Plucked from a yard sale, Part 3: Painting, baseball and Pac-Man

This week I'm writing about the 14 ephemeral items I bought for $1.25 at a neighborhood yard sale...

Item #4: "Paint Without Paints: Our Many Friends"

The activity booklet was published in 1960 by Platt & Munk.¹ The "magic" of painting without paints requires only water and a paint brush. (I'm sure you've all done one of these at some point, right?) "Invisible color" was patented by E.E. Brogle and Company sometime in the 1930s.

An interesting thing about this Platt & Munk book is that it's more than just a painting book. Each picture of boys and girls from around the world is accompanied by a page describing those children's lives and cultures. And so it's fairly educational, with descriptions of:

• Katryn and Jan of Holland, who live in a tiny village by the "Zuyder Zee"
• Tanya of Poland, who raises geese (pictured above)
• Ah Ling and Mo-Lee of China, who go buy a kite
• Ali Basm of Arabia and his camel, who live in the desert
• Rudi and Veronica of Switzerland, who live in a chalet at the foot of the Alps
• Christina of Norway, who eats "very plain food"² and is never scolded
• Golden Eagle of the Wyandot tribe³
• Pancho of Mexico, who speaks Indian, Spanish and English and plays guitar

Item #5: "Hurry Home"

"Hurry Home," a 32-page paperback, was published in 1976 by Xerox Education Publications. It's the tale of Tommy Graham, a young baseball player whose father is too sick to attend Tommy's championship baseball game at the park. Tommy crosses home plate with the game-winning run, keeps running and hurries home to see his father.

The most interesting thing about "Hurry Home" is the author, Donald Honig. He's a baseball historian and author who has written dozens of books about the national pastime.

Honig's works include "Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties, Told by the Men Who Played It," "Baseball between the Lines: Baseball in the Forties and Fifties, As Told by the Men Who Played It ," "The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time" (co-written with Lawrence Ritter), and team histories of the Boston Red Sox, Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets, New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies.

Item #6: "Pac-Man and the Ghost Diggers"

Pac-Man Fever included more than just arcade games, a hit song, and an animated series. It also spawned this 1983 paperback by John Albano⁴, which was part of the "A Golden Look-Look Book" series.

The plot of "Pac-Man and the Ghost Diggers" involves Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Sue⁵ attempting to dig a tunnel so that they can steal power pellets from the cellar of the Pac-Man family. There are several mazes that Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, the ghosts and the reader have to navigate. In the end, the ghosts -- who don't exactly have the tunnel-digging skills of Hilts, Velinski and Sedgwick -- miss the cellar entirely and end up all wet.

If you prefer your Pac-Man literature to be a bit more intellectual, my wife suggests that you check out this December 2010 article by Chad Birch titled "Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior."

On deck from the yard-sale haul: There's more to come this week, including a poster of the totally dreamy Scott Baio.

Footnotes
1. When my wife first saw this, she thought the book's title was "Paint Without Pants." But that would be a much different kind of book. Which would be featured on a much different kind of blog.
2. Christina's diet is described as buttermilk, black bread and cheese.
3. Here's the book's sanitized history of Native Americans: "Hundreds of years ago, the Indians lived this way all over the United States. Then the white men came and settled here, driving the Indians West, North and South. Now the white men and Indians are friends. Indians now live in houses and buy their food from stores. The children go to school where they learn to read and write."
4. Albano, who died in 2005, was perhaps best known as the co-creator of Jonah Hex. He also wrote for Archie Comics, one of my wife's personal favorites.
5. Sue replaced Clyde as the fourth ghost in Ms. Pac-Man, if you're keeping score at home.

Plucked from a yard sale, Part 2: Pals Club activity book

The week of yard-sale tales continues with another item from my recent ephemera haul at a neighbor's sale. See yesterday's post for the complete skinny.

Item #3: "Your Pals Club"

Here's a nice children's coloring and activity book from the early 1970s. It was written by Barbara Shook Hazen¹ and illustrated by Joan Allen. The Pals Club consists of:

• Hoot, The Yellow Owl
• Fanny, The Pink Fish
• Max, The Lime Green Cat
• Nutty, The Orange Squirrel
• Randy, The Purple Turtle (who is also the Pals Club president)

The book contains what you'd expect from an activity book. It has coloring pages, connect-the-dots, tips about being a good citizen, rhymes, mazes and puzzles.

