My Wife’s Hobby

 

My wife actually has two hobbies with the first and most important being spending as much time as possible with her four (soon to be five!) grandsons. Her other hobby is collecting lunchboxes, both vintage and newer ones.  Her requirements are they must be metal lunch boxes and they must feature something from the world of popular culture. How many women do you know that has a couple dozen lunchboxes featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Hornet, Spiderman and other superheroes?

 

Among her collection (which now numbers just under 120) are lunch boxes devoted to I Dream Of Jeannie, The Archies, Bewitched, Beatles, Man From UNCLE, Lone Ranger, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Petticoat Junction, I Love Lucy, Elvis, Bettie Boop, Star Trek, Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, KISS, the list goes on and on and on!

 

I never had a lunchbox as a kid. My Dad always laid out lunch money for the school cafeteria (two dimes for each of us as I recall) but I vividly recall going into stores as a kid with Mom & Dad to do school shopping and seeing rows and rows of the newly released lunchboxes just in time for the new school year. Seeing all those rows of colorful lunchboxes with superheroes and whatever was popular on TV was a sight to behold. I recall the local Mr. Wiggs department store in Wooster, OH having what seemed like thousands of the darn things back then.

 

About ten years ago my wife picked up a lunchbox (I forget which was her first, she isn’t here right now to ask) and it was on! She is still buying them on occasion. Someday they will all go to our grandkids (you don’t think we’ll leave anything to our kids, do you?)

I Need A New Wallet

        

 

I need a wallet. Again.

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It’s not that I abuse them or have them stuffed full of greenbacks, it’s just that I rarely buy one and only then when the one I have is so ragged, worn, torn and basically falling apart, which is the condition my current wallet is in. Is it in bad shape? The threads are hanging!

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For twenty-five or more years whenever I needed a new wallet, whether I thought so or the wife did, I only had to wait until Father’s Day, my birthday or Christmas and invariably I would get a new one from one of my kids. Basic black, with a section to hold photos and don’t spend over $10.00. Five bucks would be better (those were always my requirements). 

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But with my kids grown and out of the house and no such holiday in sight it appears I’ll have to find a new one on my own. I need a new one anyway as the plastic photo holder is about worn out and of course filled with grandkids pictures but I got some new ones that need put in. Somewhere I have a stack of old plastic wallet photo holders that go back to before my own kids were in school. That’s where my collection of their school photos are, still wedged into an old wallet photo holder. 

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The pics of the two wallets you see here are the first two wallets I ever owned. My Mom bought the Batman wallet at Buckeye Mart in Wooster, OH circa 1966. The Green Hornet wallet came in 1967 when my Aunt Margie bought it for me at some store in the Summit Mall when I was spending a long weekend with her. 

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 Nothing has changed. I have about the same amount of money now as I did back then!

Welcome To The Club

Welcome to my time traveling adventures.