Vintage Mug Shots

I hope you all enjoy this as a treat as much as I did putting it together!

First off, I didn’t have any pictures of Grammy scanned when I talked about the women in my family last weekend, so I want to share a couple photos of my great-great-grandmother.

This one is my great-great-grandparents. Grammy was born in 1885, so the photo was probably taken in the early 1900s.

Wonda Pugh

This one is Grammy in the mid to late 60s

And here is Grammy with me in 1966:

Here is my last vintage family photo, the four generations of women before me that were alive at the time of my birth:

Circa 1949

Top to bottom: Grammy, Mums, Grandma and Mom

Now the photos are definitely vintage, but they are not my Vintage Thingie Thursday piece . This is my Thingie for the week:

Monogrammed cups for Wonda and Opal Pugh.

I wanted these cups when we cleaned up Mums’ house, but Grandma trumped me. “You’ll eventually have them, but for now, they’re mine!”

As I’ve said before, Mums was only Opal Pugh until 1922, so they have to be older than that. If they were etched after 1910, there’s probably another one in the family for my great grandmother’s sister, Garnet.

Family Lore: the girls were both named for gems. Had there been another sister, she would have been Ruby.

There you have it, a couple of my most treasured heirlooms and certainly the best “mugs” in my collection!

See more vintage treasures at The Coloradolady, Vintage Thingy Thursday.

Sentimental Saturday

Me and Mom 1999

Yesterday was another productive, although tiring afternoon/evening in the White Tornado world. I got another chunk sorted and cleared in the future woman cave that turned up some wonderful things. I went through a grandma box and a Mums box.

Before I go further, I want to clear up a source of confusion. I realize that what’s simple for me can be very messy to try to read and I’m sorry. But don’t we all do that from time to time? Things that have just “always been” don’t seem to need clarification. My brain says if I made a distinction once, it’s already overkill. That would be true if I was writing in my private journal and didn’t expect anyone to ever read it. Even my private journals I do want read after I’m gone. They are all my secrets that might make insightful, helpful or entertaining reading 60 years or so from now by my nieces, grand nieces and nephews, and greats and so on.

Grandma, Mums and Mom 1945

Anyway, the distinction issue. The other day when I mentioned women in my blog who were here before me, I spoke of “Mom.” “Grandma,” “Mums” and “Grammy.” Those are four different women. It gets more confusing because if I talk about Tori and Rina the names are different for each one. SO the round up goes like this:

I am Nani, nicknamed that by my mother and in 1994 it was intended that I’d be “Aunt Nani” to my nieces. Well, they never called me Aunt Nani, I am Nana, pronounced /NAH-nah/. They are 17 now and I’m still Nana, so I don’t think that’s changing.

When I speak of “Mom” on my blog, I speak of my mother, Janet. Truth there is I didn’t call her “Mom,” I called her “Fluff” pronounced /Floof/. That was a private nickname and to my friends and other family members I still referred to her as Mom. To the Niecii, she was “Grams”

My first communion with Noni and Grandma 1973

Now is where it starts to get a little more complicated. Being the oldest is so cool because you get to name everyone. I had very distinct differences in the names so I could keep them sorted out when I was very young. My grandmother, Wonda, was “Grandma.” She got to keep the American English Grandma because my paternal grandmother, Rosa, was Noni. Oldest grandkid, I got to choose to call my nonna, Noni and all of my cousins followed suit. The girls never got to meet Noni, so they know her as “Noni” or “Dad and Nana’s Noni” Grandma to them was “Grammy.”

Grandma and Tori 2005

Grandma with Rina 2007

We’ll skip a generation for a moment. This is a huge source of confusion. My nieces and I share a wonderful treasure in that we all knew our great and great-great grandmothers long enough to remember them! They called their great-grandmother, Wonda, “Grammy.” I called my great-great-grandmother, also Wonda, also “Grammy,” and their great-great grandmother, Opal, “Great-Grammy.”

I actually have just one vivid memory of Grammy whom I didn’t see very often, but I did a few times. She passed when I was 9. I have lots of pictures and things she wrote on, touched and some of her quilts, but the memory I hold is just a simple saying hello when I was about 5 or 6. It’s just at a family gathering, I made a point of finding her to say hello. I just remember saying “Hello Grammy!” and she said “Hello Honey,” with a smile. We hugged and kissed and that’s the memory. Small, but special because I don’t remember anything else from that family gathering except that it was summer and outdoors at a relative’s home in the country.

Mums and Grandma 2000

Back to the original timeline. My great-grandmother, Opal, was “Mums.” She’d originally been “Mom-mom.” which is what my mother called her, but I eventually shortened it to Mums. I was very close to my great-grandmother. I remember spending the day with her from time to time when I was little. We lived about an hour apart then, so it was a big, just us, holiday for me. When we were building our house that was just a mile away from her we lived with her for a year and we shared a room. Mums snored, shake the rafters loud. I think that’s why I don’t even notice when David snores; it’s actually a comforting sound to me. Once I started driving, I never missed a Tuesday coffee at her house. I was in my 20s, she in her 80s, the first time I heard her say, “Sometimes I feel a little old.” She also told me, “But a spoon of ice cream makes that go away!”

