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- This
column by John Cosway is a mix of 50 years of media memories
and 15 years of buying and selling experiences via live and online
auctions, flea markets, antique stores and markets etc.
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- Cosway's Corner -
Falling Out of Favour museum?
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- It's time for a Falling out of Favour
museum
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- By John Cosway
- There are museums throughout North America dedicated to a
wide variety of man's inventions, talents and cultural habits.
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- There are museums for automobiles, art, aircraft, wars, radio,
television, ships, music, toys, dolls, police and firefighters,
history, science, even shoes.
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- But in 2009, a year in which the buzz word is "change,"
we have yet to find a Fallen Out of Favour Museum, for the been
there, done that ways of life deemed obsolete by new technology
and a change of habits.
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- Each generation has its own list of everyday items that diminish
in appeal, or vanish along the way. Some call it progress, others
call it a nuisance.
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- Our Fallen Out of Favour Museum would be filled with a variety
of items large and small and would include a snack bar with a
menu of treats you just don't see any more.
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- We can see it now, as Edward R. Murrow used to say on his
1950s CBS show. A sneak preview of the Fallen Out of Favour Museum:
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- The telephone booth (endangered) - When American inventor
William Gray introduced the coin-operated telephone in 1889,
he couldn't have imagined city streets would some day be crowded
with men, women and children holding cellphones to their ears.
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- Gray's first pay phone was an elaboration of Alexander Graham
Bell's 1874 invention, which Bell unveiled to the public at the
1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The public pay phone
was a right number for Gray from the start, with one reservation.
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- The first outdoor phone was a call box setup like you see
policemen use in old cops and robbers movies. But it was back
to the drawing board when city traffic and other street noise
made it much too difficult for users to hear conversations.
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- Enclosed wooden phone booths, known as call boxes in Great
Britain, quickly followed and by the early 1900s, there were
tens of thousands on the streets of North American cities, towns
and villages.
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- The initial wooden booths were used across North America
into the 1950s, with Superman first using them for clothing changes
in the 1940s. Steel-framed glass booths became popular in the
1950s.
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- Telephone booths have had a lengthy run and Superman would
have been lost without them, but 20 years of cellphone enhancements
have trumped pay phones and booths hands down. They are quickly
vanishing from the urban landscape.
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 Advertising
ashtrays (endangered) - For decades, you could count on two
things when checking into a hotel room: A Gideon Bible in the
side table drawer and glass ashtrays with hotel insignias. More
hotel guests walked off with the ashtrays.
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- From the 1920s, hotels, restaurants and nightclubs turned
the other way when souvenir-happy vacationers slipped branded
glass and tin ashtrays into pockets and purses for display in
family rooms. They were lasting reminders of their vacations.
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- The pilfering was chalked up as an advertising expense.
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- With non-smoking hotel rooms, restaurants and nightclubs
- voluntarily or by law - sweeping the continent, souvenir ashtrays
are all but extinct as smoking collectibles. But they have become
a bonus for people who pilfered them for decades. Some ashtrays
dating back to the 1920s are selling for hundreds of dollars.
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- Collectors of New York City memorabilia should visit the
impressive ashtray selection at newyorkfirst.com/store/display.cgi?page=6091.html
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- Also long gone are the elaborate, and highly collectible,
tire-shaped glass ashtrays encased in solid, treaded rubber.
Distributed by Goodyear, Firestone and other tire companies,
they are another slice of nostalgia from an era when smoking
was cool and glamorous.
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 Television antennas (endangered)
- Two 1950s and '60s overhead snapshots that speak volumes for
change in baby boomer times are (a) A sea of men's hats in large
crowds and (b) A sea of TV antennas atop urban houses. The former
kept heads warm, the latter provided free television programming
year after year after year.
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- For several decades, your TV reception was as good as your
location and rooftop antennas, tower antennas or indoor rabbit
ears. Long Island inventor Marvin Middlemark became a millionaire
after inventing rabbit ears in 1956.
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- Inventors first began tinkering with television transmissions
in the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the early 1950s when Canadians
began buying them in large numbers. In the six decades to follow,
along came cable TV and satellite TV.
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- It was largely bye bye free television reception, hello monthly
cable and satellite fees.
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- But cable and satellite dishes haven't replaced all rooftop
antennas across Canada. Economics, or a lack of interest, have
kept numerous antennas in use, but they will become useless when
analog signals in Canada end on Aug. 31, 2011.
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- Never-say-die antenna users can convert to digital reception
with an $80 adapter, but odds are antennas will vanish in our
lifetime.
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- Meanwhile, whatever became of . . .
Hundreds of other needful things have come and come in the past
century and the Internet is a haven for people of all ages looking
for memories of their earlier years.
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- Whatever became of cloth steering wheel covers for cold winter
days; department store catalogues; manually operated cash registers,
leather caps for boys with earflaps and pilot's goggles; metal
pant clips for bicycle riders; whitewall tires; automobile inner
tubes; slide rules; 8-track tapes?
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- As for clothing, when is the last time you saw a man's shirt
with cufflinks or a woman's hat with pins? How about bowler hats
and fedoras?
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- Thanks to antique stores and markets, fleas markets and online
auctions, almost all items used in our lifetime can be purchased
to revive memories of the way we were.
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- We're not sure where you would display a phone booth in your
home, or a TV antenna, but get them while you can.
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