Mysterious gift brings flashback
A former Feilding butcher was shocked to find a calendar he gave to customers nearly 50 years ago was left anonymously in his mailbox.
Selwyn Wishnowsky said the 1972 calendar advertising Feilding Meat Company arrived two weeks ago in pristine condition as if it wasn’t a day old.
He bought the company in the early 1960s and sold it 30 years later.
Edelweiss Continental Butchery is now located in the same place in Manchester St and is the town’s last remaining butchery.
There was no note, name or address attached to explain why the gifter decided to leave the calendar for Wishnowsky, but he assumed it was an old customer spring cleaning their house.
The calendar features images of roast meats and recipes on each page.
‘‘My first thought was ‘where on Earth has this come from?’. What gets me is why it’s been kept so long,’’ Wishnowsky said.
‘‘Most people would have taken it down, thrown it out and put the next year’s [calendar] up.’’
He’s on a mission to find answers and to say thank you to the person responsible.
He and his wife Jan had been living in the same house for more than 40 years, so he wasn’t surprised the mystery person knew where he lived all these years later.
‘‘We think it’s probably an old customer and we weren’t home when they called in. We’d like to know who put it there.’’
The Wishnowskys handed the calendars to customers at Christmas time each year. Jan said it was the ‘‘in thing’’ to do at the time and good publicity for the business.
Wishnowsky had one employee who, after serving his apprenticeship, is now the current owner of the shop. Together they used to get through 24 bodies of beef a week - more than 7000 kilograms.
However, butchers operated in a completely different landscape today, Wishnowsky said.
When he opened his shop there were eight butchers in Feilding. Now, there was only one.
Supermarkets took over the local meat business and forced many similar family-run operations out of trade, he said.
Fortunately, the Wishnowsys had the family farm to fall back on. They went back to rearing sheep and cattle in Makino Rd and watched from a distance the slow decline of several small businesses.
‘‘That little shop has seen it all unfold.’’