If I knew then what I know now!

P

Patentleathershoes

VFG Veteran
VFG Past President
I was just thinking (scarey, huh?).

I don't remember what show it was. Maybe it was many, but the scenario is a modern day evil genius or just a lucky person, travels back in time and buys a bunch of stock right after the stock market crashed and heralded in the Great Depression. And they either bring back proof of ownership to the future, or in otherwise set it up so they would inherit it or get it once they were actually born 20-30 years later.

My brother said that if only he would have kept some of his action figures or didn't play with them so hard he would have a fortune on his hands today.

Why is this subject coming up?

Well, I will be visiting my parents for the holidays. And in light of all these cinched waisted long 70s coats that are popular...all tweeds...I thought about seeing if my mother still had mine. I wore them after the 70s were over...they were hand me downs..but i still loved them. They are probably way to small for me now, but I am going to try and get em anyways. She may not let me have them as she is quite a hoarder, but we shall see. And they certainly were not cool when i was wearing them. Who knows, maybe she really doesn't have em anymore..

Are there anythings you kick yourself for not keeping?

Okay, we can't keep everything, but have you found yourself in that situation where you said "dangit, if I could go back in time and talk myself out of getting rid of something 10-20 or whatever amount of years ago, what would that thing would have been?

Chris
 
I had almost all the My Little Ponies, including houses, "friends", even the original ponies that came out in 1982. I thought I was being "all grown up" when I gave them all to my baby cousins when I was 13 in 1988 and they promptly cut all the hair off and colored them with markers :(

The thing I could kick my mum for not buying my sister and I, are the Proudheart cat and Loyalheart Dog characters from the Care Bears. They are very rare to find, even in 1986 and those two now are worth upwards of $800- $1000 US each. When I was 10/11, they had them on sale in Woolworth's in Montreal for $20 (Canadian!) each and my mum wouldn't buy them for us. Even at that tender age, I knew my mother had made a grave mistake...

Lei
 
Funny you mention the ponies. i had them too. I actually had someone looking for them recently and was willing to buy them from me. they were at my mom's house. i was ready to walk out the door with them when i visited. as i was there for my wedding shower, i didn't have the room to take them on the plane, so my dad was going to ship them to me with a few other things i didn't have room for.

Well, of course the ponies were not in the box.

My mother had a coniption (i don't know how to spell it). and said "remember, you gave those to your SISTER" who is an adult now too but younger than i. Now she didn't want them either and doesn't remember being given them, and i never had, but they are still sitting there because my mother won't let anything out of her house. If i want to keep it for myself she may relent but if she ever gets a whiff of somethng that i might potentially sell down the road, she can't give it up.

I remind her that the stamp collection i had when i was a kid and bought my first junky car with it by myself and that my investments paid off :)
 
Oh, and yes, i too had the original ponies. Looking back, they were kinda strange when you could best desribe them as green or pink appaloosas with shamrocks or stars on their rears instead of spots. my sister had the sea ponies that they came out with later.

My husband was upset that he didn't buy a box of "Quisp" cereal when it was originally out.

Clotheswise, i will find out if i am still upset about those coats when i get there. but maybe they are not as spectacular as i remember them.
 
I had the first edition Barbie and Ken, Midge and Skipper (when they came on the scene), plus most of the original and exquisite tagged
clothes.

After I was married, and my parents moved west, these, and my other childhood dolls were either given away or
forgotten under the crawlspace storage in the house.

:(

My eldest daughter had a whole collection of My Little Ponies
when she was little (the first ones) ---->sold them at a yard sale.

Clotheswise, I wish I had all my mod clothes from the 60s and my hippie flower child clothing from the 60s/70s----->
donated to charity or sold at yard sales.



Sue
 
Oh, man Sue!

I played with my mother's original bubble cut Barbie...had the original case, all the clothes. I bet she still has it somewhere,

I also had a Cinderella Doll that she had from a shoe store back in the later 50s, but it had a big cinderella like skirt...it was some promotion where you went to try on Cinderella's slipper and all the young ladies got a doll who tried it on.

I am not a doll collector at all, but i just had that one. I gave it back to my mother though, because she kept asking about it. "how is it doing?" "do you have it displayed" and she would fix the hair everytime she saw it and would move it or put it somewhere else in my house...I was so sick of that. she probably still has it.

I think i am making my mother sound like Miss Havasham by now, aren't I?
 
I'd like to take this opportunity to nominate my mother <i>in absentia</i>.

She threw out all her early 60s Vogues early this year, without telling me she still had them.

(insert Munch's <i> Scream</i> here)

If she's thrown out my My Little Ponies too, there's going to be a thermonuclear explosion... :D


(is it just me, or is there a mother-daughter relationship theme thing developing here?)
 
It's an on-going thing though. I always remember my parents talking about when they lived in grans house - which was big because she "took in theatricals" (a kind og guest house). Gran sold up and decided to move in with my parents - but they couldn't give away half the stuff she had - so dad had a major bonfire with all the bentwood chairs & rocking chairs, not to mention the mountain of smashed crockery, like the old washbowls, jugs and chamberpots!

I wish I'd kept my 'walki-talkie doll' - no idea if she'd be valuable now, but I wish I'd kept her! Mr brother wishes he'd kept all his Thunderbirds stuff!

And in a few years time, probably my sons would wish they'd kept their old mobile phones and playstations! LOL
 
Well, I guess I am lucky. My Mom was the coolest! She saved many of my dolls and I still have them today. I think I still have my daughter's My Pretty Ponies (My Little Ponies?). Need to find them!

I still have a couple of the first Nintnedos and Ataris. They go for pretty good money.

