Discover Joy in Vintage Collecting: My 20 Best eBay Picks This Month!

Hey everybody, this month we've got love for sale. Or at least we have 20 items we hope you'll love going on eBay right now. And the first one is this. This is a program from the 1955 Miss Universe Beauty Pageant. It was the first time it was televised. Nowadays it gets 1 billion viewers all over the world. And this is Miriam Stevenson, the first American to win the pageant. She is wearing a swimsuit. And that's a notable thing. Miss USA and Miss Universe did not exist until 1952 because the big beauty pageant was Miss America. And in 1951, the winner of the Miss America pageant, Yolanda Bet-Bazee, objected to wearing a swimsuit. She'd been raised in a convent school. She ended up being something of a feminist and an activist. And she did not think that it was appropriate that she be made to wear a swimsuit. That did not go over well with the sponsor. It was Catalina Swimwear. And they thought Miss America should definitely wear their product. So they broke off from Miss America and they started their own pageant. And that is the Miss USA slash Miss Universe pageant. And inside you'll see a lot of very lovely women from all over the world in swimsuits with heels. Because nothing goes better with a swimsuit than heels, right? The fact that it was televised made this a big event in a way that it had not been before. And because of that, people ordered these patent catalogs, including Mr. Michael Wright of Mercer Island, Washington. And so there's a letter in here and signed by the administrative secretary. It has a crease. It was folded over in mailing. Other than that, a minor bump on the corner. It is in excellent condition. And wow, look at that crown. Look at those trophies. The Miss Universe crown was valued at a quarter million dollars in the 1950s. And in here is a little newspaper clipping saying that Miriam Stevenson has decided to get married to Don Upta, the old local songwriter. I'm sure Michael Wright was very disappointed. While you're in Long Beach, you might want to go see Knott's Berry Farm and Ghost Town. You could have also gone to see Disneyland. It had just opened. A bountiful bevy of beauties. And it's a lot of fun. These pageant programs sell in the $50 range. We're starting this one at only $9.99. We do have a Buy It Now on it and several other pieces. So if you're a level 2 or level 3 member and you're seeing this early access, well, you might have first dibs on these. If you're not a member, consider becoming one. You can check out the membership links below the dash line in the description of this video. In the 1950s, Miss Universe might have worn this fragrance by Lanvin of Paris. This original box, and it is Arpège, which is French for arpeggio, like a run-up the scale on a piano, for example. They came into prominence in 1925 when they came out with My Sin. And this was their follow-up fragrance. This was made for Jean Lanvin's daughter, Marguerite. And Marguerite was absolutely doted on. Her mother had started off successfully as a milliner and designer in Paris, had her own house, designed children's clothing for her daughter, which became very popular. And she was able to parlay that into the perfumery. She showed her designs at the 1925 Art Deco Exposition in their fashion salons. In 1927, her perfumers came up with this, and Arpège became a very, very popular scent. It has a wonderful intaglio design on the top of the stopper. This is about 95% full. It still smells great. It is collectible, and especially when you find bottles like this that are still in good condition and still have a nice fragrance. So we're going to put this one at a starting bid of $29. They typically sell for around $50. We'll see where this goes now. Our next piece is something very different, but it's very near and dear to my heart, because it is a license plate from a very unlikely place, where there aren't even really cars. And that is Antarctica. There have been a few cars in Antarctica. They sent a Volkswagen Beetle that was specially designed to be able to take the extreme cold as something to run around in on the ice there. And there have been a handful of other cars that have come over. But there is no official licensing in Antarctica. These came about in 1963 as souvenirs sold at the McMurdo station to people who happened to make it all the way to Antarctica. SB stands for South Pole. 90 degrees is the latitude at the South Pole. It is indeed the world's last frontier. This was designed by Lt. Jaminet of Operation Deep Freeze. Operation Deep Freeze has its logo right there. I'm very familiar with Operation Deep Freeze because my father wintered over in Operation Deep Freeze when he was in the Navy in 1956-1957. It was a big assignment. He was helping set up the first radio stations at McMurdo. You had to be pretty hardy to winter over. They would actually give them special dispensation to allow their facial hair to grow to help keep warm. So there's these great pictures of my dad with his chief's uniform on and a big flowing red beard down almost to his navel. It's pretty funny. He had some great pictures too. I still have all the old slides. It was quite a duty station. He actually went back the second time. He was so enthralled with it. So you had to be one of those brave souls who was willing to go to Antarctica and then you could get this license plate. Because of that, of course, they're rather scarce. We are starting this one at $29.99. I think the value is typically around $50, but we're going to find out together right now. Now if you didn't want to go into the