Petroliana

Most people, when you mention porcelain, think you're referring to fine china or some item you saw appraised on Antiques Roadshow. All the signs pictured below are "porcelain" signs, as opposed to painted on metal signs. The different colors in the sign start out as granules that are baked onto the metal surface. Early porcelain signs such as the Veedol ones have what they call "heavy shelving", caused by the layering of one color onto another. This can be felt as a slight bump as you run your hand across from one color to another. Those two particular signs are circa 1930.

The first sign I acquired was the "women's room" one. I found it in the bee house some years ago. It is copyrighted 1939 by the Union Oil Co. At one time my granddad's service station was a Union '76 so that is maybe where the sign came from. Except for some slight chipping of the porcelain on the very bottom, the sign is in excellent condition. Without that damage, the sign would be NOS (new old stock) which is what serious collectors are always looking for. Comparable to a book collector wanting a first edition with dust jacket, both graded FINE/FINE!

The other signs are "pump plate" signs, and would have been installed on gasoline pumps to let the customer know what type of fuel that pump dispensed. Texaco ones were typically 12" X 18". All of my pump plate signs are from the 40's and most were purchased from the same seller in New Mexico. His father had ran a Texaco distributorship in the 70's and the signs were tucked away in the warehouse. I pretty much bought any sign he put on E-bay because they were always in such good condition. The Indian sign is a precursor to Texaco, dated 1940 and in exceptional condition. I felt I paid too much for it, but being a stubborn bidder, I couldn't let it get away from me.

The "Vico" painting was taken in Coalville, Utah. It reminded me of an old photograph taken in Levan, Utah circa 1930. Barely discernable in the background of the photo is a "gravity feed" 10 gallon gas pump and a "tombstone" Vico oil sign from my granddad's service station. I would love to have THEM in my collection! The "Utah Liquor Agency" building is also in Coalville and I'm certain it was at one time a service station. I'll go there tomorrow for a fill up.

Beekeeping circa 1950

"You can't go home again", so said Thomas Wolfe in his novel by that name. The more I realize that physically that is true for me, the more I head down there in my mind. Logistically, it's less than 100 miles away, but emotionally and chronologically it's much farther.

When I was a boy, that forlorn looking apiary had some 2oo+ hives, each one made from scratch by my dad and his dad. I remember standing on an empty hive body, turning the honey extractor while my dad did the uncapping. It was an old-fashioned way of doing the bee work. Just getting the frames of honey into the bee house was back breaking work. Nowdays they use a potent chemical to drive the bees out of the upper hive body where the surplus honey is stored. We would use a bee smoker to placate them while we opened up each hive, took the honey frames out one at a time and shook and swept the bees off. This had to be done in the heat of the day when most of the bees were foraging for nectar. The uncapping was done with a long- bladed, double-edged knife. Two such knives were used, one hand held and the other in a pan of hot water to be used whenever the first one cooled off. There are now automatic uncapping machines that all you do is turn them on and feed the frames into them. But the most archaic step was the extracting itself: we used a hand-crank, two frame, reversible extractor. Its modern counterpart is the electric radial, which can take 50 or so uncapped frames at a time and spin the honey out without having to reverse the frames midway through! The last step, getting the honey into a "settling tank", uses a "honey pump", whereas we strained the honey into a 5 gallon can and lifted and dumped it into the tank.

Our honey was truly organic. No chemicals used, no "flash heating" to prevent it from granulating, and no mixing of different types of honey.

I bought some honey at Costco recently and thought it tasted terrible. It really didn't, but my expectations weren't met. Don't even get me started on "locust blossom" honey! It's to honey what Maker's Mark is to bourbon.

P.S. At no point in the gathering of a honey crop is a buffalo used!

It's a kid's "fun center", where they can bowl, play laser tag, miniature golf, have birthday parties and so on. I've been working there these last few days and finished our part of the project on Friday. Something about the whole surreal atmosphere of the place got me to thinking about how different my childhood was compared to those that would frequent this place. Bear with me, this is not a rant about walking to school uphill both ways in a blizzard.

Visually this place was impressive. There are huge fluorescent colored paintings of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, trolls and wizards, etc. Also several larger than life statues of extra-terrestial warriors, magicians and the like scattered about. Everything was over the top and in your face; I would think smaller children would be overwhelmed and intimidated by it all, but of course older kids would eat it up!

One of my first memories of a "fun center" was playing in the sheep corral with my older brother. There were some wooden grain troughs for feeding rolled barley and a dried molasses mix to the sheep. The troughs were built with an upright strip of wood completely around the perimeter to keep the grain from falling onto the ground. We had an entirely different use for those troughs.

When my grandfather was much younger, he had a pool hall / bowling alley on the property. We had found some remnants of that enterprise in an old outbuilding near the corral. There was on old trunk that held bowling balls and pins. These weren't the modern shiny plastic and composition ones. They were made entirely out of wood, some sort of extremely dense maple. As I recall, there were various sizes of bowling balls all the way up to the adult regulation size, which was as heavy as it's modern counterpart!

It didn't take an Einstein to figure out we had all that was needed to go bowling. We'd set a bunch of pins up on one end of the grain trough and then go to the other end and roll the ball at them. There was no such thing as a gutter ball. Most of the time we got strikes.

I would venture to bet that we had just as much fun bowling as those kids will at their high-tech ( and somewhat artificial ) facility.

I still have one of the bowling pins and two different-sized bowling balls. I don't know what happened to the rest of them.