My uncle Charles – whom some of us called Dye and his siblings called CW – was a Tuskegee Airman, but I didn’t fully recognize it until long after he had died. I should have remembered,…
Category: history
WWII women pilots on a deck of playing cards
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, history, Military, and Women
The women looked cool striding purposely to some unknown place in their leather bomber jackets, full-legged pants and thick boots. Their backdrop was a World War II plane with an imprinted name of which I…
Niagara Falls novelty moccasins you could send through mail
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, history, and Personal items
The tiny moccasins were both cute and crude, but I was drawn to them by the bright yellow tag hanging off them. The moccasins had been mailed unwrapped to a woman in Delaware, and I found…
Snuff, a slap and life inside 1800s rich family’s home
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history
The newspaper clipping had turned yellow with age, but I was drawn to it by both its appearance and the headline on the article: “50-Cent Turkeys Graced Tables of Rich in 1815, Old Diary Shows”…
The weather-beaten chest caught my eye because it was so beat-up. The wood had long lost its brownish color, and the thing looked to weigh a ton. It had heavy iron handles on the front,…
Frank James’ gun, corpse’s belt buckle & gangster’s faucets at sale
Posted in Antiques, Civil War, collectibles, and history
The man was waiting to nab one of three outlaw revolvers used in bank robberies by the Jesse James and Younger gangs in the late 1800s. But the prices that most of the items were…
A friend of mine took a trip a few months ago to Niagara Falls. I believe it was her first time there, and though she enjoyed going, she didn’t seem too impressed with the falls.…
He’s not looking right at you, he’s looking past you, the auction-goer observed as I stood looking myself at a wall plaque of the plaster bust of a Native American chief. I was standing directly…