service, another option might be to take a business college course. McCain Private Business College is no longer in business, so I guess they didn't learn the business as much as they purported to be able to teach it. But they talk about how this is a school of quality and not quantity. And that it is a select school at a select location. The select location is Delaware and North Streets in Indianapolis, just north of downtown. You see they were using five and six digit phone numbers then. This is in the 19-teens and advertising pocket mirrors were very popular in the 19-teens with young women, and young women were often candidates to go to business college, as well as young men. A really lovely building that is no longer there. It's all parking lots and modern buildings in this location now. So Caine Business College and its building are long gone, but those who are fans of Indianapolis souvenirs or remember this part of town when it was a little different than it is now will find this interesting. And I suspect that's who the collector is. I suspect this will go to somebody who likes Indianapolis ephemera. We're starting at $9.99. I don't really have a buy it now on this because this is so singular. The chances that very many of these are still in existence are rather slim. So I'm not really sure how we decide to price it. And that is one of the reasons I like doing eBay auctions is because we get to let the market tell us what the unusual and scarce things might go for that we've never seen before. This next piece I'm going to have to show you in a photo because it's nicely packed and it is the size of a door. And it's too big to really pull back far enough to show you here. So I'll just show you the picture that we took of this Charlie Chan three-sheet lobby card. A one-sheet is a small lobby card, a two-sheet is a poster size. A three-sheet is the size of a door to a room. And they would fill an entire window in theaters. This is Roland Winters as Charlie Chan. This is the second turn of playing the Chinese-American sleuth from Honolulu. And this saw him sleuthing when two murders designed to keep a shipment of poison gas in the clutches of evildoers took place. This was near the end of a successful two-decade run of movies featuring Charlie Chan. Return information, you're supposed to send this back to Theatre Advertising Company in Washington, D.C. Back in 1948, they expected these to come back. Somebody kept this one and there's not a whole lot of them around. Now Charlie Chan looks kind of antiquated in our eyes today. I remember as a child thinking he was very funny. I remember as an adult thinking he was a little cringey, particularly when you grew up and realized that they're all being played by white people. But it turns out that the person this was based on was a real Honolulu detective. Earl Derbiggers, who wrote about Charlie Chan, loosely based his character on Chang'e Pana. Chang'e Pana had a very illustrious career. He was instrumental in breaking up a lot of the opium and gambling syndicates in Honolulu. He was thrown out of a second-story window and managed to land on his feet and run away. He was run over by a horse and carriage that was full of contraband. He was a badass. I've heard people say, oh well, Charlie Chan is such a racial stereotype. But to be honest, in this period of time, in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, it was one of the first times that a Chinese character in America had been depicted as anything other than the quote-unquote yellow menace, a horrible expression that was used at the time, used to imply that people from China were just interested in underground nefarious activities and the Chinese had faced a lot of discrimination. So this is the first time that someone of Chinese heritage in America was actually portrayed in a positive light. Chang'e Pana actually liked the movies and he met Walter Olin, who was the first one to play Charlie Chan, and was quite pleased by the depiction. They met in 1928 when The Black Camel, the very first Charlie Chan movie, was being filmed in Honolulu. So Charlie Chan, who did delight several generations of moviegoers, there was a little more to him than there was a little more to him, and he was about a little bit more than meets the eye. And because of that, I think this is an interesting piece. Also the fact that it's so hard to find lobby posters this size. And so, I think somebody will really enjoy this. You can see that somebody had this priced at $140 retail. I actually got this from the stock of a couple who sold movie posters for many, many years. We are starting it at $95, but I don't think that there's very many of these left in existence and the condition of this one is really good. Without tears, without stains, without any perceptible damage at all. When I first started YouTube, I was selling off a big collection of Gouda, or as the Dutch say, Gouda Paderijk. Gouda is a town in the southern part of Holland, and Holland of course was a huge trading center. And they got pottery and interesting art pieces from all over the world. They also had, of course, a very important art tradition of their own. Everything from still lifes to Rembrandt. And so, it was not surprising that around 1898 a number of potteries started in the town of Gouda. Initially, they did high-glaze, glossy artware, similar to what was being made in America at the time. But they quickly switched over to this semi-gloss and made these really interesting Art Nouveau designs with very freeform decoration in this color scheme. This one says Candiel, which, well, it's a candle. I really