And then, at the end, there's a cute little piece of music and lyrics:

We're your pals, Pals are we, in your vitamin, vita-minagerie!

Wait! What?

In the worst ending I've come across since "Signs,"² it turns out these colorful critters were animal shapes in Pals vitamins, from Bristol-Myers.

Here are a couple of their vintage commercials³, courtesy of YouTube:





Randolph, Hoot, Fanny and the Bristol-Myers gang were certainly no rival for Flintstones Chewable Vitamins, which were introduced in 1968 and beat Pals vitamins in both sales and early commercial quality.

Flintstones then continued to steamroll the children's vitamin competition with "We are Flintstone kids! Ten million strong and growing!" and the addition of Betty Rubble to the stable of vitamin shapes in 1995.

Tough luck, Randolph.

(If you're still nostalgic about Pals vitamins, though, you might want to check out this 2007 blog entry by Dan Goodsell.)

On deck from the yard-sale haul: Painting without paints and a 1954 school safety guide.

Footnotes
1. Barbara Shook Hazen has written many books, including the 1958 Golden Books version of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer." But she doesn't mention the Pals Club in her online biography.
2. Water kills them? Really?
3. I also stumbled across this script for a Pals vitamins commercial, which I believe was used in an advertising class.

Plucked from a yard sale, Part 1: Mister Rogers and How to Meet Men

"Each piece can tell a story."

That's what I wrote about ephemera in my first blog post last November. I can research and write something interesting (to me, at least) about just about anything.

That's one thing that makes yard sales fascinating. They offer a chance to root through OPP -- Other People's Paper.¹

Yesterday morning I found myself with a few spare minutes before Sarah and I had to leave to work on a 4-H project. One of our neighbors was having a yard sale, so I wandered over to see what they had. While others were checking out the kitchenware and items that appeared to have actual useful value, I went straight for the oddball items, the books and a disorganized box marked "free" that looked as if it been filled with the former assorted papers from a long-forgotten drawer. Heaven.

I was good and showed restraint. I only brought home a small stack of 14 items² (pictured above), purchased for a grand total of $1.25. (I even argued that the seller was undercharging me.)

Over the next several days, I plan to live up to my Papergreat motto -- "each piece can tell a story." I will write something illuminating about each of the 14 items brought home from this yard sale.

With further ado, here are the first two items. Check back Monday through Thursday for the rundown on everything else you see in the photo at the top of today's entry, including a poster of a 1970s teen heartthrob.

Item #1: "Going to the Hospital"

This is a 16-page paperback book published in 1977 by the producers of "Misters Rogers' Neighborhood." Pictured on the cover are Fred Rogers and Daniel Striped Tiger.³

The book would have been accompanied by a video⁴ featuring Mister Rogers. According to the archived version of The Neighborhood Archive Blog, the series was produced in the 1970s and featured the following book/video combos:

• Let's Talk About Going to the Hospital
• Let's Talk About Having an Operation
• Let's Talk About Wearing a Cast

The book features descriptions of what a hospital and a hospital visit are like. It also includes some activity pages with a connect-the-dots and suggestions for how to make your own paper-bag hand puppet.

Mister Rogers closes with the following note: "It can be scary to do something hard for the first time -- like going to the hospital. But it's nice to know that there are many people in the world who want to take good care of children. I hope you will feel better each day and be able to go home again soon."

Item #2: "How to Meet Men"

From Mister Rogers to Meeting Mr. Right! (Though, for some people, I'm sure that Mister Rogers is the ultimate Mr. Right!)

This book, by Elena Mann⁵, was published in 1968 by Bantam. It appears to be the kind of miniature volume that would have been sold in a grocery-store checkout line.⁶

It's an interesting relic of its time and the attitudes toward single women and dating in the late 1960s. It discusses how night classes, clubs, sporting events⁷, cocktail parties and church groups are "pre-tested" solutions to meeting Mr. Right. It also discusses "new" developments on the social scene, such as apartments for singles, dating bars and weekends for singles.

