Skip to content

Grammie’s Recycling takes the wheel of Georgetown Cruise Night

The owner of the local thrift store and her team are the new organizers of the popular gathering and have saved it from being cancelled
pat-and-friends-at-grammies
(Left to right) Doris Kennedy Lee, Pat and Tim Bonozew.

Local shop Grammie’s Recycling Thrift Store is now sitting in the driver’s seat of Georgetown Cruise Night.

Things briefly looked dire for the weekly car show that's been running for 20 years as outgoing organizers Mike and Allison Farrugia had trouble finding successors. However, Grammie’s owner Pat Bonozew and her team have stepped up and taken over, saving the event. 

“The economy has to be supported,” Bonozew said about the social responsibility she felt. “With doing the Cruise Night, it's going to bring the people in and they're going to come to the stores.”

It's still early days, so ideas about making the event their own are not yet in place. They are mulling over working with local service clubs to figure out how to direct proceeds to various charities. 

More concrete decisions will be made in the coming weeks as bureaucratic and logistical issues get ironed out.

cruise-night-photo
Georgetown Cruise Night during its 20th-anniversary celebration. Mansoor Tanweer/HaltonHillsToday

One consistent theme remains about Grammie’s: They want to strengthen the local business community. 

“If you make a nice bulletin board with all the sponsors’ names on them and the gifts that they've given, (cruise night supporters) are going to give their loyalty to those people,” car buff and former race car driver Bonozew said. 

Though a floating pool of volunteers will be ever-changing, a core group of Bonozew, her son Tim, Doris Kennedy Lee and her husband Dave will run the show. 

The relationship between the Farrugias and Grammie's goes back many years. Bonozew said she has known Mike since he was “knee-high to a grasshopper.” The shop also sponsored Cruise Night during the five-year tenure of Mike and Allison.

The pair has chosen to step away from organizing Cruise Night due to the huge amount of time it took to run the events. They recently put out a call to attract someone to take over.

For a time, organizers were hard to come by. Posts on Facebook suggested that the gathering would be coming to an end as the deadline to apply for funding from the Town of Halton Hills was fast approaching. 

A temporary reprieve from the Town created some much-needed time to secure the Grammie's team as successors.

Mike Farrugia breathed a sigh of relief once new organizers were chosen, even if stepping away from Cruise Night is “bittersweet” for him. 

“I'm very, very happy that it's going to continue. I'm very happy that there are new people taking over, but at the same time that email [from the Town about the approaching deadline] was the realization that we are done,” he said. 

He and Allison will not completely fade away from the Cruise Night scene as they plan to volunteer their time where they can. They may even put their cars on display at the weekly community events. They will also be taking a vacation - going 'glamping' and taking Allison’s '64 Parisienne station wagon to a meet in Pennsylvania.