Saturday, November 20, 2010

Two Silver Spoons Together...

On my way to help move some furniture this afternoon, I saw a lone (and lonely) garage sale in Watertower Place subdivision on Telegraph Road.  An older woman appeared to be cleaning out her garage and had some things thrown out in boxes with no prices.  I saw a few loose silverware in one box.  We're hosting Thanksgiving this year, so I'm on the lookout for some serving spoons, etc.  After looking closer, what caught my interest was the writing on the spoons.  One said "1933 Century of Progress" which I recognized as a souvenir spoon from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.  The other said "Banner Buggies" and had a picture of a horse buggy in the bowl of the spoon.




She wanted $1 a piece, so I took them.  And before I left, she had me open a stubborn window for her in the garage.

Looking online (okay, eBay), these don't have a lot of value, but still interesting.  The World's Fair spoon features the Federal Building which housed the Navy exhibit featuring painted murals of the Navy's seafaring power throughout U. S. history.

I discovered the Banner Buggy spoon was an adverstisement for a St. Louis-based company that produced horse buggies from 1880 through 1910 and then began a foray into automobiles.  Initially proposing their own line of automobiles, they ended up producing car bodies for Cheverolet, then assembling whole vehicles before finally being acquired by them around 1917.   Russell Gardner, the owner of Banner Buggies before the buyout, went on to produce the Gardner Automobile in St. Louis which built automobiles through 1932.

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