Yesterday, the Wifey and I had a couple sawbucks in our pockets and decided to go hit the thrift shops and antique stores. At the Moorhead Antique Mall, one of our favorite ratting-around stops, we found a booth with an appropriately-labeled “junk box” — everything inside $5 or less. It was, of course, mostly junky things, small stuff that didn’t deserve being locked up in the glass cabinets. One of the items in the box is pictured to the right: a small baggie, about 4″ x 7″, labeled “Bag of misc pictures $4.00“. “Misc Pictures”? I’m all over that like stink on our terrier (but that’s another story). In the end, of course, $4 was just the tip of the iceberg, but the mystery of a little sealed baggie of photos is worth sharing.

From the outside, the only really recognizable thing is a photo of a large, art deco style building identified by the huge “FORD” sign over the doorway. The Ford building is the top of a stack of a bunch — 20 to 30 — of small 1-½”x3″ photos. Underneath them are several larger, odd-sized photos, and stuck in the middle are some loose color-printed paper. We’ll start at the top.

The Ford building is one of the many buildings build for the Texas Centennial Exposition — the size and format of the pictures would indicate that these were purchased as a souvenir set, and probably would have originally had a custom sleeve to hold them. The corners of these pictures have glued paper remnants, indicating that the owner had probably moved the pictures from the sleeve to a scrapbook. If you want a better look at these pictures, I’ve uploaded some of them as a collection here at CQ.

Right underneath them, the color paper confirms the origin of these photos — here we have a ticket stub from the expo, and a tourist pamphlet. The ticket is beautiful, and the missing corner is a disappointment; I wonder if that’s how it was canceled, or if something important was there to identify the owner, but whatever it was it is sorely missed. The rest of the ticket is far from disappointing; the bright, vivid colors are excellent, showing banner carriers from the six flags that have flown over Texas in its colorful history. The pamphlet is cool, but is a little short on information — I’d have loved to have found a map, but, ah, well, I’ll just have to be satisfied that I now have a pretty full dossier on the Texas Centennial, all spilled from this little baggie.

There were a few things left in the bag, and these are my favorite: actual, person- photographed pictures that appear to be from the same time. The provenance would indicate that some antique dealer pulled these all from the same scrapbook, so while there’s no real proof they were taken any time around the Exposition, it’d be a reasonable guess to make. What especially appeals to me are the natural settings, not posed portraiture that dominates so many photo albums. These are, by far, the more valuable part of the baggie’s contents. My favorite? The Radium Spa photo to the left. When on your way to the Texas Expo, be sure to soak in irradiated water! The rest of the photos can be found in the Community as well.

So, was it worth the $4? Most definitely — although nothing was earth- shatteringly cool, the fun of figuring out what was in a mystery bag beats anything else I could do for $4, and I was happy to see that the photos fit into the rest of my photo collection.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under flea market finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.