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The Hygienic Lunch, and the Father of the Veep
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File this under: How did we not know this? Hoxsie grew up hard by Schenectady in the 1970s and was perhaps more tuned than your average teenager to both politics and local history. And yet, until this week, we had no idea that the father of Vice President Spiro Agnew, one Theodore Agnew (originally…
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How to Google Things in 1973
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The kids and their interwebs these days. They have no idea how the world worked before there was a worldwide web. Well, here’s how it was done. Say you wondered where to find a particular oven cleaner. You could just wander aimlessly from grocery store to grocery store, hoping to find what you needed.…
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19th Century Railroads: Unsafe at Any Speed
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In 1865, every railroad in the state made a report to the railroad commissioners of the State of New York. There are lots of facts and figures about capital stock, funded debt, length of road laid, numbers of passenger cars and snow plows, etc. They even give the average rate of speed and the…
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Van Doren’s Patented Sewing Machine Motor
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This ad from the Troy Daily Times in 1917 touts the patented factory sewing machine motor of E.I. Van Doren of River Street. “Saves one-third of current because motor stops and starts automatically every time sewing machine does.” Imagine! In an article on the same page (not an uncommon practice in those days for…
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Careers, 1911
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We now live in a place that still uses an ancient occupation tax, and as a result its list of occupations includes a number of jobs that don’t exist any more, such as IBM Key Punch, Paste-Up Artist, Teletypist and Photolithographer. It also lists a number of jobs that technically may still exist but…
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Wagar’s Confectionery
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Thumbing (digitally — although thumbs are digits, too, one supposes) through the 1909 Troy City Directory, we ran across this ad for Wagar’s Confectionery, which sounded vaguely familiar despite its way-backness. Turns out there’s a reason. At this time, the name of D. Lester Sharp was attached to Wagar’s Confectionery, “Manufacturer of Absolutely Pure…
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Schneider’s Blood Purifier
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You’re a resident of the Collar City in 1909, and you feel like your blood is just a little . . . impure. Perhaps a dose of Schneider’s Blood Purifier would be just the thing! Made up of sarsaparilla, cherry, dandelion, burdock, mandrake, prickly ash, “&c.,” three tablespoons a day probably couldn’t do much…
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Sejo Ice Cream
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The Al-Tro park program from 1909 included this ad for Sejo Ice Cream, which made us curious because we’d never heard of it. Perhaps we never heard of it because it was sold only at the ice cream cone stands at Altro Park (it was styled both with and without hyphens; and if you…
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Uncle Sam
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Just in time for Independence Day, Gettysburg Flag Works sent us a note highlighting their recent blog entry with a brief history of ol’ Sam Wilson, who put the “Sam” in “Uncle Sam.” The full entry is here. Gettysburg Flag Works is located in East Greenbush, not too far from the encampment where, during…
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The Mystery of Ivanhoe Bland
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Happened to be looking through the 1920 Albany City Directory, as one does, and looked up an address where I spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades. I knew that the building currently there had not been there that far back, and that there had been a little neighborhood of…