All Sorts of Stamps

During my childhood, I watched the men in my family spend hours wearing little loops on their eyes while sorting stacks of coins and stamps. They filed them in huge books and binders, then lined the nicely labeled spines along the built in shelves in their offices. Their collections were real accomplishments. Back in the 1920's  and on up into the 1960's stamp and coin collecting were in their heydays.

Electric lights in homes had made it possible for folks to stay up later and engage in a number of pastimes while listening to entertaining things on the radio or Victrola.  This last week I spent some time going through those same vintage postage stamps while listening to podcasts, audiobooks and music on my iphone and drinking cups of steaming hot coffee to keep the focus going. It was a trip back in time.

These old stamps are beautiful little steel engravings done on wonderful durable papers with excellent oil based inks which have held their brilliant colors for nearly a hundred years.  I can't bear to see them end up in a trash can out back.  The stamp collectors may be diminishing as the older generations die off, but the artistry of these stamps is still strong and compelling.
 

The stamps commemorate important events and public figures in American history.  Inch by inch, they proclaim our values, urge us to higher achievement and direct the viewer to messages of government propaganda during times of war.  So, I am sorting them again... not into binders which will sit on dusty shelves, but into  packages of colorful history to be used in new artistic ventures like  scrapbooking and cardmaking where they will be put out there to be seen and enjoyed once again.  Perhaps they form a field of green fields and blue skies in a lovely collage.  Maybe they will just fill a bowl on a table so folks can enjoy a happy hour of browsing something other than a computer screen.  At least I hope so.

Wash and Wear Hair

Freedom is... wash and wear hair.  That's right, I'm an activist now, an activist for freedom from expensive, time consuming hair care.  I want to opt out.  I've been a slave to my own hair for years. 

Every night of the 60's was a ritual performance of sitting on the floor of my bedroom, listening to 45 records and rolling my wet hair up onto brush rollers (otherwise known as thistle and thorn head torture devices) then tossing and turning the night away trying to find a sweet spot on the pillow where the little plastic spikes and wires weren't poking painfully into my temples.

I woke early each morning  to tease and torture my hair into shape and spray it with a half a can of Aqua-net until it was as crunchy and crispy as a potato chip.  In later years, I spent hours having my hair rolled onto tiny plastic rods, doused in chemicals and blasted in head furnaces only to find the end result was a head full of frizzy, cotton candy like, split ends.  Nothing at all like the picture above which I found on a wonderful vintage hairstyle archive where you  can see exactly what it took to come up with a hairstyle like this one.

For the last 15 years I've had my hair cut in the classic two inch long pixie, which was the closest I could get to wash and wear hair. You'd think that would be freedom enough, but...sadly, no.  I still need product for volume and constant trims to keep the hair from shooting out at odd angles as it grows.  I want total freedom, I want to grow my hair out and put it up in a bun.  That's what the old grannies of the past always did when they declared freedom from bobs and heat curlers and Marcels.  What do you think of this classic look?

I also want that neck, those cheek bones and that creamy skin.  Anybody know where you can get that because the jars and bottles I've been buying just don't seem to be doing the trick.

A Thousand Words

If a picture truly paints a thousand words, then these vintage 1960's graphics have a whole lot to say about how we thought about things like success, gender, and ethnicity.  That's one of the fascinating things about coming across these old ephemeral (meaning temporary, or fleeting)  gems (having the meaning of treasure).

I spent the afternoon sorting through an old box of vocabulary cards which had these images plastered all over the outside of the box.  The people are engaging, well dressed, happy and working in what looks like wonderful professional lives.  I wondered what the magic words were that insured that kind of a winning life back in 1960?

I wondered how often folks used words like desuetude to refer to uselessness, or lugubrious, to mean mournful, or welter to describe a kind of tossing and tumbling that happened when a holiday was announced?

The words I found in the box were indeed interesting and certainly descriptive, but they weren't the words I might choose to describe what I learned about success in the 1960's.  They forgot to include, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, never mentioned the family business, trust fund, or club, as in good old boy's club, or country club or connections. Words like self-made, hard work, man of his word and firm handshake didn't make the cut either.  She...... was completely absent from the package, unless referring to something nice to look at or on the opposite side, demanding and shrewish.  I'll have to give my granddaughter a call tonight and ask her what she is learning about success at college this year.  It could be very interesting and may, perhaps, involve being some kind of a celebrity ...with a lot of money.