Wooden nickel from the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the Northwest Territory, 1937-1938, Marietta, Ohio. The nickel measures 2 1/2 inches in diameter.
HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. (AP) – Jeff Chandler easily recalls a childhood admonition from his grandfather – don’t take any wooden nickels from his collection.
That command started a lifelong fascination with wooden nickels that continues to this day for the 52-year-old Hopkinsville resident.
The Kentucky New Era reports that part of the collection, some 2,000 nickels and wooden nickel bills strong, will be displayed in the Pennyroyal Treasures Exhibit at the Pennyroyal Area Museum in Hopkinsville courtesy of a donation by Chandler.
“A lot of people would think that was just a little small thing, but my grandfather was the one who really got me started,” Chandler said.
Chandler has been collecting since 1968. He has gotten his wooden nickels through yard sales, the Internet, friends and many of them from his grandfather.
“A lot of people, when you say you collect wooden nickels, they kind of laugh at you,” Chandler said. “A lot of people don’t even think wooden nickels exist.”
Janet Bravard, education coordinator at the museum, was happy to have Chandler’s collection in the exhibit. Bravard said wooden nickels were used as currency during the Great Depression when merchants or businesses would issue and redeem them for specific values.
After the Depression ended, Bravard said wooden nickels mainly became a collector’s item for people like Chandler.
“That’s the whole idea of the exhibit,” she said. “For people to come in and want to share their collections so we all are educated from them.”
With little information about wooden nickels publicly available, Chandler hopes to flip his collection into a book.
“I just hope people get as much enjoyment out of them as I have,” he said of his collection, which will be on display until the end of July.
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Online: http://www.hoptown.org/museum
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Information from: Kentucky New Era, http://www.kentuckynewera.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The beautiful palomino horse Trigger is an iconic symbol of American pop culture. His image was included in numerous licensed items associated with his owner, Roy Rogers. This 4-foot-tall plastic composition Sears store display featuring Roy Rogers on a rearing Trigger was auctioned for $10,350 on March 31, 2005 at Morphy Auctions. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Morphy Auctions.
BRANSON, Mo. (AP) – Trigger, the palomino that carried cowboy movie star Roy Rogers, will be on the auction block later this month.
Trigger, who was stuffed after his death in 1965, will be auctioned off with other Roy Rogers memorabilia at Christie’s in New York. The Christie’s website says the auction is scheduled for July 14-15, and that Trigger is expected to bring in about $100,000 to $200,000.
The Springfield News-Leader reports that the Rogers family decided last year to close the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum that had been in Branson for about six years.
Other items included in the auction are paintings, household furnishings and tools.
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Information from: Springfield News-Leader, http://www.news-leader.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Jacobs model 35 Coca-Cola vending machine has the manufacturer’s distinctive mailbox shape. Image courtesy of Midwest Auction Galleries Inc., Lapeer, Mich., and LiveAuctioneers archive. GRANITE FALLS, N.C. (AP) – In the annals of American ingenuity, where the Holy Grail is the efficient delivery of a popular product in its perfect package at the right price, it all came together at least once, in the JLC-144.
The F.L. Jacobs Co. of Indianapolis achieved this confluence of style and purpose sometime in the early 1940s when U.S. factory workers, on break from their labors in support of World War II, needed quick refreshment. What they wanted was a Coca-Cola, in a glass bottle so well chilled that if pressed to the temple it could ease a production-line headache.
The red-and-white, mailbox-shaped JLC-144 delivered, and for just 5 cents a pop.
Today, just the empty, curvaceous steel cabinet of the 144, minus the refrigeration system, the rotating rack that held 12 dozen clinking bottles, and the crown catcher into which the metal caps clanked, can fetch $400.
With its innards tossed, “The 144 made a killer refrigerator for deer meat,” says Alan Huffman. “I’ve bought ’em with the antlers still in ’em.”
