Past Paper: Letter Gram Puzzles

One of our favorite things about flea markets, vintage shops, antique malls and thrift stores is finding a product or artifact we never even knew existed.

One recent example is this bit of ephemera from 1933. It’s a collection of small cardboard cards cut jigsaw-style but left intact. The idea was that one (carefully, we presume) wrote a note to a friend, paramour or family member on the card, broke it up into pieces and then mailed it in the envelope provided. The recipient then had to piece together the puzzle in order to partake of one’s wit and wisdom.

We think this is a rather charming idea, and we’re sorry its time seems to have passed. But when we saw a batch of these at a neighborhood flea market, we couldn’t resist springing for them and sharing them with you, the Cladrite community.

Doing a little retro(active) browsing

Anyone who spends time browsing antique fairs, flea markets, and eBay knows that vintage retail catalogues are in demand and command a pretty penny, but no catalogues are more coveted than vintage Christmas catalogues.

As we’ve said here before, there’s something about Christmas that fosters a wistful nostalgia more potent than any other holiday, and it’s the pull of Christmases past, we’re convinced, that keeps these old mail-order catalogues in such demand.

If you find you can’t swing the price of one of these treasured commercial publications, don’t despair. We’ve found a site that will fill in ably while you’re saving your pennies.

Wishbookweb.com boasts scans of complete Christmas catalogues dating all the way back to 1933 (and up to 1988). The majority of the catalogues featured are from Sears, but there are other delights to be enjoyed, too, including a 1941 Lord and Taylor catalogue and a Spiegel catalogue from 1933.

And this site doesn’t just offer selected highlights from these forty-plus catalogues; they’ve scanned and posted each in its entirety.

So if you’ve ever wondered what kind of holiday toys might have enticed your parents, your grandparents or, heck, even your great-grandparents when they were whippersnappers, you need wonder no more.

And of course, Christmas catalogues don’t limit themselves to toys—these publications are terrific resources for researching and tracking the changes and advances in clothing, furniture, electronics, housewares, and so much more.

And if you find yourself wondering, while perusing these catalogues, “What would that gorgeous console radio that cost $52 in 1937 run me today?”, just call up the Inflation Calculator, which compares and contrasts prices from as far back as 1800 all the way up to 2010. (To answer our own question: $52 in 1937 was the equivalent of $781 in 2010.)

Past Paper: Season’s greetings—stop

We don’t view the Cladrite Era as the good ol’ days in the sense that life was better then than now. Different, sure, and it’s those differences that fascinate us. But better? In some ways, but worse in others. We figure things tend to balance out over time. Every era has its highlights and low points.

But we do mourn the passing of certain practices and traditions, and high on that list is the telegram.

Truth be told, we’d give our eye teeth to be able to observe special occasions by sending telegrams. Sure, sure, email’s great, and Facebook, texting and Tweeting all have their place, but none possess the charm or carry the weight of a telegram. And while Christmas cards are a delight to send and receive, imagine sending Christmas telegrams!

We, alas, have never received a telegram, and we’ve sent only one, in 1984 (it never arrived, and to this day, we have no idea whether we were charged for it). But we perk right up any time we see a telegraph office or a telegram delivery depicted in an old movie. The practice and process of sending telegrams continues to fascinate us.

So we were very pleased to come across this promotional pamphlet for Postal Telegraph, Commercial Cables, and All-America Cables (were they all owned by the same concern? We assume so, but we don’t really know. If there are any telegraph experts reading this, by all means, please clue us in).

Hi-res view	Hi-res view	Hi-res view

We like that telegrams are pitched in the pamphlet’s copy as the “modern way” to send holiday greetings, as the “convenient and timely way of sending good wishes.”

And we love the list of suggested messages on the back. We’d heard that one could order a pre-written telegram by the number, like an item on a menu at a Chinese restaurant, but we’d never seen a list of pre-composed messages and their accompanying numbers. Clearly one would hope to receive a telegram bearing one of the messages numbered from 134-141, since they were all intended to accompanied by wired money. Happy holidays, indeed!

