Once upon a time, America was a cocktail party throwing nation.

I know because the wonderful world of movies and television tells me so. The vintage films and retro TV shows have not been digitally remastered to remove the images of highballs — at least not yet. Nor have they removed the tinkling of ice which underscored the lounge music, which underscored the conversation.

In this fairy tale land of long ago, there were specific locations — hot spots, if you will — in which one could not only drink (and smoke) but eat a bloody steak and enjoy live entertainment.

On your vintage maps of Forever-Ago America, these spots would be seen as Supper Clubs.

Supper Clubs were fabulous places where the ladies dressed-up and smelled of pretty perfume. The men dressed grand too. As did the children who were lucky enough to attend such an evening meal.

Don’t be shocked, long-ago and far-away in this land, children were allowed in bars, taverns and supper clubs as long as their parents or other adult family members were in attendance.

I know, I was lucky enough to be there.

One of the greatest thrills of going to a supper club was being allowed to play dress-up. More than playing dress-up, really, you were playing grown-up — and the supper club helped.

They gave you kiddie cocktails, in a highball glass, on the rocks, complete with a nifty garnish and a take home souvenir. It might be a paper parasol, or a plastic sword with fruit skewered on it, or, and these were my personal favorites, plastic monkeys which hung off the side of the glass.

Adults got souvenirs too. They were called swizzle sticks. Some were just plastic sticks, others had fancy decorations. All were stamped with either the name of the Supper Club or a maker of the booze used in the drink.

Unlike the boring sani-straws you get in a bar today, swizzle sticks were nifty. You sure could tell how fancy a place was by their swizzle sticks. Plain plastic with just the liquor company was for the lower-rent places, a step up were the fancy offerings from the liquor company, and a step up from those were the plain sticks with the joint’s name on them. But the holy grail of swizzle sticks were the fancy sticks, one of a kind really, with the club’s own unique design and logo.

Swizzle sticks were such a cool thing, folks even had them in their homes — and not the recycled ones taken home as souvenirs, but folks went out and bought plastic and even glass sets of swizzle sticks so that they could properly serve their guests. Containers of swizzle sticks were on every good host and hostess’ bar, along with a proper cocktail shaker, and ice bucket and proper ice serving tongs. I know, because I’ve seen them. (Don’t worry mom and dad, I won’t tell them about your parties!)

Because we didn’t know much about safety, we left the Supper Clubs and parties and drove home — not only drove drunk but sans seatbelts too.

In fact, we transported drunk or at least with a drink in hand as a general rule. We flew drunk, boated drunk, and before those wonders we rode trains and horse-drawn carriages drunk.

And when we traveled, we traveled with companies (and stayed at fine hotels and motels) which had swizzle sticks of their own.

Alcohol was ‘everywhere.’

Even if you weren’t around to visit the Supper Clubs, attend the swank parties, or fly the not-so-sober-skies of yesteryear, you can still see evidence of Alcohol America in vintage advertising.

Forget all about medicines and snakeoils with alcohol in them, just look at the ads recommending liquor for the consumer who — well, who lived.

We romanced women, wooed African Americans, and we even preached that drinking alcohol was good for baby.

(But hey, why shouldn’t beer be good for baby if smoking is?)

Back then, we may have been utterly ignorant regarding alcohol consumption, but it sure makes for fabulous collecting.

For as long as I can remember, my kid sister, Vicki, loved costume jewelry! From the time she was a small child, she would sit on my Aunt Mary’s lap and play with her necklace, or ask my mom if she could ‘just hold’ her earrings. She was in awe of anything that sparkled or clinked or jangled. She would save up to go to the local Five & Dime Store to get a pretty bauble and when garage sales started to be popular, she would trek wherever she had to go to find a trinket. She rarely paid more than a quarter or fifty cents for any item, even if they were marked “Weiss” or “Kramer” or “Boucher” or “Monet”, etc.

As we got older, I became more appreciative of her treasures and even asked to borrow them from time-to-time. They always had to be treated with respect. If we went to an antique store and they had their rhinestones ‘in a heap’, she would berate them, advising that they were fragile, made of glass and could easily scratch. As she got older, her love, and her collection grew. She was well-known for her bright, rather gaudy pins that she’d put anywhere. They would be on her jean pocket, pinned proudly to her purse, perched on her shoulder, or elsewhere. She also wore large, dangling earrings, often they would brush her shoulders. And clinky bracelets! Ahhh, now that was fun when you were sitting in a theatre with her.

One of her best finds was at a flea market in Indiana. She was one booth ahead of me, ran back and asked to borrow $30. I said sure, but why and she proceeded to drag me to the booth that had this amazing bracelet! I just stared! It is so large and dramatic and not for the shy or demure! All the signs of the zodiac are found, in a most interesting display. A bracelet fit for a …well, sister!

Wearing “sparklies” was a big part of her and she could not resist! She was quite a dazzler. And she was the first to comment to others about their jewelry. Once we were in a restaurant, right in the middle of a conversation, and she jumped up, ran across the room to talk with an ‘elderly’ lady. She just HAD to tell her how beautiful her crystals were and ask where she found them, wondering if they were heirlooms or new. It always seemed to make their day! Her kindness and appreciation of the jewelry they wore always brought smiles to their faces and often a little story too.

