As a child, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house, along with two cousins. Occasionally, granny would let us play in the attic. It was there that I saw the most amazing lamp my young eyes were ever laid upon. Tucked away in a nook was a beautiful kerosene parlor lamp. I begged granny to light it up, but she explained she had no kerosene to fill it with. I asked where she got it and she told me it was her mothers lamp, my great grandmother. I have never seen my great grandmother, even in photos. I have seen my great grandfather's photo though. He's the 5th man from the left. Three of the men on the left are his son's. A lot of years passed, then one day, after my grandmother had to give up her house, after gramps died, she passed the lamp on to me. Needless to say, I was thrilled to have it. It was very much like the lamp in the photo. Well, by that time I was married and living in a small 5 room house with 5 destructive kids. I had no safe place for it. Dad said I could keep it in his basement since no one but he and mom ever went there. That worked for awhile, then my brother got married, had two kids and parked them at our parents house over the weekends. When they got big enough to play in the yard, or basement in bad weather, my prized lamp was in danger. One day dad told me I better come and get it, he didn't want to be responsible if it got broke. Since I had no safe place for it, dad suggested I sell it. It cost me nothing and would be all profit, he pointed out. It broke my heart to part with it, but I had little choice at the time. An antique collector was only too happy to buy it.
During my largely misspent life, I amassed three gun collections at three different times. The first one I lost during my divorce. Lost the second one when the business I worked for closed and I had to sell to pay bills until I got another job. The third I had to get rid of when I moved to this building I now live it. It's a "gun free zone". A very dangerous place to be. Each collection featured a few prized pieces. The first collection held my old Colt MT Woodsman shown below. It put a ton of small game in the pot. I was at rock bottom and needed gas and groceries. I felt bad about selling it, since it was the very first pistol I ever owned. Got it when I was 14 or 15. I got to working again, and soon accumulated my second collection. This collection contained an old 10 ga. double barrel shotgun and a Hopkins and Allen .22 single shot target pistol, like the one below. There's not many of these around plus, the pistol had a three digit serial number. It was something like 147. At the time I was living in a cheap hotel room, so I kept my guns at my dads house. Well, dad and his best friend were like Mike and Frank on American Pickers. Dad and his friend both bought-sold-traded everything they could lay their hands on and make a profit. And dad just had to show his friend my Guns. Well, dad's friend just had to have them. Not to keep, but to resell. And this guy was persistent. He would either phone me or stop by, always asking when I would sell him those two guns. He even got dad to start working on me about it. Finally, I named a price I thought he wouldn't pay, but he did. I made a note to myself. Tell or show no one what you have, if you plan on keeping it.
To think back on the dumb decisions we made, divesting ourselves of things that would either be valuable today or have deep sentimental value...... Sheesh!!! Dad's WWII uniforms and letters home to Mom. After my Mother passed, dad sold the home without telling anyone. He just told the new owners to clean out anything he left behind and burn it. So many memories lost. Ike, I too, had an extensive collection of firearms. Had a Federal Firearms License for a short while. Lots of reloading tools and supplies. We hit some extremely difficult financial times and I got rid of them all. To have had a few of them.... .257 Weatherby Magnum hand picked from Roy Weatherby's personal stock. .25-06 SAKO Winchester 94 chambered for .44 Magnum. Few of them made. Matched ammo with my S&W Model 29. Belgian Browning Auto 12 in a Browning hard case, complete with 30" Full, 28" Mod, and 26" IC barrels... never fired. Still had the original owner's instructions, etc. in the hard case. Dozens of firearms owned. Those above were a few that I wish I had never let go of. RCBS Rock Chucker press with dies for a number of high-power and handgun rounds. Pacific shotshell reloader set up for 12 ga and 20 ga. Used to buy AA empties by the dozens and reload for trap shooting, quail, pheasant, etc. '69 Chevelle SS, Crager chrome spoke wheels, Gabrial "Hi-jacker" shock. Beautiful car we should never have let go. Low miles, but dumped for a Plymouth Satellite that was a total junk pile. That's been over 40 years ago and my wife has never forgiven me!! :>)
Rant ON.... "Treasures lost". Today's society doesn't write letters, have photos developed and kept, or keeping anything that makes memories. Everything is digital and simply disappears. A few will put photos on thumb drives, but how many people dig those out and look at them? My wife's parents kept every cancelled check they had written for their entire married life. When they passed, my wife stored the boxes in our basement. About a year ago, we were in a "clean out" mood. She started going through the checks. Found checks for her parents honeymoon, first furniture, rent payments from back in the 40's, shoes for kids for school......... on and on. She kept many that had notes in the memo. Put together an envelope full for each of her brothers and her sister that had notes pertaining to them. Tossed many. Today, we don't get cancelled checks. Heck, most folks don't even write checks anymore. So much history... so many "treasures lost". Rant OFF.........
Oh, I certainly know exactly what you're talking about here. I'm sorry to hear of these things you have "lost." I have some, too, and it saddens me greatly every time I think of them. The one that comes to mind first is a quilt my grandparents made for me as a gift for my graduation. I sat in the sewing room while my grandmother sewed it together on her old treadle sewing machine. My grandpa did the cutting and piecing, etc. I was 18 and the sentimental value that such an item would have given me all these decades later was lost on me... I would have rather, in my teenage senselessness, had cash for graduation. I still get tears (yes, as I'm typing this, too) when I remember that. I sold my high school class ring in the early 80s. Dumb. I've sold a lot of things at yard sales that although not worth much at the time would be worth half a goldmine now. For a lot of the larger things, I simply didn't have storage space, just a basement that routinely got flooded and everything smelled musty/moldy. No attic. But not all of it was large. As Ol' Blue Eyes sang, "regrets, I've had a few, but then again too few to mention".... uh no, not too few to mention. Many regrets when it comes to this subject.
