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When our children were in elementary school at Alta Vista they had an annual Halloween Carnival on the school grounds with games, fun rides, and yummy food. It was a fun evening for all. Every child won a prize at every game.

I think at some point someone complained about it being a "Halloween" event because it denoted some kind of pagan ritual so they renamed it a Fall Festival and still the kids had fun.

One year I co-chaired it with my next door neighbor, Helen Valentich. We spent hours planning and coordinating all of the games, food, drink and rides. We made a trip to St. Pete to buy hundreds of prizes and Pete pulled a hay wagon behind our old gray Jeep and gave kids rides around the school yard. What fun memories. LIFE WAS GOOD!

New, time saving, household appliances have always been a favorite of house wives, house husbands and anyone else with culinary responsibilities. In its time, I think the electric ice box, now called a refrigerator, must have been a sought-after status symbol.

I'll bet you there were some "againers" back in the early 1930s. Things like, "My Mother didn't have one and I don't want one. What if the electric goes off? What if my husband loses his job and we can't pay the light bill? All our food will spoil!" All valid considerations back then.

I remember riding to the ice house with my mother to pick up a twenty-pound block of ice that would ride on the bumper support bar of our car. Did it get dirty like that, riding outside like that? Sure did, but the dirt just melted itself off.

Electric refrigeration did have its economic drawbacks; no more ice houses making 300-pound blocks, no more mule-drawn ice carts on their delivery routes. You didn't have to put your ice card (shown below) up in your front window.

A local financial tragedy was suffered by 4 year-old E.C. (Bob) Prince. When his parents owned the Lynn Apartment Hotel in Sarasota, he used to make as much as fifty cents a week emptying the drip pans in the ice boxes. And, before water-use restrictions were even thought of, his Mother saved the drip water and used it in cooking. LIFE WAS GOOD!

(photo credit: Pete Esthus Collection)

"Mommy, look what Daddy brought home," I exclaimed as he and a helper undid the strap on the hand truck. But then, how much excitement for an electric ice box would you expect from a 5 year old. Not being the food buyer, nor the meal-fixer for the family, what did I know? But my Mommy almost cried, she was so excited.

"But Art, can we afford it?"

"Clara, don't worry about it. I got it for this morning's hauling job."

When my family moved here from Chicago in 1925 my Dad bought a second-hand truck and started Esthus Transfer Company. The bread and butter of that business was hauling trunks and baggage for winter tourists arriving by the Seaboard Air Line or Atlantic Coast Line railroads.

If travelers arrived by Seaboard and were going to Miami, they would have to transfer to the A.C.L. If they arrived by A.C.L. and were going to Venice, they would transfer to S.A.L. My Dad would transfer their baggage.

Sometimes, when hauling family household goods, the customers didn't have enough money to pay their bill. At one point or another Daddy brought home a dining room table, a bedroom set, and even an upright player piano with music rolls. LIFE WAS GOOD!

Back in the 50s Sarasota hit the big time. We had 'arrived' with the opening of our first big chain department store. It stood where the current Hollywood 20 theater is located on the Northwest quadrant of Washington Blvd and Main St. and the parking lot was to the west of the store where the parking garage now stands. On the west side of the building there was a metal cabana that ran along most of the length of the building where bicycles and patio furniture were displayed.

The store had an elevator but also an escalator and our toddler son found an interesting button on the lower part of the hand rail and what are you gonna do with a button but push it.....and of course, he stopped the escalator. One of a parent's embarrassing moments. Funny, but he doesn't remember it.

At Christmas time a good portion of the second floor was transformed into the most spectacular Winter Wonderland. It was delightful for adults as well as children and you could hear lots of ‘oohs' and ‘aahs' as you strolled through it.

When Hurricane Donna hit in September of 1960 it twisted the metal cabana into metal spaghetti. It was a very visual picture of Mother Nature's power.

When Southgate Mall opened it took a lot of the thunder away from downtown as our community spread further south and east and Maas Brothers had to share the business with another Maas Brothers that eventually opened in Southgate and gradually the downtown store saw fewer and fewer customers. It eventually became Burdines and finally closed. That was a sad day for us downtowners but Southgate was the happening place and still is a vital part of our community.

In the early 1930s, Sarasota and the rest of Florida, was still suffering from the stock market crash in October of 1929 and the local real estate boom and bust of 1926. Things were so low that the public school system shut down a month early and instituted a tuition fee to be able to re-open in the Fall of 1933.

What a welcome sight it must have been to see the long-vacant Dixie Hupmobile Automobile Co. building on the corner of 9th Street (now Fruitville Rd.) and Goodrich Avenue morph into the Sarasota Nehi Bottling Co.

During the 1890s, carbonated soft drinks were available only at soda fountains. As bottle blowing became more mechanized, the soft drink makers developed more markets and opened more bottling plants.

About the time I was 11-12 years old my family moved to within a half-block of the Nehi plant. I soon discovered heaven-on-earth. When they would crank up the bottling machine we could hear the clink-clank (no air conditioning and open windows) as the bottles progressed along the conveyor.

That was the signal for me and my buddies (Grady Cain, Elmer Taylor, Billy Blasingame, Peanut Harding and Charlie Parker to name a few) to go sit on the inside window sill and wait for the "cripples" to come along. No matter if it was R.C., Orange, Strawberry, Root Beer, Grape, or Chocolate, the operator would let us have the mis-capped and the mis-fills to drink there. After about an hour or two we would be stuffed. Come supper time-my mother found out-I wasn't hungry. I don't know for sure but I suspected she might have gone to the plant to complain because we soon found a "Employees Only" sign hanging across the doorway.

And then the plant ceased operations in 1978. Oh well, by then I was 50 years old and didn't need all those extra calories. Such is life....