Remember the mystery of Ed Crackins-or-Drackins? I passed a clear stamp tonight, on the west side of Ferguson Street just north of Vine, that solves it. The name is Brackins. I’m sorry this is so dark, but there wasn’t a near enough street lamp, and attempts to capture it with a flash washed it out entirely.

“Brackins” is a more plausible reading of the previous stamp I found than “Crackins,” since the letter isn’t round enough on the left side to be a C. The classifieds I turned up advertising for Ed Crackins were probably OCR glitches, because I can find similar ones spanning the same time period (the 1950s through early 1970s), and more importantly using the same phone number, for Ed Brackins.

On October 29, 1958, the [Lansing] State Journal ran a piece titled “Career Events Set.” The Iota Phi Lambda business women’s sorority and the NAACP were sponsoring a program titled “Careers – Unlimited” at the Friendship Baptist church at 925 West Main Street. (That address appears to have been obliterated by I-496.) The article goes on to list all the professionals who would be providing information at the career fair, and one of them is cement contractor Ed Brackins.

The dates involved suggest that this could be Edward E. Brackins, Sr., 1912-1983, buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt (according to Find a Grave). That is just a guess, however, since I can’t find his obituary.