Detective Polhaus: “Heavy. What is it?”
Sam Spade: “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”

Last night was rainy. Several storms moved through the area, bringing heavy rain, strong wind, and occasional light hail. The lightning show was spectacular.

Under normal circumstances, I would not have been out in it, braving the rain-slicked roads in the Mustang. It’s low-traction and high-torque. It doesn’t take much to make it fishtail or hydroplane in bad weather. But no rain clouds would deter me this night as I rounded the Twin Cities and headed north. For you see, these storm clouds had a silver lining.

A sterling silver lining, to be exact.

It’s a bit tarnished now, but with the proper care it should shine up nicely. For those unfamiliar, this is the almost-never-seen sterling silver edition Smith-Corona Sterling. The body is solid sterling silver, made by Gorham. They were made as part of a promotional window display for dealers in late 1931. The most accurate figure I have located for the total number made is 184. Only a fraction of those seem to have survived. Perhaps the reason for that is that Smith-Corona actually suggested to dealers that if they didn’t sell the silver machine by the end of the promotion they could recoup most of the cost of the $127.50 display by selling the machine in a regular housing and taking the silver housing to a silversmith for the market price of the silver.

I’ll have more about how this particular model came to be on Machines of Loving Grace soon.

EDIT: MoLG has been updated.

Under normal circumstances, if I were to come across a late-model Royal Royalite in the thrift store, I would probably pass it by–especially an off-white one beginning to yellow with age. The Holland-made Royals  with the “squashed Futura” look just don’t do much for me.

But an off-white Royalite slathered in flower decals…?

Now that’s irresistible tackiness! $5 was worth just the opportunity to photograph it.

If you were to guess that this typewriter was probably owned by a 16-year-old girl, you’d be right. The proof is that her class schedule, including Driver’s Ed, was written on a sheet of notebook paper inside the case. Take note, Pottery Barn set designers!

Also down in the bottom of the case were three Gold Bond Stamps. Those of us of A Certain Age remember trading stamps. Your mom would get a certain number whenever they bought groceries. At home, the stamps (most often the green S&H variety) would go into a little booklet, and after so many booklets were filled up, they could be redeemed for Valuable Prizes. I remember my mom once got a set of “unbreakable” dishes with trading stamps. (“Unbreakable” is a loose term in the presence of an 8-year-old.) I think that one could even get a Maytag washer by redeeming a ridiculous number of stamp books.

It makes one wonder: were typewriters ever offered as trading stamp prizes? Could that be how our mystery teenager’s mom bought her typewriter?

I’m leaning toward naming her Lizzie, after Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry Tudor (aka Henry VII) effectively ended the Wars of the Roses by bringing together the houses of Lancaster (whose badge was the red rose) and York (the white rose). Henry subsequently adopted a white-on-red rose as his own badge. Known today as the Tudor Rose, it is still used as the heraldic emblem of the UK. It seems doubly fitting for the name, then, that our Royalite should be white with red roses.

Now if only it had script typeface.

Who’d-a thunk?

I picked up an ice crusher at a garage sale this weekend. Been wanting one for a while (a proper mint julep just doesn’t work on the rocks), so I grabbed it without examining it too closely. And whaddya know? It’s a Smith-Corona ice crusher!

Evidently, Proctor-Silex was one of SCM’s kerjillian or so subsidiaries.

Fahrenheit 451–the comic book

File this one under either “Supreme Irony” or “You’ve Got to be Fracking Kidding Me”. Ray Bradbury’s classic novel about the diminishment of the written word as a dumbed-down society stultifies itself on comic books, television and Twittering, has itself been dumbed-down into a comic book graphic novel.

From the article on Slate:

Think back to the original novel. Comic books are the only books shallow enough to go unburned, the only ones people are still allowed to read. Beatty, the fire chief, who seems to have loved books once and whom Bradbury has called “a darker side of me,” explains it all to the hero, Guy Montag, the reluctant fireman. When photography, movies, radio, and television came into their own, he says, books started to be “leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm.” Burning them isn’t so tragic, he suggests, because they are already so degraded.

