Here is item #4 of 8 from the Dover Township yard sale. It's an AZO real photo postcard dating from between 1904 and 1918. No identifying information, but we do have an additional tie to York County, Pennsylvania. On the back, there's a circular purple stamp (similar to a postmark) from Electric Studio in York, Pennsylvania. It was located at 57 East Philadelphia Street, and F.A. Meyers was the manager.
The July 26, 1915, edition of The York Daily has this small advertisement for Electric Studio, which offered postcards at rates as low as 45 cents per dozen. (Forty-five cents in 1915 would be the equivalent of about $11.28 today, according to my old friend, The Inflation Calculator.)
The postcard features a serious-looking young girl wearing a white dress and holding a parasol. She is standing in a pleasant yard alongside a ...
... what the heckfire is that? Dog-rabbit genetic experiment? Fat dog? Pregnant dog? Dog sitting on another animal? Stuffed animal or taxidermied dog (because the mouth almost appears to be stitched). I'm kind of bummed that we'll never be able to fully answer this question.
But wait, there's more!
I'm leaving everything above this intact, but I received some very important information after I finished writing this post, but before it was published.
Laura Eckert Thompson, who was one of my fellow students at Penn State back in the day and is currently a co-worker of mine at LNP, points out that the odd-looking animal is definitely a toy. The biggest clue — which I totally missed, because I'm a doofus — is that there are obvious wheels and axles underneath the animal's legs. I'm not sure how I missed that. Perhaps, deep down, I really wanted this to be some missing link between dogs and giant bunnies. And so my eyes were blinded to the truth.
But the truth is even cooler. As Laura notes: "Vintage stuffed animal riding toy. See the wheels attached to the feet? Steiff produced a lot of them." Here are some internet images of the kind of (now antique) toy she's talking about.
Oh! Oh! My sides hurt... you're SO funny!!! Thanks
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