Huffman hunts antique soft-drink vending machines with all their parts intact, these mechanical marvels that eliminated the need for drugstore soda jerks and made the cold, carbonated concoctions easier to find in some places than plain water. Huffman has more than 700 vintage machines in a museum at his Antiquities Vending Co. in the Caldwell County town of Granite Falls, just outside Hickory. The collection is both a roadside attraction and a working archive of parts and operating systems for nearly every make and model of soda vending machine produced from 1925 to the late 1970s. Many are thought to be the only complete examples of their kind.
Huffman’s main source of income is repairing and restoring vintage machines in a small shop adjacent to the former cotton mill building that houses the museum and a banquet hall he rents for special events.
“I can pretty much put together anything anybody’s got,” said Huffman, who loves a mechanical challenge.
When he gets a Vendolator that won’t vend or a Tyler Champion that won’t chill, he can unlock the museum, open the door on his complete version of the identical device and figure out what’s wrong. If he can’t buy a replacement part, Huffman has a machinist copy one from the museum model.
Sometimes he makes 10 repairs a day.
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Nostalgia pays off
This unintended career arc began in 1989 when Huffman was 21 years old, thumbing through a Sharper Image catalog that offered a restored round-top glass-door Cavalier 96 for more than $6,000.
It reminded him of the machine in the old Galaxy Food Store in Granite Falls, where he bought 10-ounce Orange Suncrests for a quarter when he was a barefoot kid. What ever happened to that old machine?
Later, wandering through an antiques mall in Columbia, S.C., he found the model he’d seen in the catalog, but unrestored and just $350.
Smelling a deal, he charged it to his credit card and installed it in his apartment. He found another one, and put that into service in a hair salon. Another shop owner saw it and wanted one, and a business was born.
Huffman still has 120 machines in service, which he stocks with 40 flavors of soft drinks, all in glass bottles. He never, ever deals in cans.
“Glass is a better package,” he said.
One of his machines stands against a wall of the oak-floored Granite Hardware store in town, near the galvanized washtubs and the bug zappers. Clerk Lisa Arrowood says a fair number of people come in just to buy a cold Cheerwine or Mountain Dew.
“I try to lay off,” she says, but succumbs to a Sundrop once in a while.
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Go ask Mama
At 43, and stout as a Westinghouse refrigerator cabinet, Huffman drinks only the diet versions. “Co-Cola,” is how he pronounces the brand name, in an accent as sweet as grape Nehi.
He has a story for every machine he has: how it was designed, where it was built, where it was found. They turn up in barns, storage buildings, in old businesses whose owners turned out the lights one evening and never came back.
Huffman can restore the most forlorn machines to their former glory, with polished chrome and a professional paint job in Coke red or Pepsi blue.
In more than 20 years of business, he’s only had three women buy machines for themselves. But a lot of the men say they have to ask their wives’ permission. Huffman offers them his secret weapon, a 1940s-era Coca-Cola logo featuring a little blue-eyed boy that he can reproduce on the machines.
“Go show her that little boy,” he says. “It never fails.”
Restored, the machines end up in businesses or home game rooms, delivering memories in a bottle.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748-1825) portrait of Napoleon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) – Rare memorabilia of former French Emperor Napoleon 1st, including a lock of hair cut from his head after he died in exile in 1821 on the remote island of St. Helena, have fetched 140,000 New Zealand dollars ($97,000) at auction.
Bidders from England, France, Lithuania, Hong Kong and the United States joined the auction by phone for the 40 items – sold by a New Zealand family, descendants of Denzil Ibbetson, commissionary officer on St. Helena during Napoleon’s incarceration on the remote island.
The highest price, NZ$21,000 ($14,500) was paid for a lithograph and watercolor death bed sketch of Napoleon by Ibbetson, Art+Object auction house managing director Hamish Coney, said Wednesday. The unnamed buyer bid by phone from London.
A lock of hair Ibbetson cut from the former emperor’s head fetched NZ$19,000 ($13,100) from a private collector in London who did not want to be identified, he said.
Ahead of the sale, Coney said he expected the hair to sell for up to NZ$300,000 ($207,000).
