Category Archives: Bob’s photos

Willis Supply

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Willis Supply, a subsidiary of Willis Supply of Knoxville, opened its office at 801 East Main Street in 1960.  Its manager was Manford Willis, a native of Kingsport.  The company wholesaled electrical, plumbing and boating supplies.
willis

This is plastic specialty piece that fitted over the dial of your rotary phone.

It has what look like three badly placed thin pieces of paperboard on the back, perhaps there to stabilize the piece. The notch in the lower right accommodated the finger stop (actual name).
I haven’t been able to determine when this company closed, but this item would have been pretty much outdated by the mid-1960s, as the  push button phones took over.

In a 1968 ad supplement to the Kingsport Times-News, this company bragged of “Selling GOOD Products in the Best DAMMED Valley in the World”.

Remember the dial tone?

 

 

 

Bays Mountain Golf Course lighter

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Look in the dictionary for “rough shape” and you’ll see a picture of this lighter.
It’s a “Mi-Lite Korea” issue, probably early 70s.  The lighter is a little over 1-1/2″ wide and a little over 2″ high.  Altogether, it closely resembles a Zippo.
I can, through back issues of the Kingsport newspaper, find Bays Mountain Golf Course, about 2 miles south of Church Hill, in business in 1964.  It’s mentioned as an attraction for the area.  That location would put it somewhere behind McPheeters Bend School.  I think that’s the land that Bays Mountain Park acquired to extend its hiking trails

This once belonged to Sam Assid, who owned a well-regarded custom furniture/restoration/refinishing shop on East Sullivan Street for ages.

JBR Buick GMC

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jbrknife

A 2.25″ pen knife.  These were generally given out to customers or potential customers who were a little above the ordinary “hearty handshake” group.  I’ve received several of these over the years, not from auto dealers, mind you.  The blades will cut butter, once or twice.  After that, the joins begin to decouple.
JBR, owned by the Belle family for three decades,  was absorbed by Courtesy Chevrolet in 2010.
I did at least one remote broadcast from JBR on Lynn Garden Drive.  I was in the showroom, facing the street through those big windows.  It was a morning remote and business was slow. At one point, the manager came over and handed me five one-dollar bills.  “Tell ’em that the next five people who come in for a test drive will get a one-dollar bill,” he said, “that’ll bring some in.”
Sure.  I recall that one guy straggled in after I’d put out the word a couple of times.  The rest of the time, I could almost hear the crickets outside.

I can hear Daffy hissing, “Ingrateth!”

General Shale Brick Display

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generalshale

Back in 2011, before the police got touchy about people wandering around the old General Shale property (there had been a LOT of vandalism), I would walk over there with my camera and take pix of stuff lying about.  This is apparently a display showing the different colors that General Shale could product on exposed brick surfaces.  These are all stringers.  No headers are shown, so I don’t know if they were also treated or if these were just for decorator areas.

Center and Cherokee

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Now that Bank of Tennessee is breaking forth from the constraints of the past and is going to land a big new footprint, so to speak, on the half-block of land they own between Cherokee and Cumberland with Center Street frontage.  This is what that area looked like around 1975.

cherokeeandcenter

It’s got crappy resolution.  I was living in a, er, low-rent apartment at the time and was playing around with a Polaroid camera I’d bought somewhere.  Anyway, this shows the corner of Cherokee Street (see the Kingsport Camera Shop sign mid right?  That’s all been taken over by that other bank) and Center.  There was a service station there, and one across the street.  They used to everywhere, for some reason.   Like pharmacies now.
The tower just under the wires on the right is where the telephone company is.
Roberts Tire & Recapping occupies the buildings low in the picture.

Hello, Bank!

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oldbank

Construction work brings to light the facade of a structure built in 1927 at 209 Broad Street.  The date is in the escutcheon above the remains of the front door. Originally, there were white columns on either side of the building, in front of the facade.

There was a building boom on Broad Street in 1927 and both Kingsport National Bank and this, The Farmers and Merchants Bank, opened up around June of that year.  In 1945, it became Sullivan County Bank. At some later date, it was home to Harris & Graves Insurance.  By 1959, it was the Moore & Walker Insurance building.

Garrett & Garrett Attorneys, as you can see, had the upper floor.

Go, Pirates!

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SULLIVANHI

I found this at an antique store.  It’s the old blue and gold, Sullivan High Pirates.  Looks like a booster item to be.  I can’t even hazard a guess as to the date.  I went there 1961-1963 and don’t recall ever seeing one.  But, then, I never paid much attention to sports.

It’s 1.25″ in diameter with a lethal-looking pin on the back.  Those were dangerous times…

RESCO Rules!

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resco

Radio Electric Supply Co. (RESCO) was THE place for electronics when I was starting out in Radio.  They had everything, or could get it quickly for you.  This shows them at 961 East Sullivan Street in Kingsport and this is where I remember them.  At the station where I worked, it was standard practice to answer any query as to where the engineer was with “You checked RESCO?”

However, in 1945, the company is listed at 210 Cherokee Street (near the alley behind the bank) (across from where Kingsport Camera Shop used to be), you know the place.

This little measuring tape (I haven’t chanced pulling the tape out to see how long it is) was made in Hong Kong.  That the trademark is “HONG KONG” and not “Made in Hong Kong” places this in the ’60s.

Supermarket Row

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Those of you who used to travel West Sullivan Street know that a major widening of this venerable artery is underway.  This echo of the path of the South Fork of the Holston River will become a grand boulevard to lead traffic down to where they’re hoping to get all that development going.
Anyway, my point in all this is that wall you can just see a bit of at the lower right hand corner.  That wall was on the boundary of the leveled parking lot for The Little Store Supermarket built here in 1952-53 (Grand Opening was January 15, 1953).  It was the second Little Store in Kingsport.  The first opened in 1939 at 311 East Sullivan Street (for years afterward that building was Brown’s Custom Shop).  Kermit Young started the first Little Store in Bristol in 1934.  He learned the business working at his father’s grocery operation in Johnson City.  Thank you, Kingsport Times-News, January 14, 1953.  Note: this building was razed in 2009.
From The Little Store to Oakwood Market, all on Canal Street: this was Supermarket Row.