking my then newborn to a Wednesday night prayer service so my mother could show her off. On the stained glass windows; Pastor Fritschle always wanted to remove the ones depicting Jesus with long hair because they were offensive to his beliefs but he told us that wasn't possible because they were donated. On some of the interiors of the windows it would state who had donated the window and if memory serves me correctly many were donated in memory of lost loved ones. The church was massive and had the wonderful damp smell of an old building. I can still remember the sound of the doors closing from the doors of the basement entrance. There were 2 balconies but I believe that there were at one time 3 if memory serves me correctly. There was a door behind the sanctuary that also had a balcony and beneath it were several rooms that we used for Sunday school. The basement housed another stage, restrooms, boiler room, and a kitchen. There were also classrooms down there as well. The were stairs somewhere in the church leading up to the steeple I believe that you entered them from one of the balconies although I never tried going up there. Chris and Sally Lubinski from South Milwaukee, Wisconsin: We have been coming to Mattoon annually to celebrate our wedding anniversary for the last 12 plus years. We have been married for over 26 years now and I chose Mattoon out of a Holiday Inn guide to Honeymoon in. I wanted to take myself and my new wife on a honeymoon on a train! Mattoon was the place! This was March 4th 1979. We came back in 1989 for our 10th anniversary; had such a great time we came back two weeks later with our kids. (They were 10 and 8 then.) We all loved the place and the family friendly surroundings and fell in love with "Uncle Bill's family restaurant". We have been coming every year now for many years and our visits always included breakfast at "Gowin's.” We have long since fallen in love with your downtown and it's charm and we consider it "our Mayberry". Thank God the IC station is being renovated! It was looking a little on the sad side for a while and we were worried about it's future! We stepped off of that train as the New Mr. and Mrs. Chris G. Lubinski and it's so special and marriage strengthening to come back every year and stand on the Broadway bridge and look down at the place we got off the train at! Barbara Cook Clouser Kime It was the summer of 1944, when I was in high school, that Mattoon was panic-stricken. A woman claimed she had been the victim of a gas attack, through the open window of her home. More attacks were reported and hysteria soon grasped the entire city. I remember, during a babysitting job, being so afraid that I kept the lights off and huddled far away from any window. After several weeks, reports of the attacks ceased and no evidence was ever found to substantiate the victims' claims. Later this episode was featured in a college textbook as an outstanding example of mass hysteria. It was the summer of 1954 when Mattoon had a record drought. Lake Paradise, our water source, almost dried up. The lakebed was so hard and cracked a car could be driven across it. As a result of this drought it was determined that Mattoon needed a larger, more reliable water source, and Lake Mattoon came into being. For two weeks the thermometer was in the upper 90's or above and at one point reached 114 degrees. The woman across the street from us installed a window air conditioner and was the envy of all the neighbors until we found out that it cost 50 cents a day to run. Who could afford that? Justin "Jud" Clouser I grew up in the 50's and 60's in Mattoon. Becky Richardson was a neighbor and we all played together as kids. One of my favorite memories is going Trick-or-Treating at Halloween. We used to go on 2 nights. We would go on the 30th and 31st of October. We could cover a lot of territory in those 2 nights. We lived at 3012 Walnut at the time and on the first night we would cover both sides of Walnut from 27th Street to 33rd Street. On the second night we would cover Oak from 27th to 33rd. Of course, we always had a bar of Ivory soap with us so we could soap the car windows of anyone who didn't give us what we considered to be a fair treat. In high school, the main activity on friday and Saturday nights was cruising Broadway. A group of us would pile into a car and head down broadway. We'd turn down 12th Street abd drive through Gill's parking lot seeing who all was there, then drive back up 12th, back down broadway and turn around in the parking lot next to Warner's Office Supply. We would make this continuous loop all night long until curfew. If we we lucky enough to have a date and could borrow our parent's car we thought we were pretty cool. Winter time didn't slow us down. We just couldn't hang out the windows like we could in the summer. We never felt like there was nothing to do in town because we always had Broadway. Former Mattoon resident Kyle Kirts: Your website is
absolutely awesome! I was just home last weekend and mom just kept
on saying how Rebecca Porter sent this in on early Mattoon History: I came across this in my uncle’s papers. He has boxes and boxes of information but never put in any order. Came across this that came out of a book called "The Johnstown Story" I know that Johnstown is in Cumberland County, but Coles County used to be longer and took up Cumberland also. Here is the following that is from the book on pages 485 and 486: 2-7 Charles Michaels, son of David and Eva (Shut) Michaels, was married and had 2 sons in 1855 when the first house was moved into Mattoon, Illinois. An interesting bit on Mattoon and Charles Michaels is found in an old Coles County History. An early familiar scene where the city of Mattoon now stands was the herding of cattle. The Noyes, Trembles, Messers and Allisons spending days in their saddles, never dreaming of the future city. Two years later came rumors of a railroad and the aim of every settler was to secure land at or near the crossing. In December 1854, it was platted: On May 14, 1855 it was named for William Mattoon, one of the contractors of the Terre Haute and Alton Railroad and on the following day the sale of lots began. The first house on the site was one brought from the Benjamin D. Turney farm 3 miles a bit southeast from near the Turney Springs and on what was called the Old State Road. It was February 1855. It was drawn over the snow on hickory poles by 16 yoke of oxen, 8 yoke being driven by B.D. Turney and the other by Charles Michaels. James and John Michaels, sons of Charles, riding within the house to the new townsite. In October 1855 the original plat was filed at Charleston, Illinois, and received its legal name. During the rainy seasons the streets were a quagmire, single boards serving as sidewalks and often submerged in mud. This seems strange since Mattoon is on the highest point of land between Terre Haute and St. Louis and is 740 feet above sea level. "Breathe there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my own home town...Mattoon." If you get a chance to read this book it is full of information on the past. I think it was written in the 1950's. Becca
Patrick Shavloske of Terre Haute, Indiana: My grandfather was a NYC engineer and road foreman. He and his family lived in Mattoon in the early 1930s (on Edgar Street, I believe). Last year, I spent a Saturday retracing the Big Four from Terre Haute (the city in which I grew up) to Mattoon. I was surprised to see a depot still standing as Terre Haute's Big Four Depot had been pulled down in the early 1980s--also to make way for a parking lot. That was every bit as much of a loss as Mattoon's as Terre Haute's depot was also an interesting structure. Fortunately, the door into Mattoon’s baggage room was open and I wondered around the first floor (yes, I'm guilty of trespass!). I was amazed that baggage carts were still stored inside; I hope those at least were saved. I remember standing on the old platform and thinking what a sight it must have been to see the Southwestern Limited call there. To make a long story short, I'm glad I saw the building while I had the chance. My mom has an old family photo of Big Four shop man posed on a steam engine on the turntable at Mattoon. My grandfather is in a suit in the first row. I'll try and locate that when I'm back in Terre Haute next and see if I can't get that scanned for you. Perhaps you would find that of some use in your efforts. How short sighted of your city leaders. Best of luck in your future preservation efforts. Patrick Shavloske |