I walked a 5K today (the Mayor’s River Walk) and so I didn’t take my usual neighborhood walk. Realizing I didn’t have a stamp for the blog, I suddenly decided to pull into the next neighborhood street I came to as I drove home from Potter Park on Pennsylvania. The next one turned out to be Walsh Street, so this stamp is from the north side of Walsh between Pennsylvania and Parker. I’m not sure if the date on this one is 1966 or 1968 but I mildly favor 1968.

It’s a contractor I haven’t seen before. I took my usual approach for finding contractors when it’s in the “Initial(s) and Last Name” format that often comes up in older stamps: I checked Find a Grave for people buried in a cemetery in or near Lansing with a matching name and a plausible birth and death date. In this case I found Alton M. Brayton (1908-1986) buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt.

Facing west on Walsh Street. This is the better side of the street, as far as sidewalks; the walks on the other side are so crumbled as to be totally absent in some places. The city should be ashamed to have let the sidewalks get so bad. That’s some Lansing Township level BS.

Armed with a full name, I searched again and found the June 13, 1974, Clinton County News (bless Clinton County for having scans of many old issues online). On page 11A, a brief piece titled “Sign Ovid Street Contract” accompanies a photograph:

It was contract signing time in Ovid Monday as village officials, engineers and contractors inked the
line for $230,000 street building project. Signing the contracts are [from left] Earl Canfield, village
clerk; Carl McIntosh of Capitol Consultants; Alton Brayton, contractor and Dale Crossland, village clerk.

Clinton County News, June 13, 1974, p. 11A

The photo is very muddy because the paper has been scanned in black-and-white, but you can get at least a little bit of an idea what Brayton looked like.