Unfortunately, my dear sister had a second and final bout with cancer a while back. It did not deter her from her love of costume jewelry. She still sparkled! A stunning pin would adorn the loose shirts she wore, and bracelets that were too large for her thin wrists still were adored.

The last vacation we took together was special. She would wear a turban to cover her naked head but with a lot of pizzazz and of course a brooch! She had a long, long necklace with about 150 charms and she wore it often. It seems that it was now payback time. For on our trip, there were many times when people would stop her and comment on her lovely jewels or how nice the jingling of her bracelet sounded. I was, of course, in ‘denial’, and refused to see that this was indeed our last trip together. But she knew. The last time I saw her was in the hospice and she had no jewelry on, no turban, no ‘bling’ at all. Then I accepted it.
Her love for jewelry has been passed on to me, my daughters and granddaughters. They love grandma’s sparklies! When I hear the song by Mariah Carey “I Know You’re Shining Down on Me From Heaven”, I look upward and see Vicki. She has dazzling pins on her white gown, a long, sparkling necklace and earrings that reach to her feathers. And I know she IS still shining!

I probably wasn’t the only kid to watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time and shed a single tear, thinking, ‘Man, I’m just like that Scissorhands guy… except my scissors are in my SOUL.’ I didn’t have a hilltop castle to retreat to, nor a Winona Ryder to awkwardly grope on (even though a surprisingly reasonable facsimile was found in my girlfriend at the time), so I’d retreat to my own inner sanctum and blast the Scissorhands soundtrack, safe from the angry and ignorant townsfolk.

The soundtrack, of course, is by Danny Elfman - one of the more distinctive names in modern cinematic composing, noted for scoring pretty much every Tim Burton film ever made, as well as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and countless other films both dark and light. Around the same time that I was falling in love with his eerie angelic choirs and carnival melodies, I was equally appreciative of his non-soundtrack work with his band Boingo, previously Oingo Boingo, previously Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Sure, there probably isn’t anything in the world better than The Breakfast Machine from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, but it was all pretty good stuff.

I had a few musical collections as I was growing up, all of which were fun to complete in those scary pre-internet days when you actually had to go to the store and talk to people, digging through the alphabetical tape and CD racks until you found an album that you didn’t even know existed. Among my complete collections of The Beatles, DEVO and Jethro Tull, there was my growing Elfman collection. Oingo Boingo was primarily a West Coast phenomenon, with a majority of their eclectic fanbase living on the opposite coast from myself, so I often resorted to the Oingo Boingo Secret Society Underground Newsletter for my information and to become acquainted with my more well-informed Boingo-friends, but locating albums usually required a trip into SoHo and a lot of luck. For the record, ‘Boi-ngo’ and ‘Dark at the End of the Tunnel’ were pretty instrumental (no pun intended) during my teenage years, because I really found very little appeal in whatever was on the radio in those days.

And I gave up on Jethro Tull the day they named an album ‘J-Tull.com’. Seriously guys, pretty goofy. Way to sell out.

The Elfman love that I was exposed to through the Secret Society was pretty enormous, and I’ve remained in contact with a few people from the SS all these years. We communicated in odd video clips of Elfman interviews and obviously lip-synced Boingo telethon performances, candid photos and weird demo tapes. I was exposed to the cinematic bludgeoning that is ‘Forbidden Zone’, a black and white exploration into nonsensical perversity written and directed by Danny’s brother Richard Elfman (also father of the more well-known Jenna Elfman), in which Danny Elfman plays the Devil and performs a Cab Calloway musical number amid topless women, ending in a charming decapitation. The odd Elfman preoccupation with Day of the Dead themes found its way into my own collections, eventually inspiring my own accumulation of skulls and other such items.

Boingo filmed their last performance on Halloween in 1995, and recorded the whole thing on both video and audio for posterity, marking the end of my Boingo collecting days. Elfman himself has recently stated that he has no interest in bringing the band back together due to the hearing loss that he suffered while performing. A few odds, ends and unreleased things trickle in, but this was a case of a collection choosing to end itself after ten albums (and countless compilation and ‘greatest hits’ collections that I avoided), since my interests in Danny Elfman never really extended into looking at his unusual face for hours at a time and dreaming of what could be. My interests is purely musical.

Elfman’s most recent project is the Serenada Schizophrana, an orchestral exploration unassociated with any film, though two ‘Music For a Darkened Theater’ compilations of selections from Elfman’s soundtracks have also been released and are still very available. All of this is quite an accomplishment for a music who calls himself ‘self-taught’. So, happy birthday, Mr. Elfman. You weird creep.

