Here it is.... (drum roll please)...the famous Ray's Dairy Store.

If you didn't grow up in the neighborhood, you might not have even heard the name much less have ventured inside. But any kid within walking distance of the store (3907 W. 54th Street) knew Ray's was the place to go for candy. I had heard about the store from several people as we prepared our "Growing Up in Edina" exhibit, now on display.

Jeff Thompson wrote: "I grew up in the sixties near 60th and France Avenue and our "corner store" was Ray's Dairy Store on 54th Street just west of France. It was operated by Ray (Carlstedt) and his wife Dorothy. I remember Ray always seemed fond of us kids but his wife did not seem very happy whenever we came in. Ray was a small man but his wife was a rather large woman who with one look told us we had better behave while in the store. They lived in an apartment above the store. The building still stands today as a craft or needle point shop."

Sherry Ott also fondly remembered biking to the store. "Ray's Dairy Store on 54th and France had the best selection of penny candy in town. If you were lucky, you might hear the sounds of Ray's daughter, Susanne, playing piano upstairs." Bob Herman also included Ray's among his happy childhood memories.

Children's author and illustrator Nancy Carlson turned her childhood memory of shoplifting a candy bar from Ray's into a picture book, Arnie and the Stolen Markers. Although Arnie steals markers instead of candy, Nancy said her drawings of the store with its myriad choices of penny candy are true to what she remembers of Ray's.

The book is out of print, but is part of a display on Nancy Carlson as part of the "Growing Up in Edina" exhibit.

For more on Nancy's childhood in Edina, see previous blog post here or check out her web site.

Of course, Ray's sold more than just candy. Parents also picked up necessities at the little market between trips to the larger grocery stores in town.

What businesses would you like to see featured on Photo Friday? Supply an address, if possible, to make look-up easier. We don't have photos of every business, but if we do, I'll post the photo on a future Friday. Make your wishes known by commenting here or emailing me.

Today is a perfect day to go to an amusement park, don't you think? Beautiful blue Minnesota skies, high 70s, cool breeze... If only we all could play hooky and ride on a roller coaster or four and eat a funnel cake for lunch.

Besides the summer like weather, I can attribute my mood to the serendipitous coincidence of finding out that Valleyfair is now open for the season on the same day I saw this 1948 ad for Excelsior Amusement Park in our files.

I wasn't researching Excelsior, but the ad appeared alongside a news clipping from the June 17, 1948 issue of the Edina-Morningside Suburban Press.

If you grew up between 1925 and 1968 in the Twin Cities, you probably went to Excelsior for summer fun (unless you were the children of my parents, who thought the place was too run down in the late 60s for little kids.)

They may have been right. Excelsior was a teen hangout in the 1960s, thanks in no small part to its Danceland, that booked such big name acts as the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. You can read more about the history on the sites listed below, but let's just say cops were called out to the place with some regularity to establish order.

Even if you can't sneak out this afternoon, why not take  a virtual trip to the bygone days of Excelsior Amusement Park by checking out these links:

• Minnesota Historical Society has great photos of the park in its online database.
• Three-part series with lots of photos on the Lake Minnetonka web site.
  
• Rolling Stones' concert story on Jeanne Anderson Twin Cities Music Highlights web site.
  
• KARE 11 story on "Mr. Jimmy". Yes, that Mr. Jimmy.

Presumably, if you're still reading, you decided to stay at your desk today, in which case, I'll leave you with the legendary words of Mr. Jimmy, "You can't always get what you want." See Official Rolling Stones video from live 1975 concert at the LA Forum below.

As always, I love to live vicariously. Tell me about your fun days at Excelsior Amusement Park or any other memory this story brings to mind. Comment here or email me.

When I was growing up, my mom would send my brothers and me to the little corner store to pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread if she ran out between her weekly trips to the bigger supermarket downtown.

"The Little Store," as we called it (although that was not its real name), stocked the necessities along with penny candy and pop for the youngsters enlisted for the marketing errands. The store looked like a house, but the owners lived upstairs and operated the business on the first floor.

What store am I talking about?

Brookside area residents would probably say Docken's store, but those near Cahill might think of Cameron's. Tedman's might come to mind for those living near Valley View Road (although the owners lived behind the store, not above it.) Those who lived near the Minneapolis border might venture to Ray's Dairy store, while Morningsiders had Morningside Grocery near the northwest corner of 44th and France.

