This stamp is on the south side of Lasalle Gardens (according to the city, “Gardens” is the suffix, like “Street,” rather than part of the name proper) between Kipling and Midvale. This neighborhood on the east edge of Lansing is the Midtown subdivision, developed in the 1950s, around the same time as the nearby Frandor shopping center. It is full of neat little 1950s homes and so reminds me of the street I grew up on. The house this is in front of was built in 1955, the same year as the stamp, and so most likely the sidewalk was installed by the builders.
So who was J.A. Hicks? Well, one clue is that there was until recently a J.A. Hicks Building in East Lansing. It was a row of brick storefronts downtown, and so of course it was torn down to built a mini-Target and a big pile of lofts. Yet aside from references to the building, I could not turn up anything about J.A. Hicks, except for a few classified ads from someone by that name selling non-sidewalk-related items in the 1910s. So I tried one of my usual strategies, checking Find a Grave to see if I could determine a full name. There I found a John A. Hicks, born in 1872 and buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing. That would make him old enough to be the J.A. Hicks of the classified ads. He was also in the right line of work: Polk’s Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory of 1921 has an entry for John A. Hicks that attaches him to a firm called the Hicks-Nichols Co., line of business given as “real est.”
But wait: there’s a problem. John A. Hicks died in 1937. Frustratingly, I have not been able to find his obituary, which would answer the question I am left with: did he have a son with the same name or initials? There was certainly some John Hicks around East Lansing in the 1950s, but he seems to have been a merchant. On December 2, 1953, the [Lansing] State Journal reported on a “new innovation in the field of merchandising In East Lansing these days,” which was “the dressing up of the back doors to shops along the city’s main street to attract customers from the city’s new municipal parking lots.” It goes on to say that “John Hicks opened up the back door of his shop when the first municipal lot was completed several years ago.” The January 24, 1956, State Journal article refers to “John Hicks, retiring president of the city’s Merchants Association.”
I tried the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection index, but there wasn’t a single entry for the keyword “Hicks” – this despite the fact that John A. Hicks’s death was considered notable enough to rate an entry in the State Journal‘s article “Chronological List of Important Events in Lansing During Past Year” on New Year’s Day 1938. Under the subheading “Important Deaths of Year” is “Nov. 10 – John A. Hicks, East Lansing business man, succumbed.”
