On my rare visit to Barnes and Noble, a store that encourages consumer to buy books online, I discovered a new batch of books containing vintage photos of Kansas City and other nearby places of interest. While I admire the effort to collect and annotate enough historic photos for a book, I don’t see myself paying over…
Category: Old Photos
Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow
If you are not just headed to the Kansas City Public Library to look at porn or have sex, you may want to visit their excellent free exhibit Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow: Living With the Atomic Bomb, 1945-65. Whether you are a history buff or just want to know why your crazy grandpa is storing canned water…
Old Photos: Missouri Meerschaums
Little Midwestern town of Washington, Mo. is the world’s corncob pipe manufacturing center. When about 1870, a Missouri farmer made himself a pipe out of a hollowed-out corncob, he invented something which has brought a unique industry to Washington, Mo. Since then the Missouri Meerschaum Pipe Company, the world’s biggest corncob pipe maker has made…
Old Newspapers: Red Satellite Up With Dog
On November 3, 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik II timed to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Sputnik II was bigger and better than Sputnik I and carried a dog Laika – the first animal to orbit the Earth. The American headlines did not suffer from subtlety and political correctness…
Behind The Iron Curtain: Stalin’s Corpse Moves Out Of The Tomb
When Stalin died in 1953, his body was placed into the Tomb where he played Felix Unger to Lenin’s Oscar Madison for the next 8 years. They spruced up the front with Stalin’s name: