Happy Birthday to Pooh

A.A. Milne (rhymes with "kiln," one syllable), Christopher Robin Milne, and Winnie-the-Pooh

NPR has reminded me that this month is the 90th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh.  They posted a story about it, along with an audio clip of A.A. Milne reading from one of the stories in 1929:

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/22/280761847/celebrating-winnie-the-poohs-90th-with-a-rare-recording-and-some-hunny

So it seemed only appropriate, and timely, that I found these old friends at an estate sale this weekend:

One is The Pooh Story Book and the other is The World of Pooh, both by A.A. Milne and featuring "decorations and new illustrations in full color" by E. H. Shepard.

Inside one of the books was tucked a May 1970 McCall's magazine article on E. H. Shepard, shortly after he had created those new color illustrations.

That made me think:  E.H. Shepard did the first illustrations for the "Pooh" books in the 1920s.  He created new, color illustrations for reprint editions of the stories in the 1960s. 
  

E.H. Shepard, from www.pooh-corner.org

The website ClassicPooh.net says of Shepard:

In his eighty-ninth year, he visited old friends and relations in Cape Town, Durban, Perth, Sydney and Tasmania, returning through Tahiti so that he could look at Gauguin relics.

In the same year, he completed some new Pooh drawings for a revised edition published by Dutton [publisher of the two books I found at the estate sale] in the United States; these remained lost and forgotten until discovered some years later by the now President of Dutton Children's books, Christopher Franceschelli, in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.

89 years old.

I love stories about people who keep doing what their Creator gifted them to do, for decades on end.  E.H. Shepard did, and so did Christopher Robin and his faithful Bear:

And they still remember, to this day, 90 years later.  I give them a very good chance of reaching that hundred-year mark.

I have a young friend who will receive these old books about Pooh and the other creatures who live in the Hundred Acre Wood.  He's just discovering the joy of a good tale simply told and well-illustrated.

The story, indeed, goes on.  

Think Spring: Pink Pyrex in the Pantry

(Yes, I love alliteration.)

A neighbor kindly brought us a bag of lemons from her backyard tree a few days ago.  (The fact that lemons bear fruit and flowers simultaneously, is a blessing with many benefits.)

I wondered for awhile how best to use so many lemons, and then I remembered the pink Pyrex dishes I'd found at a couple of recent estate sales.  Pyrex pink and lemon yellow are excellent Springtime colors -- and in some parts of this country we really need Spring to come again soon -- so I decided to combine them in my kitchen by making Lemon Bars.

Pyrex bowls and serving dishes are, as I've discussed elsewhere in this blog, extremely durable and useful. 

The blue snowflake Pyrex mixing bowls, featured in a previous blog post.

They came in a variety of colors, including at least two shades of pink.  I now have a carnation pink mixing bowl and a coral pink baking dish. 

 I also have a very good recipe for Lemon Bars, that came many years ago from my friend in Vermont.  I copied the recipe into the ring binder that serves as a homemade cookbook:

(You can tell that the recipe is a good one by the amount of food stains that have collected on the page over the years.)

Here's the recipe:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Combine in a mixing bowl (using an electric mixer if you have one):

1/2 cup (one stick) real butter
1 c. flour
1/4 cup powdered sugar

Mix these together in the bowl until the mixture looks like large crumbs about the size of split peas.  It may take awhile, depending on how cold the butter was when you started.  

Press this shortbread mixture into an ungreased 8x8" or 9x9" baking pan so that it covers the bottom of the pan evenly.  Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.

While the shortbread mixture is baking, beat together thoroughly:

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice, strained

When the shortbread base is golden brown, remove it from the oven.  Pour the lemon/sugar mixture over the top evenly and return the pan to the oven for an additional 20-25 minutes or until the top is set and brown.

Cool before slicing into bars.  (I used a sharp knife dipped in very hot water to cut the slices.)  

Since my pink Pyrex baking dish is larger than 9x9", I doubled the recipe and it worked fine.  No sense running the risk of running out of Lemon Bars!  And I can take half of them to church for dessert after lunch tomorrow.