The answer: none of the above. I didn't grow up in Edina, but as you can see, the description fits nearly every little corner store that operated until 1970s or so, when two-car families became the norm and Mom could run her own errands or Dad could pick up the essentials at the gas station on his way home from work.

Docken's Community Store (as it is named in the Edina phone directories) was in a house at 4356 (later renumbered to 4360) Brookside Avenue, just north of the streetcar tracks that ran along 44th Street, making it an easy destination for commuters coming home after work. Arthur and Lila Docken operated the store from at least 1926 to 1949, when it was purchased by Jon and Eloise Garner. (Many customers pronounced the name "Gardener's" or "Gartner's," having only heard the name and not seen it spelled.)

Now the site of the Brookside Court condominiums (built in 1965), the house/store was located on the northwest corner of Brookside Avenue and 44th Street.

Jeanne Anderson from the St. Louis Park Historical Society researched the Dockens and the store, which was important to the Brookside neighborhood on both sides of the SLP-Edina border. She writes, "The Dockens reportedly owned all the land behind the store, down to the creek.  People could pay a fee and picnic on the site and swim in the swimming hole upstream from the CP Rail trestle over the creek.  The Dockens also kept horses on the property.  The undated photo above shows two houses side by side on the property.  The store itself is not pictured and would have been toward the left.  Edina directories list six separate addresses on the block, although one or more of the buildings may have been a duplex."

The Garners closed up shop in 1957 or 1958, perhaps as a result of a loss of business following the end of the streetcar operation in 1954.

Those are just the highlights of the story. Prompted by questions from a researcher, Jeanne recently came over to the museum and we looked through directories and our files, as well as online newspapers to find more.

Turns out the Dockens have a long history in Edina. A society note in the Minneapolis Journal dated August 18, 1905, lists a Miss Docken as a guest at a party given by Miss M. Blanche Craik for bride-to-be Mabel Millam.  Craik and Millam were names associated with the Edina Mill. 

Arthur Docken had a feed store in Hopkins prior to opening his Brookside market. His children attended St. Louis Park Schools. During her junior year at the University of Minnesota, daughter Lila Agnes "Mickey" Docken was selected to be a stewardess for American Airlines. She died on January 10, 1945 in a plane crash five miles north of Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, California. She and the pilot, along with 21 passengers, all members of the armed forces, lost their lives.

For more information, see the St. Louis Park Historical Society web site. Jeanne also was kind enough to share her research for our files, so come on in if you want to know more. Our research is a "work in progress" and we can always learn more. Help us out. Do you know more about the Dockens or the Garners? Share your knowledge by commenting here or emailing me.

At least that's how it is named in the 1960 Edina phone directory: Carl's Edina Cities Service, located at 5241 Eden Avenue.

For all I know Carl could have been Ms. Carl, but this was 1959, so I'm betting on a Mr.

There isn't a gas station in the city today that matches the same address, but there are a couple that are close on Vernon Avenue. Because the area was redeveloped, the address numbering system could have changed. Maybe the gas station has survived under a new name. Maybe it has not. I'm letting you do the work this week to find out. (It's not like I didn't try. I just couldn't see a similarity in the roof lines with the existing stations.)

Is this building still around in the Grandview area? Did you know the owner or do you remember the business? Inquiring minds want to know. Share your knowledge by commenting here or email me.

Happy Friday, everyone!

In 2001, the City of Edina acquired the land by eminent domain for redevelopment, and the Edina Public Library and the Edina Senior Center were built there.

At that time, Edina Pet Hospital was owned by Dr. Dan Shebuski, who had worked with Bonnett at both his Edina and Southdale practices. Edina Pet Hospital, now in its 53rd year. still endures in Edina  at 7701 Cahill Road.

Dr. Bonnett died in 2010. His obituary (published in the June 27, 2010 Minneapolis Star Tribune) noted that he founded the Edina, Southdale, Eden Prairie, and Eagan Pet Hospitals.