Ibbetson, a talented artist, completed many drawings and paintings of Napoleon and of scenes on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, a British colony, and the private collection came to New Zealand with his son in the 1860s.
The historical collection, probably the most important ever to have been found in Australia or New Zealand, had been held in the family ever since, Coney said.
“I can’t think of anything that’s comparable,” he said.
“The world of Napoleon around (the globe) is huge. There’s a very vigorous Napoleonic community and there’s so many books published every year about Napoleon, it’s incredible,” he said.
A French bidder who bought a sketch of Napoleon’s home on St. Helena, Longwood House, would be returning the artwork to the place it was drawn, he noted.
“We have a delighted purchaser out of Paris who has bought this on behalf of the St. Helena Society … to return (it) to Longwood House,” he told New Zealand’s National Radio.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Official White House portrait of Pres. Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States, painted by Everett Raymond Kinstler.
VINCENNES, Ind. (AP) – When the Vincennes Historical and Antiquarian Society received an original signature from Barack Obama late last year, it nearly completed its collection of signatures from all of the 44 U.S. presidents with one exception – Ronald Reagan.
“The greatest rarity of the signatures is the Reagan signature because 99 percent of the letters that came out of the White House in Reagan’s administration were signed with electric pen,” said Dennis Latta, a society member. “Reagan was averse to signing letters and so he let the secretaries do it.”
Latta said society members have been in contact with U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar about getting a Reagan signature to complete the collection.
“The danger and difficulty is getting the original signature because so many documents are signed by facsimile,” he said. “They use the electronic pen over and over again. If you get a letter from the White House, chances are it’s not signed by the president. Chances are the secretary has gotten the pen out and signed it.”
The collection began as a hobby of Judge Curtis Shake, a Knox County resident who was an Indiana Supreme Court Justice and who served as a judge during the Nuremberg Trials in Germany following World War II.
Shake’s collection began when he received a personal letter in 1930 from President Herbert Hoover, commending him for his role in a Vincennes celebration of the 100th anniversary of the migration of Abraham Lincoln’s family from Indiana and Illinois.
Shake later received personal correspondence from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
From the beginning Shake traded for and purchased the rest of the original signatures for 40 years, getting every signature up to and including Richard Nixon’s. One of the documents had both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s autographs.
In 1973, Shake donated his collection, which included personal letters, land purchase documents and letters of appointment, to the society.
“(The Historical and Antiquarian Society) was revived in 1965 and Curt Shake was one of the founding fathers and he was interested in it,” Latta said. “And that’s why he donated the collection to the Vincennes Historical and Antiquarian Society.”
Since then, the society has continued the effort.
“I think it became a challenge for every Historical Society administration to get the new president, and some more difficult than others,” Latta said.
The key to obtaining the signatures is having a personal connection that can get in touch with the president, Latta said.
It was Jim Corridon, former county Republican Party chairman and now the State Archivist, who helped get the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush autographs. It was former speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives John R. Gregg of Sandborn, who was responsible for getting Bill Clinton’s signature when he visited Vincennes University during a campaign rally for his wife, Hillary Clinton, in April 2008.
And it was Dale Phillips, superintendent of the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park and also a member of the Historical and Antiquarian Society, who wrote a letter to U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh asking about Obama’s signature.
A member of Bayh’s Evansville office brought the autograph, which was on a White House stationary, to Phillips during the re-dedication ceremony last October of the Clark Memorial following it’s renovation.
The collection was originally held at the Lewis Library at VU, but was later moved to a bank vault after society members became concerned about its rising value of the signatures.
A copy of the display can be seen at Tecumseh-Harrison Elementary School.
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Information from: Vincennes Sun-Commercial, http://www.vincennes.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Harrison Ford drove a similar 1955 Chevy in ‘American Graffiti.’ Image courtesy of RM Auctions and LiveAuctioneers archives. EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (AP) – Carl Parker traded a cow for his, igniting a lifelong passion.