Here's a link to my previous blog post on Pyrex bowls:

http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/08/bless-you-julia-child.html

Valentine's Day Traditions

One of my favorite things to find at estate sales, is an old greeting card.  It's even more fun to find a box of old greeting cards someone has saved, because the images evoke a certain time in our history.

Anyone who went to a public elementary school in the mid- 20th century will probably remember the traditions surrounding Valentine's Day.  

In some schools, a few days before February 14th, you brought an empty cardboard box from home (such as a shoe box or an oatmeal tub) and decorated it in class with red, pink and/or white construction paper.  The teacher showed you how to fold a piece of construction paper in half and use your blunt-nosed school scissors to carefully cut half a heart out of the paper.  When you opened the half-heart, it had transformed into a whole heart!  

Then you pasted the hearts you'd cut out (probably using your fingers or a small flat round-edged wooden tongue depressor to apply the school paste) onto your box and wrote your name on it.  

There were no glue sticks back then, and there was no standardized test based on your classroom activity.  You were learning to follow instructions, to work quietly at your own desk, to develop hand/eye coordination, and to problem-solve when you forgot about cutting the heart out along the folded side of the paper and ended up with two half-hearts instead.   

You persevered, and your box was complete.  Then you cleaned up the little paper shards around your desk as best you could, and washed the school paste off your fingers at the classroom sink.  That is, unless you were the proverbial kid who ate school paste, but we won't go into that here -- we need to move on.  We need to get some Valentine's Day cards.

Sometime before the 14th, you also had to make or buy Valentine's Day cards for each of your classmates.  Perhaps you were stuck at home one evening with your scissors and your red construction paper, cutting out dozens of hearts and writing "BE MINE" on the middle of each (writing "BE MY VALENTINE" a couple of dozen times was too labor-intensive).

Or your mom took you to the drug store to buy a package of the appropriate number of school valentines.  These usually came either pre-cut in small flat boxes, or in book form that you could punch out.  

Some of the cards were interactive (although we didn't use that word to describe them).

You usually signed your name on the back of each card, although you also had the option of writing "FROM ???" ("ANONYMOUS" was too labor-intensive) if you didn't want the recipient to know that a) you liked them; or b) your mother told you that you had to give them a card even if you didn't like them -- it was The Right Thing To Do.

Note the cut-and-paste stickers on this page.  You'll need to get out your school paste again, or if you don't have school paste at home, the can of rubber cement or the golden-brown bottle of LePage's mucilage with the weird rubber nozzle.

There was usually a special card you could give to your teacher, who certainly deserved some extra love for all her hard work and especially for her patience.

Then on Valentine's Day at school, you set your decorated box out and your classmates (you hoped) filled it with their own valentines.  (I'm certain that the teachers kept extra anonymous valentines handy, so that everyone would get at least a few.)  Some kids gave a valentine to everyone in the class (probably at their parents' insistence); others would only give cards to the people they really liked.   

Either way, you always gave the cards you liked best to the people you liked best.  And sometimes you saved back a card for yourself because you just couldn't stand to give it away. To You, From You.

I'm keeping this one.

I found these old Valentines at some estate sales over the last couple of years.   Enjoy, and share them with your own Valentine.

I'm keeping this one, too.  

Happy Valentine's Day!

One Good Pan Deserves Another

In my quest for More Things Vintage, I sometimes find more than one of the same kind of old thing in a short period of time. 

Such was the case at this morning's estate sale, which was within walking distance of the house.

At Christmas I'd received the gift of a large old Wagner Magnalite roasting pan.  So guess what I found at this morning's sale?

A smaller old Wagner Magnalite roasting pan.  For two dollars, I couldn't leave it there.  And just in time for more cool-weather cooking.

Junior still needs a little more cleaning before being put into service.  But they do look nice together.

If you missed my previous blog post on the larger Magnalite roasting pan, it's here: 

http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-roasting-pan-like-grandmas-wagner.html

A Puzzlement

Every so often I find things at estate sales that don't seem to belong with the rest of the stuff.  

