Someone on my dad’s side of the family had money way back when. Probably around 1900. None of this money found its way to us and I suspect it evaporated in the Great Depression, though that’s pure conjecture on my part. Maybe they lost it all buying war bonds in 1917. Or maybe they just lost it the usual way, slowly, almost unnoticeably, with bad business decisions and poor financial planning, at a wholly unremarkable point in history. Who knows.
But every once in a while I run across something that reminds me these people were fairly well off for the time.
When my dad passed away in 2016 we did a sort through the house in preparation for my mom’s move to the senior apartment where she spent the rest of her life. A lot of things in the basement went out the door, but we saved a bunch of stuff too.
One thing that sticks in my memory was an entire box of piano rolls – paper scrolls about a foot wide with holes punched in them. You put them inside your player piano and started it up and it would play the song for you. Each of these rolls cost between $2 and $4 in the early 1920s, which was a good chunk of a day’s wages – or more – for a lot of people.
These days they’re worth nothing. I couldn’t even give them away. I tried. Nobody wanted them – not university music programs, not museums, not antique stores. I saved one and tossed the rest. I’m still sad about that, but so it goes. But back then you had to have some coin to afford that many of these rolls, not to mention the player piano to slot them into.
Every now and then I go into the basement and bring up another box that I took out of my mother’s apartment after she died. My brother didn’t want most of it – he lives in a small apartment and is working on downsizing from that – and we have a big basement, so much of it ended up here. Last week, while trying not to pay attention to what I suspect will be an oncoming train wreck (no, not the political one – that one I’m kind of resigned to), I pulled out a box and went through it.
There were some photos I hadn’t seen before and some interesting papers, all of which I need to scan and add to the genealogical folders I have online. Honestly, I could spend the next year just organizing the genealogical information I already have without searching for any new stuff, and that’s kind of a nice project to have out there. Maybe when I retire.
I also found this:
But every once in a while I run across something that reminds me these people were fairly well off for the time.
When my dad passed away in 2016 we did a sort through the house in preparation for my mom’s move to the senior apartment where she spent the rest of her life. A lot of things in the basement went out the door, but we saved a bunch of stuff too.
One thing that sticks in my memory was an entire box of piano rolls – paper scrolls about a foot wide with holes punched in them. You put them inside your player piano and started it up and it would play the song for you. Each of these rolls cost between $2 and $4 in the early 1920s, which was a good chunk of a day’s wages – or more – for a lot of people.
These days they’re worth nothing. I couldn’t even give them away. I tried. Nobody wanted them – not university music programs, not museums, not antique stores. I saved one and tossed the rest. I’m still sad about that, but so it goes. But back then you had to have some coin to afford that many of these rolls, not to mention the player piano to slot them into.
Every now and then I go into the basement and bring up another box that I took out of my mother’s apartment after she died. My brother didn’t want most of it – he lives in a small apartment and is working on downsizing from that – and we have a big basement, so much of it ended up here. Last week, while trying not to pay attention to what I suspect will be an oncoming train wreck (no, not the political one – that one I’m kind of resigned to), I pulled out a box and went through it.
There were some photos I hadn’t seen before and some interesting papers, all of which I need to scan and add to the genealogical folders I have online. Honestly, I could spend the next year just organizing the genealogical information I already have without searching for any new stuff, and that’s kind of a nice project to have out there. Maybe when I retire.
I also found this:
It’s a dipping pen, the kind you’d use with an inkwell. It’s about seven inches long, from tip to nib. Most of it is solid mother of pearl and it still has the original velvet case. It probably dates to about 1890, plus or minus a decade or so.
It’s not worth a whole lot now. I looked online for auctions of similar (and occasionally identical) items and most of them were in the $20-70 range depending on condition though there were a couple of wildly optimistic sellers who clearly had not done a comparable search before listing their asking price. Most things aren’t worth what people want them to be.
But once upon a time this would have been an expensive item for a middle-to-upper-middle class household, the sort of aspirational purchase someone like that would make as a statement of moving up in society.
