I didn’t know Mantan Moreland made so many movies, my old auction buddy Janet exclaimed. Neither did I. We had individually gone through items in an upcoming online auction and were marveling at how many…
Category: Movies
“Blacula” movie poster recalls ‘70s blaxploitation films
Posted in Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Movies
One wall at the auction house was plastered with movie posters, but I saw only one that I actually wanted. It was for the movie “Blacula,” a black Dracula for those movie-goers who in the…
Picture Stories: Lobby card for Eddie Jones’ “One Round Jones”
Posted in Black history, Movies, and Photos
The wonderful photos kept coming. For several weeks, black and white photos with a mix of people, events and celebrations turned up on the auction table. An auction-house staffer told me that a dealer brought them…
Faces from an early black movie poster, but whose?
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Movies, and Photos
The image of the black police officer with a raised gun was the first to spark a memory. I had seen that image somewhere, but where? Someone had cut the picture from another poster and…
‘Ordinary’ black women who did extraordinary work at NASA
Posted in African American women, Books, and Movies
Margot Lee Shetterly thought nothing of the black female scientists who peopled her childhood world in Hampton, VA. Her father was a research scientist at the Langley Research Center in her hometown and he worked with…
I remember going to a movie theater in South Jersey soon after I moved to Philadelphia in the 1980s to see the cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with some friends. I had heard…
Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles will be selling that slinky see-through gown that Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang a sexy “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy in 1962. The “skintight, sheer, flesh-colored dress that sparkled…
The empty box of Ivory Snow detergent was much like the other product boxes that turn up on the auction tables. The cute happy baby on the front drew a smile from me but didn’t…
The old building looked stranded, left alone and neglected at the bottom of a street teeming with ice cream shops, a burger joint, restaurants, and stores hawking T-shirts and other stuff that tourists buy but do…
I was only a few feet away from my car in the parking lot of the auction house when Joe, another auction-goer, asked me over to look at some books he had bought at an…