Floorboard Follies
Category: History
“Fall Back” In Style
Pigskin Proud
Lovely Weather For A Desert Sleigh Ride Together
Yep, this is the classic National Geographic you know and love. Nearly naked barefoot bushmen covered in dust. And while their bellies look distended, the author asserts that is due to swaybacked posture, and neither gorging nor starving. At any rate, the toddlers seem to be enjoying the ride on a discarded cape, making due with what they had and using their imaginations to create fun. Such is life in the veld.
veld: wide open rural landscape in Southern Africa
New North
Back when this photo was taken in the summer of 1947, Penasse, Minnesota was the most northerly post office in the US. Nowadays, it’s Barrow, Alaska. I’m pretty sure we’re done acquiring new states, so Barrow will probably retain the title.
The man who looks like The Skipper from “Gilligan’s Island” is actually Captain Young, a veteran skipper of the mailboat Resolute (not the S.S. Minnow), which had just arrived on the 50-acre island from Warroad, just shy of Canada. The poor-postured woman with her pelvis tucked beneath her is postmistress Mrs. Fran Cole. The two men beside her, one of which appears to be leering menacingly, are Chippewa Indian fishing guides for summer visitors.
Snowfall On Iowa Farm
Depression-Era Santa Starved From Lack Of Milk & Cookies
Actually, Santa wasn’t the one lacking that year. The UT Zeta house hosted a Christmas party for needy children, and a makeshift Santa proved too svelte for the outfit. It does make you wonder if folks left out perfectly good milk and cookies for Santa during the lean years.
The irony is that the tradition didn’t even START until the lean years. In an era of such economic hardship, many parents used the gesture as an example of generosity and gratitude for the gifts they would receive on Christmas Day. The Greatest Generation indeed.
Halloween 1949
It’s Halloween of 1949 at the University of Texas at Austin, and Nautical Nellie is excited to see the ghoulish costumes of her peers. 
Just a girl and her horse. That seems normal, right?
Only Interesting People
Ooh-la-la! Très exclusive. Only for the interesting people! Why, you’ll find novelists, actresses, professors, and big-game hunters on French Line! Only the best and brightest are allowed aboard, where they serve table wine complimentary. Much fancy! The servers even speak the English because that’s civilized.
One wonders how the French ever got pegged with a rep for snobbery.
“Children Are A Poor Man’s Riches” – English Proverb
What a blessing has Johann Inauen, and I don’t mean his pipe. Son Reto could not be more smitten with papa, enjoying a childhood on a small Appenzell dairy farm in Switzerland. Idyllic indeed.
Great-Aunt Minnie Loved Her Some Charles Marion Russell
*CMR created over 2000 Old West paintings, such as the one above.
Hurtling O’er The Hill
Back before climate change, we had winter, and folks use to ski in water that would freeze and make snow. People used gravity to ski from the top of the snow to the bottom of it. Sometimes they snapped their shins or skied right into a tree and died, but other times, they caught the wind under their skis and soared, ever briefly, high above the crowds, catching the cold crisp air beneath their feet, alighting upon the soft snowy incline and gliding to the stretch.
I Don't Get It 