But is this new adaptation a diminishment of the original, or a clever subversion of the comic medium? Ideas, after all, transcend the printed format and can be embedded anywhere; it’s how we integrate those ideas with our own intellects once we encounter them that gives ideas importance. Is graffiti on a brick wall any less substantial than a painting in a museum if there is an idea embedded within it?

Bee-ball!

Our 20-month-old son is addicted to baseball, or “bee-ball!” as he calls it. He demands it from the moment he wakes up till he falls asleep (there have been a few nights when the only way we’ve gotten him in his crib is to leave the TV on Fox Sports North with the sleep timer set). He wakes in the middle of the night asking for bee-ball. He throws just like the pros and mimes the hat-chin-nose signals and the base players’ stances. I’m hoping he doesn’t find the miniature Louisville Slugger factory tour souvenir.

You’d be amazed how often some sort of ball game is on TV–fortunately for the sake of peace and quiet in our house. And fortunately as well, I like baseball (being distantly related to a hall-of-famer, I suspect it’s in my blood). The spousal unit, on the other hand, not so much. But even I am becoming drained of enthusiasm for the Great American Pastime. When I am reduced to watching the Little League World Series while wanting to gnaw my own foot off, I know I’ve had enough.

Admittedly, it’s still better than watching that “Baby Einstein” DVD for the umpteenth time.

Heaven help us when football season starts.

Typewriter: 1961 Hermes 3000

Or, why I should stay away from thrift stores.

I was going to typecast this, but judging by the stack of unscanned Project 88 pages, you’d likely not see it for weeks if I did.

I was doing my usual weekly-or-so sweep of the thrift stores. In the back of one, in the area where the typewriters usually get dumped amongst the computer keyboards and broken scanners, I came upon this:

Now, you should know that I was an English major. Like most English majors, numbers and I don’t get along well. In fact, we find most numbers–especially large, hairy formulas–downright frightening. Only unlike large, hairy spiders, we can’t squash numbers underfoot before they scrurry into the dark, paranoid recesses of our minds and give us a case of the shuddering willies. So you’d think that a machine bristling with figures and arcane numerological functions would send me prancing to the safe confines of the Broken Records Dept at the other end of the store.

Ah, but I’m also a technerd and a retrophile. That means that I am irresistably drawn to all things with levers, knobs, buttons, and gears. I assure you that that is the only reason I bought it. I don’t even know how to work the damn thing. Oh, but you turn the crank on the front, and the carriage thing moves back and forth! And you push this big red button and something happens! And you press this lever and something else happens! Technerd joy!

It was only after I got it home and was looking it over in search of a model number that I noticed the two prongs hiding in the hole on the back. The one where a power cord goes. A bit of semi-fruitful Googling identified this as a Monroe LA5-160 adding machine. An electric model. More accurately, an electromechanical or electric assist model. Bother. That means that unless I can find or fashion a power cord, I can’t even play with it. And that’s only if all the electrical components still work, something I’ve had spotty luck with in other contraptions.

But here’s the neat thing: See that metal plate on the back? “Property of Defense Plant Corporation, an instrumentality of the United States Government”. Ooh, sounds mysterious! I hadn’t heard of the DPC, so I did some research.

The Defense Plant Corporation was an offshoot of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity created in 1932 to umbrella the various departments developed to rebuild and stabilize the US economy in the midst of the Great Depression. Its main function was facilitating loans to businesses and financial institutions.

With the national emergency of impending war succeeding the national economic emergency, in 1940 Congress granted the RFC unprecedented powers to purchase or build essentially anything the President asked it to. It immediately set about forming a number of new “instrumentalities” to handle wartime materials and production. One of the largest of these was the Defense Plant Corporation, created in 1941. The DPC coordinated supplies and equipment between the various branches of the armed forces and the factories that produced those goods. For instance, the Army would tell the DPC, “We need ball bearings”, and the DPC would contract with a ball bearing factory to get the Army what it needed. Everything from tiny screws to entire bombers passed through the DPC this way.

