Saturday..........

The phlox are fading and the sunlight is looking more like fall each day.  I have taken a lot of shots of the phlox as they were so healthy and tall this year.  I expected more butterflies on them but I am thinking that there just are not too many butterflies out there.  My wife saw a hummingbird feed from then the other day.  In the evening the hummingbird moths can be seen scrambling from flower to flower.

I finished a book.  I like to read but my task oriented personality doesn't fit in reading in my life. It is a good book of history.  My interest was peaked because my dad walked the land that the monuments walked in last part of the book.  I am very interested in art and reading of what was done to recover so much art from salt and copper mines is amazing. Another interest of the book is the person Stout, who led the groups of men, was from Winterset, Iowa, Bridges of Madison County area.

Hitler was far more disturbed with his motives than what history describes about him.  He really wanted to be the grand king and have a world recreated and built to honor his ideal world.  His philosophy of killing wealthy Jews then recovering all that they own was justified by saying they had abandoned their properties.  Taking everything in the households down to the silverware and curtains was disturbing. The art really was one of his major obsessions that encouraged his movements in Europe.  The whole art collecting schemes were so corrupt and so well planned that it started years before he had started eliminating people.

The odder things found in the mines included jet airplane engine inventions, caskets of Purssian kings, gold teeth, draperies and historic documents that were hundreds of years old.  The finding of many peoples collections of art and whole museums was too much to believe.  While the US was waiting to join in the war to stop Hitler, he had many years of continue ransacking and storing in organized racks of the European artwork shipping it by train loads.  The movie is a recreation of the essences of the book. The writer of the movie consolidated it so much in order to get a story and yet covered the goals of the Monuments Men. I found it interesting that the movie author really consolidated all that the person Roirmer, played by Matt Damon, was doing. He accomplished tremendous amounts of work saving and restoring museums in France which the movie never recognized.

My work with the class composites continues. I only  have 9 left to take apart from the 50 that I started with last Wednesday.  It doesn't take a lot of time to take them apart and yet I am trying to be as careful as I can to do the job.  I am working with the group of classes that go from 1919 to 1971.  The 1971 to 2002 classes are all hanging on walls in the school auditorium and I am hoping they leave them right there.  It is impressive to see them on the wall.   I suspect that the framed works will actually be better preserved that the ones that are headed to the display racks.

It is story time now as I want you to see what I have found in the back of one of the older ones.  I know from my previous life that our boys' grandfather and great grandfather ran a furniture store.  The great grandfather was partially in the funeral business and he sold caskets out of the basement of the store.  The store had a special hand drawn lift to take the new caskets down to the basement and to bring them up when purchased  Funeral homes eventually sold their own caskets.  In Murray the funeral home and furniture store was owned by the same person.

When I was taking composites apart some of them had a message on the back of them saying photos only, no frame.  That meant that they had to hire someone to frame them. The old furniture store in Aplington, Iowa also had a framing business as they bought prints and framed them with ornate old frame pieces.  I am now thinking that the Battani furniture store in town here, the building is now torn down, probably did the framing of a lot of these older composites. The cardboard backings came from furniture boxes or casket boxes as you can see in the photo. The more modern frames evolved into a light hardwood frame that matches that era of the 50's cupboards and woodwork.  Battani Furniture closed in the 70's and I am finding a lot of the frames from then on were custom made then probably from the wood working shop at school.

I have the old cast iron miter box that came from the boy's grandfathers old store. I have some of the old containers of glue and stains from that store.  They are very old and nothing would be any good.   Just by finding the label on the cardboard I was able to answer the curiosity about those old frames.

It seems to be a rambling blog post today so I will wave a white hardy geranium bloom as a flag and call it quits for the day.  We both are tired today and planned to just hang around home the whole day.  Storms are promised to start late this afternoon and to last for most of the night.  I hope all are well out there and thanks for stopping by this Saturday.