While visiting my parents for Thanksgiving I spoke with one of my father’s friends who told a fairly heartbreaking story about his early childhood. His parents were buying a new house and they brought him along to a store to pick out the wallpaper that would go in his new room. He decided on a pretty blue design with sailboats.
Months later when they moved into the house he was shocked to find that his room was instead covered with a brown wallpaper with trains on it. The locomotives were facing forward like they were coming to get him, and he found their anthropomorphic features menacing rather than friendly. When confronted, his parents explained that they didn’t want to have two blue rooms next to each other and, since their bedroom was blue, they’d picked him out another pattern that they’d thought he would like.
At night he had such fear of the trains coming to get him that he had trouble sleeping. He says that he still feels traumatized by them to this day. Eventually he found them so upsetting that he took the point of a geometric compass and scratched out the faces of all the locomotives that he could reach. As he grew taller, he would remove more and more of them. His parents, despite normally being very involved in small matters of his life, never intervened. Apparently they sensed that this was something serious to him.
At any rate, one of the striking things about this story was the detail with which he could still describe the blue sailboat wallpaper that he had wanted all along. I know it’s a long shot, but I thought that with the power of the Internet it might be possible to reunite him with a small piece of it, or at least an image that he could draw some comfort from. Casual googling hasn’t turned up any designs that sound similar, and I was wondering if anyone knew of any good sites to check.
Here are all the details he could provide:
[ul][li]The wallpaper was sold in Queens, New York in 1941.[/li][li]It was from a line of children’s wallpapers which also included the aforementioned trains design. Unfortunately he didn’t know the brand name.[/li][li]He described it as having “three levels of perspective” – there was a row of sailboats up close, one at medium distance, and one far away, with some land in the background.[/li][li]The boats were displayed from the side.[/li][li]They had black hulls with single masts.[/li][li]The sails were white, full of wind, and had colored numbers on them.[/li]The water and the sky were blue.[/ul]