The DPC also helped companies and individuals build new factories. There was a concern by factory owners that once the war ended they would be left without a market for their production. The DPC acted as sort of a guaranteer of the factories. The way it worked was that an individual would work through the DPC to build a factory at their own cost. The DPC then agreed to incrementally buy back that factory over five years. At the end of that time, the factory owner had the option to buy back the factory at fair market value.

As an interesting aside, it was a DPC contract for a new, enormous cargo aircraft that led to the construction of Howard Hughes’ (in)famous Spruce Goose. It seems that Secretary of Commerce (and thus head of the RFC) had been friends with Howard Hughes’ father, and had known Hughes since he was a child. The $23 million Spruce Goose, which flew only once–long after war’s end–became symbolic of government waste. Another DPC contract with Hughes Aircraft was for a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft dubbed the XF-11. It was during a test flight of the XF-11 that Hughes crashed into a Los Angeles neighborhood, damaging or destroying three houses and nearly killing Hughes. It’s thought that the trauma of the crash and Hughes’ subsequent addiction to painkillers from his injuries were catalysts for his later mental instabilities.

When the war ended in 1945, the Defense Plant Corporation was dissolved.

Somewhere in all of that, this adding machine was there, tirelessly cranking out calculations to help our boys on the front.

Typewriter: c.1963 Remington Holiday

Found imprinted in the red portion of an old ribbon:

“BIG RED for the girls. Mayonaise for Susan. And a surprise for Paul.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a story in that somewhere.

Here is another of this blog’s infrequent forays into the world of early music reocordings. While visiting Sioux Falls this past weekend, I made a detour into a new (to me) thrift store calls Y’s Buys (it’s run by the YMCA). The place was huge. A bit overpriced, but ten times better than the measly Saver’s that’s further down 41st.

They had a small selection of 78rpm records, which at $1.99 apiece were ridiculously overpriced. I managed to find two interesting ones that weren’t broken (I mourn the death-by-neglect of “The Hipster’s Boogie”). I would never have paid their price if they hadn’t been a pair of labels that I’ve never seen before, and will unlikely come across again soon.

Herschel Gold Seal immediately intrigued me with its obviously Jewish moniker and local Northwestern Phonograph Supply Co name. Usually, these indicate a very small record company with a limited catalog and primarily long-forgotten regional artists. The hard part about researching such labels is that today there is almost no surviving information about them. To my surprise, my initial research lasted only five minutes before I hit pay dirt.

A few years ago, science journalist and musical history buff Kurt Gegenhuber began a quest to discover the musicians who played “The Moonshiner’s Dance, Part 1″, featured in the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music. That record was also a Herschel Gold Seal release, and it led Gegenhuber on a sprawling historical journey through the Twin Cities’ early 20th-Century Jewish culture, a journey he recounts in his terrific article Music, Moonshine, and Mahjong. It turns out that Herschel Gold Seal was a house label maintained by Gennett Records for Harry Bernstein’s chain of Minneapolis/St Paul record stores in the late ’20s and early ’30s. The relationship probably originated with the fact that Harry Bernstein’s was a former Starr Piano distributor, and Starr Piano was Gennett’s parent company (the recording division changed its name from Starr to Gennett in 1917).

Gennett Records is a sprawling story in itself. They seemed to specialize in leasing their vast library of recordings to many smaller record labels. Adding to the confusion, they changed their name to Champion in 1930 but continued releasing some of the same recordings previously released on Gennett. I have found side A of this record, “Meadow-Lark” by the Royal Troubadors, on three different labels under as many band names, all apparently the same recording. This particular record, BTW, is a relabel of Gennett 3388, issued around 1927.

Side A: Meadow-Lark, by the Royal Troubadors. Recorded 10/04/1926. This side has heavy surface damage. I did the best I could to minimize the noise. It’s listenable, but not great.

