Getting My Kicks

I had to travel to a couple of the small farm towns north of Cornfedton last week and decided I would skip the Interstate and drive Route 66.

I must be living right. I pulled into a roadside thrift store that I have passed at least half a dozen times before and hit the jackpot.

Five food company cooking leaflets (including one from Post cereals circa 1943) and ten vintage sewing patterns. One of the apron patterns is cut from a newspaper, complete with a shoe ad and an article about Adlai Stevenson on the back.

(I thought of Lidian when I saw the “Too Tired To Cook” booklet from Veg-all but neither the recipes nor the artwork were tempting enough to shell out the quarter it cost).

The patterns were ten cents apiece. I tactfully pointed out the church ladies running the shop that the three patterns from the 1930’s would sell on eBay for five dollars each, minimum (and the monogram for probably a lot more). It took some convincing but they reluctantly agreed to let me pay them ten dollars for the entire haul; patterns, booklets, and a cone of ice blue synthetic mohair. If I were a truly unscrupulous person I would have walked off with the entire shelf-ful of Little Golden books they were selling for a buck and a quarter.

And in one of life’s little mysteries, in the rear of the store, on a rack full of polyester caftans, was a beautiful eyelet peignor with a “Pierre Balmain Paris” label. How it wound up in a church thrift shop in a town of 1100 in the middle of the cornfields is anyone’s guess.