I was delighted to find this pair of stamps on the west side of North Fairview Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw. Why? Because they solved a previous mystery. I had found another Herb Riebow stamp on Vine Street, but was unable to fully read the last name.

Unfortunately, I can tell you little about Herb Riebow besides that he existed. The Traverse City Record-Eagle of April 10, 1947, reports that Mr. and Mrs. Herb Riebow of Lansing were in town staying with relatives, having been driven from their home by flooding. From this I infer that they must have lived near the river. The 1940 census places the Riebows in Ward 7, but I confess I don’t know where that would have been. Lansing currently has only four wards.

The August 4, 1953, Lansing State Journal reports that “Herbert Riebow of Lansing was awarded a contract to install curb and gutter on S. Cedar St. in front of the new West Side grade school, and a sidewalk on the west side of S. Cedar, between Columbia and W. Ash, extending from Ash to the school, and also down the south side of Ash to connect with the existing walk.” Later in the 1950s and early 1960s, however, I find a few scattered classified ads suggesting that Riebow was now in the real estate business instead.

Herbert S. Riebow is buried in Deckerville, having died in 1993 at the age of 84. Obituaries are often a useful source of information on people’s businesses, but they don’t seem to have run one in the Lansing State Journal and I don’t have access to the Deckerville Recorder.