Garage Sale Finds, 2023

I spent a lot of the day wandering through garage sales and yard sales in my neighborhood, so I have a few finds to share and discuss. Almost all of them come from the same sale, where the seller had a huge number of items that his parents had kept "since the Depression," as he put it. 

He had priced them to move. There were so many cool things all in one place it was a bit overwhelming. I didn't get very many things, really: I told other people about that sale as I went around the neighborhood so they could get in on the goodies.

This small tin for In-B-Tween Cigarritos is from some time after 1914. Check out the bee graphic in the top left corner.

It's from Baltimore and made by Kraus & Co. There are several for sale online, but this was a very good price. There isn't any other information about it or the company that I could find. 

Princess Pat, on the other hand, was a well-known cosmetics brand until at least the beginning of World War II, now forgotten. It was created by a Jewish couple who had both immigrated to the U.S. as children. They were also both chemists, living in Chicago. Their various companies went down a number of paths, but one was the Princess Pat brand, named for a daughter of Queen Victoria who got married in 1919 just as the company was starting.

This is a rouge compact with mirror, from 1925 according to this site. (The rouge is all used up.)

I had no idea there was such a thing as a wash board made of glass, meant for lingerie, but The Glass King has informed me that there is. "Do not rub hard - the board will do the work." Do you think that's a double entendre? There is no information on the company online, but lots of these for sale.

Check out this Fisher-Price hot dog wagon. It's from the 1930s or maybe around 1940. 

Fisher-Price was founded in 1930 by four people, two men and two women. One of the women, Margaret Evans Price, was the art director. Her colorful lithographic designs gave the toys, particularly the push-pull toys like this hot dog wagon, their details and charm. 

You can see the dots used in the lithographic printing in this close-up photo of the logo, which also gives the East Aurora, N.Y., location of the company.

The other woman involved in founding and running the company (through 1957) was Helen Schelle. She had run her own toy shop in Binghamton, N.Y., in the 1920s and was asked by Fisher and the Prices to join them to be part of starting the new company, located outside Buffalo. According to the Entrepreneur magazine encyclopedia of entrepreneurs, Irving Price (Margaret Price's husband) was the financier of the company, while Herman Fisher had been working for a toy-builder for four years and wanted to start a company. The magazine also says that Schelle and Margaret Price collaborated on the designs of many of the early toys. A 1935 article from the Buffalo Courier-Express about Schelle describes her life up to that point.

At a different sale, I found this hard-rock maple Playskool car. I remember my 1964/65 kindergarten classroom having indestructible cars and trucks like these. The person I got the car from, a Gen Xer, said his grandmother worked for Playskool, and he used to play with it at her house when he was a child in the 1970s. I couldn't find images or information on these types of Playskool toys online but I remember them vividly. This was the best page I could find on the company's history. 

That car weighs about three pounds; one child could probably knock another one unconscious with it.