I still kick myself for giving away a 60s beaded purse I kept for years. Found the exact same one in a Handbag Book. Darn it! I would have sold that for big bucks!!

No telling what I have in this house that is worth a lot of money now!!
 
My Pretty Pony was a larger than the My Little Pony with hair mane and tail (synethetic of course) . She was closer to a normal horse color.

My patents still have the Atari 2600 but its missing a connector piece and the Atari stunt cycle. I wish it worked because we would have a lot of fun with how we thought the graphics looked and how advanced vs seeing them now in today's light. actually for my eyesight, those games with the simpler graphics work much better when using it for vision therapy/coordination than the elaborate almost too real graphics now.

Margaret! What a horrifying tale. sounds like something of novels....the grandmother with the houseguests...the burning.. I am a wood furniture junkie so can feel your pain!!! If my husband would let me I would have even more vintage occassional tables than i do (let me=needs traffic paths which i don't blame him for!)
 
Originally posted by dancingdresses
And my vintage 1967 bod!
Click to expand...

I'll second that one!!!!

I'm afraid I am too old for My Little Pony! :(

Fortunately I still have my barbies. Not my first ones like my red-headed Midge doll - but my second wave of barbies. They aren't in very nice shape though. I am afraid I was quite fond of giving them haircuts and poor Ken's head is being held on my tape! lol!! But I still have the original Barbie camper! When my sister's daughter was littler she used to love to play with it too!!

My family is pretty good about keeping stuff. My mom still has all her original Elvis 45s in the original cardboard photo record sleeves! We will probably have to pry them out of her cold dead hands!! lol. I do have all her original Beatles albums plus the program and ticket stub from when she took my aunt to go see them! I just wish I still had my Beatles t-shirt. I have photos of me wearing it when I was 4ish.

One thing she did toss, which her and I talk about and lament, was all her old Vogue magazines from the 50s thru the 70s. She keep them for years and years but finally got tired of moving them and chucked them about 15 years ago. We mourn them when we talk about them now...

I do wish I had my mother's old clothes from the 50's. She was quite stylish and very pretty with long red hair!! I sigh when I look at the old photos! Here she is with her younger sister, taking her someplace fancy. I'd kill for that suit she is wearing!! Look at the sleeves!! Sigh!! Look at my aunt in that big ol' puffy dress!!!!!!!

mom_linda.jpg


Ah, those were the days....

~Maureen
 
Wow...those are quite the dresses! My husband's aunt still has all her original Elvis records. And every glass aspirin bottle or baby food jar that entered the house over her entire existence. She has a stack of them sky high with buttons in them.

I am on the official countdown on going to visit my parents now...9-10 days away now....

So i just wonder what i might be finding or not finding when i get there.. .
 
My family weren't keepers. I grew up in a house of Danish Modern furniture and Italian pottery and glassware. Antiques were something grannies had.

Of course, as I grew up I desired all the OLD stuff and sniffed my nose at the Danish Modern... Apparently "THe Chair" by Hans Wegner of which we had two are now worth about $4,000+ each. I remember seeing those being taken away by the Sally Ann on a cold winter morning in 1977... We had a Frank Gehry cardboard table too... don't know what happened to that but it went about the same time -- probably in the garbage.
 
I wish I still had my 1964 Beatles sweatshirt.

I also wish I had the trunk of old "dress up" clothes from my great-aunt's house that my stupid uncle burned after she died. (What is it with fires, anyway?)
 
What is it with fires, anyway?

Interesting, huh?

The first thing that leapt to my mind is you know how people burn letters from old boyfriends,etc? A lot of cultures use fire as a cleansing ritual, which sure would tie in here....but about the whole ex-boyfriend thing....it kind seems its like stamping out things so its like they never existed. or what it reminds you of.

Unless you are in the middle of siberia and need to keep warm of course.
 
Oh my goodness. I am at my parent's house right now and my coats are nowhere to be found but I did find something very nostalgic and I can't wait to smuggle it home. well, it won't be smuggling it because it was mine to begin with...but to save it before it gets wrecked!

: )
 
What a fun thread!

Well, I would have kept all my barbie dolls and accoutrements. After my freshman year in college I was so dissapointed that my life wasn't anything like Barbie's (I didn't look like her, I didn't have a glamorous life like her, I didn't have beautiful clothes like her), I packed them all up in boxes for the salvation army to take. My mother said "are you sure?" I was sure and she said "fine then... give them all away". The thing is, I had some very nice stuff. I had the barbie camper too. But the nicest thing I had that I really should have kept (don't know why my mother didn't rescue it from the box because she really loved it) was the barbie piano / music box. I actually did keep just a few of my early barbie dolls, but what I gave away ended up being worth quite alot.

My mother learned early on not to give anything away without first asking me. I threw a fit when I discovered she had given away her old wicker doll pram (I was still in my single digit years at the time). Why was I so upset when I had this new plastic buggy to push my dolls around in? Well I liked the wicker one better even though it was broken. She wasn't planning on giving it away. Just some lady had come to the house for something else, saw the wicker pram and offered to buy it. "That old thing? You can have it for nothing", was my mom's reply.

What else... wish I would have kept my mother's gold dress suit which she had been married in in 1949. When she asked me if I wanted it, I had recently had my "colors" done and gold wasn't in the summer palette so I said I didn't want it. It was a lovely suit...

Carol
 
Oooh... I thought of something else I wish I would have kept. My mother had these lovely floral broaches from the 40's(?). She had over half a dozen, but I only kept two because they were the only ones in my "colors". Now I wish I still had them all. Here's a pic of the two I kept:

<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-10/858248/Img_5260.jpg"><br></p>

The things I wish I kept aren't necessarily worth a lot of money, but had sentimental value to me now that I think about it.


Carol
 
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