like the studdiness and yet some freeform and naturalistic elements as well. It has some variegation in the green part of the glaze with that wonderful handle. This would have been a chamber stick, something that you might take around at night, for example. I just love the rich combination of the rust and blue and green. This is very typical of second-generation pottery from that town. We're starting this at just $9.99. We have a buy-in now of $32 on it. It's about four and a half inches tall. And it's just a wonderful miniaturization of a candlestick holder. We have a couple of pieces we're selling by stoneware makers of import. And this particular one is Glidden Parker. Glidden and his wife started their pottery after graduating from the New York Art School at Alford University in 1940. They were one of the first Americans to make stoneware. And even though they had a factory, and even though they could produce as many as 6,000 pieces in a week, all of these were hand-decorated. Every single piece had hand-decoration throughout the 300 pieces they made over their 18-year history. The Gliddens had the good fortune to be taught by some really important artists and designers, including Don Shreckenghost, who is considered to be the father of American industrial dinnerware design. Shreckenghost made a lot of very, very famous patterns, like Salem tricorn shapes. He worked for Hall China. He worked for Homer Laughlin. He worked for just about all the big companies at one point or another. And then when the Gliddens started their own company, they had several famous designers work with them from all over the world. This particular design with the very cute, whimsical tiger is by Ernest Sohn. Ernest Sohn went on to have his own design house and make all sorts of things for many years. This particular one has the Glidden 35 mark on the back. They did a number of other animals as well, and the tiger is definitely one of them. This design is graffito, and what that means is that the outline of the tiger, they would put the glaze on and then they would scratch through by hand. They did it in a way that was very uniform, so the pieces all have a very similar look. But it was more than cute. It was really good quality, and it caught the eye of a lot of famous people, including television set designers in the early years of television. Some of these pieces were on I Love Lucy, because Lucille Ball and Desi Ardez actually had Glidden as one of their dinnerware patterns at home. They also were on the set of Perry Mason and Make Room for Daddy with Danny Thomas. This is a nice little 5.5 inch square plate. We are starting it at $9.99. They typically sell for about $25 to $35. In 1852, Poland was occupied by Russia. And then as now being occupied by Russia was not a ticket to a happy life. And so a gentleman by the name of Michael Goldwasser emigrated to the United States, and he came to San Francisco. He quickly heard of gold rushes in towns in Arizona where there were no goods and nothing for people to buy. And so he took the load from San Francisco to Arizona and started a trading post in 1860. And that was the humble beginnings of the Goldwater Department Store. He was determined to bring quality goods from San Francisco to the gold miners and the pioneers coming into Arizona, which was a very empty and very lawless state at the time. He endured attacks by Native Americans, as well as robberies by Western desperados. And he eventually was able to found his first store. And with some trial and error, Goldwater's stores started to become a big success. The store motto was, The Best Always. And he really looked for high quality. And eventually Goldwater's was a very successful department store that, in addition to regular high-end department store goods, sold things like DeGrazia. They had a whole shop for that. They had a whole shop with Native American jewelry. They eventually opened in Scottsdale Fashion Square. And around that time, they sold scarves like this. They did a lot of things that were for the local market. This is Cowaback Mountain. And it says so in the corner. And it also says Goldwater's with the cactus logo with the saguaro in the other corner. And made some time likely around 1960. At that point, the family still were involved with the stores. But they were also involved in politics. In 1912, the family got involved with the Drive for Arizona statehood. And that was the beginning of their political aspirations. By the third generation, grandson Barry Goldwater was running one of the stores, and then became the senator from Arizona. And in 1964, the Republican presidential candidate. They eventually sold to May Department Stores, which ran them until the late 1980s, and then closed the stores. Goldwater's got the name and the logo back, and are using it for a food distribution business run by a fourth generation Goldwater. There are a couple of different collectors for Goldwater items. They always were known for good quality. So there are people who buy their logo items because they were well made in the time, and are well made now. There are other people who buy these because of the family name and their connection to politics. Overall, it is in good condition. There's one small run right here, which is very difficult to see. But for full disclosure, I always like to be honest about condition. Other than that, there is nothing wrong with it. And we are starting this one at $19. We're just going to let whoever wants it pay what they feel it's worth. Our next item is a wonderful glass dresser box made by the very famed Lalique Company of Paris in the