It was love at first sight when Greg Hageness spotted his while deer hunting near Eleva.
Everett Blakeley let his get away but was lucky enough to be reunited years later. Now he wouldn’t consider parting with it.
The object of these Chippewa Valley residents’ affection: their first cars.
Apparently, there’s something about a first automobile that, like a first love, is hard to put in the rearview mirror forever.
“It’s a matter of tying yourself to your youth,” said Blakeley, an Eau Claire developer and car collector. “First cars are historical and help us remember a part of our lives that was so happy and carefree. There are a lot of people who still want a piece of that.”
The strong connection many people forge with their first set of wheels became abundantly clear when more than 50 Chippewa Valley residents responded to a recent Leader-Telegram call for stories about first-car experiences. The tales, focusing on everything from rusty clunkers to dreamy sports cars, were published in a special section called “Memory Lane.”
The fascination with cars goes far beyond just polishing fenders, kicking tires and revving engines. It extends to the natural desire of people – especially teenagers and young adults who’ve never had the ability before – to hit the open road and go wherever they want.
“Cars provide the basic fundamental called freedom,” said longtime local car dealer Ken Vance. “Transportation is freedom and independence.”
Vance, owner of Ken Vance Motors, has witnessed that special connection time and time again since first coming to Eau Claire 37 years ago and working for car dealer Lee Markquart.
While some buyers are merely looking for a way to get from point A to point B, others develop a real infatuation with what they drive, Vance said.
“There is a lot of nostalgia involved with cars, and there aren’t many products like that,” said Vance, who keeps an enlarged photo of his own first car, a 1952 Chevrolet hardtop, in his office.
“It was a chick magnet from way back,” Vance quipped, adding that he bought the car for $325 and sold it a year later for $475, perhaps planting the first seed for what would become his life’s work.
While some people keep a special spot in their heart for their first car, others prefer a more tangible reminder and keep it in their garage.
Hageness, for one, never has been able to part with his first car since he managed, at age 16, to acquire a version of an automobile he had dreamed of owning since first admiring it in the movie American Graffiti. The vehicle was a 1955 Chevrolet two-door post car just like the one driven by actor Harrison Ford in the 1973
“After watching that movie, I said, ‘someday I’m going to get me a ’55 Chevy,’” said Hageness, 49, of rural Fall Creek. “So when I saw one out behind a barn south of Eleva while deer hunting, I had to have it.”
The year was 1976. The price: $200.
After towing the car, which had been sitting outside for some time, back to his father’s shop, Hageness wanted to see if it would run. He made sure it had oil and created a gas line by extending a hose to a can of gasoline.
“I turned the key, and by golly the thing started,” he said.
He since has replaced the motor twice and given it two new paint jobs, changing it from the original green to a maroon and white two-tone to red. It clearly is a labor of love for Hageness, who still drives the car fairly often every summer, including in a few car shows, and allowed his daughter Anna to take it to prom two years ago.
Though he has had opportunities to sell the Chevy, Hageness has resisted, in part because of all the people who have told him over the years how much they wish they still had their first car.
“It’s Americana. It’s a connection to the past,” Hageness said. “Generally, when you think about the past, you think of the good times, and it brings a smile to your face.”
Blakeley, 65, bought his first car, a 1948 Nash, in 1963. He sold it a year later because, he recalled, “It wasn’t enough of a hot rod for me.”
After years of regrets about the one that got away, Blakeley couldn’t believe his good fortune when he was driving around town and spotted his first car, looking pretty neglected, with a “For Sale” sign on it 20 years after he’d sold it.
Blakeley bought the car back and restored it to its original two-tone color – tannish gray on the bottom and green on the top.
“It’s a very nice car” and one of a half-dozen he has collected, said Blakeley, who still enjoys going for an occasional spin in the Nash. “I wouldn’t sell it again. It has a good, safe home now.”
A photo album in Parker’s town of Seymour home is a testament to the love affair many Americans have with their cars.
