When Bay Area artist Lea Redmond, known for running the “World’s Smallest Post Service,” stumbled across Parlor Coo Coo on eBay, she knew she’d found something special. Sure enough, handheld punch-board parlor games, like Coo Coo and its companion The Fortune-Teller in Rhymes, were the icebreakers du jour at cocktail parties of the 1920s and ’30s.

Sold by the checkout at five-and-dimes, these palm-sized stacks of pressed cardboard had all the scandal of a slumber party: You’d push out an accordion-fold paper slip, and it would tell your fortune, pose a quiz question, dare you to kiss another player, or challenge you to “Tie your shoelaces together and strut like a peacock.”

But the origins of these pre-smartphone amusements are not so cutesy. First designed for gambling, punch boards quickly became the go-to scam for gangsters and mobsters like Jack Ruby, con artists, and lottery operators hoping to swindle the gullible.  We found a thorough history of the parlor games’ less-than-savory past at Punchboard.com.

Their story goes back to 18th-century America, when lotteries were the new rage. In those days, lotteries needed a substantial number of participants, until a clever tavern owner figured out way to host a lottery for even just one customer. He built a lottery game board out of wood (the original was probably eight inches square and half an inch thick), drilled holes in it, and stuffed each hole with a paper slip printed with a number or symbol. Then, or so it’s surmised, he posted a sign boasting a chance at cash prizes for the price of a penny. A customer could push out a slip of paper with a nail, and check to see if he had the winning number.

These games spread across the country, but in the early 19th century, gamblers grew wary of them. They had figured out that barkeeps, who usually made their own boards, often kept the top prizes for themselves. Because they knew where the winning numbers were, the owners would push out that slips and claim the prize had been won by a random customer. Some just didn’t bother to include a winning number in the first place.

The instructions read, “Tie your shoelaces together and strut like a peacock.”

Punch boards made a comeback during the Industrial Revolution, when they could be manufactured with paper or foil covering the holes on both sides—in theory, this technology should have prevented the operators from rigging the games. This new generation of boards came with a metal “punch” for gamblers to push out the tickets. By 1910, these games were so inexpensive to produce, they sprang up everywhere. In fact, these were the predecessors to modern-day lottery scratch cards, as well as “The Price Is Right” game Punch-A-Board. Bingo was also often played on punch boards.

The games were also adopted by mobsters like Jack Ruby, also known as the man who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. While some manufacturers produced punch boards with as many as 10,000 holes, earnestly placing the prizes in random locations, others designed by the gambling industry sold “keyed” punch boards that came with a map indicating the locations of the winning tickets. Those were popular with con men, like the character played by George C. Scott in the movie “The Flim Flam Man,” who sold boards to bar owners for less than their market value, kept the maps for himself, and then enlisted an accomplice to go bar-hopping and win all the cash prizes.

Punch boards reached their height of popularity in 1939, when more than 50 million were produced. Thanks to all the criminal activity around them, by World War II the games were banned in several U.S. states. To hide the true purpose of these boards, many manufacturers labeled them “for trade only,” claiming the tickets were not redeemable for cash (even though they were). Tobacco and beer companies would use boards to advertise their products, suggesting you could win a beer or a cigar, but these, too, were used for cash gambling. Zippo was particularly successfully using these gambling tools as advertisements, selling around 300,000 lighters through punch boards.

Like modern-day slot machines, punch boards often had themes and were decorated with images of sports or folk heroes like Paul Bunyan. During World War II, punch boards that let you pretend to take a crack at Hitler were common.

The most popular theme was what’s known as a “pin-up punch board,” which featured an image of a comely young woman. Some had suggestive names, like “Pick a Cherry” or “Hit Me Take Me.” Jim Linderman at Vintage Sleaze even found a punch board advertising “mystic” girlie glasses, which were drinking glasses that featured a pin-up who appeared to strip naked when the beer was poured in.