Some of the real treasures I found in the box from Mums’ things that I went through yesterday include a diary that starts on January 1, 1944, which is the year my grandparents eloped. There are lots of very old photos. Three identical photos of a baby in an old brown cardboard fold over frame. There’s nothing written on any of those, but I have a hunch it might be Donald, the older brother Grandma never met because he died from pneumonia before she was born. I think that’s part of why Mums and I became so close. I was hospitalized with pneumonia when I was 2. Mom had told me that Mums was terrified when I got sick and the happiest of the whole family when I came home.

Here is one of the wonderful treasures:

Mums 5 years old

This says “Opal, taken 1912” on the back. She turned 6 in December of that year. What really struck me was that if I’d dressed Rina up and taken her picture in black and white when she was 5, it’d look like they were sisters. Mums is definitely where the eyes come from, those sultry eyes that Grandma had, I have and Rina has. But Grandma and Rina work them, without trying. I’ve got the same eyes, but I’ve never been sexy. All the older pictures of Mums, they’re just pretty eyes, not sexy. Grandma and Rina got the tools and the natural talent. Mums and I appear to have gotten gypped in the sex appeal department. Oh well. Who needs sexy? There’s still ice cream!

On the top of the box were some more current photos. I recognized those as the ones Mums kept on her buffet. She kept every post card I sent her when I travelled, and if I went to the zoo, I sent a post card, and some photos. She used to show off the picture of the production truck I drove for sports and the George Bush presidential rally photo from 1992 to friends and family when they visited. She kept this picture on the buffet too:

Me and Mums 1985

That’s us on New Year’s Day 1985. I kept the same photo framed in my living room. Her buffet is now my buffet and if you visited that same table we used to sit at for our Tuesday coffee, you’d see Tori and Rina’s senior pictures displayed. The buffest still boasts about the women of the current generation.

So that’s the nomenclature of the women in my family you hear me speak of from time to time, especially if I’m talking about my vintage treasures or the origination of some of my quirks.

Treasured Re-Find

1956 May Birthday Angel Bell

NAPCO S1307E

This was from my great-grandmother’s home. I liked it for several reasons. First, her dress is peach and I could just imagine seeing her on a trinket shelf in my dream kitchen. Second, it’s dated 1956 and definitely has the look of that time and it whispered to my love of household vintage things. Third, and this was a biggie, it wasn’t Mums’ taste. She like the modern look and had a lot of oriental-influenced knick-knacks. Also, her birthday was in December and this is a May figurine. I love a good mystery.

This re-find is part of the good of the White Tornado project. She was wrapped up in my boxes from Michigan. As the White Tornado is officially in the future woman cave now, there are boxes from Grandma, which include boxes from Mums that Grandma didn’t go through, and boxes of my own. I had the little bell from Mums’ house that I planned to research and get the story, or as much as I can, about how it was that this girl was in my great-grandmother’s house and then promise her a decorative home in my living room in Michigan to eventually be a sweet decor piece in the dream kitchen. She lived on a shelf in my Michigan living room for 4 years and was carefully wrapped and packed up to come with me when I moved to Toledo. Well, she lived the next 5 years carefully wrapped in that box in the storage area of our home!

You can see where the wings were connected.

She is a 1956 angel bell made by NAPCO, the National Potteries Corporation. The wings are no longer there, they must have broken off sometime between 1956 and 1992 because I never saw her with wings. NAPCO began production of glass and ceramic collectibles in 1938 and was at its peak popularity in the 50s and 60s.

My May girl has the appropriate transfer mark to be a real NAPCO piece, so she is the “real deal.” NAPCO was based in Cleveland and the products were made in Japan. Now it starts to sound like a piece Mums would have bought, except that the old fashioned girl in the frilly dress just didn’t seem like Mums. Had it been a slender Japanese woman in a kimono holding an exotic flower, I never would have questioned it being in my great grandmother’s house. I had to put together the last piece of the puzzle.

That last piece wasn’t difficult. In the maternal side of the family, the custom is that when going through an estate, items that were gifts are first offered to the person who gave them. I own things that aren’t so much my taste the same way. I have a Virgin Mary night light because I asked for it from Noni’s house. I’d given it to her as a Christmas present years before. On Mom’s side of the family, you don’t have to ask, it’s automatically offered. It represents a connection between you and the person who passed. As I said, the NAPCO brand was Mums’ taste, but not the figurine and there was still the December birthday and a May bell. Her mother was born May 9, 1885. It was a gift that Mums gave Grammy and when Grammy passed in 1975, it was offered back to her.

I’ll call my wingless angel Wonda, that’s my great-great-grandmother’s name. Grandma, also Wonda, with an o not an a, was named after her. Now that I traced the puzzle back and have a reasonable history for her, Wonda is an even more meaningful piece of my family history!

