Chair

Then & Now
This is actually two separate selections of my grot. The first is the chair on the right. It's my favorite chair. I like it because it is a sturdy piece of furniture, but to be honest I can't describe to you the style and I am clueless about the manufacturer and its relative value. Furniture is not my forté. It is very roomy and confortable, a great reading chair. It has a small footstool that I use with it, part of which you can see in the photo. This is one of those items I own just because I like it, and no other reason.

If you have read some of my grot pages, you may have seen me refer to the house in Springfield before. This is a house that I helped my friend Ellen settle when she was named executor. This chair is another item I retrieved from that house, it was one of the few pieces of furniture in the house that had not been found piled high with other things, so I have a feeling that Nellie, the former owner of the house, had liked it too. It was in bad shape though, and so I had it reupholstered.

The day the chair had been delivered to me from the upholsterer I was babysitting for my friend Robbie's twin babies. When Robbie came to pick up the kids, I showed her my chair, after all there it was sitting in my living room. "Where did you get that!," she exclaimed. Mistaking the exuberance in her voice, I told her how I had acquired the chair and that it had been a great bargain. "I would hope it would be a bargain," Robbie responded, "who would want it."

I was stunned. Who would not want it? But maybe the deep maroon woven fabric depicting birds of paradise was not as keeping with the period as I had thought it would be. Maybe it was a bit too much. It does look like it would be quite at home in a Victorian bordello, and I often do refer to it as my bordello chair. But that hasn't changed my fondness for the chair at all.

In this same house, in the process of attempting to organize its contents, I happened upon a small carton of what turned out to be old negatives. I took these negatives with the intent of looking through them, but forgot about them for months. Later, when I came across them again and began to look through them I realized they were dated from the 1930's. I was able to guess this era, because in the mid 1930's western Massachusetts had been hit by a storm of tremendous force that had caused extensive flooding and damage. In this group of negatives were many shots taken in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts. These were shots of high water, flooding, and trees fallen onto old cars of that era.

There were lots of other negatives too, and in going through them I found a negative that surprised me. It was a negative of a woman sitting in my bordello chair, and that printed photo is shown at the top of this page, on the left. The shape of the wooden arm is unmistakable. The woman sitting in the chair, however, is unrecognizable. I asked Ellen, who's relatives had lived in this Springfield house, to identify this woman, and she could not. We do not know who she is. All I know is that I now own the chair she sits upon in the photograph.

Ellen thinks it may have been a group of negatives that somehow ended up in the house with the chair, perhaps from a border that may have stayed there. The items in the photo were not found in the house, other than the chair itself. Also, in going through the negatives even further, I was able to find a photo of my footstool, posed with another unidentifiable woman of that era, and that is shown at the bottom of the page. You can see the footstool in the foreground, to the left.

So really, this page has two pieces of my grot, although highly connected. I keep the chair, because I like it so much. The photos I keep because first of all it shows my furniture in use 60 years ago by what appears to be two nice women. This adds some good karma to my furniture, I think. Secondly, the photos make a general statement to the way we live today. There is longevity in that woodwork, it still exists, in the best of condition I might add.

Somehow, 60 years from today, I do not expect anyone to be looking at a photograph of me sitting on or near my put-together furniture made from "pressed wood particles with real oak veneer" and then looking across the room at the same item in their own home. Some things just don't last in our contemporary world, some things are just not made to last. I guess all we can do is hope the negatives will endure.



Comments may be directed to:
Laurel O'Donnell
lod@zapix.com
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