Dahlia pattern. René Lalique designed this pattern first in 1931. It was a fairly wide line. It included three perfume bottles, three atomizers, a bowl, and this piece which he referred to as the Dahlia Beauty Box. René Lalique died in 1945, but they continued to make this line because it's so pretty. In 1947, they added black enameling to the center points, as you see here. These are so popular that they have long taken two to three months on back order to get. René Lalique, of course, was inspired by the Mexican Central American flower, the Dahlia, which was not known in Europe until around the 19th century, and then became very popular in gardens there. René Lalique was inspired by the beauty of the Dahlia to make this piece, and it really is a lovely piece and well made, as Lalique glass always is. Wonderful satinizing. The enameling is very precise, and it's just very good quality. You can feel how soft the satin glass is. It's not done by sandblasting. This is very smooth from being put in an acid bath. A wonderful design with lots of detail when you look closely. This one is going to start, believe it or not, at $9.99, but they do typically sell in the $125 to $175 range, and I have seen asking prices for the René Lalique signed ones as high as $850. So still a very collectible line for Lalique, and very happy to have this to present to you. Our next piece is also a piece of Dahlia glass, but it is a colorful Dahlia, and it is a paperweight made by the Caithness Company of Scotland. You can see the Dahlia in the magenta trapped inside this green ball, and there's stippling on the back so you see this interesting dot pattern through the top of it, which I can show you a little bit more clearly from the back. Yes, there you can see it up at the top. It's a very pretty piece. The Caithness Company started in 1961, and since then they have created over 2,500 designs, many of them paperweights. I love how you can even see down into the stem here. The quality is just really good. The paperweights started about a year into their production when Paul Isart came to work for them, and he was really interested in paperweight development, and launched this line, which has carried them into the 21st century. In 1968 they got the Royal Warrant because the Queen Mum loved Caithness paperweights, and around that same year the first limited editions came to be. Now, this one does not have the later Caithness edge, Caithness Scotland, and then on this side we see where it says W154, which is the stock number. It tells us it's the Dahlia. I have always been fond of Caithness paperweights. I think they're beautiful. I think there's a reason that they've managed to stay in business. They've ridden the ups and downs. They have faced studio competition from all over the world, and they are still making paperweights because their quality is so good. The faceting, the polishing. We're starting this one at $29.99. We have a buy it now of $59, which I honestly think is pretty reasonable for this piece. We'll find out if the market agrees with me. Now, this is another pretty piece of glass, but in a little different guise. This is a 1910s hapken holder with a lovely deep magenta glass stone with faceting, and look at the detail on this. Love the two birds. There's something very regal about that. It almost seems like European heraldry somehow. A few things to know about hapkens. First of all, look at the attachment there. Very important that you see that kind of an attachment because reproductions do not have that. So this connection here has a lot to do with the authenticity. The shape of the surround is very typical of early Art Nouveau around 1895 or 1900. That is the heyday of the hatpin because up until the 1880s, a lot of women wore bonnets. Hatpins started the 18th century, but it really is in the 1880s and 90s and the early 1900s that they really became popular. Hats became very elaborate, and as a result, hatpins became elaborate as well. And the Gibson girls liked them too because they had big, tiled hair, and so they wanted long pointed shafts. This one's about 13 inches long, which is definitely on the long side. That became an issue in several major American cities before and during the suffragette movement. There were rules about having to keep the pin covered, rules about how long the shank could be because there was concern that they would be used as weapons, particularly after a New York riot in 1908, where suffragettes were surrounded by the police on four sides and used their hatpins to try to battle their way out. I mentioned that story previously and had someone say that they did not believe that was true, but I have actually been able to confirm that from other sources since. There were also ordinances regarding hatpins in Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and other American cities. This one came from a longtime collection in Seattle. I think it's just beautiful. There are collector societies both here and in the United Kingdom that are devoted to hatpin collecting, and you can see why when you see one as fine as this. And we're starting this beauty at only $19, far below where I expect it will land, but we're going to let the market tell us, because we like to do that here sometimes when we have something that we think is rather exceptional, but we're not exactly sure how to price it. So we're going to let the collectors tell us what this splendid piece is worth. Back in the 1920s, the southeastern part of the country was considered rather distant from the manufacturing, and because of that, there was a desire to place manufacturing in the