Although punch boards promising cash prizes thrived in bars, casinos, and mobster-run joints, as Lea Redmond discovered, handheld punch-board parlor games of the era—with names like Cats-Meow, Peppy Punch-It Parlor Ranks, Prof. Bunken, Phony Fibs, Kissing Game, and Dippy Parlor Game Charades—offered much more innocent diversions for the home, until they disappeared amid the anti-gambling fervor. Delighted by these long-lost amusements, Redmond decided to create her own.

Available at Leafcutter Designs, Redmond’s Retro Punch Boxes are conceived as Valentines—suitable for friends, family, or the object of your romantic fancy—each stuffed with 12 hand-scrolled paper slips, printed with “Sweet Words” such as “You are so awesome that I would loan you my favorite wool sweater.” For a little bit extra, you can compose your own punch-box messages for your sweetheart.

Even though these gentle Valentines may seem far removed from the punch board’s seedy back-room roots, it seems appropriate. After all, what is love if not a gamble?

(Images of Parlor Coo Coo, The Fortune-Teller in Rhymes, and Retro Punch Boxes from Lea Redmond at Leafcutter Designs; images of Peppy Thrill, Charley Board, and Cats-Meow from Punchboard.com)

The corset has a bad reputation. And unfairly so, according to Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, who says this undergarment of centuries past is not nearly as evil or confining as modern folks have come to believe.

With the Edwardian Balls just around the corner, we started ogling gorgeous antique corsets on Collectors Weekly Hall of Fame site, The Antique Corset Gallery, including this 1895 pink-and-black Y&N corset (right). Then, we asked Steele, the author of “The Corset: A Cultural History,” to set the record straight about this much-maligned piece of fashion history. Here are her top three misunderstood facts about corsets:

1. Thirteen-inch waists are a thing of myths.

Even though so-called “tight-lacing” was popular during the late 1800s, women rarely reduced their waists more than 1-2 inches. Generally, a corset with a 20-inch waist would be worn with a gap in the back, so the woman’s corseted waist measured between 22 and 26 inches. Where did these tales of ladies of the court and their obscenely tiny 13-inch waists come from? Fetish fantasy literature of the era.

“A lot of people believe in the 16-inch waist being typical when, of course, most corsets were no smaller than in the 20s,” Steele says. “Most people would reduce to a couple of inches. You can reduce it 4 inches or so, but most women were not going to be doing any more than that.”

2. Corsets did not create misshapen livers or life-threatening diseases.

A long corset made by CK in Belgium, circa 1890. From the collection of L. Hidic, corsetsandcrinolines.com, via The Antique Corset Gallery.

Over the years, corsets have been credited with causing a whole litany of health problems. It’s been said that they misshape internal organs and cause cancer. Other illnesses attributed to corsets were fake, sexist conditions, like “hysteria.” There’s also no record of a woman having a rib surgically removed so she could better fit into a corset, which is a particularly absurd myth, given how deadly surgery was in the 1800s.

Of course, they weren’t exactly the healthiest things to wear every day, either. They did force organs to shift around, cause indigestion and constipation, and eventually weakened back muscles. And they didn’t leave a lot room for pregnant women’s fetus-incubating bellies. But deadly they were not. They also didn’t prevent women from doing their work—any more than, say, stiletto heels do.

“Most people today think corsets were extremely dangerous and caused all kinds of health problems, from cancer to scoliosis,” Steele says. “And that’s quite inaccurate. Most of the diseases that have been credited to corsets, in fact, had other causes. Corsets did not cause scoliosis, the crushing of the liver, cancer, or tuberculosis. It doesn’t mean that corsets were without any health problems, but it does mean that most modern people are wildly naive in believing the most absurd antiquated medical accusations about corsetry.

“For example, the idea of the misshapen liver seems to be a mistake based on the fact that there is a lot of variation in the shape of livers. When doctors did autopsies, they would see these weird-looking livers and they’d go, ‘That was caused by the corset.’”

3. Men did not force women into corsets.

Madame Lemay silk damask corset, circa 1901. From the collection of M. Talkington, laceembrace.com, via The Antique Corset Gallery.

