Sunday, May 12, 2013

Shea Stadium- World's Fair

    I did a Mother's Day event with my date this afternoon. We had pizza from Papa John's, followed by cake and ice cream- Well's Blue Bunny ice cream. As an Iowa kid I am quite familiar with this brand of ice cream.
   In the evening I did get the typical errand running done like groceries. Then I decided to look at postcards to order on E-bay. By accident I apparently found out how many postcards are available on the entire site- just over two million! Not too surprising to me. To some it is likely a big deal how the total of postcards I own is nearing a thousand. Last fall I counted how many I had before getting them into photo albums, it was about 700.
  With World's Fair postcards, there are plenty to look at. Even when narrowing the search down to a particular city, there can be a thousand. So I do go further- like 'Buy it now' only and under a certain price like $10. At times this still doesn't narrow it down much. But I would have to say, based on the research, that I likely won't get many of Expo 67, the Montreal World's Fair. I have five vintage postcards so far of World's Fairs, one of them is Montreal. There may not be many that interest me of St. Louis either. This leaves mostly Chicago and New York, which is plenty.
   After looking around some, I did order one World's Fair postcard tonight- of New York's Shea Stadium. I had to check first to see if I had one already, since I did visit New York City in 2005. I did have a decent number of the city, like Madison Square Garden and Central Park, but not Shea. There was one of Yankee Stadium, an image of inside, though the description just speaks of the team and not the stadium. Two of the five I already own are from New York's two fairs- both from General Electric buildings. The one from the 1964 fair has an image of the unisphere in one corner, and on the back it says this object was presented by U.S. Steel. The Shea postcard has this image in the corner as well. The one I already have I noticed has a perforation on one end, suggesting it was part of a series- at one point inside a pack or booklet.
    Besides the Shea postcard, I did order a Maytag postcard as well. It was a cool one with images of various products they made apparently in the 1940s, with the factory as a backdrop. I am still researching postcards from Chicago's two World's Fairs, though I seem to be finding more from 1933 (as opposed to the earlier one in 1893). One of the five I own is from Chicago's fair- the Wonder Bread/Hostess building, actually stamped 1934 as this fair did run for two years instead of one. Some from Chicago are not too surprising, as I am finding postcards of meat companies. At that time there were plenty of stockyards in Chicago, and of course they need to have food available at a fair. I am also finding replicas of buildings like Washington's Mount Vernon and Lincoln's log cabin. This of course is in addition to Fort Dearborn.   

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