I grew up in a house that had been built, I think, by one of my uncles, who was the first of the family to come over from Sweden, but I'm not sure. I believe it was another relative other than my father, however. The attic room had been boarded off on the sides to create squared walls, leaving a crawl space all around the room. That space was not lighted but it was filled with stuff. After making the attic into my bedroom, I would bring a flashlight and explore the crawl space often. There were several old portraits of people who I am sure I was related to, although I would take some downstairs from time to time, and my parents would have to try to figure out who the portrait might be of, so they couldn't have been close relatives. There were several of those, ornately framed, just leaning up against the side throughout the crawl space. I found boxes of things like cast iron toy soldiers and other figurines, and there were at least four boxes of old photos on glass, a large number of them being of trains. Someone was really into trains. Then there were a lot of antique appliances, which didn't interest me as a child. All of this stuff was lost when my dad's house burned to the ground while I was a away at college. Such a large part of our history is based on things on paper, and that will not exist for this generation, or the generations to come. Even things that are stored on disks will inevitably be stored on media that may no longer be easily accessible to future generations. People text or send email today rather than writing letters, and a significant part of the history of our nation is derived from letters that were written by those who played a part in it. Even photos are stored digitally, and often in a cloud today, one that very likely won't be accessible in the future. I have about ten old computers packed away because they have photos and things that I think I might want to get to at some point, but I'll probably never get around to it.
Oh, that's so terrible about the fire taking all those treasures, Ken. I have to say that although I know many (maybe most?) people do the digital storage and cloud storage, I'm not one of them. I've been on the Internet for about 18-19 years now, and I'm not sorry to say that I still don't fully trust computer storage for anything important. Case in point... I used to trust VHS. 'Nuff said? But really, I have dozens of VHS tapes from a time that I'll never get back and I thought I would *always* have those memories because I "recorded it" after all. Ugh! (I realize I can get the ones transferred that haven't been ruined by now.) I have cassettes of my grandparents voices... many have been ruined after all this time. They can still be played, but it's a risk of breakage playing them because they're 35+ years old. I have a friend who swears by clouds... "Oh, no worries, I have EVERYTHING in an online cloud!" and I cringe realize that the particular cloud they use is only good for as long as that company stays solvent. I'm not sure why more people don't realize that. Well anyhow, in my world, pictures are *printed* on glossy photo paper like they were 30 years ago. Genealogy records (I have tons) and research is HAND printed in jumbo journals. Sure the ink will fade eventually, but I'm thinking not nearly as fast as "the clouds" may go away or entire computer languages may change. One more word... no, two. Floppy disks.
Your lamp is so charming and quaint! Don't know about guns though. What a collection you have. Thanks for sharing with us here at the forum.
I am not a collector per se; however there is one thing that I really love, and that is my mother's Desert Rose Franciscan China . She lived in California in the early 1920's, when Franciscan was still made in California . She didn't have a whole set; but she had a few beautiful pieces of the Desert Rose, which she kept in the little china cabinet by the old dial-telephone, and we never ever used them. After I got married, I found pieces of the same China here and there over the years, most from Thrift Store finds. Later, it was made in England, and now comes from some foreign country which I can't remember the name of. Most of mine is. The Californian, with a few pieces from England. I love my Franciscan, and do use it sometimes; because it does not make any sense to me for it to spend its whole life packed away, and I never enjoy it. I have always dreamed of having a small antique china cabinet to put it in where I can look at it every day; but it is now (sadly) on the very topmost shelf of the kitchen cupboard, where I can barely even see it, let alone touch it anymore. One of these days, I will ask @Bobby Cole to get on the step ladder and bring it down where I can use it again. I think that when I touch it, that is when I feel the closest to my mother. (This is not mine, but a picture to show you what it looks like)
I have nothing like that, family heirlooms and relics that can remind me of my family. Even my husband has nothing of that sort because all their family belongings were grabbed by his sisters. I saw a old Singer sewing machine, religious figurines and brass statues that I'm sure would fetch a price from antique collectors. There were 2 pieces of big coins that my husband said are amulets of his grandfather (who is a grand-nephew of a national hero). It's just sad that those are just memories and we haven't hear from his sisters anymore. Even the photo albums are all gone, no idea where they went. My husband's siblings are all in the US now so it's probably goodbye to those items.
Yvonne my mom had some of those beautiful Desert Rose pieces too. I wish I had kept them all but we were moving a lot and sold a lot of things. I really feel bad about that now. In the early 70s my husband and I owned a Ford 1955 Glass Top Crown Victoria. He didn't give much for it at all. After a few months he traded it for some other vehicle. He was just talking about that the other day and how it makes him feel sick what he got out of it, which was not much at all. I just now looked on the internet and see one for sale for $69,999, excuse me while I go beat my husband.
About the guns: numerous little-known pieces were made and used over the last 2 centuries. Names of oddities which come to mind are Wildey, and Gyro Jet, which was one of the most radical departures from firearms technology, up to it's time (1960s), used no cartridge case in it's ammunition, but rather a solid, one-piece round which propelled it's bullet ahead of it, consuming itself in the process. Saw a few examples in the Phoenix gun shows, 1990s. Here's a pic from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet
Treasures that were kept in a storage unit by my Mom. My grandmother (Mom's Mom) had a collection of the neatest glasses. She kept them locked in a cabinet in the dining room. After she passed my mother somehow ended up with all those glasses. Now that Mom is gone I have all those glasses. Every year I go out to my carriage house and unpack and unwrap and look at them and wonder 'What am I going to do with all these glasses?' Then I rewrap and repack them wondering 'What am I going to do with all those glasses?' There are other treasures that my Mom left behind but those glasses...