Steele says women wore corsets quite on their own volition. Men, in fact, regularly protested corsets, claiming they caused hysteria and the other health problems mentioned above. Women wore the corset because it made them feel attractive and properly dressed, she says, two important indicators of status. However, they were intended to reshape the natural body to what women perceived as the most ideal figure—meaning the most youthful and sexually desirable. Men might not have oppressed women by demanding they wear corsets, but women certainly wore them to impress men and assert their rank among other women.

“The corset was associated with high status and with respectability, indicating you’re not loose,” Steele says. “Also, it enhances the sexually dimorphic curves of the female body. It acts like a proto-Wonderbra and also emphasizes the waist-hip differential, which makes you look younger, slimmer, and curvier—which is still what everybody wants. But now women get on a StairMaster or get plastic surgery instead of putting on a corset.”

A hand-made cone-shaped stay corset from circa 1786. From the collection of K. Augusta, antique-fashion.com, via The Antique Corset Gallery.

In early 16th century Europe, corsets called “payre of bodies” pushed the breasts upward and shaped the torso into a slim cylinder, thanks to boning made of horn, buckram or whalebone, and a flat wooden “busk” running down the center. But by the 17th century, corsets took on more of a cone-like shape, often made of two separate pieces of boned fabric known as stays, held together in the front with the busk. For a brief time, from 1800 to 1830, the Napoleonic high “empire waist” look freed bellies from the confines of waist-constricting stays, as corsets became smaller and closer to modern-day bras.

The Victorian Era revived the desire for wasp waists and hourglass silhouettes, and so corsets, now extending below the waist and incorporating steel boning, created that shape. Curves were further exaggerated with big shoulders in blouses, and huge hoop skirts over layers of crinoline. Also, new manufacturing technology allowed for affordable mass-produced corsets, which had previously been custom-made to a woman’s measurements.

This illustration from a 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal shows the change from Victorian to Edwardian silhouettes.

The Edwardian period hailed a whole new corset shape. This decade at the turn-of-the-century (1901-1910) represented a tremendous time of transition in fashion, as the elaborate getups of the Victorian Era got a bit more ridiculous, and then fell out of style all together.

A corsetier with an M.D., Inès Gaches-Sarraute, came up with the straight-front corset—also known as the “swan-bill,” “S-line,” or “S-bend” corsets—which he believed kept the pressure off a woman’s stomach. But these corsets forced women to tilt awkwardly, hips back, breasts forward, and created an exaggerated S-shape in the back. Of course, these were probably much worse for one’s health, putting all sorts of strain on the spine by forcing such an awkward posture. But if a woman were to dress as an authentic Edwardian, this is the sort of corset she’d wear.

Bianca Lyons in typical Edwardian dress, circa 1902. Image from the U.S. Library of Congress, copyright E. Chickering.

Between 1908 and 1914, fashion favored a more natural shape, but corsets got even bigger and more complicated, extending down to the thigh and creating a higher waist.

An early 1910s longline corset made from bow patterned pink brocade. From the collection of L. Hidic, corsetsandcrinolines.com, via The Antique Corset Gallery.

“You’re getting a shift away from what high Victorian and Edwardian fashion writers described as ‘the Venus ideal’ and a movement towards ‘the Diana ideal,’ which was slimmer and more athletic,” Steele says. “So increasingly, people started to say that they didn’t need to wear a corset, that their body was already ideal. Often, when you read old interviews, actresses will say, ‘I don’t need to wear a corset,’ but you look at their photograph and you go, ‘Babe, you are so wearing a corset.’”

In the 1910s and 1920s, as women became more interested in sports and clothes that allowed for a greater freedom of movement, the socially desirable silhouette changed to a thinner, more streamlined figure. New elastics allowed for shaping undergarments that narrowed the hips without the use of steel boning.

“By the 1910s, the tango had become trendy,” Steele says. “If you had a boned corset, your movements weren’t right, so people would wear these boneless tango corsets, which are just long elasticized girdles. And there began to be a gradual movement towards dieting and exercise as the way to control the way your body looks. By the ’20s, of course, your clothes were showing more of your body. You couldn’t hide behind corsetry so much anymore.”

