Hubba-Hubba?
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Hicksville Dollar Day event
Huntington Long-Islander
June 27, 1930
FultonHistory.comIn 1926, a group of businessmen launched a PR campaign that tried to get people in the region to think of Hicksville as The Hub. This idea must have some about when someone finally understood the blatantly obvious: Hicksville is equidistant from Long Island’s two shores, and what with the roads and the railroad tracks, goods can be shipped between Hicksville and almost anywhere else.
Unfettered, this simplistic vision can skew your thinking until you see Hicksville as the center of the world: everything emanates from, or leads to, Hicksville. It’s the hub around which the business world turns, right? Right? And if you want to persuade others of this, you must decide what Hicksville serves as a hub for. Sadly, when the faithful got the Long-Islander to print a full newspaper column on the topic, the heading was The Hub of the Sunrise Trail. Too bad Mr. Spock was not around to tell the rest of the crew that the slogan was illogical. A wheel has a hub, but the Sunrise Trail – like a snake -- does not. But that’s just my opinion.
There were believers. In 1925 the Hub Service Station opened at the corner of Old Country Road and Broadway. It’s highly likely that in 1928, when the Hicksville Theatre opened, the Hub Diner stood waiting across the street for theatre patrons to also become diner patrons. With Hub mania swirling around downtown, I wonder if anybody considered selling kids’ beanies as Hub Caps....
The ad on the left ran on June 27, 1930. One wonders what kind of “Dollar Day” bargains Elwood Curtis, DDS offered.
Two months later, a classified ad said a “dining car” that was “opposite the theatre” needed an “attractive girl” to be a waitress. “Dining car” suggests this was a faux railroad car pre-fab; “opposite the theatre” suggests it already was where it would remain for decades. Now and then, later references in the newspapers confirm that its address never varied.
