Silver cocktail shakers in fascinating designs. Mostly 1930’s. American. All making you want a daiquiri right this minute.
Tag: 1930’s
Sailing the ocean blue back before everyone caught a plane. Posters from various steamer lines that were mostly on the North Atlantic run.
1930’s American advertisements from when linoleum was new and exciting . . . .more later, found enough for at least one more post.
An envisioning . . . .somewhere over the English Channel and a dinner engagement to be kept in the fall of 1937.
Oh to be there. . . .
The airplane a bit late leaving the aerodrome in Croyden but all right after. Over the Isle of Jersey and the rest. Looking like teardrops in the sea, they always did. Funny. Part of Britain but always seeming like little ducklings attached to a mother somewhere near Dover.
The heat no better than the last time but a new beaver coat to be worn and a splendid new hat to show off. Better than summer, for sure. No bits from the wicker in the chair back to stick into bare arms in a summer dress. The front of the thing still stocking catching but wool of course, not silk. Not so bad and hard for anyone to see.
Dinner with uncle’s lawyer friend’s son someplace in Amsterdam. Cab to the hotel, first, and a long bath. Satin cocktail frock with heels to match and a tiny tiara from who knows where. Not really a tiara family but auntie unearthing it. Might be better not to lie but still. Getting to be on the shelf and a husband needed soon.
But a nice gentleman across the aisle and time to chat. With any luck the winds going the wrong way and having to land somewhere else and have dinner with him. . .like the girl who was down the hall back at Saint Timothy’s . . . .had to go to Barcelona and not Lisbon . . . . a Spanish count met and then married . . .never did get to Lisbon at all . . .
An envisioning . . . . fall afternoon after school in 1931 when Mother got arrested with whiskey in the bottom of the baby carriage
Oh to be there.
Somewhere on the edge of Boston as the leaves fall off the trees and the fathers build mounds of them in the driveways with the biggest heaps of all in the park to be turned into bonfires for Halloween.
Twigs to kick at on the way home from school and races to the corner. Homework in the kitchen but with the table pulled over the trapdoor in the floor.
The railroad not hiring but not mattering much. No, a special carpenter from somewhere in South Boston that knows not to tell. A special wall in the cellar with cases from that cousin up in Canada reaching up to the little windows that you have to be barely able to walk to peek into.
Bottles to unpack and straw that makes you sneeze. Sheets draped over Sunday clothes when a Saturday night shipment comes in. Having to be ready to be delivered Monday and Mass to go to. No one to really ask but a need to be careful. The priest getting three fifths a month but still.
Little sister sworn to silence and the nuns at the school not asking. But the straw burned. Too much to be put in the rubbish can and lugged out into the street.
Only an hour in the beginning but Mother at it for five years and two more babies needing to be fed. No, up before dawn now and everyone helping.
A few raids but nothing more. The wall with its coal dust blended in across the bead and board done perfectly. Cost a fortune but no matter. Twenty police and no one could tell.
New customers down past the hospital and things likely to chink. Bottom of the baby carriage underneath the baby. Two blankets so they don’t roll around and mother with the little ones starting out. But oh no . . . . . .someone having told . . . .the police coming out like honey bees out of a hive . . . . .
This is not my story though it happened in my neighborhood. A co- worker I had where I worked in my twenties had a grandmother, a mother of nine, who rode out Prohibition in fine form by starting up a whiskey distribution business out of her house after her husband lost her job. . . . did very well but was forever bored once Prohibition ended. . .. in her later years she was given to denial, but her children remembered all too clearly when Mother got raided . . . .