If I had to guess, I’d say the purchaser was my great-great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran who, toward the end of his life, would occasionally turn up in the Philadelphia papers in the social notes section. He wasn’t the subject of a whole lot of column inches – mostly the odd one-or-two sentence announcement – but that’s more than most people got for their activities. That sort of social prominence began and ended with him, as far as I can tell.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this pen. It’s lovely and I’m not going to sell it because it has that family connection, but I don’t know what I would use a dipping pen for. My handwriting isn’t that great to begin with. Oliver says there are special tools you need to clear out the nib – a razor blade would be too thick – so I can look into that as well. Perhaps I will learn copperplate style.
I keep acquiring small projects.
6 comments:
You, more than anyone I know, understand the value of historical treasures.
Many decades ago, my uncle (a physician) owned a full-sized Gutenberg Press. And several complete boxes of type in multiple typefaces. (not entirely dissimilar to this):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/176402806561?itmmeta=01J1QCS6RBE1BE8CYMGWWWRPNF&hash=item29126d3721:g:DiEAAOSwOZNmV5KP
I have no idea what happened to that monster, but I would have loved to have acquired it. As you can see, even if you can find such items outside of a museum, they tend to be a bit ... price-y. (I just called his son. He donated that printing press to a museum in Las Vegas. They traded it to a museum "somewhere in the Midwest" for some things that were needed to complete a collection. At least it wasn't sold for scrap.)
Our family has demonstrated a tendency to dispose of our history. My mother had a handmade cedar chest that was given to her on her sixteenth birthday in 1935 by her mother. That cedar chest was over 50 years old when my mother got it, and it was supposed to come to me with all of its contents when my mother died. The chest itself was worth several hundreds of dollars. The contents (a significant portion of our immediate family history) were priceless.
My sister sold it in a yard sale for $38.00 mostly because she "just didn't want to deal with it".
It's sad but true that so much of that was regarded as junk by someone and subsequently, essentially, discarded as trash.
It boggles the mind to consider just how much history has been destroyed over the millennia because someone didn't understand or appreciate potential historical significance.
Lucy
Oh, that hurts to hear - so much history lost to apathy.
When I worked at the local historical society we'd constantly get donations from people whose great-grandparents had died (that town had more 90+ year olds than anywhere else I've ever been) and they were cleaning out the attic and had no idea what that stuff was or why it would be interesting. Photographs. Family bibles. Boxes of papers. Antiques that were not immediately salable. All sorts of things. It was nice that we got them, but I felt bad about the fact that all that family history was being ignored by the actual family. At least we could preserve it, though.
I'm glad your printing press found a home, at least.
There is an inherent survivor bias to history - the stories we can tell are limited by the evidence that survives, and that is in turn limited by what people felt was worth preserving (and, in some cases, what people felt was worth destroying). It can definitely be a "through a glass darkly" sort of endeavor.
My branch of the family tended to hold onto things, but there are other branches that I've found recently that didn't and it bothers me how much was lost.
I wish it had been ‘my’ printing press. I’d still be cranking out stuff this minute …
One point of clarification: It was a Gutenberg “Style” printing press, not an actual Gutenberg Press. My uncle purchased it somewhere in Belgium in the years after the end of WWII and had it shipped to his home in Las Vegas sometime during the late 1950s. Just the fact that it had survived the war intact was a story unto itself. He had it installed in what would have been the dining room in most homes. He loved to ‘toy’ with it and frequently demonstrated its use. My cousin told me when we spoke that his dad played with that press right up until the week that he died. If he’d had any idea that I wanted it, my cousin would have gladly given it to me instead of the museum. Lost opportunity there …
As to the cedar chest; you need to understand that the thing was built in Switzerland in the late 1860s and it was massive - eight feet long, three feet tall, and three and a half feet deep - roughly 85 cubic feet packed full of trinkets of all manner of personal import. The remnants of a lifetime of memories.
And as to "that hurts to hear" ... My mother had a knack for collecting things of importance. The last time I was able to go through that chest, it had ten full copies of the Salt Lake Tribune dated Dec 8, 1941, through the 18th (Not just articles cut from those papers, the full editions - including the full text of FDR’s Day of Infamy speech). More full editions from V-E and V-J days. My parents' high school diplomas, their original birth certificates, and their marriage license. My dad’s military discharge papers. At least 100 war bonds that were never cashed in. Jewelry. Awards. Certificates. I could go on for several more paragraphs, but I think you get the picture.