While these new hip-controlling girdles and breast-supporting brassieres became the order of the day, corsets made a comeback briefly in the late 1930s—after World War II interrupted fashion, they returned again for Dior’s New Look, which emphasized small waists, full busts, and big flowing skirts. They went out of fashion again when ’60s mod style brought back the short skirts and girlish figure of the ’20s and the hippie movement embraced more natural body shapes.

“When you read old interviews, actresses will say, ‘I don’t need to wear a corset,’ but you look at their photograph and you go, ‘Babe, you are so wearing a corset.’”

Up until the punk movement of the ’70s, corsets were strictly undergarments, never intended to be worn in public. In their quest to be shocking, punks started wearing old-fashioned lingerie as outerwear. Haute couture designers like Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier quickly put this brazenly sexy look, drawn from the bondage porn of early decades, on the runway. Then, in the ’80s, mega pop stars like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna brought it to mainstream America.

Ever an object of fascination and debate, the corset will make its way out of the closet in the coming weeks, as the Edwardian Ball hits San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom on Jan. 20 and 21 and Los Angeles this spring, date and location to be announced. These events are a fantastical and Halloweeny celebration of macabre mid-century illustrator Edward Gorey, as well as of the fashions of the Edwardians.

This year, Edwardian Ball goers will surely see plenty of outerwear corsets at the events, where people let their imaginations run wild a la Burning Man and mine countercultures like goth, bondage, and steampunk for inspiration. But for ladies who value historically accuracy, the swan-bill corsets will be worn more discreetly under the layers of lace, ruffles, and ribbons of their gorgeous period-perfect gowns.

If you were in a rock band in late-1960s San Francisco, the world beat a path to your garage door. Record executives walked the length of Haight Street and saw dollar signs instead of peace symbols, signing bands to fat contracts as fast as they could.

But if you wanted to rock ’n’ roll in the East Bay, particularly in that no-man’s land between Oakland and San Jose, you were a beggar at the banquet happening just a few miles away. It didn’t matter that you thought your group could be the next Herman’s Hermits, Beatles, or Rolling Stones. If you and your band were so cool, why weren’t you in San Francisco?

Above left: In the mid-1960s, Bill Quarry promoted local and international acts alike at Rollarena on East 14th Street in San Leandro. Above right: Bill Quarry (left) with Tiny Tim.

Bill Quarry was the exception to this exclusionary rule. Throughout the ’60s, Quarry promoted East Bay bands (including the Baytovens, shown at top) in shows at a number of now legendary East Bay music venues, the most famous of which was a roller-skating rink called Rollarena at 15721 East 14th Street in San Leandro.

“The San Leandro strip was second to none,” recalls Bruce Tahsler, who was the lead singer in a British Invasion-inspired outfit called the Talisman and is the author and editor of “Garage Bands From The 60′s, Then And Now.”

“When kids got out of the drive-ins, they would cruise the strip,” Tahsler says. “We’re talking bumper-to-bumper traffic for about a mile or so. It was a terrific place to be, like in ‘American Graffiti’. Every restaurant and coffee shop was packed.”

Quarry got his start producing Teens 'N Twenties dances at the Moose Club in Castro Valley. In the late-1950s, Quarry helped promote shows such as this one with Fats Domino.

“Bill Quarry could have been as big as Bill Graham in San Francisco, but he was too nice.”

While the Rollarena may have been Bill Quarry’s most famous music venue in the East Bay, it was by no means his first. “During high school,” Quarry says, “I was working with the Hayward Recreation Department at a teen club they sponsored. We’d put on little dances around town. After I graduated in 1955, I realized there was no place for people who were out of high school, but still under 21, to go. So a friend of mine and I rented the Castro Valley Moose Club for dances. We wanted to get teens to come, but we also wanted people who had just turned 20, so I called the dances Teens ’N Twenties. Every Friday night we’d pack 300 or 400 people in there, as many as it would hold, at a dollar a head.”

From the Moose Club, Quarry branched out, promoting concerts at Carpenter’s Hall in Hayward and even bigger venues. “I knew a guy named Mannie Schwartz,” Quarry says. “He was a big-time promoter who used to book the Coasters, the Drifters, Duane Eddy, all those people. He happened to live in San Leandro, so we used my name when he brought in acts locally.”