But the section that that caught my eye was "Computer Dating". I had no idea that computer dating was already on the scene in 1968. Here's an excerpt from that section:

Another thriving business has developed in this automated age of ours simply from the need of many men and women to meet the "right" person. ... Computers have been in the matchmaking business over ten years but when the college crowd and young "swingers" became involved several years ago the boom was on. Many of the computer services for those still in college or recent graduates are designed to turn up compatible dates rather than mates. Fees for this type are a modest $5 to $10. Other services, involving personal interviews, psychological testing, etc., may cost up to $400.⁸ ... Probably the oldest and best known of New York's computerized match-making services is the Scientific Marriage Institute⁹, which, according to last reports, had arranged nearly 2,000 marriages since it was founded in 1956. ... Other New York-based operatins included TACT -- Technical Automated Compatability Testing -- a "blind date" bureau that matches girls and men by computer for $5 each; and Operation Match Inc., which is also popular with young college graduates.¹⁰

Come back tomorrow for more tales from this yard sale!

Footnotes
1. Sadly, when you type "other people's paper" into Google, the first result you get is for "Free Term Papers, Research Papers, Essays, Book Reports" at OPPapers.com. On the bright side, however, I found this nice blog entry by Brandie Kajino at OnlineOrganizing.com. I strongly suspect Brandie would not have nice things to say about my ephemera hoarding.
2. My wife is used to this sort of thing and is relatively understanding about my tendency to bring OPP into the house. The "good" news is that other than books and ephemera, I truly don't have a lot of "stuff." And so I am doing my best to be on our board with our goals of reducing our number of possessions and keeping the household as decluttered as possible.
3. Here is some background on Daniel Striped Tiger from Wikipedia: "[He was] the first puppet ever to appear on 'Children's Corner' and 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.' Daniel is a shy, tame tiger who lives in a (non-functioning) grandmother clock with no hands (because in make-believe it is what ever time you imagine). Despite his shyness, Daniel exhibits phenomenal wisdom and intelligence when he does speak (he discerns the root of Lady Elaine's bad behavior on several occasions). He is the only child among the puppets whose parents are never seen, nor spoken of. ... His favorite toy is a small dumptruck, and he wears a watch on one arm because 'when you live in a clock you really should know what time it is.'"
4. Did you know that Fred Rogers can be thanked, in small way, for our modern convenience of being able to watch television shows and movies whenever we please? It was argued in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. that video recorders infringed on copyrights. In his testimony in favor of the time-shifting allowed by video records, Rogers stated:

Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the "Neighborhood" at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the "Neighborhood" off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the "Neighborhood" because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

The Supreme Court, which ruled that the making of individual copies of TV shows for purposes of time-shifting is fair use and not copyright infringement, noted in its decision that Rogers' views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue."
5. "Elena Mann" was a pseudonym for author Eleanor Adams, according to copyright records.
6. And if you think it's odd that a happily married, 40-year-old man would cheerily snatch up a book titled "How to Meet Men" at a yard sale and ask the elderly woman running the sale how much it costs, then you haven't read enough of this blog!
7. I found this excerpt regarding how to meet men through sports amusing: "Two sports favored by men are very difficult for a woman to penetrate -- that is, if one of her aims is man-hunting. Men love to fish, but they go with other men, not women. ... The only way to meet a man on the golf course is to play fast and well. If there's one thing golfers hate, it's a woman who doesn't know a tee shot from a T-shirt." And what's cited as the No. 1 sport through which women can meet men? Skiing!
8. 400!! According to the Inflation Calculator, something that cost $400 in 1968 would cost $2,478 in 2010.
9. I couldn't find much about the Scientific Marriage Institute. Here's a little nugget from a 1992 Discover magazine article by Judith Stone about the use of the word "Scientific" in company names over the years: "We’ll never know what inspired the baptism of the now defunct Scientific Marriage Institute of New York, which offered couples counseling. (You may remember their compendium of case studies, Can This Scientific Marriage Be Saved? My favorite was the one in which Marie Curie gets Pierre to stop leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor.)"
10. Operation Match Inc. later ran into some criticism and trouble. New York magazine wrote the following "Consumer Beware" note in its September 24, 1973, issue: "Advice to the Lovelorn -- Computer dating firms that offer long-term high-priced contracts may be leading bachelor Ms.'s and Mr.'s on a wild spouse chase. That's the opinion of New York State law, which limits such contracts to two years and $250. Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz recently charged Operation Match Inc. (519 Anderson Ave., Cliffside, N.J.) with offering three-year contracts that ranged in price up to $595. Operation Match has agreed to return to its customers all monies received by the company in excess of $250 per contract for any social referral service contract signed after September 1, 1971. The firm has also agreed to stop offering contracts that exceed $250 and/or run for more than two years."

