Souvenirs of yesteryear (1950s-1960s)

Cafe Society
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I re-visited Polar Caves in Rumney, NH recently. I had been there as a kid, and the place hasn’t changed all that much. They used to have a guide to take you through the tortuous paths and stairways through the interstices, but it’s now self-guided. And the cave with fluorescent minerals (none of them native to NH) has been taken out. The biggest change is in the store as you go in r come out. The souvenirs and the things they sell have changed. They added a collection of tumbled minerals, and they sell bags of sand and rocks that you can take to the nifty washing mill they built outside so kids can use the flowing water and a seive to “pan” for the minerals (lots of places have these now). But in my day, there wer different things, which I wax nostalgic over.

Here are typical souvenirs of the day:

Bumper Stickers in Day-Glo colors (now mostly replaced by window stickers in more discreet colors)

Pennants with the Name and Location, also in Day-Glo – now completely gone

Postcards by the ton with spiral-bound “books” of postcards – now there are far fewer of them

View Master Reels, or 3D images, or Color Slides of the attraction – Viewmasters are virtually gone, there are few er of the non-viewmaster 3D viewers around, and nobody has slide projectors anymore

Little Stanhope-type color slide viewers shaped like tiny TVs – totally disappeared

https://www.etsy.com/market/souvenir_tv_picture_slide

Mold-a-Rama Plastic Souvenir Generators – almost completely gone. I miss the polyethylene molding machines that gave you a still-warm molding

Little Cedar-wood Tchotchkes with stickers having the name of the attraction – these were immensely popular at souvenir stands. They even have their own entry in the Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.

https://www.rubylane.com/item/212146-18765/Vintage-Souvenir-Cedar-Vanity-Wood-Dresser

Penny Pressers – put your own penny in, along with a few quarters and turn the handle, and your penny will be remolded into an ellipse with an image of whatever you’re visiting. Actually, these are still around.

Stupid Oversized Pencils in bright colors – and combs and other random things. Sometime in Day-Glo

Decals for your car (or whatever) – nobody seems to make water-set decals anymore, but they still sell adhesive-backed window stickers

Modern places add

Refrigerator Magnets with photos of the place; or flexible ones in shapes

Books about the place – my favorite, although these seem to be disappearing

Stupid little wooden signs with aphorisms, and the name of the place clumsily put it “Once a Mom, now a friend, at Ausable Chasm”

Anybody else got suggestions, or memories? (“Souvenir” means “memory”)

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What’s the deal with souvenir thimbles? They are still around but not like they used to be. And it’s not just in North America, but all over the world. My wife’s mother (who never traveled outside the UK or Ireland) had one from every place she ever visited.

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Spoons, too. Pewter spoons, some enameled or painted, none useable. My grandpa had a bunch of History of America ones but travel souvenirs too. I recently got a homemade-but nice spoon wall case with sliding glass doors and about 4 green felt-lined shelves, each about an inch and a half deep. The ‘seller’ just gave it to me at a garage sale, he has sold all the spoons (?). I guess there might be some silver content.

I’m putting assorted small nicknacks like fountain pens, minerals, ham walkie talkies, and figurines for display in it.

4

Smartphones and PCs have made entire classes of analog media like color slides obsolete. I’ve often thought that hardcore preppers archiving against the end of digital databases might be interested in reviving some version of microfiche imaging like the Viewmaster; but not that I’ve ever come across.

Similarly, the rise of email has sharply curtailed many features of the “culture” of physically delivered mail, like postcards.

Back in the day (early 1970s) extremely vulgar t-shirts were a thing at fairs and carnivals. Cartoon figures giving the finger with the caption “Here’s One For You”, or copulating animals with captions like “Makin’ Bacon” or “Fly United” for example.

Souvenir shot glasses and 2oz espresso mugs seem to still be common.

5

Souvenir spoons (and thimbles) go way back.

The one souvenir I was able to obtain from Wonderland Park (Revere, MA 1906-1910) was a souvenir spoon with “Compliments of Wonderland” written on the bowl.

https://lost-wonderland.com/wonderland-souvenirs/

At least I think and hope it was from there. There were a dozen amusement parks in that era named “Wonderland Park”. They were all copying the new amusement park that was to open on Coney Island in 1904, but at the last minute founder William Reynolds changed his mind and renamed it Dreamland. Most of those Wonderland Parks went bankrupt following the Panic of 1907. Revere’s did, too, but managed to wobble around for a couple more years before finally closing at the end of the 1910 season.

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There are still entire stores dedicated to those kind of t-shirts in beach towns and other tourist destinations. Seemed like every other store when I visited Key West earlier this year.

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There are plenty of vulgar -shirts at a lot of resorts, especially at beaches along the shore and at big lakes.

I started a thread, in fact, about the disappearance of Trump-branded T-shirts (often with vulgar sayings on them) in the wake of the non-release of the Epstein files.

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There was a period in the 70s (?) where they took glass bottles (like pop bottles) heated, stretched and twisted them, then refilled them with colored water. They were kind of cool. I had one, don’t know where it disappeared to (I didn’t break it, it just…vanished)

I still have my “made while you wait” stamped Museum of Science and Industry commemorative ash tray, but my “made while you wait” plastic (or wax?) spray molded bust of Abe Lincoln is long gone. Maybe it melted.

I once had a nice bronze model/paperweight of Chicago’s Prudential Building I got when I visited the viewing platform, once the tallest building facing Grant Park. Now it gets lost in all the tall buildings next to it, and my model is long gone.

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This used to be a big thing at the Jersey shore.

Another thing a lot of places did was to make tiny bottles with pennies in them

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Mold-a-Rama: a vending machine that created a toy from molten plastic as you watch.

(Did we ever have a thread devoted to the postwar “-a-rama” usage?)

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I collect vintage travel paper ephemera (postcards, pamphlets, guidebooks, etc) and take photos of more substantial “souvenirs of yesterday” whenever I come across them in museums and antique stores. Gift shop merchandise has always been mostly mass-produced junk, but the old stuff has acquired what I guess you could call “a patina of nostalgia” that makes it more seem more authentic and interesting (to me a least).

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Mentioned in the OP

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One of the more interesting souvenirs I got – and the most personalized – was a “drawing” done with a stylus on a thin copper sheet of me in profile. It was done by an artist at Freedomland – the short-lived (three years) amusement park located in the Bronx i n New York City. It was, at the time, the largest amusement park in the US. It was bigger – literally – than Disneyland. And built by the same guy who built Disneyland – Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood.

14

I think you can still get a mold-a-rama of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile at the Henry Ford Museum.

15

Sorry teach, will you accept commemorative/souvenir salt and pepper shakers? Here’s one of JFK

Thankfully the holes aren’t in the back of his head

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They’re located in the same Chicago suburb where I live; they’re still pretty popular (as a cheesy, retro souvenir) at a number of Chicago tourist attractions, and that’s where many of their remaining machines are located.

17

I saw a Mold-O-Rama at the Griffin Museum of Science & Industry in the spring. Operating, not only an exhibit! The odor is what really sends me.

18

I don’t know about the US, but when I was a kid in the 70s in Germany, every souvenir shop had snow globes themed around the attraction you visited, and also additional generally themed ones. Haven’t seen them for decades.

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Have you listened to this recent podcast?

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In my experience, they were quite common in the U.S. in that era, too.