Magnolia boys, Cedric and Walter
As a side note, Bonnett was born in Magnolia, MN, the same small town as another Edina resident, Cedric Adams, popular radio host and owner of Cedric's restaurant in the same Grandview area. With Magnolia's population at 261, it can't be a coincidence that Bonnett and Adams both moved to Edina and set up businesses within blocks of each other. They weren't classmates, though, by any means; Cedric was born in 1902, while Dr. Bonnett was born in 1921. Hmmm.... a mystery to be solved on another day. Does anyone know more? If you remember Dr. Bonnett and the early days of Edina Pet Hospital, please comment here or email me.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Note: Because I've posted only twice this week, I will publish a bonus Photo Friday later this afternoon.

Yes, it depicts Minnehaha Grange No. 398, which originally stood at the St. Stephen's site. The 1879 building was moved after Samuel Thorpe purchased the land as part of his Country Club District development. Doesn't the stained glass image look remarkably close to the photo below of the building when it stood at 50th and Wooddale? [Please ignore the slightly distorted angle of the window. I am height challenged.]

I think it's interesting that relative newcomers to the community chose to honor its past in a medium traditionally reserved for the sacred not the secular. 

The church, built during the Depression, was originally built with clear glass windows. As the congregation raised enough funds, they purchased stained glass windows, created by nationally acclaimed Connick studios in Boston, MA.

Thanks to parishioner Keith Freedy and Larry Reynolds, Minister of Worship, for their great information on the stained glass windows, and to architect Chuck Liddy of Miller Dunwiddie for leading the tour at the church.

In case you can't read the menu, here's a sampling of what you could buy. (Note that nothing cost more than $1.65.)
Broilburger 50 cents
Steak sandwich 50 cents
Cheeseburger 40 cents
Biltmore burger 50 cents
Floats 20 cents
Heavy malts 30 cents
Freezes 25 cents
1/2 Chicken in a basket $1.65
Shrimp in a basket $1.25
Egg salad 30 cents
Peanut butter sandwich 25 cents

Did that make you hungry? Sorry to do that to you.  Well, it's Friday. Go out and enjoy a malt... just remember to bring more than 30 cents.

Note: Edina had a bunch of businesses with Biltmore in the title, but as far as I know, none shared the same owner. In the same way that many businesses today have Southdale in their name because of the nearby landmark mall, these businesses no doubt traded on the fact that the well-known Biltmore Hotel was in the area. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Do you know anything about the Biltmore Drive-In or any other drive-ins in Edina? Does anyone know who owned the business or how long it lasted? Share your knowledge and comment here or email me.

Happy Friday, everyone!

All of those children were war babies. Her father deeply missed being home to see the first years of his daughter's life; Bonnie didn't realize how much until after his death when she came across a letter he wrote to her on her first birthday.

"In the 1940s many American families were greatly impacted by World War II and ours was no exception. My Dad Bill Ott served in the U.S. Navy, Pacific Theater. He entered service in September of 1943 when I was just 9 months old. He returned home in November of 1945 as I was approaching 3 years of age.

This was a time of difficult separation, but also of great love and longing, as evidenced by the letters he wrote daily to my Mom Helen. Among those letters is one written to me on my first birthday. It is a gift from him I will always cherish. I read it for the first time at age 59, following my Dad's passing in 2002."

Bonnie was too young to remember her first birthday without her father, but she still has a mahogany child's chair that was given to her as a gift from her family.

And now she knows the gift of a letter, sent before she could read but something she will treasure the rest of her life.

Like the fathers featured in the newspaper this morning, Bill imagined his daughter as she grew: "I still am able to picture you in memory. And more than that, for I can think of you in so many ways, and like for hours to imagine you at different ages ---right up to the time you are twenty-one. But you must know how poor a substitute this is to actually holding you on my lap or in my arms!"

What stories do you have about being a war baby in Edina? Or what letters have you saved that tell a piece of history? Comment here or please email me.

I'm hoping that at least some of you know that this is a May basket, although it's much grander than the paper cone of violets and penny candy I left on the doorsteps of my neighbors when I was a kid.

Shockingly (to me, anyway) not everyone grew up with this tradition and my online research tells me that the practice is on the wane. May baskets were a big part of my childhood --  we even made our own little baskets in school. One year, we wove strips of construction paper to make a basket; other years we decorated those green plastic strawberry baskets or tin cans.

Joan Gage remembered May baskets from her Edina childhood in the 1940s and 50s, and she continued the spring-time ritual with her children. "Some sixty years ago, when I was a little girl in (first) Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then in Edina, Minnesota, on the first of  May we would make May baskets out of construction paper and fill them with  whatever flowers we could find in the garden or growing wild," she writes on her blog, A Rolling Crone. "We would hang the baskets on the doorknobs of neighbors—especially old people—ring the door bell, then run away with great hilarity and peek out as the elderly person found the little bouquets on their door."

