Innehållsförteckning för December 1, 2021 från Kovels Antique Trader

Although COVID-19 has brought the tremendous work of nurses to the spotlight, they have labored and given their hearts to heal patients throughout history. Honoring the critical role nurses have in the world and sharing the rich history and heritage of the profession is the Living History Museum at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. It is one of the only museums dedicated to nursing, which is the nation’s second-largest profession and the largest profession for women. Established in 1999, the museum features hundreds of historic objects and photographs, as well as audio histories and video presentations, and traces the evolution of nursing education, research, and practice at the University of Maryland, from its early years as a hospital training school to its emergence as a premier professional nursing…

Recently, Terry Kovel visited an estate sale near her Shaker Heights home in suburban Cleveland. Kovel was impressed, which is saying something considering she just turned 93 and has seen about all there is to see when it comes to antiques and collectibles. The sale was neat. Orderly and clean. Everything was displayed just ... right. Naturally, Kovel had to buy something. What’s the fun of browsing through a house filled with life’s collected treasures if you don’t buy something? And yes, Kovel’s own home, the one she and her late husband, Ralph, built in 1955, is filled with so many treasures it’s nearly impossible to wrap your head around them all. No matter. One more pretty thing is always welcome. Besides, Kovel discovered a great deal. She bought a…

There are a lot of ways of letting go of things you no longer need. Entire industries have been built on the concept. Craigslist, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Letgo, Ruby Lane, Etsy and even the old reliable yard sale are all options. Here’s another one . . . The teenage boy wore a T-shirt and shorts. He was stocky with shaggy hair. He was cute, in that sort of frumpy teenage boy way, and the first out of the minivan, excited and just a little confused. His mom, at least we think it was his mom, and his aunt, she sure looked like she could be his aunt, walked more slowly to the collection of objects we had set out at the end of our driveway. My wife, Amy, used to…

DALLAS — For years, the painting hung in the hallway of a Massachusetts American Legion Post — alone, unattended, and unrecognized for its hidden-in-plain-sight promise on a wall near the front door. For years, no one cared too much about the fate of the painting at the Eugene M. Connor Post 193 of Winchendon, Massachusetts, thinking it was nothing more than a reproduction of Norman Rockwell’s Home for Thanksgiving, which first appeared on the cover of the November 24, 1945, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Ken LaBrack, a past commander of Post 193, says it wasn’t until someone walked in and offered $500 for the work that the post’s officers began reconsidering their position: Maybe this was far more than just a beautiful fake. On Friday, November 5, the…

So, there we were (my wife, daughter, and I), traveling along the backroads of Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country, when out of nowhere we spotted the rotting hulk of an abandoned riverboat. We expected to see antique forms of transportation near Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, such as horse-drawn Mennonite carriages (of which we saw many), but not a paddle-wheeler. A few shallow creeks ran through the area, but there wasn’t a river in sight. I stopped to take photographs of the grounded relic, then pulled into a local restaurant to inquire about its history. All anyone knew was that the riverboat had always been there. The only explanation I could think of was that the riverboat once belonged to Roadside America, a now-defunct tourist attraction in Shartlesville that once featured just under 8,000 square…

The normal fare offered by comic books in the 1940s was fantasy, science fiction, superheroes, hard-boiled detec tives and rough-and-tumble cowboys and gunslingers, but also a lesser-known genre: real-life heroes — the mavens of medicine. True adventure comic books spun off of the highly successful superheroes’ genre, and were presented in numerous innovative titles. Each booklet was chock-full of tales of real people, both from days long past and those contemporaneous. These comics put the fantasy world in the rear-view mirror to dwell on real people from both medical history and twentieth-century medicine, portraying them as heroes and role models who might encourage children to enter the science field as a profession. They touted the field of medicine and disseminated both medical and scientific ideas, highlighting important triumphs of medical…