Blonde Record Cabinet Offers More LP Storage

I recently picked up this great blonde storage cabinet, and I need it to help deal with storing a big bunch of records.

The price was right and shipping cost was very reasonable.

This is very light and the top is in nice condition, as you can see here.  Oh, and aren't those Dick Clark / Dr. Pepper contest forms cool?

I picked these up in April.  I'm probably going to frame them.

Road Trip Report from the Old Sled Works, Duncannon, Pa.

This large sign in the shape a sled leans against the Old Sled Works Antique Mall, a remnant from when the town could take pride in producing the Lightning Guider sled for decades.

I made the drive north through Maryland to south central Pennsylvania this morning to attend Sled Fest, a two-day celebration of the Old Sled Works antique mall's 20th anniversary in business.  I shot more than 100 photos today, but I'll try to pare those down to a manageable number.  This post will cover what I bought, and I'll follow with a post to show a little more about the Sled Fest.

I've been to Sled Works many times in the past, in fact, it's where I bought some of my first mid century collectibles, including some wrought iron and brass items I still have.  I have never left there without some kind of a great find at a good price, and today was no exception.

I made the drive early, left home at 6 a.m. and was sitting in front of the antique mall at 8:05 a.m., earlier than I expected.  Luckily there were some flea market vendors setting up outside so I did a little pre-shopping shopping.  Bought a baggie full of post cards for a buck, and got two more tiki masks for our screened porch wall for $5 each, 

And I also picked up this 50-cent cookbook...

 and got this Presto percolator coffee maker along with a few old paper/ephemera items I'll cover in a different blog post.  I plan to give the drip coffeemaker a rest and perk some joe in the morning with this baby.

So when I finally made it inside the building, I did a sweep through all the booths and found a few LPs for a buck each, including this Pajama Game with some cool cover art,

 some paper collectibles such as this 1963 Girl Scouts calendar for $3.75 (I'll probably hang it in the camper),

 and a decent deal on about a dozen miscellaneous Viewmaster 3D reels, including this Tom Corbett Space Cadet set.

Here's a rundown of the other stuff I picked up inside the mall:

$4 for this melamine server plate

$4 also for this bamboo Hawaii souvenir tray - I don't think it's real old, but it looks good anyway and we can use it in our bar

an aluminum sugar container for $2

On my second pass through, I spotted this small bookshelf - with the discount it was only $18.75 - score!  

I have to find a home for this bookshelf, right now it's in the dining room, but it will probably move to either the hallway or basement.  I love the look of this thing, but it really is pretty small, only about 24 inches tall.  Maybe I'll put some of my Whitman TV books on it.

And to wrap up this post, when I saw it I knew I had to grab this brass-framed, 3D, light up version of the Last Supper!  Once I polish the frame it will hang next to the similarly framed fat Elvis I picked up last summer.  

At the rate I'm going, I have the makings of quite a low brow art gallery, with the paint by numbers paintings and these lighted brass-framed babies.  I think the gallery will probably have to be in the man cave, i.e., the unfinished basement - She Who Must Be Obeyed does have her limits.

I'll be back with more photos from the Sled Fest, and some bonus pics and a couple more scores from another antique mall I hit on the way home.

First Families - political comedy albums part 1

In an older post, I've shown some of the TV-related vinyl LP records I've collected.  Now here's another LP collection that's even more unique.  Here in the Washington, DC, area, politics is unavoidable.  And with politics comes political satire.  Here are a few albums that have poked fun at occupants of the White House over the years.

This is probably the most commonly found First Family comedy album, produced by Bob Booker and Earle Doud during the Kennedy administration.  Kennedy's voice is done by Vaughn Meader. This album sold around 7 million copies and earned a Grammy as album of the year for 1963.  It was followed by a Volume Two version, which I do not have.  The cover for that second album used the image above but reduced it in size and the rest of the space was a very wide white border around the centered image.  The second version and the first album were both pulled off the market after the Kennedy assassination in November 1963.  Kennedy spawned a large number of comedy and serious records during and after his presidency, and I'll cover more on that topic in a future post.

This next album is a lot less common than the original First Family record.  'The New First Family, 1968, A Futuristic Fairy Tale', was produced by Bob Booker for Verve.  The focus here is on popular celebrities of the time, many of whom got involved in endorsing presidential candidates.  It's a lot less common than the First Family record.  This is the only one I've ever run across. If the art looks somehow familiar, it's probably because the artist is Mort Drucker.  He was a prolific album cover artist, but a lot of his work also appeared over the years in MAD magazine.  Voices on this album included impressions by two of the era's more successful presidential impressionists, John Byner, who did Lyndon Johnson, and David Frye, who did Richard Nixon.  Frye just passed away within the last week.  I'll have more albums by Frye in a future post of Nixon-related albums.

During the Jimmy Carter presidency, the first family format got a freshening.  On the album 'The Washington Hillbillies', Carter, his brother Billy, and their grandmother Lillian provided plenty of comedic opportunities. If you get around to antique malls much like I do, you still see unopened six packs of Billy Beer.  For the younger crowd, do a Google search on Billy Carter and you can get some idea of the color he brought to the White House in the late 1970s.  Although the cover art looks a lot like the first family albums, Booker and Doud do not appear in the credits so I'm guessing they had no involvement in this record.

Following Carter, the Reagan presidency once again lent itself to lampooning, and we got another first family comedy album, again from Earl Doud.  Celebrity impersonator Rich Little appears on this 1981 album, along with Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame, and Vaughn Meader, who was on the original album.

These last two albums were produced during the Kennedy years.  Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev got the comedy treatment in both records, which seem to be pretty rare.  'The Other Family' included impressions by Marty Brill and Larry Foster.

'At Home with The Other Family' featured voices by George Segal, Joan Rivers, and Buck Henry.

I still keep an eye out for more of these political comedy records and I have stumbled across some good ones over the years.  If you ask what they're like to listen to, I can't answer.  I'm still searching for a nice vintage console stereo to use to play the old records in my collection.

Still to come, a post on LBJ-related records, Nixon, and some others from the 1960s and 70s.