Side B: Sunday, by Harry Pollack and His Club Maurice Diamonds. Recorded 10/01/1926. Again, listenable, but the quality was pretty bad to begin with, and you can do only so much with a disk that’s had its dynamic range ground down to nothing by multiple passes with a steel needle.

As a rule, I hate polka, but I was delighted to find this disk. WNAX is well-known to anyone who grew up in South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, or western Minnesota or Iowa. An unusually powerful station for a relatively small community–in the ’40s it claimed to have the country’s tallest transmitting tower–WNAX was one of the most popular stations in the predominantly rural upper midwest. The rest of the country better recognizes its most famous musical prodigy, Lawrence Welk, whose decade-long stint as leader of the WNAX house band took him from struggling road musician to household name.

After the Welk era, WNAX housed many acts, mostly specializing in the polka-style music the heaviliy-Germanic upper-plains population enjoyed. One of the longest-lived of these groups was the WNAX Bohemian Band. The Bohemian Band could be heard every weeknight at 6:15, and played under the sponsorship of Minneapolis-based Grain Belt Beer. (The “Grainbelt Polka” song featured on this record is surely a thinly-veiled advertisement for their sponsor.)

The WNAX Bohemian Band. L-R: Billy Dean, Homer Schmidt (a veteran of Lawrence Welk’s ensemble), Bill Tonyan (still alive and performing!), Keith Eide, Rex Hays, Lynn Edwards, Eddie Texel, and Fred Burgi.

I left the noise level higher in these two recordings, because the dynamic range was so unusually well-preserved in these little-played sides that I didn’t want to sacrifice it. They’re still pretty good quality. The A side and B side are a guess, as the record has no catalog number. I went by the sequence of their recording matrix numbers.

Side A: Marenka Polka

Side B: Grainbelt Polka

In the words of Monda, I am heartsick. The typewriter I have lusted after for ages, the Monarch 101, matched in its elegance only by its elusiveness, just went to someone with far deeper pockets than I. I hope whoever won it loves it as much as I have from afar.

I’m going to go cry into some vodka now.

Spurred by both the need to downsize a bit and our sense of duty to stimulate the economy, we sold our massive old entertainment center and are in the market for a new TV stand. The old nightstand that the TV now sits on functions well enough, but is a bit topheavy (not a good thing with a toddler running around). So we went shopping for a new TV stand. However, we want something that fits with our midcentury sensibilities, not an easy thing in this mission/prairie/craftsman age. Here are a few interesting items we came across, though most are not in the running for cost reasons.

The Predicta

Oh, my gawd, check out this beauty! Telstar Electronics has a whole line of atomic-inspired, custom-built televisions. The only drawbacks (besides price) are that the screens are CRT tubes and not HD, and the largest is 24″. Still, this would look so very, very cool in your sunken den.

The Kurve

From England comes this beauty that’s just begging for you to run your hands along its suede finish. It’s not yet available, and I’m sure that by the time it is I still won’t be able to afford the overseas shipping.

The Audra

This is perfect if your tastes lean toward ’60s/’70s Danish modern. This is the one, in fact, that we had picked out, but it seems to have been discontinued, despite what Home Decorators’ web site says.

The Wharfside

Speaking of Danish modern, UK furniture makers Wharfside make this gorgeous stand with sliding tambourine doors. Downside: I have a slight problem with buying a TV stand that costs 3 times the television that’s going to be sitting on it.

The Swedx

Again, from Europe (maybe we ought to just move there). This all-wood television suite really wouldn’t fit in any way with our living room, but it’s pretty nifty, nonetheless.

The Atlas A4

Impressive, but, uh, we just unloaded a wall-sized unit, and I’m pretty sure our old plaster-and-lathe walls are not going to support that.

The Wilkerson

If you really want to go down Retro Road, and have the cash to spare, have Wilkerson Furnituremakers custom-craft this extremely throwback cabinet around your flat-panel. Hope you don’t have a TiVo box or anything like that.

I suspect that unless there is a drastic drop in the prices of these high-end products, my best bet will probably be to find an old turntable console at the thrift store, gut it, and convert it for living room AV use.