southeast so that pottery and other goods could be distributed regionally. An Ohio investor found a family named the Lessels who were willing to move to a place in the southeast to be named. And so they had a contest between 25 different towns in the south to see who would give them the best deal, and the winner was Camden, Arkansas, and the pottery that resulted was Camark pottery. James Lessel had some of the clay sent to Ohio, he made some wonderful artware pieces with lusterware that were very high-end and very beautiful, and then he died. And his wife and daughter had to go down and start the factory. They quickly sold it to another artware maker who made more beautiful pieces that were hand-painted, and then the depression hit, and he couldn't make a go of it either. And so the Camark company switched to molded wares, and by 1936, they got a continuous tunnel kiln, and that meant suddenly they could produce a few thousand pieces per day. And that's what made all the difference. Suddenly they became wholesalers to companies not just in the southeast, but all across the country, including Macy's in New York. Because their quality became very good, their glazes were pretty colors, they maintained a real evenness as you see here, and this bird, which is a flower frog, a flower arranger, would have sat in one of their bowls, or a bowl that you already had at home, has lots of holes to arrange your flowers, and this nice center portion with the hole that goes through so everybody can get water. It wasn't used a lot, so this one doesn't have water stains, it doesn't have any chips or cracks. By the 1940s, Camark had 100 employees and was at their peak, and that's about the time this piece was made. They actually stayed in business until the 1980s, which is a pretty good run. It's going to start at $24.99. I believe the value is closer to the $50 or $60 range, and we're going to find out together now. In 1900, St. Louis was becoming a huge American city. There was talk of moving the capital from Washington, D.C. to St. Louis because it was very important and very much in the middle of the railroads, the river traffic, and the migration from east to west. However, St. Louis was also a pretty rough city in 1900 and needed a lot of civic improvements, and the answer to all of those things was to host a World's Fair commemorating the Louisiana Purchase, which was originally to be held in 1903 for the 100th anniversary, but had to be held up because of the improvements that needed to be made until 1904. But one improvement they had made in the 1870s that was considered quite remarkable, and among the greatest in the world at the time, was the building of this bridge. This is the Eads Bridge. It is still there today. It goes between St. Louis and Illinois, and it was built in 1874. It is the oldest bridge remaining over the Mississippi River in the St. Louis area, and the reason it's lasted so long is that it was built all the way to bedrock. Those pillars you see go 100 feet below the river, and the center span at the time was the world's largest at 520 feet. This postcard, which was done for the World's Fair, is remarkable in that it is called a hold-to-light. Hold-to-light cards have two layers, and when you shine a light through them or hold them up to the sun, out pop all of these windows, and it's suddenly a night scene with the moon and all of these windows lit. And that was quite a novelty in 1904. This is before the golden age of postcards, and so hold-to-lights are a really early, interesting technology and a very specific form of collecting in the postcard world. And this one has the double whammy of having a relationship to the St. Louis World's Fair. I'm putting this one up to bid because it's in the best condition, but I also have these two from the fair, and if you're interested, let me know because I'm not putting these on eBay. They both have creases, but they are also scenes from the World's Fair. And it says hold-card-to-light right on all of them. Hold-to-lights are just a really neat, collectible area of postcards. And of course, one of the reasons the hold-to-lights were so notable to people at the time is because the St. Louis World's Fair, for some people, was the first place they ever saw electricity used in a hall. And these cards give you the idea of what it's like to have electric light. They are just fun. And having fun is so much the reason that collecting is what it is. So Eatsbridge is going up now. It is offered at $9.99. There is a buy at now of $30. They typically sell for at least that in this condition. The other two, if you're interested, well, please inquire at theantiquenomad at gmail.com and we'll give you a price for those. World's Fairs have an amazing way of bringing different peoples from around the world together. And that was true in 1915. Even though World War I was starting in Europe, the San Francisco Panama Pacific Exposition was a huge success. And part of the reason for that was that it was not only to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, but also to celebrate the rebirth of San Francisco, which had slowly rebuilt over a nine-year period from the fire and earthquake. Countries from all over the world wanted to participate, from as far as Siam, New Zealand, Australia, and a whole lot of European countries, including Denmark, which had its own pavilion. And in the Denmark pavilion, you could get this plate. If it looks a little bit familiar, well, yes, it is by Royal Copenhagen. And it is similar to the Christmas Eve plates that they were making then. There's the Royal Copenhagen mark on the back. But