I decided to walk a bit in a different neighborhood, Old Town near Bancroft Park, to try to get some new stamps. I didn’t find anything entirely new there on a short jaunt, but I think this is another instance of the hard-to-read stamp on Elizabeth Street that I thought might read “Buonodono.” Unlike that one (which is undated) this one seems to bear a date of 1961.
It’s on Ohio Avenue near the northwest corner of Ohio and Taft.
These handwritten stamps are a little way up the street from the handwritten C.H. Peel, but in this case I can be quite confident they are contractor’s marks from the fact that there are two of them paired on either end of a stretch of sidewalk, as a contractor would do to mark the beginning and end of the work they were responsible for. This is on the west side of the 400 block of Leslie Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.
In these (not very good) photos it is hard to tell that the first letter is a C, but I’ve seen it by daylight and know that it is. My usual tricks didn’t bring me any joy. I couldn’t find out anything at all about C. Fletcher.
This handwritten mark is on the west side of Leslie Street’s 500 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. Is it a contractor’s mark, or graffiti? It could easily be either, but guess is the former, based on its placement.
I can’t seem to find out anything about C.H. Peel, either as a contractor or as a person, but my guess is that this is either Charles Hubert Peel or his son Charles H. Peel Jr. Both lived (and died) in Lansing according to Find A Grave, and both were plausible ages in 1961. The father lived 1907-1988 and the son lived 1932-1988. Sadly, they died close together, first Charles Jr. in May 1988 and then Charles Sr. in November that year.
I had one of those lucky moments today in which I walked past a previously illegible stamp at a different time of day and it revealed itself to me. It suddenly became apparent that this stamp, previously catalogued as illegible, is in fact from L. Ketchum. Like the other L. Ketchum I’ve found, it looks to be from the 1960s, and if I’m reading it right, 1961.
This illegible stamp is on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Clemens and Fairview, just west of the alley. It doesn’t resemble any stamp that I recognize, but I can’t make out more than couple of letters. It looks to start with a K or B.
The date is also illegible. I can say with fair confidence that one digit is a “6”, but I can’t be sure whether it’s the last digit or the penultimate one, so I can’t even narrow down a decade.
Update 4/28/21: Walking past it in different light, it suddenly jumped out at me that it is an L. Ketchum stamp. The date is almost certainly 1960s, like the other one I’ve found, and I think it’s 1961.