The treasured album is devoted to photos of automobiles Parker, 75, has owned over the past 62 years. It catalogs 51 vehicles, including campers, lawn tractors and boats that have been a part of his fleet.
It begins with a 1940 Studebaker and progresses through the 2008 Audi A4 and 2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in his garage today.
Each page has a story that goes along with it, but none can top the tale of how Parker acquired his first car, in 1948.
Parker’s brother, who worked at Madison Street Auto Body at the time, took ownership of the badly damaged Studebaker four-door sedan after it was rear-ended and the owners decided not to even bother with repairs.
Parker was intrigued by the car but, as a 14-year-old, didn’t have a lot of assets to his name. So he milked his only cash cow – literally.
In exchange for the car, Parker offered to give his brother, a farmer, the cow he had been raising for 4-H and FFA.
The deal was struck – cow power for horsepower – and Parker became a car owner.
“The back end was caved in, and we just left that. It definitely was not a fancy buggy,” Parker said. “It burned oil like mad, and it was a big, old tank, but I didn’t care. To me, it was fantastic. I had a car, and it gave me freedom.”
The unusual transaction marked the starting line for more than just a photo album.
“I’ve been a car buff all my life,” said Parker, who has owned cheap and fancy cars and even dabbled in restoration. “It’s a way of life. It’s just an interesting thing to keep you occupied and busy.”
Though he may have used cash for his first car purchase, Glenn Haukeness of Strum didn’t need too much.
Haukeness paid a mere $5 for a 1919 Ford Model T in 1939. Remarkably, a driver’s license at the time would have set him back more than the car.
However, the 14-year-old avoided that cost because he wasn’t old enough to drive legally but got permission from the guy who enforced the law in Osseo, where Haukeness worked at a gas station.
“The local police officer said if I behaved myself and did not drive after dark it was OK,” said Haukeness, 85.
Jim Paulson, 52, a member of the Indianhead Old Car Club and an organizer of the upcoming 36th annual Indianhead Car Show on Aug. 1 in Chippewa Falls, certainly had one of the most unusual introductions to the world of auto ownership in 1975.
His first car, acquired at age 16, was a Cadillac. But before anyone jumps to conclusions about him living the high life at such a young age, it should be noted that the car was 26 years old and designed for purposes less uplifting than cruising the parking lot at North High School.
The vehicle was a 1949 Cadillac hearse that he recalled refusing to buy unless it came with a casket, which made a marvelous prop at Halloween parties.
As for the car, Paulson said, “I used to drive it to school quite a bit. I think kids just thought, ‘There goes another goofball with a really big car.’”
He still owns his next vehicle, a 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible, which he considers his first “legitimate” car. The Eau Claire resident said some people have questioned why he has kept that old car along with a few others and spent more money restoring some of them than they’re worth.
“That’s not the point,” Paulson said. “They mean something to me.”
Just after finishing his military service in World War II, Gene Rineck of Wheaton ordered a brand new car for $1,344.
Since new cars were scarce in the postwar era, he had to wait a year before his 1947 Plymouth four-door arrived. But it was worth the wait, coming with such bells and whistles as a heater, radio and outside sun visor. In addition, he recalled fondly, it could go 80 mph and offered a smoother ride than he was used to.
“It was a lot easier than riding on the back of a tank,” said Rineck, now 85, noting that as an infantryman serving in Italy he was assigned to follow a line of advancing tanks and occasionally would hop on the back of a tank and ride for a while.
As a student at Eau Claire High School in the 1950s, Fritz Bushendorf knew just what to do after someone crashed into his first car, a blue 1937 Ford 85 he had purchased for $50, and discolored the bumper.
He and a friend planned to show their spirit by painting the vehicle in school colors – white with purple polka dots.
But when their preferred colors were unavailable, they settled on using brushes to apply John Deere yellow and International Harvester red in a unique design created by Bushendorf.
One day he asked a friend if she could make a stencil so he could add his girlfriend’s name to the side of the car. The friend made the stencil but told Bushendorf he’d never follow through.