Quarry promoted shows all over the East Bay. This pair of posters by Don Ryder advertise concerts in Vallejo, San Leandro, and Oakland.

In partnership with Schwartz, Quarry promoted Fats Domino at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, as well as a big “Cavalcade of Stars” at the Oakland Auditorium, with everyone from James Brown to Jerry Lee Lewis to the Everly Brothers on the same bill.

A stint in the service interrupted his career, but by 1964, Quarry was back at Carpenter’s Hall, booking local bands who were inspired by the success of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show earlier in the year. One of the most popular proto-Brit band of the mid-1960s was the Baytovens, which opened its first show in 1965 at San Leandro High School’s Christmas Dance with a cover of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Quarry made it a point to pair big-name acts of the day like Paul Revere and the Raiders with East Bay bands like the Harbinger Complex.

“They were a Beatles look-alike and sound-alike band,” says Tahsler. “They dressed like The Beatles and had topnotch equipment like The Beatles. They brought their own sound system to their concerts and dances.” For a brief while, the Baytovens were one of the highest paid bands in the East Bay, but 18 months after their first gig, they were gone.

At the tail end of 1965, on New Year’s Eve in fact, Bill Quarry produced his first show at Rollarena, which held about 2,000 people. Peter Wheat and the Breadmen headlined. “It wasn’t big names,” Quarry says of the majority of bands who played Rollarena. “I built two stages so we could alternate bands. One band would be setting up while the other was playing. It was the first time anybody had ever done that.”

Jim Armstrong of Them with an unidentified fan at Rollarena, the first California stop on the Irish band's first U.S. tour.

A typical Rollarena show featured four bands and admission was usually just $2, although Quarry had to charge an extra 50 cents when big-name acts like Them (Van Morrison’s band) were headlining. “The first California stop on their first American tour was Rollarena,” says Tahsler of Them. “Van Morrison met his future wife there.” Rollarena was also the site of the first California performance for Neil Diamond.

For about six months, Quarry promoted weekly shows at Carpenter’s Hall and Rollarena simultaneously, but he eventually dropped regular bookings at Carpenter’s Hall in favor of high-impact events, like the April 6, 1966, appearance of Paul Revere and the Raiders at the Oakland Auditorium. East Bay stalwarts Peter Wheat, the Baytovens, and a group of Rolling Stones-like tough guys from Fremont called Harbinger Complex provided support.

Quarry nurtured the East Bay music scene by giving young bands a chance to play Rollarena and bringing East Bay acts to San Francisco venues like Longshoreman's Hall.

Despite the nostalgic that’s usually shown for 1967 and the Summer of Love, 1966 was easily the most important year for music in the San Francisco Bay Area. That was the year Chet Helms began producing dance concerts at the Fillmore, before Bill Graham’s signature on that storied auditorium’s lease forced him to move his Family Dog productions to the Avalon Ballroom. During one week in August alone, The Beatles played their last gig at Candlestick Park, Country Joe and the Fish played their first concert at the Fillmore, and Bill Quarry hosted the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds at the Carousel Ballroom, which would become the Fillmore West in 1968.

Quarry could have had the Carousel’s lease, but he was “very content to stay in the East Bay. I actually had no wishes to go into San Francisco at all,” he says. “But eventually, reluctantly, I did some things in San Francisco because younger people, both musicians and fans, wanted to go over there. I guess I was a little jealous because they were getting all the publicity and we were basically ignored.”

Above left: San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham didn't like it when Bill Quarry produced a Jefferson Airplane concert at Rollarena. Above right: Less than two years after Quarry presented the Yardbirds at the Carousel Ballroom, Bill Graham had moved in and renamed it Fillmore West.

“They,” of course, were Graham and Helms, the yin-yang rock impresarios of 1960s San Francisco. “I liked Chet Helms a lot,” Quarry remembers, “and Bill Graham was really friendly with me when he was starting out. He gave me a tour of the Fillmore; he was just so gracious. But five months later he was calling me up, cussing me out. He didn’t like what I was doing, especially when I booked the Jefferson Airplane at Rollerena. He complained about the small stages, the lighting, the sound. He didn’t like any of it.”

