1418 Photo album at an antique sale

Yesterday's antique sale at Lakeside was well attended and appeared to have about the maximum number of dealers the place could hold. Many are set up outside, and during showers, they just spread plastic over everything. I didn't pay much attention to antique sales until the early 1970s, then I noticed things I remembered from Grandma's house in Franklin Grove, IL. Then in the 80s, I began to notice things I remembered in my parents' home, and now I'm seeing items that I received as wedding gifts.

At this sale held the last week-end of August I usually can pick up a few pieces of my silverplate, and keep an eye open for my mother's, just as a memento. Occasionally, I see old photographs from the 19th century and pause to wonder if the little children grew up or if the young couple made it. But yesterday I saw a dealer of the mid-20th century with several photo albums. I leafed through one that looked just like the one I started when I was a little girl. It was dated 1950 and most of the black and white photos were of stock car races in Michigan--proud drivers standing beside their cars. Parts of it were the picnics and swim parties that the young people had who followed these racers. Just small and perfectly placed black and white brownie Kodak snaps--beautiful 20-something girls in swim suits and guys posing like "Charles Atlas." The dealer said the albums had come from a Toledo estate sale.

At dinner I told my husband about the album--mystified that families let these little treasures go. Although I still remember rescuing the box of photographs from his grandmother's apartment after she died. No one else seemed to see the family connection but me--and she wasn't even my grandmother. We talked a bit about digital images, wondering if family memories will be lost long before the 55-years- after-estate sale. Many people don't go to the trouble to print them, and just view them on the computer or TV screen, sort of an update of watching slides of the family get-togethers. You do it once, put them away, and rarely pull them out again. We have boxes of his parents' slides--the color is fading, and we have no idea who or what is on them, and when enough time has passed I'm sure we will dispose of them--acres of trips and scores of parties with friends, viewable only if we find a projector that will take them. Will the next generation of computers even be able to bring up today's digital photos? Or will you always have the wrong port or USB cord?

But there they were at the antique show. Black and white photos snapped by an amateur, dropped off for developing at the corner drug store, and then carefully pasted with little corners into an album 55 years ago, just as clear and crisp as they were when those young people were out having a good time at the stock car races.