Vintage trade card featuring two kids riding a large pig

This old illustrated card comes with no identifying information on the front or back. It measures 2¾ by 4¼ inches. I assume it's a trade card of some sort, but without an additional details, it exists solely as a picture of two kids riding a large pig. That's it. It has no higher purpose.

To see some very disturbing vintage food advertising, much of which features pigs, check out this section of the Found in Mom's Basement blog. And don't say you weren't warned.

Or if, on the other hand, you're looking for some ephemera that you can actually use on the rainy Saturday night in northeastern United States, here are instructions for making a sock monkey and a sock elephant.

Guide to Papergreat's photos of graveyards and old buildings

Autumn, which doesn't officially start until tomorrow, is the time for spooks and chills. So here's your one-stop shopping for all of Papergreat's past posts involving cemeteries, old (mostly abandoned) buildings and more.

Enjoy! And never mind that noise behind you.

UPDATED OCTOBER 5, 2015
Graveyards

• Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia
• Oak Hill Cemetery in Vermont and Phoenix Cemetery Tioga County, Pennsylvania
• Alpine Road Cemetery (Bender Burial Ground) in York County, Pennsylvania
• Manipulated photos of a graveyard at dusk

Old Buildings (Falling-Down Things)

• Dilapidated structures of Southern Jersey
• The abandoned Great Barrington Fairgrounds (Massachusetts)
• Taftville/Ponemah Mill in eastern Connecticut
• Creepy & dilapidated structures of the eastern United States, Part 1
• Creepy & dilapidated structures of the eastern United States, Part 2
• Old house in Coudersport, Pennsylvania
• Dutch photographer Niki Feijen's urban exploration masterpieces
• Sue Tatterson's trip to Scranton Lace Company

Other spooky posts

• The 10 movies that scared me the most
• Happy Halloween: Witches and zombies and scarecrows! Oh my!
• Four spooky tales for the Hallowe'en Witching Hour
• Happy 150th birthday, M. R. James
• Happy 143rd birthday, Algernon Blackwood
• Happy 100th birthday, Vincent Price
• RIP, Sir Christopher Lee, champion of literature
• Postcard: The Haunted Room in the Mint House, Pevensey
• Halloween Countdown #10: Clowns. Why'd it have to be clowns?
• Enchanted forests and vintage Halloween postcards
• Slightly unsettling old postcard: Dungeon Rock in Massachusetts
• A few ephemeral tidbits for your Halloween 2013 enjoyment
• Old postcard showing Teufelsbrücke (Devil's Bridge) legend
• Book cover: "The House on the Borderland"
• Vaguely creepy vintage snapshot of a woman's head
• Scholastic Fest: #2, The Ghost that Came Alive
• Nightmare fuel: Covers of two "children's" booklets with clowns

From cookbooks to ghost towns: A great harvest of #FridayReads

This illustration appears in 1925's Standard Bible Story
 Readers, Book One, which I wrote about in
this November 2011 Papergreat post.

Here's another collection of interesting — and sometimes offbeat — reading material from around the web. There's more than enough great stuff here to get you through the upcoming weekend!

Also, quite unintentionally, ghost towns ended up being the theme of several of these links.

• Messy Nessy Chic: "The Time Capsule Ghost Town waiting to be brought Back to Life" (This is easily the most fascinating thing I've read in the past week.)
• Lizzy Young Bookseller: "Seven Milestones in the History of Cookbooks" and "Milestones in the History of Cookbooks, Take Two!"
• The Atlantic: "The Case Against High-School Sports" by Amanda Ripley
• David Hewson: "The curious story of Schalken the Painter"
• The Atlantic: "Meet the Family That Shuns Technologies Introduced After 1986" by Megan Garber
• Odd Things I've Seen: "High and Dry and Dearly Departed: The Ghost Town of Dana" by J.W. Ocker
• Strange Flowers: "The ghosts of Versailles" by James Conway
• Smithsonian.com: "The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary" by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie (Warning: Scary pictures)
• The New York Times: "In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System" by Brooks Barnes
• Messy Nessy Chic: "10 Inspiring Bookshops around the World"
• Vice: "I Went to a Vibe-tastic Bookstore in the Middle of LA's Woods" by Chloe Cassidy
• Forgotten Bookmarks: "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" (which has inspired me to attempt to find old hobo symbols that might be scrawled on signs here in southcentral Pennsylvania)
• Capper's Farmer blogs: If you're interested in farming or rural lifestyles, you'll definitely want to check out the Capper's bloggers, who write about everything from canning to pickling to cooking to gardening. And I hear they might be adding a new blogger soon — one with much less of a green thumb.