Graham was also miffed that anyone would have the temerity to compete with him. “He didn’t want any competition, period. I think his goal was always to have everything to himself. Chet used to say, ‘I have to admit, Bill Graham gets up way earlier than I do.’ Bill was always ahead of the Family Dog people on everything.”

Bruce Tahsler puts it this way: “Bill Quarry could’ve been as big or bigger than Bill Graham in San Francisco,” he says, “but Bill Quarry was too nice of a guy.”

A snapshot of Doors singer Jim Morrison, taken by Quarry from the stage of the San Jose Rock Festival, 1968.

Quarry tried his best to create an East Bay scene that would do the musicians and fans there justice and feel, well, hip. He even got his “everything guy” Don Ryder to create psychedelic posters for his Rollarena shows, just like the ones Wes Wilson and others did for the Fillmore and Avalon. But East Bay bands languished in the shadow of those on the other side of the bay.

“There were definitely groups in the East Bay that were really good,” Quarry says, “but they were penalized for not being in San Francisco. I think if a few of them had moved into the Haight-Ashbury, they probably would’ve made it, but they didn’t do that.”

The crowd and security at an early Rollarena show.

“We all know what took place over in San Francisco,” adds Tahsler, “about all the wonderful bands that played over there, but not much is known about what took place on this side of the bay. A lot of musicians used these little garage bands as springboards for their careers. Skip Mesquite, who played keyboards and sax for my second band, The U.S. Male, went on to play in a little band called the Motowns, and they evolved into Tower of Power. He played with Cold Blood, too. Keyboardist Gregg Rolie was with William Penn and His Pals. He went on to Santana and Journey. Ron Meagher was a bass player for the Offbeats before he joined the Beau Brummels. And on and on.

“There was a self-consciousness about San Francisco,” Tahsler continues. “All of us wanted to record at Golden State Records and play the Fillmore. We looked at the Airplane, Moby Grape, all of those bands, but for one reason or another, most of us didn’t make it.”

Neither did Rollarena. After a great run throughout all of 1966 and most of 1967, the roller-skating rink closed its doors.

Like Wes Wilson, Don Ryder used hand-drawn lettering to create the shapes that filled his posters.

The 1960s ended on the same sour note for Quarry as it did for most people in the Bay Area music scene—Altamont. “I was promoting shows with former Baytovens manager Larry White,” Quarry recalls. “We were doing concerts here and there, and somehow or other we got word about a Rolling Stones show that was supposed to happen at Sears Point. We knew it was going to be a free show, but we wanted to get involved, so we got in touch with the Rolling Stones’ manager, Sam Cutler. We ended up getting a contract to do food concessions. Then, at the last minute, they moved everything to Altamont.”

The Stones decided to hire the Hells Angels to provide security for the event. Reportedly, the gang was paid in beer. Unsurprisingly, this plan did not go well, but ominous signs were literally on the horizon before the first note was played. The day before the ill-fated concert, if you lived in some parts of the East Bay and looked up, you probably noticed helicopters transporting pairs of portable toilets from Sears Point to Altamont. The porta-potty airlift went on all day and into the night. “It seemed like the sky was full of them,” says Tahsler.

“The night before the concert,” Quarry remembers, “Sam Cutler drove me all over those mountains in his Lincoln Continental, to show me where to put the concession stands, where everything would go. But things were already out of control; people were just streaming in.”

Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones looks on while his Hells Angels security force practices crowd control at Altamont, 1969.

The trouble at Altamont went well beyond the killing of a gun-toting spectator by a member of the motorcycle gang. “The whole thing was a disaster,” says Quarry, “it was terrible. We had arranged for two school buses of kids from a local high school to work at the concession stands. And we had a couple of trucks full of food, but we couldn’t open up but one stand because the crowd at the show expected everything to be free. One vendor opened up his truck to sell oranges and within 10 minutes he was completely looted. We had three or four bikers working for us to keep one of our stands open, but there were 300,000 people, so…”

In the 1970s, Quarry juggled his time between a printing company he’d started in the late 1960s—his day job—and concert promotion, much of which occurred at a venerable club in Hayward called Frenchy’s, where Quarry briefly promoted shows in the 1960s.

