At Fullerton

As I was scanning this photograph a question occurred to me.   It may be a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.  Did women shave their legs before the twentieth century?   It wasn't until the World War 1 era that women began wearing dresses that showed their legs, so who would have know?   And what would they have shaved with?   The safety razor wasn't invented until 1880.  (It's amazing what you can find on line.)  A straight razor isn't the easiest thing to master.  Most men either grew a beard or where shaved by a barber.  I had a beard for a few years while I was in college and never really liked it.  But if my only other choice involved  a straight razor, I suspect I would have gotten used to  whiskers.  I can't imagine running a straight razor the length of a leg without major blood loss.  And just think of a nicked femoral artery.  Ouch.  Anyway, just curious.

Written on the back, "Mae, Guy, Ruth, Mother at Fullerton."  Fullerton is a city in northern Orange County in California.  It was named for businessman George Fullerton who bought the land for his employer, The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.   The city was incorporated in 1887.  This photo was probably taken in the 1920s.  Fullerton would have still been a major grower of oranges and other fruit, but by that time it had also become an oil boom town.  I'll have a barrel of crude with that orange slice.

Horse

Now here's a mystery.  Why would anyone make a postcard from this nag?  He's not a race horse.  No, this horse is a working horse, made obsolete by tractors and cheap fuel.  This one's a pretty old card, from back in the day when farmers worked their horses and didn't think of them as a family pet.  Maybe the owner of this animal had a soft spot and liked his livestock.  Maybe after his working life this horse was retired to the back pasture.  More likely, when this photo was taken, the farmer/owner was thinking of how much money he could get for old Jughead.  Take a look at this card and make an offer.  Jughead can still pull a plow, a wagon, and if that doesn't work, there's always the slaughterhouse.

50,000 + How It All Started

I just took a quick look at the stats page and noticed that, sometime in the past week or so, I went over 50,000 page views. I have no idea whether that's a big number for a blog like this or not, but when I started this I was lucky to get thirty or forty views a month, so it seems big to me. Anyway, to mark the 50,000 milestone, I thought I would do something I've never done before. I'm repeating myself. These seven images, all hand printed, by me, form the original glass negatives, are the very first photographs I posted on The New Found Photography.

I think it must be the dream of every collector of old photographs to walk into some out of the way junk shop and find a box of photos by an unknown photographer of real talent. I sometimes wonder, if circumstances had been a bit different, if this could have been my discovery. It was back in the good old days when I had a full time job, a decent income, and three weeks of paid vacation a year. I had just finished a backpacking trip in Montana, had cleaned up, packed the car, and was headed home to Los Angeles, when I made an impulse stop at an antique store, well more of a junk shop actually, and found these glass negatives. The owner of the place told me that he once had a crate of images, all from the same source. He thought that there must have been 500 or so, but he had broken up the collection. He had given some of them away, thrown some out, (Not because they were damaged or not very good, but because they were taking up too much space.) and had been selling the rest for a couple of bucks a piece. He had about forty or so left, but for reasons I've never understood, thought credit cards were for suckers, and it was a cash only sale. I bought these seven, got his phone number, and after I got home called him up, and offered to send him a check for the rest, but he said, "Nah, it's too much work."

I wonder what those other negatives might have been like. And I also wonder who took them. Perhaps it was a local professional or maybe an amateur who had a primitive darkroom in the fruit cellar. When I look at the farm photograph, I don't see the mother of the family, so I sometimes speculate that the photographer was a woman. We will never know, and any chance of finding out has, I think, been destroyed by a road side vendor, who thought more highly of telephone poll insulators, old barbed wire, and 50 year old beer bottles than he did of a box of glass negatives, and the unknown photographer who recorded a small, intimate piece of Montana history.

Courcelles

Thought I'd take a break for a few days from the German-American photo album, but still stay in Europe. Stamped on the back of this one, "STUDIO R. TASSIN E033 COURCELLES" I went on line and found 32 communities in France either named Courcelles or with Courcelles in the name, one in Quebec, and one in Belgium. Only the one in Belgium is large enough to sustain a trolley system. This photo came from the mystery grab bag of photos that I've already dipped into for several posts. (It looks like there are a number of images from Europe in the lot.) Click on the image to bring it up in a larger window to see the old Volkswagen and trolley car waiting for the parade to pass by.