Most of all, we admire the graphics on the pamphlet’s front cover. In fact, we suggested using this graphic for our Christmas cards this year, but Ms. Cladrite nixed that idea, dang it.

Past paper: A Warner Baxter bonus

We’ve come across any number of theatre flyers over the years (including the drive-in flyers from the late 1950s featured in this post), but we’ve never encountered one quite like this one.

At first glance, it appears to be simply a promotional headshot of once-popular leading man Warner Baxter with a printed autograph (which is surprisingly convincing, by the way—we were briefly fooled into thinking we’d scored an genuine autographed photo of Baxter for a mere five smackers), but turn the photo over, and voila—it’s a programming schedule for three different New Jersey theatres. Part of the name is missing from the top theatre, but a little research has us convinced it was the Branchville Theater in Branchville, New Jersey. All I’ve been able to ascertain about the Branchville is that it was listed in the Film Daily Yearbook in 1944 and 1951, and on one weekend in 1937, they screened The Awful Truth, with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, Angel with Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, and Melvyn Douglas, and Conquest, starring Greta Garbo and Charles Boyer.

How much earlier than that the theatre was in operation or when it closed, we can’t say. But we’d pay good money to see those three pictures at a small-town bijou like the Branchville, of that you can be sure.

Also featured on this promotional photo is the Colonial Theatre in Beach Haven, New Jersey. (Did you know that no fewer than ten Jersey towns had a theatre called the Colonial at one time or another? It’s true. And an eleventh burg, Hopewell, had a movie theatre called the Colonial Playhouse.)

This Colonial opened in 1922 as the New Colonial on the corner of Bay Avenue and Center Street, replacing an old wooden structure some blocks away. One source says the old Colonial was retained and used in the winter, when the crowds thinned out (Beach Haven, as you might have guessed, is on the Jersey shore, so the population no doubt used to drop precipitously each year at summer’s end. Probably still does.)

Here’s a pair of then-and-now photos of the Colonial. Word has it, it’s now a private residence and no longer the hardware store it was in 2007, but I have no proof of that.

Interesting to note they were featuring the same three movies the Branchville was showing, but each played one day later at the Colonial. (We can’t help but wonder what the Colonial was showing on Friday, Nov. 12, 1937. The flyer doesn’t say.)

The last bijou on the flyer is the Park Theatre in Barnegat, New Jersey. Both the Barnegat and the Colonial (and, we’re guessing, the Branchville) were owned and operated by one Harry Colmer, who died in 1956. His family operated the theatres until 1964, when they sold them.

The Park, which opened in the early 1900s as the Barnegat Opera House, a venue for vaudeville and minstrel shows, began also showing movies between 1915 and 1920. It later became a full-time movie house under the new name. The Park Theatre, since demolished, was located on Shore Road in Barnegat, which is presently Route 9.

The weekend of Friday and Saturday, November 12th-13th, 1937, the Park was featuring Ali Baba Goes to Town, starring Eddie Cantor, Tony Martin, and Roland Young. That one we’d have to think twice about catching. We’d likely opt to drive the twenty miles over to Beach Haven to take in The Awful Truth or Angel at the Colonial (Branchville lies 142 miles away, a bit of a trek to catch a movie).

Play ball!

We won’t pretend to be especially excited about this year’s World Series—we’re not big fans of either the Cardinals or the Rangers—but you’ve got to respect any event that’s taken place on an annual basis for nearly a century.

As such, we thoroughly enjoyed—and we think you will, too—the New York Times‘ slideshow of 14 World Series program covers spanning the years 1911 through 2011. and we also recommend Ken Belson’s accompanying article, Get Your World Series Programs Here!, which explores the history of baseball programs and how they’ve changed over the years.

Whether you’re of the opinion that Albert Pujols is an all-time great, deserving of mention with names like Ruth, Cobb, Mayes, and Aaron, or you’re convinced that even the best players today just don’t stack up with the immortals, enjoy the Series and the fond memories it will almost certainly stir.