My Dad's Thing
My dad had a miniature wine bottle and glasses on a tray, made of pewter. This sat on the fireplace mantle. I found a brass coke bottle at the same scale. It was sitting in the street gutter somewhere in San Mateo County one Thanksgiving around 1968 or 1969.
When we moved to Oregon I dug it out of my shoebox stash (one of the few things my Mom did not clean up in my room). I put it on the platter. My dad was not amused.
One day the bottle was gone and he would not confess he did it.
Decades later he gave me the wine bottle set. I purchased a brass coke bottle (it was popular in the 1960s to go with keychains). The pewter and brass/ Coke and wine are together once again! My dad, those many decades later, admitted he removed the bottle.
It was so nice that Dad gave me the platter. It upset his wife, though, because she was a waitress and felt some connection to it. I am glad he did give it to me and sorry she lost that--but when I think of all of the other items in her house that came through Dad...things I grew up with...I don't feel she got a raw deal at all.
Dad did a little lie with my mom that was actually pretty cool. It was a white lie. In the early 1970s I would go to yard sales and see old radios. One I actually bought: a Montgomery Wards Airline. It was a wood standup radio with the speaker in the bottom and the set in the front. The veneer was peeling off and the radio didn't work. At the time I did not have the skills to fix it, so I dismantled it.
I loved the style. Enough of it remained to make me want to find a working radio.
That led me to the newspaper classified ads. One day I saw one with an old radio listed which was in my price range. We drove out to see it. Turns out that the radio in question was a battery operated one. Old, but not cool. Still, the seller did have a Knight radio...and it worked. Same price?! My dad bought it and insisted it was the same price. Before he died he admitted he bought it for some higher price, but didn't remember how much. In fact, it may not even have been for sale, but he could see how much I liked it.
I have had that radio all these years. It needs a little work and I did my part in ruining part of it. It used to have a motor that would pull the tuner around and stop where set. I played around with it and ended up (probably) grinding the gears. The celluloid tuner window has also cracked from more than 50 years of exposure to the sun. It missed one knob, so I found replacements...but have yet to put them on (the old ones are stingy and not easy to remove). The speaker is sitting in a closet: I had removed it years ago to make the cabinet easier to carry.
Eventually I might be able to get it up and running. I would like to do it myself. The motor part could be tricky, though. I bought a similar Knight model on Ebay and took a plane to Chicago specifically to pack it up and mail it back home!
I did the same thing with a Teletype model similar to the one I used with a Hewlett Packard HP-2000 series timeshare system. To buy one of those I flew to Baltimore, Maryland and stayed overnight, rented a car, picked it up, dismantled it and shipped it back home.
The similar Knight is on our front porch. The Teletype is in the basement. I need to do something special with them.
When we moved to Oregon I dug it out of my shoebox stash (one of the few things my Mom did not clean up in my room). I put it on the platter. My dad was not amused.
One day the bottle was gone and he would not confess he did it.
Decades later he gave me the wine bottle set. I purchased a brass coke bottle (it was popular in the 1960s to go with keychains). The pewter and brass/ Coke and wine are together once again! My dad, those many decades later, admitted he removed the bottle.
It was so nice that Dad gave me the platter. It upset his wife, though, because she was a waitress and felt some connection to it. I am glad he did give it to me and sorry she lost that--but when I think of all of the other items in her house that came through Dad...things I grew up with...I don't feel she got a raw deal at all.
Dad did a little lie with my mom that was actually pretty cool. It was a white lie. In the early 1970s I would go to yard sales and see old radios. One I actually bought: a Montgomery Wards Airline. It was a wood standup radio with the speaker in the bottom and the set in the front. The veneer was peeling off and the radio didn't work. At the time I did not have the skills to fix it, so I dismantled it.
I loved the style. Enough of it remained to make me want to find a working radio.
That led me to the newspaper classified ads. One day I saw one with an old radio listed which was in my price range. We drove out to see it. Turns out that the radio in question was a battery operated one. Old, but not cool. Still, the seller did have a Knight radio...and it worked. Same price?! My dad bought it and insisted it was the same price. Before he died he admitted he bought it for some higher price, but didn't remember how much. In fact, it may not even have been for sale, but he could see how much I liked it.
I have had that radio all these years. It needs a little work and I did my part in ruining part of it. It used to have a motor that would pull the tuner around and stop where set. I played around with it and ended up (probably) grinding the gears. The celluloid tuner window has also cracked from more than 50 years of exposure to the sun. It missed one knob, so I found replacements...but have yet to put them on (the old ones are stingy and not easy to remove). The speaker is sitting in a closet: I had removed it years ago to make the cabinet easier to carry.
Eventually I might be able to get it up and running. I would like to do it myself. The motor part could be tricky, though. I bought a similar Knight model on Ebay and took a plane to Chicago specifically to pack it up and mail it back home!
I did the same thing with a Teletype model similar to the one I used with a Hewlett Packard HP-2000 series timeshare system. To buy one of those I flew to Baltimore, Maryland and stayed overnight, rented a car, picked it up, dismantled it and shipped it back home.
The similar Knight is on our front porch. The Teletype is in the basement. I need to do something special with them.