Maybe things were just simpler. I found this wooden pointer during a clean-out and began immediately having all sorts of grammar school classroom anxiety flashbacks. I don't know why but holding that pointer made me feel a little queasy.
It is only a rubber tipped, two foot long piece of wood but it has some power. In the old days, you sat in a class or a meeting and the person speaking had one of these pointers. I think that it's primary purpose was to bring your attention to a smaller subset of information in the bigger picture. The instructor or teacher held it and moved the rubber point to the particular image, word or object that your attention was required to fix upon.
Nowadays we use laser pointing devices. A usually red beam is shined from a handheld laser pointer to bring your attention to the subject matter at hand. It works pretty well but it somehow fails to have the same presence as the good old wooden pointer. Maybe that is because the wooden pointer many times doubled as a weapon.
While the laser pointer can also be used in meeting combat, the old fashioned wooden pointer was the equivalent of the knife or bayonet - up close and personal weaponry. The laser pointer could be used from a safe distance but the wooden pointer was a clear weapon of hand to hand combat. I think maybe that is why I get kind of queasy seeing the old pointer.
Then again, maybe it is because the last one I saw in action was used to help instruct us on nuclear fallout avoidance in the early 60s. I vaguely recall the teacher banging one of these on her large oak desk while instructing us to get under our metal desks to be safe from the nuclear blast that was about to happen. A wooden ghost from the past - or maybe a reminder of the fragile times we live(d) in.
I came upon these lovely periodicals in a Connecticut antique shop earlier yesterday. One can only imagine the pleasure that was derived when finding these in your mail box - hopefully in a brown wrapper to hide the scandalous and risqué content from prying eyes.
Imagine Uncle Sam asking you the make 1942 "your best year with chicks". If you were lucky enough to be home to read this periodical you would have a pretty good year with the chicks - just saying. Especially true if you were reading this after December 8th when the draft began for WW II.
The cover art certainly looks patriotic and somewhat geared up for what was about to hit the fan in Europe and the Pacific. Even chickens were being prepared for the war effort and we were all apparently waiting enter into the war as this early publication might suggest.
so, who could resist reading about Dairy Dollars from purina? A plethora of valuable dairy information and just plain, old fashioned fun with cows. These topics firmly suggest that farm life before television was obviously an empty desert as far as entertainment goes.
My personal favorite is Ful-O-Pep Egg Mash. What was in that? Chickens and giant eggs on the cover seemed to suggest that the eggs would be super-sized Probably resulted in some pretty hyper-active chickens but not gigantic eggs.
A feed product called Ful-O-Pep is still being marketed except now by Allied Feeds out of Texas.
Allied Feeds http://www.fulopep.com/poultry.shtml
It is not clear that it is the same Ful-O-Pep that Quaker Oats once wrote about though - no more giant eggs, just tables of nutritional data.
More from the Quaker Oats company featuring talking chickens. Using Ful-O-Pep stuff obviously turns normally stoic chickens into english speaking jabber beaks. Rather articulate chickens too - I might add.
The two chickens discuss the "matter" in the mash while Quaker Oats claims to drive egg profits higher, and suggests that chickens talk about their food. These are two things that would be attractive to any chicken farmer in the 1920s. What the heck, tic-tac-toe playing chickens are popular even today so having a chicken to talk with would be priceless.
Something for everyone here; Profitable Pork Production - another riveting title with state of the art graphics. The folks at Quaker Oats seemed fully engaged in the feeding of almost every imaginable farm animal back in the day.
The cover art reminds me of the Saturday Evening Post styled covers. Except instead of a Norman Rockwell image a gnarly pig head pops out of the circle. Really when you just get right down to it there is probably nothing as attractive as a fattened pig with a bright blood red background.
All very cool examples of advertising propaganda meets farming technology from the first half of the 20th century. Interesting things and evidence of the military industrial complex in it's infancy - right in your local antique center.
I grew up when coffee was made in a percolating device. It was put on top of the gas or electric stove and you watched the coffee go blub-blub into and out of the little glass viewing portal on the top of the pot. That was for everyday coffee and it made the house smell real nice.
You got your coffee grinds at the local A&P supermarket from a big red and chrome electric coffee grinding machine. There were few safety guards on the beast and it regularly nipped off the fingertips of small children and less sharp parents that would go on later in life to get stuck in the refrigerators because they wanted to know if the lights stayed on if the door was closed. The difference then was that if you did something stupid you paid your own doctor bills and you either got smarter or just did not make it - I digress.
Sometimes when there was a family gathering or you got dragged to some Cub Scout thing
at the school the really big coffee making machine got hauled out. It was about three feet tall and made enough caffeinated sludge to keep all of the adults animated enough to make sure the kids did not kill each other playing dodgeball or kept them awake during the award presentations. Still this was an amateur coffee making device compared to the copper monster pictured here.
We found this one some time ago and just fell in love with it. I don't think that it actually works but I do remember seeing machines like this during our trips to the 1964 worlds fair or when we stopped at the automat in NYC after a double decker train ride from the east end of Long Island. I cannot imagine today with $6 cups of designer coffee what the value of the inventory these babies held would be - but I am sure that the coffee tasted pretty good.
Anybody that drank coffee from one of these is probably pretty damn old and would hate todays Dunkin-Star-buck-corporate coffee when remembering a good old cup served up in a two pound porcelain mug that looked like it had been washed 10,000 times. Served with real milk and a couple of heaps of sugar - hmm.
I am slacking a bit again with my postings… Just a a few photos of the new space hopefully will buy me a few days. I have located some vintage WWII models that I am still researching. I will Photograph them and share the images soon.
I added the display case and a few new items this week. All fresh to the area.
The right photo shows a nice biscuit barrel with CT markings.
Come by and visit us at The Trove in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Open 7 days a week. Physical address 1353 Boston Post Rd, Old Saybrook, CT 06475 or call
(860) 391-8636.
