Wooden Shoe eBay Memorabilia
Continuing last week's blog post about local eBay memorabilia, Wooden Shoe paraphernalia represents by far the most prevalent historic items on eBay related to our local communities back home. Several examples follow:
The Wooden Shoe Brewery opened in 1869, surviving a 1888 fire and Prohibition from 1919-33. The brewery closed in 1953, but fortunately the recipe for Wooden Shoe beer lives on as the first of the modern day craft brews, Sam Adams Boston Lager. Apparently a sixth generation descendent of the founder of Wooden Shoe used the original family recipe to start the Boston brewery in 1984. Once closed, the Wooden Shoe Brewery building was eventually turned into a cannery. I recall hauling wagons loaded with tomatoes picked by migrant workers to the cannery from the fields around home. Each migrant worker was paid 10 cents a bushel while working from sun-up to sun-down. The best workers could pick about 15 bushels an hour, with entire families sometimes doing the picking, including young children and aging grandparents. The cannery no longer exists and the building has since been demolished.
Years later, a micro-brewery under the same Wooden Shoe brand opened in 2005, only to unfortunately close in 2012. However, one Minster mainstay, the Wooden Shoe Inn, pictured below, remains open to this day. This restaurant was a favorite of our family, having held many get-togethers in their back room. Proprietor Fred Meyer, pictured below tending bar, always greeted us with a smile, a mug of cold beer and some great stories from the past, one of which is chronicled in this previous blogpost.
Fred was a great basketball player for Minster, leading his team to the State Tournament in 1965. His younger sister, Pam, was a cheerleader on the team and looked like Doris Day, pictured below, only cuter! Every basketball player on teams playing Minster had a crush on her. What does that detail have to do with eBay memorabilia? Don’t know and don’t care!
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