My walk-through at the auction house wasn’t turning up any noticeable gems on this particular day. But I’ve been going to auctions long enough to know that items sometimes hold a story and a history worth telling. Then I zeroed in on a few that looked interesting and inviting.
Here’s some of what I found:
Western Union call box
The bold navy and white colors on this porcelain item caught my eye. It was certainly a vintage piece, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was and how it was once used.
I learned that it was a call box. It hung on a wall in a business or office, and workers would turn the dial at the top to summon Western Union when they had a message that was ready to be transmitted. Western Union would dispatch a messenger (usually a boy) to retrieve the message.
The call box executed a series of clicks that were specific to a particular business, so the telegraph office knew exactly where to send the messenger.
Sad iron and electric iron
There were two vintage irons on two different tables. The first one I came across was a sad iron. Whenever I picked up one of these things, I almost needed two hands. They seemed to weigh more than a ton. Most are pretty utilitarian in their look and design, as this one was. It was marked with the name Avery.
Sad irons were solid to hold the heat and flatly press the sheets, clothing or other articles to be de-wrinkled. They had to be heated often during ironing day on Tuesday (Monday was wash day). That meant a long day of heating and ironing – summer and winter. The irons were sold with trivets to hold them between pressings.
The irons were made in a triangular shape to easily glide around buttons. They were handled with a thick cloth until an Iowa woman named Mary Florence Potts patented an iron with a detachable wooden handle in the late 19th century.
Sad irons were the forebears of electric irons, one of which was on another table at the auction. It was inscribed with the manufacturer’s name on top of a wavy design: AMERICAN ELEC’L HEATER CO. DETROIT, USA.
W.T. Grant Department Store photo
The photo was a snapshot in time, but I wasn’t exactly sure what time it was. It showed a mass of people standing in front of a W.T. Grant five-and-dime store. It may have been the opening day for a new store on a downtown street in practically any city in the country.
The photo appeared to be from the 1920s, based on the look of the car parked at the curb and an ad in the store window that Bell Records were sold there. The label, whose records were made exclusively for Grant’s, was discontinued in 1928.
The first Grant’s store opened in a local YMCA in Lynn, MA, in 1906, and it was named after its founder W.T. Grant. The store sold everything from clothes to books to furniture and small items in between.
The photo also showed the sign for Woolworth, one of Grant’s competitors. During the 1960s, lunch counters at Grant’s, Woolworth and S.H. Kresge were the sites of student sit-ins protesting segregation.
Folder to hold Kodak negatives
This folder looked innocent enough, but I was intrigued by the Kodak film flyer inside and the illustration of the photo company’s storefront. The John Haworth company, I learned, figured into an antitrust suit brought by the government against Eastman Kodak Company.
From 1895 to 1910, Kodak bought up the John Haworth Co. and other photographic-supply companies, as well as camera and film companies and paper suppliers.
In 1915, a District Court ruled that “Kodak had monopolized the amateur camera, film, and photofinishing industries through acquisitions and a variety of exclusionary practices,” and ordered the company to sell portions of the businesses it had purchased. Kodak entered into a decree in 1921 to do as the court had asked.