Saturday's postcard: Kozy Kabin Service Station & Kafe

Here's an interesting old postcard that is from 1951 or earlier, because it calls for a 1¢ stamp on the back.

The text across the bottom of the front of the postcard reads:

A HAVEN OF REST FOR THE TIRED TOURIST
...You Are A Stranger Here But Once...

The text on the back of the postcard reads:

Kozy Kabin Service Station and Kafe. We specialize in Chicken and Western Steaks. One of Georgia's Best. Modern Kabins, Gas Heated Hot and Cold Running Water with Tile Showers, Simmons Beds with Beautyrest Mattresses. Member of AAA. Officially Inspected by Public Travel Bureau. On U.S. Route 1 in City Limits, South of Folkston, 45 Miles North of Jacksonville.

The postcard's maker is listed as: Genuine Curteich-Chicago "C.T. Art-Colortone".

The service station pictured sells Sinclair gasoline and also touts the pecans it has for sale.

Folkston is a small town but countless travelers would have passed by this service station on Route 1 during the station's heyday. In addition, Folkston remains the site of heavy rail traffic. Here's Wikipedia's description of the Folkston Funnel:

With virtually all rail traffic headed to Florida passing through Folkston, the rail lines through the city have acquired the nickname "The Folkston Funnel". As many as 60 trains a day pass through Folkston heading into and out of Florida, which some years draws ten times as many railfans as people who live in the city. To provide for a safe (and advantageous) viewing situation, the town has followed the example of another high-density rail town, Rochelle, Illinois, and has built a platform for visitors, along with picnic tables, chairs, BBQ pits, restrooms, and grills. And at night, lights shine from the platform onto the double rail so if someone wanted to, he or she could watch after sunset. Trains that come from the north move south toward Savannah, go through the Folkston Funnel, and arrive in Jacksonville. Trains that come from Florida do the same, just the opposite direction. At the covered viewing platform, there is an active scanner running and visitors can listen to train engineers as they run the trains through. As of 2006, there is also free WiFi for laptop users.

Can anyone in the Folkston area tell us what happened to this service station and what's at that location now?

Great links: The world's most inspiring bookstores

In case you missed it¹, Salon.com had a slideshow earlier this week titled "The world's most inspiring bookstores." My favorites were the bookstores in Detroit, Paris (pictured above), Buenos Aires, Urueña and Cairo².

Which bookstores in the slideshow seem most appealing to you? And what are the best bookstores (in any corner of the world) that you've visited over the years?

Footnotes
1. And 12,000 people already "liked" this slideshow on Facebook before I wrote about it. So there's a good chance you've already seen this.
2. I found this additional fun tidbit about the Azbakia Book Market in Cairo in an article by Salma Tantawi: "There are no price tags; so the pricing mainly depends on the salesman’s mood and what he thinks you can pay. Therefore, never take their word as absolutely final; or you could end up buying a torn Nicholas Sparks novel for 50LE. Bargaining is key here; try your best to reduce the price, and if that doesn’t work; pretend that you’re leaving: the owner wouldn’t let you go away that easy, and he will eventually relent." Kind of makes me want to go to Cairo this weekend!

Teaching America to sew in the 20th century

Here's the cover from "Simplicity Sewing Book: Easy Guide for Beginners and Experts." It was published in either 1954 or 1955.

