LBJ's dead.

One of the reasons I’m happy to live in Atlanta is that I can get home easily if there’s some sort of family event or a good concert in Asheville. This weekend there was both! The good concert was Lucy Kaplansky, who’s a folk singer and one-third of the folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry which I have previously mentioned. I haven’t really listened to a lot of Lucy since high school, but the concert keyed me into some things I had been missing. During the concerts, Lucy told a lot of adorable stories about her five-year-old daughter, Molly. When I heard Lucy had a daughter named Molly, I thought that perhaps I might be the inspiration for the name, because in high school, I saw a fair number of Lucy Kaplansky shows and she always signed an autograph for me. My uncle even got her to sign one, “To Molly, my favorite fan” or something like that. So anyways, I thought that all those autographs for me might have made her think, “I must have a daughter named Molly also!” But it turns out her grandmother’s name is Molly.

The opening act…I don’t remember his name, but he did a weird/interesting thing where he played along to his CD during some songs, but the CD was staggered a bit behind him, so it was sort of like singing in the round, with himself. I don’t know if that makes sense. He sang a song about babies dying at birth and a song that he said he wrote to explain to his 20-month-old daughter what a funeral was, because they had to take her to a funeral. I would say that the song was a little inappropriate for a 20-month-old because it had a lot of drinking and also, I think a funeral is a pretty good time to spring for a babysitter.

Anyways, the fun family event was the American Political Items Collectors (APIC) Spring Show in Greensboro, NC!!! Now, some of you who read this blog know that my father has collected political memorabilia since he was 10 years old. Things like campaign buttons and posters and weird presidential toys. When I was little, we completely renovated our basement so it could be like a campaign memorabilia museum. I spent a lot of time down there.

You find buttons by going to antique stores and to APIC shows. When I was little, I’d have to go down to the basement before an APIC show and look at all the buttons and try to memorize what Dad had in the collection, so that at the show, he could say, “Do we have this Goldwater button?” and I would say yes or no. Eventually I started to get it wrong and there were duplicates and then I went to college so now Dad has scanned all his buttons and put them in a binder and this makes going to APIC shows infinitely less stressful for me.

We found some pretty good buttons this year. I learned that LBJ is dead in terms of the value of his buttons, and my dad and a dealer had a pretty engaging conversation about cardboard backing vs. pinbacks on buttons. Some weird guy came up to my brother and showed him a picture of a Christmas tree that had political buttons on it, which you may think would be sort of a one-sided topic but as it turns out, my family also has a Christmas tree with political items that we put up every year. I saw a ferrotype of Lincoln that was selling for $3000. Other than that, it was a lot of middle-aged guys looking at buttons.

After the button show, my dad got horribly sick, but he still went through the button book and showed me some of his favorite buttons. I tried to take pictures of some buttons to put up here, but it turns out buttons don’t photograph well. But here’s what he pointed out:
--A McKinley goldbug. This is a bug with pictures of the candidates in the wings. William Jennings Bryan had silverbugs because the issue of the day was whether the country was going to have the gold standard or the silver standard.

--A Woodrow Wilson Peace Preparedness button that my dad likes because he bought it for a dime when he was ten.

--A button of FDR driving a boat. The button says, Don’t change pilots, re-elect FDR.

--The Landon sunflowers. Alf Landon was from Kansas and a lot of his buttons are brown with yellow petals on the border.

--The Willkie and Roosevelt slogan pins. Man oh man Willkie buttons are the most fun buttons of all! Here’s the deal with Willkie. He was a Democrat who switched parties to run against FDR in 1940, when FDR was up for this third term. People went ape-shit for Willkie, and this manifested itself through thousands of different buttons. They say fairly clever things like “Don’t be a third term-ite,” and the immense number of them led the FDR camp to release a button that said “All you can get from Willkie is buttons.” One of my dad’s favorite buttons is a button that says “Will” and dangling down from the button is a key. Will-key. Willkie. This is probably my favorite button of all-time as well. If my current job doesn’t pan out, I’m just going to become a Wendell Willkie scholar. He was fairly dapper as well.

--An Ike and Dick button that has a matching Mamie and Pat button. Fun fact: political items with two people on them are called jugates!

--A PT pontoon button for JFK. This was JFK’s favorite as well…he used to keep them in his pockets and hand them out to supporters.

--Goldwater buttons—My dad just loves Goldwater buttons. That is probably his specialty. There are a lot of buttons that say “A choice not an echo” or “In your heart you know he’s right” or simply, AuH20.

--Flashers. This one is not candidate-specific. Dad just likes all flasher buttons. They’re the ones you hold and then you move them and they say something different. This weekend we got a cool one that at one angle is a picture of Adlai Stevenson, and at the other angle, it says “Madly for Adlai.”

Also this weekend I came up with the word “Barackulous” which is like miraculous, but meant to denote a Barack Obama miracle. It is sadly too long to fit on a button.