Baby dressed nicely, sitting in a rose garden; appears to be 1930s. (more here)
Tag Archives: 1930s
Radium Baths For Your Health
Combining bathing and radium doesn’t strike me as a wise idea: as the name alludes, radium is a highly radioactive element that decomposes into Radon, another not-so-healthful element. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, however, radioactive compounds were seen as quite the opposite: a curative, capable of curing pretty much whatever ails you. Radium was […]
Portable Radios: Root of Modern Technology
This is where it all started: you might argue that it was the portable record player, or the Walkman, or the laptop, or the iPod, but portable personal electronics started in the 1930s with the advent of portable radios. As a revolution, the cover shows just how large the jump was from the last comparable […]
Leatherheads: North Dakota High School Football, 1930s
Yeah, you could consider this a tie-in to the new movie Leatherheads (opening today across the country!), but it’s as good an excuse as any to show an old movie of leather-helmeted football I own. The video linked above was part of a very small film-reel from the late 1920s or early 1930s; it couldn’t […]
Bob, Flipo, and Elmer
This photo was titled, “Bob, Flipo, and Elmer.” However, we’ve got four entities in the photo: Two horses, a man, and a dog. So, who’s who? Elsewhere in the album, we’ve met an “Elm“, which is probably short for Elmer, and a Brownie, that looks a bit like this dog. So, that means the horses […]
Thumb Problem
Poor lad — broken a thumb at such a young age, then made to get all dressed up for family. He does appear to have a brace (the black in his palm), which would indicate a pretty serious break, and the lack of our ultra-modern materials means it looks a lot worse than if you […]
Howie and his Truck
This picture was captioned “Howie.” Mr. Zillmer had a truck, was from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, owned a 1930s-era Chevrolet truck, and was friends with the photographer of this album. That’s about all we know — and with this magic of the internet, can anything more be discovered? Not as much as you might think — Howie […]
Potatoes!
From this collection. Potatoes. What more can I say?
Swimming at Mt. Tello
This photo is captioned “At Mt. Tello“. The rest of the series are from Wisconsin, so I assumed there must be a Mount Tello somewhere in the area. Google, sadly, has no results, but it sounds so familiar…Mt. Tello…Tello Mountain…Mount Tello — and a light turns on above my head. Along Highway 23 in central […]
A Sea Of Hats: Farm Foreclosure Sale
This image, one of two captioned “At Uncle Nick’s Auction,” shows a common sight around the rural USA during the 1930s. No, not just a crowd of fedoras and paperboy hats (although those were quite common, especially at the employment office or the bread lines). Farm foreclosures were driven by the Great Depression, a sluggish […]