“Back then you didn’t dare people from my side of town,” said Bushendorf, now 71, noting that for the next year or so he drove the brightly colored car around town with the name “Marilyn” painted on the side.
Fritz and Marilyn Bushendorf, now of New Auburn, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in January.
As for the car, Bushendorf said, “My mother finally made me sell it so she didn’t have to have that red and yellow thing sitting in her yard.”
Like many other senior citizens, George Stanek, 85, of Augusta recalled that motorists in the 1940s often went to great lengths to drive a car.
His first car, a 1936 Chevy he bought in 1943 at age 18, wasn’t in terrible shape except for its bald tires, which were difficult to find replacements for because the nation’s resources were devoted to supporting World War II.
To get around, Stanek said he pealed the rubber off his original tires and replaced it with rubber he cut off another old set of damaged tires. He endured the “not quite balanced” ride for seven months until he finally was able to buy a set of reground tires, which he enjoyed for only two months before selling the car when he joined the military.
Still, Stanek said all the extra effort seemed worth it at the time.
“I was the only one in the neighborhood of that age who had a car,” he said, grinning at the memory of squeezing nine people in the car and hauling them to the local dance hall.
As a nurse working in Lansing, Mich., for $11 a day, Jeanette Baumgartner scraped up enough cash to pay $2,163 for her first car, a 1951 Pontiac Silver Streak convertible, in 1953.
The convertible was a hit with Baumgartner’s friends, as evidenced by an old black-and-white photo of Baumgartner and a friend lying on the hood holding their hands by their heads as if they had antlers. She labeled the photo “nurses dear hunting.”
The fire engine red car also seems like a perfect fit for a woman who six years ago, at age 74, sent Christmas cards adorned with a photo of her at the wheel of her first car. Baumgartner, now of Eau Claire, attached a caption that captures some of the mystique that many Americans associate with the automobile:
“Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, ‘Holy (expletive)! What a ride!’”
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Information from: Leader-Telegram,
http://www.leadertelegram.com/
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Amelia Earhart mounts her Lockheed Vega 5b circa 1935. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – An astronaut who carried a scarf once owned by famed aviator Amelia Earhart aboard the space shuttle is returning it to an Oklahoma women’s flight museum.
Astronaut Randy Bresnik will formally present the scarf to officials from the 99s Museum of Women Pilots at the museum’s grand reopening event on Saturday. The museum has been closed for remodeling.
The Kansas-born Earhart disappeared in 1937 at age 39 while attempting an around-the-world flight. Bresnik’s grandfather, Albert Bresnik, was hired by Earhart to work as her only authorized photographer, but he wasn’t with her on her final flight.
Earhart wore the scarf on her long-distance trips, but not on the flight on which she disappeared. Bresnik asked to carry the scarf aboard space shuttle Atlantis last November to honor Earhart.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
PARIS (AP) – A Paris auction house says it plans to put 12 never-before-published portraits of Michael Jackson on the block in December.
The portraits were shot by French photographer Arno Bani in 1999. One of them, called Michael Jackson’s Blue Eye, depicts Jackson with a sad expression and a large blue dot over his left eye.
Jackson contacted Bani, only 23 years old at the time, after seeing his fashion photography in a newspaper.
Auctioneer Frederic Chambre said Tuesday that the bidding is expected to start at euro1,000 ($1,228) for each portrait. Chambre said the images could not be displayed before because of copyright issues.
Auctioneers Pierre Berge Associes will put the photos on the block, along with 50 contact boards.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
John Lennon rehearses Give Peace a Chance, 1969, copyrighted photo by Roy Kerwood licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License. NEW YORK – John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for A Day In The Life sold to a private American collector for $1,202,500 at Sotheby’s Fine Books & Manuscripts sale Friday. An intense bidding battle that lasted almost 6 minutes resulted in a sale of almost double the high estimate, which was $700,000.
