I don’t usually look at clothes at auction, but the auctioneer was practically giving away some lovely coats and suits at this one. I could donate them to charity, I pondered, as I listened to…
Author: sherry
Selling what’s left of a shuttered elementary school
Posted in Architecture/Buildings, Auction, and School
The woman was a solitary figure in a long hallway that 10 minutes earlier had been filled with a clump of people moving mechanically from one classroom to another. In this quiet time, she seemed…
The bright green discs were the first thing I saw on the items as I entered the furniture room at the auction house. None of them had just one sticker, most had two or three…
Even a missing address couldn’t stop delivery of mail
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history
How on earth did these letters ever make it to through the mail, both I and another auction-goer wondered as we thumbed through a stack of old letters in cardboard boxes on a table at…
The face that stared out at me from the broadside put the man’s time as way before the 1960s. He had black wavy hair and a light skin tone that gave him an entry and cache that those…
Turning a corner inside the auction house, I walked right smack dab into the presence of a black and white menagerie. In front of me were tables lined with figurines of a dog I recognized…
The first time I saw Dick Gregory was during a speech he gave at Ohio State University where I was a graduate student in the 1970s. By then, he had given up his lean years as…
Jazz singer Ann Robinson’s photos at Village Vanguard
Posted in Music, and Performers
I didn’t recognize the singer in the stack of photos among many others in a half-cut cardboard box on the auction table. She seemed to be bellowing out some song with all her heart, and…
Where I come from, Bibb County, GA, you won’t likely see photos of black and white children in the same class before the 1960s. That just did not happen in the South – especially not in…
It looks like a home phone but this one’s for the car
Posted in collectibles, Equipment, and Vehicles
You couldn’t tell how the phone was used just by looking at it. A home phone was the first thing that came to my mind, even though it looked rather strange. The phone was in the…