• Sunday-What'sUP October 21 - 12:19 pm

Before our Indian Summer is gone, this week's Shoebox Memory from Paul Meier takes us on a picnic almost a hundred years ago:

While these didn't come out of a shoebox, they were in a box of photos and negative that my Grandfather stashed in the 1960's. His father, Anton Haun, was an active member of the C&H Gun Club. Usually their activities centered around the Club House at the Delaware Mine. They had the old agents house courtesy of C&H. I was surprised to find a series of negatives labeled for a club trap shoot and picnic at Swedetown Hill in 1916. 1916 was quite a festive year around Red Jacket. They had the C&H 50th Anniversary and events like this. These 3 photos show the Gun Club picnic and trap shoot.

The top photo shows the crowd at the trap shoot. You can see a fellow with a shotgun in the center background.

In the second shot, some arrived in style. Anton Haun is in the passenger seat, while possibly his younger brother John Haun is in the driver's seat. The other two are unknown to me, but the Gipp clan was also very active in the club. The fellow in the rear with the light colored shirt looks like he could be a Gipp. Anton was a C&H miner with more that 35 years experience underground. John Haun was a Shift Boss in the Hecla and had been working underground since age 15.

The final scene - a group of men at the picnic - has the car in the background and it looks like at least two were in the previous car photo. Back then one dressed up for a picnic. Despite the tough look of the men, it was a family affair.All photos by my Grandfather John F. Haun who was 20 years old at the time and worked at the C&H smelter in Hubbell... Sorry I can't provide more identities.

Paul Meier

Thanks Charlie!

Let's hope & pray that in 2016 we still HAVE Gun
Clubs!

Amen, Jbuck!
Nice gathering of yesteryear, Charlie. Thank you.

The era of hats and caps......

Looking at that hand crank on the car, one false move could result in a busted arm! Dad had a few tractors with the hand crank, they could pop backwards so fast!

On a side note, when grandpa & grandma were still with us, we would have a feast and everyone tried their aim with trap shooting. One such event all us grand kids and I think dad all witnessed and learned grandma knew what to do with a pistol in her hand! She had accuracy!

Can't make out the car company but it must be foreign. The steering wheel is on the right side............:)

Every guy in those days wore a hat or cap.
That car has the steering wheel on the right side. The guy sitting in the back seat on the left side looks like a big shot,drive James.

Do your Gun Clubs of the 2016 era include having AK 47's?

Here on Shoebox Memories we remember a simpler time when there was a different menu of polarizing topics (like the mining strike in those days). You are welcome to meet on the politics page for topics like gun control.

Thanks for the comments. As to the car, I don't know the manufacturer. In that era, I'm not sure that things were as standardized as they are today. The righthand drive may have been the manufacturers choice. The standard side for the driver of a horse drawn vehicle was the right side, so that may have been a continuation of horse sense. Some of the very earliest farm tractors were equipped with mechanical reins rather than steering wheels - evidently they thought folks might have trouble adapting.

The car in the photo does not have to be foreign. In the early 1900s, there was no standard location for the steering wheel. Most US cars went to left-hand drive in the late 1910s, however, some companies like Stutz and Pierce Arrow continued to make and sell right-hand drive cars into the 1920s.

Paul Meier: "Back then one dressed up for a picnic."
and …
Eugene Zuverink (Zube):
"Every guy in those days wore a hat or cap. …"

Some personal memories from as recently as the 1940s-1960s even:

Washday on the farm: Heating water in a huge copper vessel on the wood stove for grandma's old Kenmore® wringer washer (it still was fully functional 50 years later, perhaps to this day!), and drying loads of laundry out in the sun on the clothesline. Ironing? Oh plenty of that to do, although at least with an electric iron, no more the heating the heavy "sadiron(s)"



… on the wood stove (although they were still stored in the attic)!

My maternal grandfather heading out from the farm on his second job as the local Agricultural Adjustment Administration agent, with his briefcase and wearing a white shirt, arm garters, tie, suspenders and of course a fedora, the "little businessman" as some called him — no suit coat, though.

My dad, hardly ever without his fedora, even off to work each day at the Chrysler plant in Hamtramck, although not a suit and tie.

It was in the late 1950s before my mom stopped wearing a hat and gloves to go 'downtown', but my daddy still always wore his suit, tie and hat. He wore a straw 'sailer' in summer and a fedora or derby in winter.

I never saw my grandpa in a pair of blue jeans. Always dress slacks with a crease and a cuff and a white shirt. I remember when he use to put his cigarette ashes in the cuffs of his slacks til one day he set his pants on fire. That was a sight to see as a kid. How I miss my grandpa.

I recently was looking through some pictures from
1912 of the construction of a US post office in my
home town. The masons and carpenters would all
arrive for work dressed in coats and ties. They put
on coveralls for the days work and then returned
home dressed like they came.

My grandpa was a meat cutter by trade and I remember as a kid, 4-5-6- yrs. old, seeing him at the meat counter in a white shirt and tie with an apron.