Occasionally, yard sale stories grab our attention and fire our imaginations when we happen upon them in the news.
You know the ones: an eagle-eyed person, or one with just plain "dumb" luck, looking for a deal on a gently used swivel chair, or yard tools, walks away instead with much more. Like, say, plunking down $3 for a first edition copy of "Gone With The Wind" (est. value more than $3,000), or fishing a 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card from an $8 box of old baseball cards (est. $ millions).
I attended one of those sales recently, and made a discovery of my own. No, I didn't fork over $11 for a lost Picasso inside a cheap frame, but I still had some fun with what I discovered in a box I opened a day after making the $5 purchase. It was also good for a trip down memory lane.
On the first day of the sale, among some small collectibles and other tchotchkes, I spied a couple of souvenirs someone had brought home from the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York. I recalled attending the fair as a 9-year old while on a family vacation, and for $5, I couldn't pass up a 3x 5-inch ashtray emblazoned "Greetings From World's Fair / New York 1964-1965," including the fair's uni-globe logo. With an adorable brother and sister, aged about 6 and 7, etched in the tray's bottom and cheerily waving, it didn't appear anyone in 60 years ever had the heart to dump ashes from his Camel or Lucky Strike.
I decided to risk waiting for half-priced deals the next day. Sure enough, for another fiver, I snagged a box containing the fair's "Official Souvenir Flash Card Set." About the size of many smartphones, only a bit thicker, the box holds 28 pictures of the fair's key futuristic exhibits. Descriptions on the back are in English, French and Spanish.
My best memory is of the General Motors pavilion with its tilted facade looming 110 feet overhead. It might as well have been a thousand feet to a grammar school kid. A 15-minute seated ride provided glimpses into the imagined future.
"Man exploring the moon" on unirovers; vacation weekends at futuristic hotels deep in the ocean (nary a Michigan-sized island of plastic trash in sight!); highways spanning the continents taking one and all to the cities of tomorrow (with houses in the sky where George Jetson could land his spacemobile); and, technology pointing the way to a bright, promising future.
Well, at least it was all pretty exciting then, especially for a small town kid.
Inside the box of flash cards I discovered something else not included from the fair's gift shop. The purchaser had elsewhere bought postcards depicting New York City sights and placed them there for safekeeping.
One postcard of the nighttime Manhattan skyline was mailed to a family member in High Point under a four-cent stamp, postmarked "29 July 1965." Evocative of a simpler time, the inscription was straight out of central casting: "Dear Mother, We are in NY today. We are having a good time. We sure wish you were here. Tell Sis hello. (signed)." Evidently, "Mother" returned the card to the sender's collection.
Interestingly, the postmark matches the same time frame of my visit to the Big Apple, and the fair. I can recall my dad handing a single dollar bill, each, to my brother, Billy, and me. His admonition: "I didn't want you boys to be in the city without some money in your pockets." In Washington, D.C., days later, we "hee-hawed" over paying a quarter apiece for short bottles of Coke. (The four of us split two of them. Dad was a big spender!)
Billy provided plenty of excitement during our day at the fair — an incident which joined our family's pantheon of vacation tales. He managed to get lost in the crowd. Now, you can imagine the 21st century implications of a 7-year old kid lost in NYC; it caused mom no small amount of fretting 60 years ago. Fortunately, we had an important asset.
Another family had been friends of ours in Rockingham a couple of years earlier. A job promotion sent them to South Jersey, and we met them for the trip to New York. Bill Bingham had a sharp pair of eyes atop his 6-foot, 5-inch frame, spied Billy from a distance, and made his way through the crowd to scoop him up.
While among other things in his life, Billy has served as a paratrooper and a law enforcement officer, he was full of mischief even as a tot. I suspect any kidnapper would have been calling, soon enough, offering us money to come fetch the little rascal!
Columnist Douglas Smith lives and writes in Rockingham.
