Hickory St., E.F. Sheets, 1963

Now, at the end of a several day run of Hickory Street stamps, I have gotten to my reason for walking that block. Not the stamp itself – E.F. Sheets stamps are common enough and I’ve covered them before in the blog – but the house it’s in front of. To explain why the house is significant, I have to back up a bit.

One of my major finds in the early days of the blog was a 1908 stamp from J.F. Sowa on Prospect Street. As I noted at the time, I was unable to find anything out about Sowa because of the confounding existence of another J.F. Sowa who had authored a notable book in computer science. It turns out there was another reason. I asked my mom if she could use her Ancestry.com membership to make a quick check for a J.F. Sowa in Lansing in the early 1900s. Mom went above and beyond and worked really hard on it, sending me frustrated updates from time to time. Then, at last, in an email titled “BINGO!!!” she reported finding him in the 1910 census: John Fred Sowa, born in 1862 in Prussia, immigrated in 1896, currently living on Hickory Street with his wife Minnie (formally Anna Wilhelmina, according to other sources). Here’s what made the search harder for both of us. Between the 1910 and 1920 census, he changed his surname’s spelling to Sova. This would have been more phonetic (in English) for the Polish and German pronunciation of Sowa. (I also wonder if he might have been the John Sovey mentioned in the famous article about the Bum Walks.)

Speaking of bum walks: sadly, and ironically, the sidewalk in front of Sowa’s house is in bad shape due to having subsided.

I then went to the city’s tax records look at the house it said he lived in, to see if it was still standing. Upon looking at the record, without exaggeration, I squealed with excitement. Someone with the last name Sova still owns the house! I don’t mean to sound like I am prying into the family’s business, but I am truly delighted that his family still has the house, and I wonder if they have any idea that a sidewalk in another neighborhood is still marked with their ancestor’s name. (Based on the names involved and other cursory research, I believe the current owner is a grandson of J.F.) While digging around, Mom communicated with another Ancestry user in Germany who is doing a family tree for Sowa’s wife’s family, and that person mentioned that Sowa showed up in the previous census at a different address on Hickory. He wondered if the street had been renumbered. I have another explanation. The house was only built in 1908, so wherever Sowa was living in 1900 could not have been this house. It seems that Sowa just liked Hickory Street, and evidently the Sovas still do. He must also have been doing well for himself since he seems to have moved into a brand new house.

J.F. Sowa’s house: staid but handsome in its way.

Ever since I found this out I’ve been meaning to make a pilgrimage to see the Sowa/Sova house, but it is just a bit far away for me to walk on my usual routes, so I kept putting it off. I finally stopped there, by car, on my way home from work. I was hoping so much that there would be an old Sowa stamp on this block, better yet in front of the house itself, but I didn’t find one. So I snapped a picture of the oldest stamp in front of the house, which sadly is only this one, from 1963. The house, by the way, is on the south side of Hickory between Euclid and Pennsylvania. It’s on a double lot and seems to have both a garage and a shed; I wonder how old the shed is and whether it might have been used in Sowa’s business.

Sowa/Sova died in 1934 at the age of 74, according to his stone in the Mount Hope Cemetery. It puts his birth year as 1859, which is slightly off the year given in the 1910 census, but I am pretty sure it is the same person.

E. Kalamazoo St., E.F. Sheets, 1962

I made a mistake in yesterday’s entry, saying that most of the E.F. Sheets stamps are in the Sparrow area north of Michigan. I had forgotten another cluster of them south of there, sprinkled around the Kalamazoo/Prospect/Bingham area. This one is on East Kalamazoo Street between Bingham and Jones. It’s difficult to read but a comparison makes it obvious that it is another E.F. Sheets stamp. What’s curious is the C marked above the name. I thought at first that it was some kind of odd mis-strike, but there are a few others nearby that have the same marking (and yet others that do not). I don’t know what it signifies.

The building it’s in front of is apparently Green Concepts Irrigation and Landscaping, not that one would know by looking at it, as there is no signage. In the 1930s and 40s it was Otto Kopietz’s grocery store. The building was constructed in 1926 and I’m not sure whether Kopietz was the original occupant; the earliest reference I can find to his grocery is from 1930, but no address is given. By 1932 he was definitely at this location and selling liquid malt according to an advertisement in the August 2 Lansing State Journal. While liquid malt can also be used in baking, I can’t help but wonder how many people were using it in home brewing.

The former Otto Kopietz grocery store. One can see how the windows have shrunk since those days. The stamp is on the second closest block.

Unfortunately, I am not able to determine when Kopietz closed up shop, nor what business was at this address in 1962. And yes, that is 1962. The typeface that some of the contractors used in the 1960s for dates is frustratingly curvy and often makes me think 6 and 9 are zero. I initially read this one as “1002” and stood there for a moment perplexed by it.