Keating Bros. Celebrates 35 Years in Auto Sales Field
Thirty-five years ago Clinton E. Keating and his brother Paul opened a gasoline station at 1055 Stratford avenue, Stratford, with one employe. Today Keating Brothers Inc., is a modern Ford sales and service headquarters with a staff of 32 employes.
It was on Oct. 21, 1921 that Clint and his brother opened the gasoline station for business in a small frame building about as large as the present used car office building on the acreage the Ford dealer now occupies on Stratford avenue, Stratford. The present building was designed by C. Wellington Walker in 1948.
When the Keating brothers started in business their gasoline station was the only one between Hard’s corner and the Bridgeport city line, an area now dotted with service stations.
Today, celebrating the 35th anniversary of the opening, Keating Brothers, Inc., can boast of being the oldest auto dealers in Stratford. Their first venture was an agency for the Hudson-Essex car and 25 years ago the firm took over an exclusive Ford agency for the town. As Clint recalls it “Model A” Fords were first sold to Stratford residents from the Hard’s corner lot.
In 1932, Miss Gertrude Keating joined her brothers in the business and has been with the organization since then.
Actually the anniversary now being celebrated is a three-way affair. The Keating Bros. Inc., marks its 35th anniversary in the automotive sales and service field, their 25th anniversary as Ford dealers and 35 years as a sales and services business on one site.
In the period the firm has been in existence more than 30,000 autos have been sold including 1,218 last year. Records of the firm show an average of better than 1,000 cars sold each year for the past 30 years.
The sales reports for the first 10 months of 1955 indicate this will be a record year, Mr. Keating says.
Source: Keating Bros. Celebrates 35 Years in Auto Sales Field, The Bridgeport Telegram, Bridgeport, Connecticut, 3 December 1955, p. 16.
LJK,
Good research! I wonder if this is the deealership in that series of framed pictures?
JWK
I think that it was. Do you still have those pictures? A scan of one of them might be nice to include with this article.
Although I’ve marked them as non-related, given that our family spent some time in that area in the 1850’s before heading south to Maryland, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that your tendency to old Fords is genetic. 🙂