Finally, here are a couple of outstanding links that consist only of images:

• Early American Commercial Pleasure & Public Grounds: "In Simpler Times - A few outdoor activities at public taverns in Europe during the 1600s"
• io9: "The Strangest and Most Tragic Ghost Towns from Around the World"

A Ruth Manning-Sanders signature from 1931

Because it cannot currently be found anywhere else on the internet, my contribution this afternoon to Ruth Manning-Sanders Scholarship is to put this example of her signature online.

This signature appears on her Illuminated Text, a poem that she published through Blue Moon in London for Christmas 1931.

There were 100 signed copies distributed. As of today, three of them can be purchased through AbeBooks.com. They might be the only remaining copies, given that it's a single sheet of paper that was published eight decades ago.

The above image came courtesy of David Herbert of Greenwich Book Place in London, which holds one of the three for-sale copies.

If you're looking for the basics on Manning-Sanders, the great reteller of international folk and fairy tales, here are some key Papergreat posts:

• The start of Ruth Manning-Sanders' amazing final act
• Happy 125th birthday, Ruth Manning-Sanders (from 2011)
• In her own words: Ruth Manning-Sanders on fairy tales
• A photo of Ruth Manning-Sanders
• "New" photo of Ruth Manning-Sanders and other tidbits
• In which Virginia Woolf describes Ruth Manning-Sanders
• Rupert Croft-Cooke observes Ruth Manning-Sanders with the circus

Bonus addendum
Here's a circa 1919 poem by Manning-Sanders that I believe was originally published in the Westminster Gazette:

Autumn Song

Turn now to sleep — the air is filled with dreams;
Over the meadow grass the small winds creep
With scarce a sound, the yellow sunshine clings
'Mong trees where still birds rest with folded wings,
And on a withering branch a robin sings
Of sleep.

Turn now to sleep — for darkness will be soon,
And mists like thoughts that slumber. Mortals keep
With lighted lamps a watch on wintry hours;
But you shall turn, with all your trees and flowers
And garnered sunshine, to the quiet bowers
Of sleep.

Snapshots from a 1959 science fair

These four Kodak snapshots from a March 1959 science fair¹ were found in a box and had no other accompanying information. So we don't know where this fair was held or who these people are. Of course, if you recognize anyone, let me know.

Perhaps she should spend less time straightening
her paper and more time proofreading her poster.

Science Fair Chickens!²

There are all sorts of interesting faces in this wide shot,
if you zoom in and have a look around.

I wonder how the evolution project in the background fared.
Footnotes
1. Speaking of science fairs, our family recently watched and enjoyed October Sky, which tells the story of Homer Hickam and his West Virginia classmates winning the 1960 National Science Fair with their homemade rockets.
2. Science Fair Chickens! would be a good band name. I recommend keeping the exclamation point.

Old postcard: "Farben-Aufnahme direkt nach der Natur"

This colorful old postcard has never been used and is in rough shape after many, many decades.¹ I like it for its peaceful autumn scene — and it's a reminder that autumn, finally, is just around the corner. (The autumnal equinox is this upcoming Sunday afternoon.)

Printed in German on the back of the card is Farben-Aufnahme direkt nach der Natur, which translates to "color image directly from nature."

There's also a tiny logo on the back, the size of a pencil eraser tip. Here it is, magnified:

Finally, the postcard reminds me a little of another German scenery postcard that was featured here: Partie am Ottofels b. Wernigerode.

Footnote
1. Want it? I feel like it deserves to be mailed after biding its time for so long. That's what postcards are for! Be the first to send your address to sportseditorotto-at-gmail.com and I'll send it your way.

Need More Chemicals? (Maybe this is how Walter White got his start*)

This advertisement for The A.C. Gilbert Company appears on the inside front cover of 1959's Fun with Chemistry. It's aimed at getting ahead of those pesky inventory problems that plagued junior chemists who were using the Gilbert Chemistry Set in the mid 20th century.

Some of the equipment and chemicals that might need restocking included: graphite rods, pipettes, litmus paper, aluminium sulfate, calcium hydroxide, potassium chloride, powdered iron, and sodium thiosulfate.¹

And how safe was all this? That question is addressed in a "Letter to Parents" from A.C. Gilbert Jr. in Fun with Chemistry. Here's an excerpt:

"The answer is that people can get hurt at almost anything (statistics show a surprising number of people get hurt just getting in or out of bed), but that any injury to a person using a Gilbert set is extremely unlikely if rules and instructions are followed. As a matter of face, we of the Gilbert Company, with the help of nationally known experts, have gone to great lengths, not only to produce a set which is designed for safety, but also to make it easy and attractive for your children to learn good working habits."

The book has chapters titled Chemistry at Work, On Your Own, Making Crystals, Chemical Exploring, Chemical Magic, Glass Blowing and Nuclear Physics.