A good example of this is an autographed picture I found last week.  The gentleman whose estate items were being sold, appeared to have been a Caucasian guy who worked in the film industry.  In addition to the usual sorts of household items, the estate included some Judaica, a box of postcards of classic automobiles, and a large box of black and white stock photos taken on the sets of many "B" movies. 

In the box with the pictures from the forgettable films, there was an autographed picture of four California politicians, which I brought home for 25 cents.  

It's addressed to Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty (the second man from the left) by Mervyn Dymally (the third man from the left).  Dymally, a native of Trinidad, was the first black state senator elected in California and the first black lieutenant governor in California.  He also served six terms in Congress.  I think the other two men in the photo are (far left) Billy Mills, a retired Superior Court judge and one of the first three African Americans elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and (far right) Leon Ralph, a former state Assemblyman from Watts who later became pastor of a church.  (Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll update this blog post.)

It certainly wasn't Sam Yorty's estate; he died in 1998.  And it wasn't Mervyn Dymally's estate; he died in 2012 in another part of Los Angeles County.

I often uncover mysteries at estate sales.  Sometimes I'm able to piece together information about the items I find; other times, they just have to stay mysteries.  Maybe someone found the photo at an estate sale, and added it to their own collection?

Regardless of its travels, the photo is now on its way to the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, Mervyn Dymally's alma mater.

Most Faithfully

Hollywood is in the middle of its Awards Season.  Local newspapers are stuffed with full-page ads and inserts headed "For Your Consideration," which are mirrored on local radio and TV.   Everyone roots for their favorite movies and favorite actors, hoping they will win one or more of the coveted prizes.

It's not uncommon for me to find movie memorabilia at estate sales.  Scrapbooks with stock photographs of celebrities, or more often newspaper and magazine clippings relating to famous actors and actresses, are not uncommon things for people to save.

Yesterday I dropped by the estate sale of a woman who was born in 1912 and died last year at 95.  I found only one piece of Hollywood ephemera there: a signed photograph of one of a young lady's favorite actors.

"Most Faithfully, Rin-Tin-Tin" is in large script, and below in smaller letters it reads "Lee Duncan, Master and Friend, 1929."

Why would someone save a photograph ostensibly signed by a dog (and not even an original pawtograph!), until the day she died at age 95?  Rin Tin Tin must have been pretty special to her.

I decided to do a little research on this, one of Hollywood's first canine heroes, and it turns out that he was pretty special to a lot of people, not the least of whom were the heads of Warner Bros. studios.  

Note:  The dog in the photographs here is not the only one to carry the name "Rin Tin Tin."  Many people reading this blog will remember a handsome German Shepherd who had the title role in the popular 1950s TV series Rin Tin Tin.  The original Rin Tin Tin was a movie star in the 1920s and early '30s; I found lots of additional photos of him online.  And what a star he was.

Almost every Hollywood story is a mixture of truth and hype, so the actual story of the first Rin Tin Tin may never be fully known.  But as the generally-accepted story goes, Rin Tin Tin was found in France in 1918 by an American serviceman, Lee Duncan.  In 1919, when World War I was over, Duncan brought the dog back home to Southern California and spent hours each day training him.  

Duncan, like so many young people in the early 1920s, was tempted by the siren song of the movie industry, based only a few miles from his home.  Duncan wrote a screenplay set in the Sierra Nevada mountains for Rin Tin Tin, took the dog and went from studio to studio trying to interest them in his project.   

The Internet Movie Database shows Rin Tin Tin as one of the actors in The Man from Hell's River (1922), which starred Wallace Beery, and My Dad (also 1922), which starred longtime Hollywood actress Ruth Clifford.  

