2021 – This Post Has Been Notarized By…..
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on April 7, 2021)
I think this paper embosser is from the ’50s-’60s. I had to try it out……..
a) to see if it still worked and
b) to see what it said.
I also found his accompanying ink stamp, but it didn’t print well, so I just photographed the bottom of the stamp and reversed it:
The last two digits of the year are missing, so I’m sticking with my date estimate of ’50s-’60s.
I had picked out a LOT of stuff to post……….TOO much, in fact, so I decided to split it all into two posts, but I couldn’t find two distinctly different categories to place them in. Ultimately, I decided on “slightly more serious” and “slightly less serious”, but those are hardly enticing titles.
You see what I’ve selected for this post’s title. When you see the next one’s title, you can decide which is which.
Military items have to be considered serious, but not when you use either of the next two guys as models. This is my father’s hat:
It was not made for my faceless, 7-foot-tall roommate’s head.
It fits 3-year-old me a little better:
This is also Dad’s, but nobody here wanted to model it:
I don’t recall ever hearing that Dad was in the Army Reserve, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t – and nobody else in the family qualifies, so………..
$1.40 for a carton of cigarettes? (14 cents a pack!) I remember paying 28 cents a pack in the late 60s (and about the same for a gallon of gas):
My initial guess of the period of this flyer was early 50s. I found 4 brands listed that I ever heard of, so I looked them up: almost ALL of them mentioned early-to-mid 40s with Piedmont starting around 1910, so I’m gonna guess that this flyer came out in the mid-to-late 40s and probably appealed to my father – a smoker – after he returned from WWII.
Here are the 4 brands I never heard of. Click to enlarge it:
It’s probable that these driver’s manuals were Mom’s:
They’re undated, but the second one gives a driver’s license example that’s dated 1943:
It also gives some no-no’s that you’re not likely to find in current NJ driver’s manuals:
Unless this is a coaster (and why would the phone company be making coasters?), I have no idea what it is:
Mom had a thing for D.C., but I’m NOT scanning all this stuff. I think we all know what D.C.’s sights look like:
Apparently, she also had a thing for Steno Cuffs (whatever they are). This is the second time we’ve seen these items:
And I KNOW she had a thing for the Teaneck PD:
And ALL law enforcement:
AND Republican politicians. The first two buttons are NOT a run for the NJ governorship by Mariano Rivera (or James Hetfield). I don’t know what to make of the Long Island RailRoad Tours button:
Make your own comment:
Useless school stuff
BCHS freshman school bus pass (don’t remember this at all):
Boring course list – including ROTC – for my one semester at SHU:
ROTC deposit – probably for my uniform:
Extra ROTC expenses ($2 for HAZING?):
Parking permit (my car was also my ROTC changing room so I’d look normalish in other classes):
Useful school stuff (to Mom)
Holy Trinity Church 100th anniversary booklet:
Why was it useful to her? Because first daughter was in first grade and first son was in eighth grade that year:
AND all her favorite nuns were in it, including 6 that covered the majority of my time there:
Last and least, Father Giella was the religious pervert who has constantly shown up in the lists of the worst local offenders. “Photography” sounds about right for him. I can only imagine what photography of his isn’t shown here:
Letters to Dad
This first one is of interest to local historians. Hiram Blauvelt – owner of the famous Blauvelt Mansion and Art Museum on Kinderkamack Rd in Oradell – was the president of Comfort Coal & Lumber in Hackensack.
The Mansion:
The letter is from (and signed by) Mr. Blauvelt and expresses condolences to my father about the recent death of his father. My grandfather died on August 20, 1947, and the letter was written on the 24th.
I’m not aware that anyone in our family personally knew Mr. Blauvelt, but we were Comfort Coal customers, getting regular coal deliveries to our basement to heat our house. How did someone of Mr. Blauvelt’s stature find out so quickly about and personally react to the death of a customer? Did secretaries scour death notices in newspapers and cross-reference them with customer lists?
Whatever the situation, I have new-found respect for Hiram Blauvelt, whose Coal kept me Comfort-able throughout my childhood:
This letter arrived in 1962 from an even more famous house – a White one in Washington, DC – and was written to Dad by special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, Larry O’Brien, who would later become Postmaster General:
I don’t know who Merrill Tucker was, what position he may have been under consideration for or why my Republican father was recommending him to a Democratic president. I’m rather amazed that I can’t find a single reference to any of this online, so if you know the answers, please dazzle me in the comments. Thanks.
Let’s finish off with some fancy knifework:
Well………half-fancy.
Navy knife:
Of course, the non-Naval knife is the beauty here. It’s a Jezzine (Lebanon) Rooster handle knife that’s 10.5″ long. It took a while, but I finally got it out of its scabbard:
And here’s something similar I found online:
And here’s one with a different color scheme, but the same scabbard designs on both sides:
While I’m finding very few similar dagger-like knives, I AM finding all sorts of eating utensils that look related, so I decided to check out the town of Jezzine in Lebanon.
One interesting image I found was referred to as a Giant Phoenix – the symbol of this small Christian town in southern Lebanon:
What a great shot! (that means I wish I took it)
Lastly, I give you Jezzine at Christmas. Who wouldn’t want to experience this?
(Uh, hello……..probably all of us…….it’s in LEBANON, remember?)
Those school uniforms must have been worn in every catholic school. I wore the same one in Lodi at St. Francis de Sales.