The practice has a long history, stemming from the European pagan festival of spring, Beltane. The more raucous elements were toned down after the continent became Christianized, but the May pole dance and May baskets survived in a more G-rated form.

As the blog Old Fashioned Living describes it: Handing out May Day baskets is a charming and gentle activity for children and adults. It's a tradition that Louisa May Alcott wrote of in "Jack and Jill" (Chapter 18): "The job now in hand was May baskets, for it was the custom of the children to hang them on the doors of their friends the night before May-day; and the girls had agreed to supply baskets if the boys would hunt for flowers, much the harder task of the two. Jill had more leisure as well as taste and skill than the other girls, so she amused herself with making a goodly store of pretty baskets of all shapes, sizes, and colors, quite confident that they would be filled, though not a flower had shown its head except a few hardy dandelions, and here and there a small cluster of saxifrage." (a type of herb called Greater Burnet).

I like the May basket tradition for a number of reasons:

1. Giving is anonymous. Reciprocity is not expected. You leave the basket on the doorknob or doorstep, ring the doorbell and run. It's the nice version of "Ding Dong Ditch."
2. Children give to grownups, instead of the other way around. On almost every other holiday, only the child receives gifts; they don't get to experience the true joy of unselfish giving.  My kids love giving the baskets to the neighbors as much as they enjoy getting candy from them on Halloween. The big part of the excitement has been trying to sneak around undetected.
   
3. It doesn't take much to brighten someone's day. One year, we (okay, I) forgot to get anything for May Day but the neighbors were just as happy with our random assortment of goodies from throughout our house, like leftover sparklers from the Fourth of July, an extra packet of colorful paper napkins, lilacs from our back yard, packs of gum, etc.
4. May baskets signal spring in 2012 just as much as they did in 1812.

For more about May Days past, take a look at the Minnesota Historical Society's online photo database. If you can share stories or photos of Edina May Day celebrations, please contact me or comment here.

Happy May Day!

(The blue line shows web traffic (number of visits) for April 15-29. To compare, the orange line shows traffic for the same period the previous month, March 15-29.)

We received the most comments about those three posts as well the most visitors. Usually, I post reader comments on Monday but you can easily go back and read them this week, as compared to other weeks when I get comments from posts that are several weeks or months past. Instead, I thought I'd give you a behind the scenes look at our web site.

A few museum visitors and board members have asked me how much information I know about our web visitors. To assure anyone with fears of "Big Brother" type tracking, I don't know anything about individuals. Google Analytics doesn't report any personal information; your name, email, location, and demographics remain private.

However, I do see information about our visitors as a whole, in terms of how they interact with our site. The numbers show how many are first-time visitors, what pages are visited the most, and how visitors access our site (through a search, by typing in our address or from a link on another web site).

This helps me see what kinds of posts attract the most traffic, and whether publicity efforts actually reach the public. Facebook is the top referring web site, by the way. Because of that, I figure updates to our Facebook site are worth my time.

I do see the number of visitors from each country, but not towns or even states. This data might be more important for multi-national companies, but not for us. As one would expect for an organization focused on a single Minnesota town, we attract visitors almost exclusively from the United States. I would love to know if they're all Edina folks but Google Analytics doesn't provide that detail.

A few other countries bring a handful of visitors per month (with the most from the English-speaking countries of Canada and Australia), but I imagine our foreign visitors as the ones who send us strangely worded spam emails. Or perhaps we have some Edina expats reading of home?

In any case, I don't spend a lot of time interpreting the numbers. I'm just glad we have visitors and that the numbers are growing. Otherwise, I'm just talking to myself here and what would be the point of that?

To give you an idea of the web site's growth, see the difference between April 2012 (blue line) vs. April 2011 (orange line). It looks pretty dramatic, doesn't it?

In reality, we're still pretty small. Even with a record number of visits last month, our web site had  just 2,200 visits in April. I'm OK with that. We still reach a far bigger audience than we could with our limited hours at the Edina History Museum and our web site helps us achieve our mission of educating the public about the great history of Edina.

Thank you for being one of our 2,200-plus visitors this month!