So I’m browsing through an old newspaper from 1945 and I see an ad for a business from my hometown that I’ve never heard of. Admittedly, it was before my time, but it did make me curious. I hadn’t heard of J.W. Randall’s boat shop, and I wondered where it had been. And when I saw the address, I was more than curious, because it was just down the street from where I grew up, among a set of lovely homes along the river, in an ordinary residence that you would never suspect of having once been a boat shop. But apparently in 1945 it was. Zoning was a little less of a thing back then.
J.W. Randall started his boat shop in 1923, and was an Evinrude dealer throughout his career. By the 1950s he had a shop at 48 Mohawk Avenue; he retired in 1959 but continued living in the house on Riverside Avenue until his death in 1969.