what's different about this from the Christmas Eve plates is that the Christmas Eve plates, especially in later years, were made in very large quantities. The 1915 World's Fair plate, they made enough to sell them at the pavilion over a six-month run and that was it. And so this is actually a very difficult World's Fair piece to find. You see the San Francisco information on the bottom and Denmark at the top. And it's a very nice pastoral scene. This is one of the first times that they used their plate design to do something other than the Christmas Eve plates. And the 1915 World's Fair, of course, was significant for many reasons. Everything from the creation of the Palace of Fine Arts, which still exists in San Francisco, and Golden Gate Park, which was the fairgrounds and is still a lovely place to this day, to the Tower of Jewels, 400 feet tall, studded with refracting crystals so that it glistened in the sun by day and glistened under the spotlights at night. John Philip Sousa brought his band. They played there for nine weeks. The Liberty Bell was brought on loan from Philadelphia. This plate is actually a pretty difficult find from that World's Fair. They usually sell for about $50. Again, we're starting it at $9.99 and we'll see where it goes. We've had some luck in the past selling paperweights advertising various old businesses that are no longer there. This is Ideal Cement Stone Company and you see their cinder block there. This was a company in Omaha. I'm sure they built their own building. This is in great shape. There's a few surface scratches, but there's no chips and the back is solid. It's not chipping away or peeling off, which is important on these because that can happen. It's also got color, which is a nice feature. Ideal Cement Stone Company is long gone, but in the 19-teens when this was made, Omaha had really, really exploded from its pioneer days and had over 100,000 people and was growing very quickly, especially after the 1898 Trans-Mississippian Exposition, which was their version of a regional World's Fair. And that brought 2 million people and a lot of them stayed on. Omaha had been established a relatively short time before and had been chosen to be the eastern end of the Union Pacific Railroad, which was built from there to California during the Civil War. So it became a big railroad center, a big stockyard center. Nowadays, of course, they have Warren Buffett, but in this time they were moving from a frontier town that in the 1890s was run by an 8-term mayor who smiled lovingly on gambling and prostitution and other sordid activities happening in this town. And Omaha changed very quickly from that rough-and-tough pioneer town into a much more stable 20th Thanks to companies like this helping build it, particularly after the 1913 Easter Sunday tornado tore a lot of Midtown down and it had to be rebuilt. So that is why this company had money to advertise and they were competing to help build Omaha into what it is today. We're starting this at $19.99. I'm not really sure where it'll end up. The last time we put something like this on from Wichita, Kansas, it ended up selling for about $50. So it really is more of a question of what collectors who have an interest in either the product or the history of their city find this. Now speaking of railroads, one of the most famous railroad companies in the East was the New York Central. It was consolidated from a bunch of other planned and operating New York short lines in the mid-1800s and then was taken over by Cornelius Vanderbilt in the 1860s. It became known as the water level route because you didn't have to go over any mountains like you did in Pennsylvania. You weren't going to get twists and turns and creeks and groans because it went straight up the Hudson River, straight over to Chicago. And once you got to Chicago, you could take the Mercury and the Mercury ran from Cincinnati in Chicago to Detroit. It's heyday was the 1930s to 1950s. That's about the time that we see a lot of streamlined steam trains, and that is why you see the streamlining on this 1940s era plate from the New York Central Mercury line. It has the back stamp made expressly for the New York Central by Syracuse, China. Now this one you'll notice on the back rim and on the side rim does have some wear. That's because as good quality as these were, and it does have some surface wear, it's a little hard to tell. You may be able to get it when I tip it at an angle, but the reason is that these were very well made plates and because they were for passenger cars. During the Second World War, the trains were able to upgrade things like China and accessories and services, but they didn't have the ability to stop the trains from running to upgrade the trains. Then after the war, they suddenly had competition from airlines and trucking industry and the railroads really went into a decline. And because of that, they couldn't really afford to replace these. So a lot of these were used all the way up until 1968 when the New York Central and the Pennsylvania and some other lines merged into the Penn Central Railroad, which promptly collapsed two years later in the biggest bankruptcy to that time in American corporate history. And so because of that, you do typically see wear on these because they were used for a long, long time. This might have been used as long as 20 years on the train, but it's a great design. Love the streamlining, definitely very modernist. Syracuse make great stuff. We're going to start this one out at $9.99. I see sold prices anywhere from about $40 to $75 on these typically, and we'll find out