Simplicity Pattern Company, a brand of Simplicity Creative Group, was founded in 1927. According to the website's history page:

Simplicity designs, produces and markets sewing patterns for individuals who love to sew. ... Simplicity has long been known as a company committed to sewing education and support. In the early 1940’s, Simplicity embarked on a major sewing education program, by which travelling representatives, fashion shows, educational books and literature were presented and disseminated across the country. Such programs cemented Simplicity as the key source for learning to sew, and set the foundation for how sewing is taught today.

Author Eudora Welty is said to have used Simplicity Patterns for her short stories, pinning her paragraphs to the paper and rearranging passages for the strongest storytelling effect.

Here's some more on Simplicity's vintage sewing patterns, if you're interested.

Two stereographic cards from along the Rhine

Click on images to view larger-sized versions.

I picked up these two stereographic cards last year at the same antiques store where I purchased the old copy of The Herbalist Almanac. They weren't in splendid condition, but I couldn't resist because (1) they were inexpensive and (2) I am fascinated by the history of buildings and cities along the Rhine.¹

The caption on the top card states: "Bingen and the Vineyards along the Rhine, Germany."

The caption on the bottom card states: "The Mouse Tower and the Ruin Ehrenfels, Along the Rhine, Germany."

How that building came to be known as the Mouse Tower is a bit of a folk legend. In a nutshell: Hatto II, the archbishop of Mainz in the late 10th century, was a cruel and murderous man who stockpiled grain and would not feed his people when a famine struck. On the pretense of finally giving them something to eat, he tricked all of the peasants into entering a barn and then locked them inside and burned them to death, cackling "Hear the mice squeak!" as they died.² Soon afterward, Hatto II was attacked by an army of mice. He took his boat across the river to his tower, hoping the mice would not follow him across the Rhine. But they did. The mice stormed his tower and ate him alive. Thus was born the Mouse Tower.

For more-detailed examination of the Mouse Tower folk tale, including a long poem version of the story, see Curious Myths of the Middle Ages/Bishop Hatto on Wikisource.³ The below illustration is from that web page:

Footnotes
1. One of my favorite antique books, purchased years ago at The York Emporium on one of my very first trips there, is the 1882 volume "The Heart of Europe: From the Rhine to the Danube". It's filled with detailed illustrations of sites that simply no longer exist as they were 125+ years ago.
2. As you might have guessed, this is not exactly a folk tale for children.
3. Wikisource is an online library of free content publications. As of June 1, 2011, it had more than 200,000 English-language texts in its library.

Illustrations from "Visualized American Government"

"Visualized American Government: Principles and Problems" by Philip Dorf and Arnold J. Zurcher (editor) was published in 1936 by the Oxford Book Company. What caught my eye in this civics text were the numerous illustrations. The drawings hold interest on their own merits, but they also provide a clear take on key concepts and issues in the Constitution and the running of the United States government. As Dorf writes in the preface (penned in September 1936):

At no other time in our history has government and its problems evoked more widespread and more sustained interest; for never before in our history have the activities of government affected so many of our people in so many different and so many vital ways.¹ Too frequently the study of government has been associated with a weary memorization of definitions and a dreary enumeration of the functions of government agencies. ... "Visualized American Government" is designed for students (and adult citizens) who desire a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the spirit, mechanics and problems of American government. ... A considerable number of original cartoon-illustrations² especially prepared for this book provide a graphic interpretation of important concepts and problems.

Here are some of those eye-catching cartoon-illustrations:

"We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding ... a Constitution intended to endure for ages to come and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." -- John Marshall

"While emergency does not create power, emergency may furnish the occasion for the exercise of power." -- Chief Justice Hughes

"The Social Security Act ... is intended to remove the fear of poverty during unemployment and fear of destitution in old age which for generations have constantly hung over the heads of millions of American wage-earners." -- John G. Winant, Chairman Social Security Board

Footnotes
1. And, just think, this was decades before Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, the global warming debate, The Daily Show, Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs, Snyder v. Phelps, the Wisconsin protests, and the war on terror.
2. Curiously, the name of the illustrator does not appear anywhere in the book (to the best of my knowledge).