Former Call editor hits milestone 90th birthday
Fred Coe celebrates with family, friends and plenty of memories
WOONSOCKET — Hitting a milestone like your 90th birthday is significant enough to draw up lots of past memories and certainly something to celebrate with family and friends as Fred Coe of Coe Street can tell you.
Coe – a long retired former printer, compositor and copy editor for The Call – is sitting down to dinner at Bella’s Restaurant in Burrillville on Sunday for just that purpose thanks to some arrangements by his companion, Jeannie Farrell of North Smithfield, and her family.
His special day also drew a visit by one of his two sisters, Janice Frances, 87, of Madison, Wisconsin, and the two had a few chuckles together on Friday when thinking back to the days when they and their other sibling, Gail Corby, 79, of Sunnyvale, Calif., were just kids enjoying the busy days of Main Street.
“If you couldn’t find what you were looking for on Main Street, it probably wasn’t made,” Coe said while remembering Main Street as the focus of life in the Blackstone Valley when he was just a kid and running a paper route for the local newspaper.
The Call’s office was on Main Street of course but so was everything else, everything from jewelry and department stores to restaurants and movie theaters.
You could buy tires for the car at Sears Roebuck and Co. or stop in at Brown’s Pharmacy near City Hall to get something to eat at the long lunch counter there. There was a W.T. Grant store and also Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, the parent of
K-Mart, and of course McCarthy’s, the multi-floor department store located at the corner of Main Street and Court Street where its iconic outdoor clock can still be found today. Those looking for that all important engagement ring could choose from list of stores for that purpose including Goldfine’s, Kays’, Beaudet’s and Piette’s.
Coming back to Woonsocket for her brother’s birthday sparked a bit of nostalgia for Frances as well as the sense of having lost something treasured and familiar.
“It takes me back to when I was girl living here but there are whole sections of Woonsocket today where I feel like I am in a Twilight Zone,” Frances said.
“There are buildings that aren’t there anymore and there are new buildings that were never there,” she said. “It is hard to mentally bring the two to the present day,” she said.
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, Main Street was much different that it appears today, she noted.
“It was very busy people seemed to have a purpose and joy of being there,” she said.
“They were familiar with all of its stores and businesses and generally it was very comfortable to grow up here,” she said.
When her brother was running his paper route and doing part-time work in The Call’s circulation office during World War II, Frances said she would help him out from time to time.
“I would help him collect and at Christmas time I would get bigger tips because I was a girl,” Frances said.
After growing up on Newport Street, Frances said she went to Rhode Island College until she met her late husband, Ronald Danis, and followed him on his career with the Army. While Ronald worked on programs such as the Army’s Nike missile project at White Sands in New Mexico, and many other assignments, Frances tended to their son, Dr. Ronald Danis, now also of Madison, and their daughter, Jessica Cordon, who holds a PhD in environmental management and agricultural sustainability.
Coe of course stayed employed by The Call, for 46 years in total counting his time with the circulation department, and learned many different aspects of the newspapering business as new technologies, including computerization and digital typesetting, were brought in as the years passed.
He would move to Morse Avenue with his late wife of 60 years, Mille Jannoli, and stayed with The Call copy editing and layout pages for the Franklin & Wrentham, Burillville & Glocester and Cumberland and Lincoln editions through his retirement in 1989.
Main Street remained the place to work, at least, even in his latter years with The Call, although most of the large stores like Sears, Woolworth’s, Grants and McCarthy’s had all moved over to the new and up and coming Diamond Hill Road business district in the 1960s and 1970s.
The old Main Street movie theaters where he had spent so many hours of his youth, the Rialto and the Olympia, watching the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon serials were also long gone by then.
Coe still remembers how he had gone to the Rialto so much he had collected a full set of the Wonder Book Encyclopedia from the theater that would serve him well later in school.
“When I had to prepare for the speeches we had to give in school, I got many of my ideas out of those Wonder Books,” he said.