whether a railroad buff buys it or if one of our Syracuse China collectors likes it. I bought a big collection of playing cards, and this is one of the sets. And this one advertises Teachers Highland Cream Whiskey. Now you might think that this was something for the school administration to drink when the kids got out of hand and they just couldn't take it anymore. But the name Teachers has to do with William Teacher, who, when the UK government decided in 1823 to stop making the Scottish distilleries illegal and instead charge an excise tax, said hey, I'm going to get in that game. And by 1830, he had a license to be able to sell through his mother-in-law's shop in Glasgow. By 1860, they were making a malt using peat, and that became the basis for the Highland Cream line. And by 1878, that line was being exported all over the world, including Canada. And that's why this World War I era playing card deck has a Canada war tax stamp with King George V. So they had to pay 8 cents extra in order to have this there, because it's a sin tax. They're gambling and they're talking about liquor, well, let's get 8 cents out of them for the war. So it's interesting in that regard. The condition of this is really great. Now the box does not have a lid on this side, but the cards really appear almost as if they've never been played with. They're really crisp and clean. Here is the Joker. They are indeed all there. And the family that ran the company that made Price Metal playing cards was lucky to get these into Canada, because at the end of World War I, Canada briefly had prohibition for a few years. It went away pretty quickly. It did not last the length that it did in the United States. In the United States, it was not until the lifting of prohibition in 1933 that Teachers Highland Cream Whiskey became exported here. It is very popular in a lot of the English-speaking countries. It's very popular in India. It's a name that has lasted, and so there are collectors who would be interested in this because it's a pre-prohibition booze item. There's other people who just like old playing cards, and there might even be interest from somebody because of the war connection. So for all of those reasons, I think this is a pretty collectible deck. We're going to start this at $9.99. We have a buy it now of $29 on it. Speaking of war, well, a lot of innovation comes with war. And in 1944, a 17-year-old came up with a coaxial rotor for helicopters, and his name was Stanley Hiller, and he started the first West Coast United States helicopter factory in Palo Alto, California. And here are Hiller helicopters for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. They're showing all of their past designs, which dated all the way back to 1944, so about six years. The helicopter was a pretty new idea here in the United States. Sikorsky built the first one here in 1939. The Germans actually invented them in 1936, so it was pretty new technology. Here they talk about Hiller as a basically young teenager starting to investigate helicopters and coming up with these ideas that made them possible. Then they show their factory and they talk about today and how they would love to be selling these for civilian use, but now that we're involved in the Korean War, because this is 1951, it's going to be a while before we're able to sell them for all the other things people could use helicopters for. So helicopters at this point are still pretty much considered a military machine. It wasn't until after the Korean War that the usefulness of them for civilian purposes was fully realized. And then here we see ideas about tomorrow and how we are going to use them in military and non-military ways. And look at the designs, they are so different than helicopters today in some ways. This young man was really ahead of his time, and this booklet with all of the models is something that is a really interesting piece from its time. I think somebody is going to really enjoy this. There are not very many of these around. Hiller Helicopters ended up becoming part of Fairchild Industries, and there is a museum in San Carlos that shows 28 of their early models. So we're going to start this off at $9.99 also. I suspect the value is closer to $30. I think we have a buyout now of that amount. Well we're on a bit of a war kick here, but that's because we've been finding some really interesting items that, in this case at least, are really fun and have a rather sweet story. This fellow here is Old Bill, and Old Bill and his friend Alfie were the characters in a cartoon series started in 1914 by a wounded captain in the English army by the name of Bruce Barron's father. He first published these in the Bystander tabloid, and you get a bit of the humor here. Old Bill, with his walrus mustache, is complaining about more plum and apple, and says, when the hell is it going to be strawberry? And that's because, during World War I, they kept getting the same rations over and over in the trenches. It's really interesting in the margins. You see biplanes, you of course see bullets, and you see representations of the trenches. This became a very popular cartoon in England, and something of a morale booster, because while the society Brits found it tasteless and vulgar, the commoners who were being made to fight in the trenches, they really loved it because it was something that represented what life was actually like. Life in the trenches was described by many people, including my great uncle, who fought in the trenches in World War I and was gassed with mustard gas, as being moments of sheer terror punctuated by long periods of