See more treasures and mysteries solved at Vintage Thingie Thursday at The Coloradolady!

Cleaning Treasures

The coolest thing about cleaning and organizing is not the ultimate reclaiming of rooms that have spent the last couple of years as essentially storage rooms. Do not get me wrong there. The prospect of getting our kitchen annex back to usable additional prep space for the kitchen and having a working office/studio for my projects is exciting. We have three rooms that have been stacking places for the boxes of things we’ve accumulated and two years of disarray in our lives. Between losing my Grandma 2 years ago and the legal responsibilities that went with being the administrator of her estate and the huge cleanup at her house, which is the biggest source of the many boxes all over my house, and my health trials last year, I’ve had no time, no energy, to keep up.

Last year the dust had settled, some literally, from Grandma’s estate and I’d planned test-surgery-recovery for my back that tuned into a half year of tests with symptoms of my eventual MS diagnosis getting worse. During the 2010 cleaning at Grandma's my back, hip and knee on the right side had gotten pretty bad and I was relegated to sit, sort and shred at Grandma’s house with David, Dave and Laura bringing me boxes to “quick sort.” Quick sort is if I thought “maybe” put it in my box to take home, no reading, no reminiscing. We were all traveling a good distance on weekends to do the clean out and time really was an issue. Well, it ended up being BOXES, not box, with David asking a few times, “Where are we going to put this stuff?” Well, for the most part that answer was the upstairs office and the kitchen annex. I chose to reclaim the kitchen annex first since it’s on the main living level of the house.

I started cleaning Tuesday and I’ve gone through 4 of the boxes from Grandma's house as well as half the cupboards in the annex. I was telling my Dad last night that it would have taken the 10 years ago Nani about three days to finish the annex but the mobility-challenged Nani of today is thinking 2-3 weeks. I may need chairs and help lifting the heavier things, but I have the necessary drive to achieve! I just have to make sure I employ the necessary brains to take breaks.


Today I have a treasure box to share for Vintage Thingie Thursday!


It’s such a pretty little cardboard box. The edges are definitely worn and no question it’s old. I don’t remember seeing this at Grandma’s house, but I’m sure I was the one who decided it should come home with me because I don’t know that Dave would have just assumed I wanted it, he might have, but neither David nor Laura would know the significance of what was written inside.


The name written on the side and in the box is “Opal Pugh.” Dave would have known that was our Great Grandmother, with whom I was very close. She was born in Sutton, West Virginia, in 1906 and was only Opal Pugh for 16 years. She married by Great Grandfather in 1922. But that’s not Mums’ handwriting and the crayon markings under her name make me believe it might have been a trinket box from when she was little. Tori and Rina had trinket boxes that I gave them to have at our house when they were little. It was someplace to keep little things they collected, rocks, prizes form cereal, those kinds of easily lost things. Maybe this was a box like that for Mums.

When I opened the box this is what I saw



There is a crocheted hat pin cushion,

Crocheted string pincushion

a beautiful white silk handkerchief with royal purple trim

Silk handkerchief, SO soft!

and a crocheted band in variegated oranges. The band might have been a choker, which was a common accessory at the time, but there isn’t anything to close it. That closure may be something that fell off.

Crocheted string, maybe a choker?

So the box itself is at least 90 years old, but I think closer to 100. My Great Grandmother would have been 105 last month, she’ll have been gone 10 years in July. The items inside could have been put there at any time, but I’d guess the things were probably put in it maybe sometime around Grandma’s birth in 1925. It’s a guess, but that handkerchief is the softest and finest silk I’ve ever laid hands on!


Thanks for joining me in my treasures and guesses today!

See more vintage treasures at The Coloradolady, where Suzanne hosts Vintage Thingie Thursday every week!

Vintage Thingie Thursday

As the year nears its end and we’ll soon be counting down the seconds until 2012, I thought it might be neat to share a beloved vintage timepiece!



This was one of the pieces I really liked from my great-grandmother’s treasures. I believe the watch-necklace is costume jewelry. I’ve seen very similar watch pendants from the late 20s and that does fit my great-grandmother’s style! Mums was always a bit of a fashionista, from her flapper-influenced look in the 20s to her 80s animal prints. She’s the one who told me, from my Sweet 16 on, numerous times, that I needed to leave the top couple buttons unbuttoned to “give the boys just a little something to think about.” So a young Opal answering “what time is it?” with “oh, I have the time right here” kinda fits. She was always a lady, but always a bit of a flirt too!


When it’s wound it keeps time for a few minutes, but it stops and starts with certain movements that I haven’t figured out why they make it start and stop again, but it’s still a beautiful pendant to wear. I wore the necklace to dinner for our anniversary this year and David noticed it and asked about it. That gave me a little chuckle. Mums was right. I married the boy and it still gives him something to think about!

See more vintage treasures at Vintage Thingie Thursday!