Oct. 11—In February, the Times Leader published a vintage photo of several people who posed in Forty Fort with a Model T Ford and its owner, Joe Phillips of Gouldsboro.
The photo was part of a yellowed newspaper clipping that Phillips, an octogenarian and antique car buff, had saved for decades.
The photo, likely taken by John L. Edwards, owner of the former West Side News, and published in that weekly newspaper in 1960, showed Phillips behind the wheel of his 1918 Model T, surrounded by six people who had gathered to admire the car.
Earlier this year, Phillips thought he would like to find those people and try to recreate the photo.
Within hours of the Times Leader publishing a copy of the vintage photo in February, Bill Opet of suburban Philadelphia contacted the newspaper to say he was the small boy in the picture. And he knew the girl in the photo was Sadie Ann Sipko, seated with her dad, Andy Sipko.
This summer, 85-year-old Joseph Phillips returned to Forty Fort, this time driving a 1928 Model A Ford. Once again, he parked at the corner of Filbert Street and Wyoming Avenue. This time, he posed with some of his own family members as well as with Sadie Sipko-Cole, who had been 3 years old in the original photo, and some of her relatives.
Unfortunately, Bill Opet was unable to come from Philadelphia to be with the group, said Cheryl Phillips Matter, Joe Phillips’ daughter.
On the day they posed for the new photo, Sipko-Cole presented Joe Phillips with a framed copy of the 1960 photograph. “She told my dad he is a treasure,” Cheryl Phillips Matter wrote in an email.