Today at Collector’s Quest is for the sharp-eyed among you — as a photo collector, a goodly chunk of my time is identifying, to the best of my ability, the origins of a photo. Most of the time, this takes a sharp eye. Here’s some examples, you can play along:

First, we have the cars — they look vintage 1920s to 1930s, which gives us a ‘no earlier than’ mark. Because I have the original negatives, I did my best to read the license plates for a year, but still no luck. However, there IS something in this picture to help identify — here’s an even bigger zoom; it looks like there’s a date in the lower left corner of the plate, but there’s more to check than guessing at a year. I had an idea that these photos must be from the area, so I went over to Google and did a little poking around — the “Elect Benson Governor” ornamental license plate must’ve worked — Elmer Benson was the 26th governor of Minnesota, elected in 1936 and started his term in 1937, giving us a relatively firm date of this photo.

Next one up — a series of related photos:

This one doesn’t require any zooming or tricks: it takes analysis of the group as a whole. The set are all related to the Armour Meat Packing Plant in West Fargo, ND, and a few photos have captions on the back, all talking about construction of a water treatment plant. If there’s anything I know, it’s that stories about early North Dakota don’t show up on Google, so I turned to the local newspaper. In a short story on the history of West Fargo, I found this tidbit: “Armour dumped plant sewage into the Sheyenne River until the late 1930s, when lawsuits filed by farmers living downstream forced the plant to build a sewage disposal facility.” Voila! While it doesn’t pinpoint the year, we’ve got a good idea of when these photos originated (if you’d like to see more sewage plant photos - and I know you do! - I uploaded the whole lot here).

Last up - a postcard:

No, there’s no copyright on the card, it’s unused so there’s no postmark, thus, for the most part we’re out of luck when it comes to the regular telltales. I doubt Mount Rushmore is unfamiliar to anyone, and if you remember your history, construction started in 1927 and ended in 1941…but there’s more to the picture for sharp-eyed analysts to get even more accurate with the date. The Rushmore ‘heads’ were built in a certain order: Washington in 1934, Jefferson in ‘36, Lincoln in ‘37, and then Roosevelt in 1939. Zooming in we can see that Washington is mostly done, Jefferson is well along, Lincoln is still shaping up, but Teddy isn’t anywhere to be found. Looking at the Rushmore timeline, that would place this photo somewhere between 1937 and 1939.

I do enjoy photos for artistic and historical reasons, but I’ve always liked puzzles…while not every photo has enough clues to date it, I can’t just assume there’s no clues there. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat, find a magnifying glass the size of my head, and give photos a good once-over. Unlike variants in action figures or china patterns, there’s no limit to what might turn up in a photo to identify it’s age…and I like the challenge.

One of the saddest things to hear is that a dedicated collector is forced to sell their collection.

Whenever I’m at an estate sale, I ponder this horrid part of life.

The old “you can’t take it with you” smacks me in the face. And thrice the smarting pain, I’m faced with the knowledge that my own kids may not value any of the junk that I’ve hunted for over the years and so may just as casually offer up my goodies for sale. “They’re just things,” they’ll say, ignoring that these ‘things’ are proof of my life. (Ungrateful brats!)

And even if the estate sale is just because someone is moving to a smaller place (from the old family house to an apartment), it just seems too depressing. I wonder, should space limitations really be so accepted as we age? I mean if a collector is supposed to part with years of accumulated stuff, doesn’t that mean the dedication to searching stops? And if we stop searching, it’s like we give up…

Folks talk about how retiring can age a person. Just a few months, let alone a couple of years, can take a vibrant active person and shrink them into this old shell of a person we used to know. We no longer have a purpose and we fade. It’s the same thing when we become ‘too old to collect.’ It’s not just the things, but the action of collecting. If it is “I collect, therefore I am” then what’s the equation when we stop?

When I get to old to drive, my kids better take turns taking the old lady rummaging. And to auctions. And to thrift stores, collectors shows and whatever else I crave. If they don’t, I’ll hire a damn taxi to take me all about town. To make up for the cost of the cab, I’ll have to barter for better prices — but that’s part of the fun anyway. On weekdays I can have the cabby drive slowly through the parts of town which have garbage pick-ups waiting… And the taxi can be the get-away-car for dumpster dives (as quick as my brittle hips will allow). I’m not stopping collecting ’til I’m six feet under. And even then, my version of heaven has flea markets.

But getting old and/or dying is not the only reason collectors sell their entire collections off.

Sometimes, tough times call for drastic measures — and I’d call selling your entire Dr. Strange Collection drastic. Poor Howard Hallis quits his day job and part of tightening his belt means he might have to part with one of his babies. (I must turn away — I can’t watch!)

It’s a sad reality though. For those of us who prize collections nearly as much as our children (official rank: kids #1, pets #2, collections #3) the loss of a collection is a pretty deep cut. One should be allowed to grieve. Perhaps have services or memorials. At least have visitation rights.

And what of those who lose collections to fire, flood and tornados? (This story made us think, especially after recent events in our home.)

I guess one should prepare and plan to avoid such things. (Duck says: Aflac!) But this is America, where we already work several jobs to keep our heads — and collectibles — above water. (Duck again says: Aflac!)

“It’s only things,” people will say. But it’s not just things, is it. Those things are inexplicably tied up in who we are and what we do. And if you take them away, it hurts.