Commerce: Shearer

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The Shearer home heating business took out this little advertisement in Hobart High School's "Memories" yearbook of 1962.

According to the 1939 plat book, Shearer (first initial not given) owned a nice chunk of land just southeast of the Ainsworth Triangle.

At last Sunday's auction, I bought some old advertising pencils, one of which is emblazoned with the following legend:

SHEARER & SON
PHONE HOBART 5 & 234
FUEL OIL – COAL FEED BLDG. MAT. PAINT
GET IT FROM SHEARER THIS YEAR
USE OUR FUEL BUDGET PLAN
Going by the phone number, I'd say the pencil is considerably older than 1962.

That's all I could find out about Shearer from the resources at hand.

Yes, one of these days I am going to start doing proper research, going to the library, to the Hobart Historical Society, to the recorder of deeds' office. But right now I'm busy. Yesterday I spent 3 miserable hours picking tomatoes, zucchini and eggplants. Today I'm boiling down about 20 quarts of tomato-veggie sauce, which I'm going to can. All I can do is walk away from my boiling stock pots for a few minutes to write a little. And I still haven't mowed the back yard!

I looked on the internet for advice about how to go about researching the history of one's own house. Most sources suggest, among other things, checking the local registry of historic buildings. As if! It is to laugh! My poor little house? — historically insignificant, chronologically childish, structurally unremarkable.

But poor little houses have their histories, too.

* * *
This time of year, there is such a daily concert of locusts and grasshoppers that whenever I step outside I think of John Keats:

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

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ETA (9/26/09): Calvin Shearer, Sr. Howard Shearer and Calvin Shearer, Jr., were the "Shearer & Son" behind the business. The junior Shearer was born in 1914. The senior Shearer started a fuel-oil business (date unknown) that relied on a team of mules drawing a 350-gallon tank for deliveries. The Shearers purchased a business in Ainsworth and began selling cattle feed, hay and other materials as well as fuel oil. The business was sold to the Dalton Oil Co. of Gary in 1973 when the younger Shearer retired. Source: Bob Burns, "Shearer, 91, has lifetime of memories about Hobart," Post-Tribune (IN), Oct. 23, 2005. [8/24/10: I have struck out what I think I got wrong the first time. Now that I understand the Shearer family a little better, I have amended my 9/26/09 amendment. This makes me wonder if I should have just edited the text invisibly, which would be less confusing, or if I should leave the errors there as a memorial to the error-laden process of learning.]