Then Warner Bros. bought Duncan's screenplay for Where the North Begins (1923) and cast Rin Tin Tin in the leading role.  It was the start of a beautiful, and very lucrative, relationship.  Rinty, as he was known, made 16 pictures for Warner Bros. between 1923 and 1928, then nine more -- well, I guess you could call them "barkies," instead of "talkies" between 1928 and '31.   The films were so successful that studio insiders reportedly called Rin Tin Tin "the mortgage lifter," because the proceeds from his movies bailed the studio out of financial trouble time and again.  Rin Tin Tin's films also helped launch the career of a young screenwriter named Daryl F. Zanuck.

In most of his films, Rin Tin Tin got top or near-top billing.  Most of his films were huge box office and critical successes, and by 1926 Rin Tin Tin was earning a reported $6,000 a week, the equivalent of almost $77,000 a week today -- more than most of Warner's human stars were earning at the time.  Rin Tin Tin did celebrity endorsements for Ken-L-Ration dog food.  He was often photographed in human-type poses.  Gossip columnists wrote about him, his "wife" Nannette and their puppies, as though they were human. 

In 1929, voting for the first Academy Awards took place, honoring the films of 1927 and 1928.  Multiple sources say that Rin Tin Tin actually received the most votes for Best Actor, but the Motion Picture Academy leaders decided that, for credibility's sake, the award should go to the Best Human Actor, and it was won by the Swiss-born German/Austrian actor Emil Jannings (who later went on to star in a number of Nazi propaganda films).  That same year, Warner Bros. was also given a special award of merit for producing the first "talking" picture, The Jazz Singer, which transformed the motion picture industry.

Rin Tin Tin's radio show, to which he contributed barks, started in 1930 (although a human actor named Bob Barker -- no, really -- supplied many of the canine sound effects) and he starred in it until 1932, when his son Rin Tin Tin, Junior took over.  Rin Tin Tin's last film was a 12-part serial in 1931, called The Lightning Warrior.  One of his co-stars, far down in the billing, was a young man named Yakima Canutt. 

Rin Tin Tin died in 1932.  His passing made international news.  Like his life, his death is the stuff of legend -- one account has the dog drawing his last breath in the front yard of his master's home, cradled in the arms of a neighbor, sex symbol Jean Harlow (which many human males at the time would have envied).  His name lives on through his many descendants; Rin Tin Tin the Twelfth is currently spokesdog for the American Humane Association. 

In her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, author Susan Orlean wrote: 

In his way, Rin Tin Tin had come to represent something essentially American. He wasn’t born in the United States, and neither were his parents, but those facts only made him more quintessentially American: he was an immigrant in a country of immigrants. He was everything Americans wanted to think they were — brave, enterprising, bold, and most of all, individual.  

Perhaps that's what the young lady who saved his picture for 84 years admired about Rin Tin Tin; perhaps she, too, hoped to be brave, enterprising, bold, individual, and -- as the autographed picture said -- faithful.

_______________________________________

CBS Sunday Morning did a story on Rin Tin Tin when Susan Orlean's book came out.  It has film footage of the original Rinty and several of the other dogs who carried his name:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv8w4_nuGbY

Here’s a video clip of the original Rin Tin Tin, introducing a new movie with human stars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9C6DqQ2xY

The Internet Movie Database has more biographical and anecdotal information on the original Rin Tin Tin:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0863833/bio?ref_=nm_dyk_qt_sm#quotes

An NPR blog highlights a biography of Rin Tin Tin:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/09/24/140746523/rin-tin-tin-from-battlefield-to-hollywood-a-story-of-friendship

As does The Telegraph (UK):  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9010387/Rin-Tin-Tin-the-dog-who-charmed-the-world.html

Many people devote blog space to the memory of Rin Tin Tin, such as this one: 

http://rand3285.edublogs.org/sample-page/

Susan Orlean's book is here:  http://www.amazon.com/Rin-Tin-Legend-Orlean-Hardcover/dp/B00BR5G9M0/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390185688&sr=1-4&keywords=rin+tin+tin

Another book, Rin Tin Tin: The Movie Star gives some alternative information about the life of the famous canine:  http://www.amazon.com/Rin-Tin-Tin-Movie-Star-Ann-Elwood/dp/1453866655/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390185606&sr=1-2&keywords=rin+tin+tin