CARS - PNG / TUBE

 

DINAH’S NEW YEAR’S PRESENT - by Anonymous Author

 Dinah Morris is a colored girl. She lives in the South. By South we mean in the southern part of the United States.

Dinah is one of the most good-natured children that ever lived, but she is very, very lazy. There is nothing she likes, or used to like, so much as to curl up in some warm corner in the sun and do nothing.

Dinah’s mother wished very much that her child should learn to read, but the lady who tried to teach her soon gave it up. “It is no use,” she said, “Dinah will not learn. She is not a stupid child, but she is too lazy for anything.”

It happened, soon after this, that a young man from Massachusetts came to the house where Dinah lived. He brought with him something no one else in the neighborhood had ever seen before, a pair of roller-skates.

When Dinah saw the young man going rapidly up and down the piazza on his skates she was so astonished she hardly knew what to think. She ran after him like a cat, her black eyes shining as they had never shone before.

One day the young man allowed her to try on the skates. The child was too happy for words. Of course she fell down, and sprawled about the floor, but did not mind at all.

“Look here, Dinah,” said the young man, “I understand that my aunt has been trying to teach you to read.”

Dinah answered that she certainly had.

“Why didn’t you learn?” asked the young man. “You need not trouble to answer,” said he, “it was just because you are too lazy. Now, if, on the first of January, you can read, I tell you what I will do. I will send you as good a pair of roller-skates as I can buy in Boston.”

How Dinah’s eyes snapped. For a moment she said nothing, then exclaimed decidedly, “I’ll have those skates, sure.”

And she did. When she bent her mind on her work she could always do it well, no matter what it was.

The lady who had before this found her such a difficult child to teach, now had no trouble. If Dinah showed the least sign of her former laziness the word SKATES! was enough to make her bend her mind on her lesson instantly.

On New Year’s morning she received a box marked in large printed letters: 

MISS DINAH MORRIS,

Care of Mrs. Lawrence Delaney,

NEW ORLEANS, LA.

If she can read what is on the outside of

this box she can have what is inside.

And as Dinah read every word plainly and quickly, of course she had for her very own the fine roller-skates the box held. And now sitting curled up in the sun, doing nothing, is not the thing she likes to do best. 

QUOTE ABOUT VINTAGE

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste. - Logan Pearsall Smith 

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. - Carl Jung 

Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it. - Tony Visconti 

There's a vintage which comes with age and experience.- Jon Bon Jovi 

It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new. - Tony Visconti 

images by  Russian photographer Tatyaro (Tatiana Romaniuk)

Walter Martin Baumhofer (American, 1904-1987)

 Our whole life is a pattern of events, Where joy and trouble are near.

AMERICAN ARTIST ROLF ARMSTRONG - PIN-UP

Rolf Armstrong ( 1889 – 1960) was an American painter of pin-up art.

His father owned the Boy-Line Fire Boat Company, which included a line of passenger ships. Some were deployed in Chicago for use at the Chicago World's Fair there in 1893. However, the father's business and family were struggling, and the family homestead was lost to foreclosure. In 1899, the family moved to Detroit, Michigan.

Rolf's father died in 1903, and a year later he and his mother moved to Seattle, Washington, following the footsteps of his oldest brother, William, who had moved there a year earlier. By now Rolf's artistic interests were emerging to more than a part-time pleasure.

He moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri. 

After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.

During the 1920s and 1930s, his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines, most famously for movie fan magazines such as Photoplay and Screenland. His work mostly consists of women; Mary Pickford, Bebe Daniels, and Greta Garbo are just a few of the numerous he painted.

Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a circulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best-selling calendar artist at Brown & Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line.

Rolf Armstrong died in 1960 on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as one of the best "pin-up" artists of the first half of the twentieth century. 

Self portrait, 1914, pastel on board