All sold for … I’d better stop here - I don't think I can keep my language suitable for a more than less family blog.
Lucy
You know, with that kind of loss you can use any language you want because that fucking sucks. I don't know what makes people think things like that are expendable but whatever it is I hope it can be cured with powerful drugs.
I also wonder about the person who bought it and why they didn't think to return at least the family papers, which have no resale value. That was a failure of morals as well.
I did look at the link you sent and figured it was Gutenberg-style. Still, an impressive bit of machinery and a lot of fun for those inclined.
As part of my genealogy research I ended up connecting with a cousin on my mother's side (about my mother's age) whose grandfather was a sibling to my great-great-grandfather who came over from Italy. A good chunk of that side of the family's history was deliberately destroyed by her step-mother who didn't want it to exist. "She was a bad person," was all my cousin would say about it. Given that this is the Italian side of the family, I expect that simple phrase covered a great deal of territory and verbiage.
For some reason Blogger sent your comment off to the Spam jail. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you!
I feel a genuine need to qualify what I’m about to say*.
I was born into what can best be described as a very dysfunctional family. I had two sisters that were 8 & 6 years older than me. There was never any love lost between us due to the extensive bullying that took place in my youth. As an adult, I spent decades trying to fix our relationships (after all, they were my sisters). but to no avail. Having said that, I really had very little to do with either of them over the years, and what little bit of relationship I could build remained cold & distant.
When my mother’s health dictated that she needed consistency in her care, my eldest sister, Karen**, volunteered to have mom move in with her on her property in San Diego. They set up a single-wide mobile home as a ‘mother-in-law’ apartment, paid a professional moving company to move mom’s stuff to SoCal, and life was better all around for mom for the five years that remained of her life. Kudos to Karen for that.
I went to San Diego a few days before my mother died, and was able to engage in civil conversations with both of my sisters during that time. Before I left it was agreed that I would return in a few weeks with my truck to pick up the cedar chest and that my sisters could do whatever the hell they wanted with the rest of mom’s stuff. Three weeks later, Karen informed me that I needn’t make the trip, because, as executor of mom’s estate she had made the decision to hold an ‘estate sale’ to dispose of mom’s stuff and the money derived from that would be added to the dispersal. To be clear: she sold everything. What couldn’t be sold was hauled off to the dump. My other sister & I got nothing except what few things our mother had given us over the years. Oh, yeah, and some money. Didn’t help.
And so, having said all of that as ‘qualifying’ verbiage. as it turned out, “powerful drugs” were unnecessary. Two years later, Karen had an aneurysm rupture in her brain. Doctors said she was dead before she hit the floor. Karma is a bitch, but it’s a (small) comfort to know that there is some justice in the universe.
Spam Jail was likely deserved. ��
Lucy
* This is the considerably edited version of what I spent the last two hours writing. Didn’t realize just how truly angry I remain about this. Before the edit, I printed out what I had written - all thirteen pages - and then saved that in a file on my computer. My intent is to try to work through that on some date in the future … Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
** Although several years before that name became a stereotype, my sister fit the mold. Now that I think about it, I’m comparatively certain that that stereotype was modeled on my sister.
Sometimes you just have to get the first draft out of your system.
And it's good to save it, because you can go back over it later if you have to do that. If you sat down and wrote 13 pages on this, I'd imagine that is a deep and abiding anger. And justifiably so. That was calculatingly cruel of her, and that sort of thing is beyond the pale. You do not owe her resolution, so I suppose whether you get around to working through it all later is entirely up to you.
Karma is indeed a bitch but that doesn't fix things. That's the problem with karma - a day late and a dollar short, as my dad always said. That story just makes it worse to me. I'd thought it was something that wasn't as clear cut or as immediate as it was. Yeah, you're entitled to use all of the short Anglo-Saxon words that the English language still has to offer, I'd say.
I am grateful for the family I have. Come to Wisconsin sometime and we'll bring you in.
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