Bidding rapidly became a contest between two telephone bidders who competed tenaciously to acquire the celebrated Beatles’ autograph lyrics for A Day In The Life – the final track of the legendary 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The landmark album spent 27 weeks at the top of the UK’s charts and 15 weeks at no. 1 on the American Billboard 200. The revolutionary album marked the Beatles’ transformation from pop icons to artists.
“The outstanding price achieved for these handwritten lyrics is testament to the iconic status of the Beatles, John Lennon and especially this song. We are thrilled that these renowned lyrics were so well-received today,” said David Redden, international chairman Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department.
The double-sided sheet of paper in Lennon’s hand is complete with cross-outs, corrections, reworkings and chronicles the evolution of one of the most famous pop masterpieces from conception to the lyrics presumably used in the recording studio.
From the first time it was aired on June 1, 1967, A Day In The Life was recognized as one of the towering achievements of popular music, that elevated not only the Beatles to a new level but allowed pop music to take its place as one of the 20th-century’s defining artistic movements, said Redden.
Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer was brewed for many years in Milwaukee. This tin advertising sign measures 24 inches by 20 inches. Image courtesy of Morphy Auctions and LiveAuctioneers archive. MONROE, Wis. (AP) – Among collectors of beer and brewery memorabilia, the names of Herb and Helen Haydock pop up all over the world.
Wintering for six months in Costa Rica and returning to their hometown of Wisconsin Rapids for two to three months, the couple will now make frequent summer visits to Monroe for the express purpose to taking care of their extensive collection, now on display at the Minhas Craft Brewery Tour Center and Museum.
“Oh, this is only half of it,” said Helen. “They didn’t realize how much we had.”
Foremost collectors of breweriana, Herb and Helen were busy recently at the museum, putting some finishing touches on the new microbrewery display room, before the grand opening.
The collection includes hundreds of brewery advertising artifacts. A gallery room holds lithographs and prints from the mid-1800 era to the 1950s and ’60s. A lower-floor room holds collections of model cars, trucks and trains, tap handles and growlers from around the world.
Herb wouldn’t say which collectible was his favorite. A favorite collectable is like a favorite beer, he said. “Everyone has their own.”
But Helen was quick to point out advertising posters and calendars with the children depicted. “Those are my favorites,” she admitted.
Herb and Helen have authored two books on beer memorabilia. The World of Beer and Beer Advertising Memorabilia offer a brief history of breweries, along with full-color pictures of individual items in their collection.
Helen pulled one of the books out as she explained “The Best Tonic” advertising campaign poster. Just above the poster on display in the gallery sets the real bottle of The Best Tonic, now empty.
The book’s photo looks very similar the large poster in its unique frame, but devoid of the advertising.
“If you saved the coupons (from the bottle label), they sent you a picture, like this, of Mrs. Grover Cleveland,” Helen said pointing at the book.
Herb started collecting beer memorabilia in 1951, with eight beer glasses he bought while stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Munich, Germany. Helen, a teetotaler, married him in 1954.
Herb said she has tasted beer only once, when she accidentally took a drink from her water bottle, which he had filled with some leftover beer to save.
“Well, I didn’t drink it, I spit that out,” she said.
The Haydocks belong to numerous beer memorabilia associations, located in and outside the United States, such as Canada, Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, Australia and Argentina.
Herb was one of the co-founders, and now serves as a director emeritus on the board, of the National Association of Breweriana Advertising. The term “breweriana” first appeared with the 1972 formation of NABA.
“Breweriana was coined by one of the NABA members,” said Helen.
The Haydocks held the largest private collection of beer memorabilia, which was eventually purchased by the Miller Brewing Co. in 1996. In that collection were 150,000 beer labels.
Their second collection, assembled between 1987 and 1996, is housed at the Oldenberg Brewery, a microbrewery and entertainment complex in Fort Michell, Ky., near Cincinnati.
Their third beer and brewery antiques collection is now on display, perhaps appropriately, at the second-oldest brewery in America, Minhas Craft Brewery in Monroe.
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Information from: The Monroe Times,
http://www.themonroetimes.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