It's full of some really cool (and sometimes humorous) content and illustrations, and I plan to revisit it with at least one additional post this fall. I'd also be interested in hearing if you used the Gilbert Chemistry Set and/or have any great childhood memories or tales of doing science experiments. Please comment down below.

In the meantime, here are some related links, if you're interested in some more science and chemistry this morning:

• Papergreat: Some ephemera within the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum
• Our School at Home: Building our unschooling math and science library - virtually!
• Our School at Home: The unschooled version of an eighth-grade-ish curriculum plan for 2013-14
• Papergreat: Science stories of October 1935, Part 1: "No Men on Mars..."
• Papergreat: Science stories of October 1935, Part 2: The 100-inch telescope
• Papergreat: Science stories of October 1935, Part 3: Atom-Smashers, alchemy and gold (scroll to the bottom)
• Website for the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia

Footnotes
* Don't worry, Papergreat is not Breaking Bad. I'm not going to become Evil Otto and fold all of my postcards into deadly ninja stars to sell on the black market, or anything like that.
1. For a longer list, see the Wikipedia entry for chemistry set.

A pair of $10 Baltimore Colts-New York Jets tickets from the 1970s

I found these two Baltimore Colts ticket stubs, both for home games against the New York Jets, tucked away inside a copy of 1977's Road to Number One: A Personal Chronicle of Penn State Football by Ridge Riley.¹

Both tickets — the fronts and backs are shown side-by-side — have a face value of $10. NFL prices have obviously gone up in the past three-and-a-half decades.

The top stub has an exact date. It's for the November 28, 1976, game between the Colts and Jets at old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The Colts, coached by Ted Marchibroda, defeated the Jets, coached by Lou Holtz, 33-16, to improve to 10-2. It was one of Joe Namath's final games with the New York Jets. He played for the Los Angeles Rams in 1977 before retiring.

I'm going to make an educated guess and say that the bottom stub is for the November 20, 1977, game between the Colts and Jets at Memorial Stadium. (The coupon on the back expires in January 1978.) The Colts also won that game, 33-12, as quarterback Bert Jones passed for 322 yards and three touchdowns.

These ticket stubs are also interesting because of the coupons on the back of them — one for Wendy's and one for Gino's.² The Gino's coupon had a very short shelf life. You could only get 25¢ off a Heroburger or Heroburger with cheese during the week immediately following the football game. (The heroburger was a rectangular hamburger on a hoagie roll.)

Also inside Road to Number One, along with these ticket stubs, was a York, Pennsylvania, newspaper clipping of Rip Engle's obituary. Engle (1906-1983) was the head football coach at Penn State from 1950–1965, immediately preceding Joe Paterno. On the back of the clipping is an advertisement for WSBA 910's radio broadcast of a York Catholic vs. New Oxford boys' high school basketball game.

The book and these items tucked away inside combine to create an interesting snapshot of one sports fan's life a few decades ago.

Footnotes
1. Riley was the originator of The Football Letter, which began providing coverage of the Nittany Lions in 1938. He died in January 1976, while in the midst of completing Road to Number One.
2. My wife is a bit of an expert on Gino's and has written about the fast-food restaurant numerous times on her Only in York County blog. Here are some of those posts, in chronological order:

• Everybody goes to Gino’s, because Gino’s is the place to go!
• More on Gino’s: It’s all about the people and the food (Warning: photos of me with beard)
• Everybody goes to Gino’s, Part II: Catching up on more from our recent trip
• Even more Gino’s memories from a longtime manager and others
• Gino’s and Ameche’s memories from Bill Unger of Shrewsbury

Vintage Rally Day postcard from United Lutheran Publishing House

This is an unused, undated Rally Day postcard published by United Lutheran Publishing House¹ of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In many denominations, Rally Day happens sometime between mid-September and early October, and it marks the start of the church calendar year. (Note that the leaves on the tree in the illustration are just starting to change color.)

Rally Day is a customary time to launch Sunday School, hand out Bibles to children and unveil a church's goals for the new year. It is also, of course, a prime time for recruiting and welcoming new members. And so Rally Day postcards were both a reminder and a marketing tool. (Perhaps Facebook has replaced Rally Day postcards, in this regard.)

Here's a look at the fill-in-the-blanks text on the back of the postcard.

Postcards and churches went hand-in-hand for many decades in the United States. Back in February, I featured some colorful vintage "We Missed You at Church" postcards.

Today's postcard is from a large cache of old church postcards I recently came across. I'll share more of those in the coming weeks.

Footnote
1. I found examples of United Lutheran Publishing House books from as long ago as 1877 (Kirchenbuch Fur Evangelisch Lutherische Gemeiden). But I haven't discovered when the publisher was founded or (presumably) disbanded.