great boredom. This particular plate was made by the Winton Company before they had the royal name, and in Stoke-on-Trent, the Grimwaiths were the family who owned Winton, that's why you see that name on there as well. Some versions of this actually have a backstamp that says, to our boys, by the women running the pottery while you're away. And so, most of these pieces were made by women. The women in England went to work during the First World War to keep the pottery factories open in England while the men were off fighting. There's a few different varieties of these. It was made to be a wall hanger, as you see this old rope here, and the flat back. It wasn't that you couldn't have used them for table service, but they were definitely made as something to hang, and they were very popular for a period of time. Fragments from France was what Bruce Berm's father called his cartoon series, and he continued it, and it was made into plays and shown in London, and it lasted into the 1920s. And then, in the Second World War, he ended up being a cartoonist for American publications like Stars and Stripes and Yank, and was their cartoonist in their European theater during the Second World War. I think it's a really interesting piece. I just got it recently. I've never seen one before. I did not know this story, and I thought it was kind of fascinating, and I think someone else will too, because as a piece of militaria, it's a little bit more comic and light, but it definitely gets a point across. And so we're starting this one at 1999. And that brings us to our last piece, which is a piece of stoneware by a surprisingly influential man by the name of Bernard Leach, and he was an Englishman who went to Japan around 1910, and he was studying art, making woodblock prints. He loved Japan before the Westernization, and he met people there who fired Raku pottery and became quite enthralled with it. And so he ended up developing his own line of stoneware. This is a piece of what they call Standardware, which was the dinnerware his company in St. Ives, England, ended up making in the middle of the 20th century. This particular piece came to me from a 91-year-old woman from New Zealand who lived in England, met him, and actually took a few classes under him at the time. And so I have very good provenance on it, which is good because there have been reproductions. And so it's good to know it's the real thing. On the back there, we have the Leach mark and England. And you can see the interesting way that the stoneware is done on the bottom. He came back to England in the 1920s, joined the St. Ives Guild, and by 1940, he wrote a potter's book, which was considered the Bible for studio potters in England. And he really wanted people to consider making things not because of industrialization with an insensitivity to beauty, but because the form and the shapes and the glazes were attractive and interesting, and that there was artistry to the piece. And he was hugely influential. He worked with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamata. They did a lot of artware lines. There are museums that show them. He became famed as a pottery instructor and lecturer in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan. He traveled all over the world doing that. But he and his students also continued to run the pottery at St. Ives, and that's where this piece came from. Standardware was very robust as dinnerware went, and yet it's still really very delicately thin and just really nicely designed, and so far ahead of its time. He worked with Seattle artist Mark Tobey, who introduced him to the Baha'i faith. And Mark Tobey, of course, was a very influential mid-century artist as well. So he traveled in some really interesting circles. And these pieces are actually pretty difficult to find, not just in the United States, but really anywhere, because they're very collectible and have been. There was a book written about his artware back in the early 1980s. A lot of this has gone into collection. So I was very excited to get it. I am starting it at $99. I think the actual value is somewhere in the $150 range for this very cute, well-balanced sauce pot with a side stick handle, which has a nice vent hole in it. It's just really fun for me to be able to show something like this, because we see so little of it. And now I've gotten to introduce you to somebody who was very, very important in studio stoneware. So many of the lessons that he learned were later taken up by our Raku makers in the United States, by our studio stoneware makers, who we covet and prize now, who were working in the 1970s, 80s, 90s. And here this person was developing this craft 50 years before them. So this is the seminal stuff, and it is just a really neat piece. And I think someone's going to really enjoy having it, as I have really enjoyed bringing it to you. I'm so glad that you joined me for this. Thank you so much for watching. If you are interested in any of these items during the 10-day auction period, you can go to the links in the description below and click on them and see how they're doing, if they're still available. And we'll report back later on how they all did. If you enjoyed this video, check out this one. Also click thumbs up to like this video, and check the description for information about our Patreon, our memberships, we've got a lot of different levels with different perks and bonus videos and early content. Also please do check out our website, theantiquenomad.com, for appraisal help. And we'll see you again for more adventures in the Antique and Vintage community soon. Bye for now!