[Reece]

Check out Joe's shoes in 1912: get out the button hook. Have you guys ever seen a button hook? One lived in Mama's dresser drawer, unused for decades.

People throwing away family pictures: hard to understand. In an old house about 15 years ago I came across a whole big box full of pictures, negatives, albums, letters, etc. dating from the early 1900's up to about WWII. People left and abandoned a lot of stuff including this. There was basically the whole working life of a maiden aunt of the family who had worked as a nurse in NY state and northern PA, and some in New England. One picture in particular sticks with me: a group of middle aged women in flowered print summer dresses and wide hats, standing against a new '38 Buick parked on the sand of some New England beach, the wind blowing their dresses. I worked for a couple of years trying to locate somebody from that family and finally traced the box back to an antiques dealer. He told me that lots of people abandon stuff like this at estate sales and he ends up with it. I sent it to him. Finding something like that kind of breaks your heart that nobody cared about their past and the people that got them here.