Floating on Air

After having lunch with my parents on Friday, we decided to take a 40 minute drive to a family run estate sale in a small Texas town. Since it was so out of the way, we figured not many Houston dealers would make the trip which could mean that there might still be good things left. The clincher for us was that the newspaper said there were photos. When we got there we saw a typical middle class home with items neatly displayed in the driveway and garage. Right off the bat, John saw a Nakashima chair for Knoll ($13), so he leapt out of the car. There was only one shopper who was already checking out, so we had the whole place to ourselves. I start looking in the boxes of stuff in the driveway and John asks the lady if she still has any photos left. She says yes and shows him into the garage where there are boxes and boxes of photos. Literally thousands of photographs from the late 1800’s to the 1970’s in albums and neatly filed in their original paper envelopes. Have you ever been somewhere so great that you feel like you are in a dream and can’t quite believe your eyes? This was that place for me. We just kept pulling out box after box of photos. In addition to the photos, there were boxes of negatives, slides, and home movies. There were two ladies running the sale. One was the daughter (who appeared to be in her early sixties) and the other was her friend. We asked why there were so many photos and all they said was that the couple never threw anything out. So why wasn’t the daughter keeping them? Shortly thereafter, I found out she was legally blind. They told us they were going to throw them away, but then figured a collage or decoupage person might want them for crafts.

To Be Continued…..

But in the meantime, here are some fabulous photos that came from one of the albums. They are from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The marquee on the movie theater is showing Divorce in the Family with Jackie Cooper which would date the photos to around 1932.