I just got a book called “Found”, which is a collection of some of the best things from FOUND Magazine. For those who don’t know of it, it’s basically a magazine where they portray strangely fascinating things that have simply been found on the street. Anyone who’s found something can send it into this magazine, and they’ll probably publish it. There’s love letters, lost & found posters, suicide notes, etc. Some of it’s really funny, and some of it’s really sad, and there’s some stuff that’s just completely bizarre. Anyway, I just love this magazine, and I can’t get enough of the stories. So, what things have you found?
Here’s mine: The weirdest thing I ever found was when my family moved to a new house when I was 6. In the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom, there was a shoebox containing 4 baby chicks made out of pom-poms.
I posted about this once before, about a year ago, but when I was going to college in Miami, Oklahoma, there was a secondhand shop called Grandma’s Attic that that my friends and I would browse from time to time. I bought several things from them over the two years that I was there, but the strangest by far was an item I call my purse-phone. I don’t know if it’s actually a purse or not; I think it might be more of a briefcase. I’m so bad at describing it, but I’ll try.
It was made, I’m guessing, sometime in the 70s. It’s black and made of some kind of shiny plastic that’s supposed to represent patent leather, I think. But it’s not just a purse/briefcase. It’s a functioning telephone, too. On the front of the flap that goes over the opening to close the purse, there’s a telepone dial with the buttons arranged in a circle, kind of like the arrangement of the numbers on dial telephones. On the underside of the flap is a little box that holds the inner workings of the phone. The cord comes out of the box and you plug it in to an available… well, you know how a phone works. The handset for the phone doubles as the handle for the purse. On top of the bag, there’s a little plastic ring that closes with Velcro. You put the handset inside the ring, close it up, and that’s how you carry it. When I bought it, I referred to it as a briefcase, but my friends insisted that the small zippered compartments inside were for storing makeup. I don’t know.
I can’t figure out what its purpose is. I mean, if you’re out and about and need to make a phone call (of course, this was way before cell phones), you could plug it in to an available phone jack and make your call, but… any working phone jack you find is likely to have a phone already plugged into it, right? I suppose it could have just been intended as a novelty item, but somehow it seems that too much thought went into it for it to be that. Have any Dopers out there ever seen anything like this? Maybe even owned one?
My roommate named the purse-phone Betty, which was Mrs. Slocombe’s first name on “Are You Being Served?”. He said it was just the kind of thing she would have owned.
I guess I didn’t really find it, but it came into my possession…Anyway, when I was in fourth grade, I was walking to the bus stop one day and noticed my neighbor playing down in the creek bed near the bus stop. I continued on to the bus stop and when he came up, he held out his hands for everyone to see what he was holding. I didn’t know what it was, so he told me. It was a hand grenade. Now, this neighbor was a boy and played a lot of practical jokes, so I didn’t really think that he had found a REAL grenade near our house. When the bus came, he said he didn’t want to get caught with it, so who would keep it for him during school. Not thinking it was real, I voluneered. :smack: Long story short, I showed a lot of my friends, and all of them were pretty sure it was real. At lunch I walked up to the lunch lady and said, “Hey, I brought a grenade to school. What should I do with it?” She freaked out, so I was told to run and get the principal, who called the Bomb Squad, who also called someone from Fort Ord, the army base near by where we lived. So all these bomb squad and army guys came to our school and took it, and then the whole school had a huge lecture on weapons. Thanks goodness this was about 18 years ago. I dodn’t even get in trouble. Could you imagine what would have happened to me now??? :eek:
The weirdest, funniest and most interesting thing I have ever found? That would have to be a princess from the Barvarian forest mislaid in northern Ontario:
I was walking past this house when I was about twelve and found a brown case/box, with a little latch and a handle on the curb amongst their garbage. Not really weird or funny, but I found it interesting. If you open the box there’s some writing on the inside of the lid that says, “Not Katelin’s Box, Everybody’s Box!” in childlike writing. I’ve kept a ton of things in there over the years, like my tea collection or old letters. Right now it’s empty, but I’ll find a use for it soon enough again.
My sister once found an old wedding dress in its box right in the middle of the parking lot after she got off work. Why it was there of all places remains a mystery, but we figured for whoever it belonged to it must have been some family heirloom. After she found the box she went back into the store she works in to see if anyone claimed it. Nobody did, so she then ran an ad in the classifieds to see if someone would come forward to claim it. Again, nobody claimed it, so it’s still sitting in its box at her house. I think she plans to sell it at her next yard sale.