For a brief period in the 1960s, and during much of the 1970s and '80s, Quarry produced music shows at Frenchy's, a roomy East Bay night club.

“Frenchy’s was the biggest night club in the East Bay,” Quarry says. “We could get 500, 600, 700 people in there. Joe Cocker played there a couple of times, Tower of Power, the Sons of Champlin. I even did big bands like Woody Herman, and Michael Jackson played there after he left The Jackson 5.” Jackson was promoting a new tune called “Beat It.”

Indeed, a lot of people played Frenchy’s, including Bruce Tahsler. “Yeah, my band played Frenchy’s in the ’60s,” Tahsler confirms. “It was a big spot in those days. It had a restaurant, a bar, and a stage in the back where the bands played. Go-go girls danced in cages on each side of the stage.” This was a far cry from the liquid light shows and psychedelic sound in San Francisco, but, recalls Tahsler, “When we played Frenchy’s, we thought we’d arrived.”

(All images except Altamont courtesy Teen ‘N Twenties, where you can order a copy of Tahsler’s book. The book’s CD companion, “You Got Yours!” features songs by such East Bay bands as the Baytovens, Harbinger Complex, and Peter Wheat and the Breadmen; to purchase a CD, visit Ace Records.)

Usually when people watch items on eBay around this time of year, it’s because they have a special gift in mind for a certain someone. But we’ve noticed a surprising number of auctions with scores of watchers that don’t end until Christmas day. Will a lot of certain someones be getting slips of paper in their stockings with a URL written on them? If so, good luck with that. So for all you last-minute Santas out there, here are our top 10 eBay items whose auctions end on December 25, 2011. (Stats as of 12/21/11 at 11:23; End times are PST.)

127 watchers, 6 bids, $2,655. A lot of people are keeping an eye on this Gibson ES-355 from 1962, which was less expensive than its cousins the 335 and 345 when it was introduced but is more desirable today. Seller irongraiden promises that “All of the original potentiometers are scratch free.” Ends at 7:03pm.

120 watchers, 14 bids, $351. According to Karl Marx, Vacheron & Constantin is responsible for the industrialization of the entire watch making industry. According to eBay seller jjmtaction2011, the crystal covers on the face and back of this black enamel moon phase wristwatch are made of plastic. Ends at 6:45pm.

104 watchers, 29 bids, $666.This Chanel 08A fringe herringbone “fantasy” tweed jacket has lion buttons and is 98% wool, with a silk-and-spandex lining. Will balearic1 get the $4,900 they think it’s worth? Ends at 3:36pm.

87 watchers, 28 bids, $190.50. Here’s a Balenciaga Twiggy shoulder bag from 2007, made of distressed leather in a lovely shade of vert d’eau, from supremeluxury. Ends at 5:58pm.

75 watchers, 9 bids, $405. The folks Langlitz Leathers in Portland make their padded motorcycle jackets one at a time—think of them as the Hermès Birkins of the biker world. This brass-zippered beauty from 1995 is marked as a size 41, but guitarmanvintage says it will fit a size 42. Ends at 2:23pm.

60 watchers, 14 bids, $4,183. The last issue of “Amazing Fantasy” in 1962 featured the debut of Spider-Man. This copy from silvercomics is only graded 3.0 on a scale that goes to 10, which means it won’t be setting any records, although even at $4,000-plus the seller’s reserve has yet to be met. Ends at 6:00pm.

58 watchers, 12 bids, $82. Before credit cards gave customers rewards on purchases, people collected things like S&H Green Stamps. Maybe you could apply some of your plastic credits toward this 1955 porcelain sign from nekbe. Ends at 5:36pm.

56 watchers, 18 bids, $152.50. Here’s a sheep’s wool Navajo blanket from the 1930s, offered by ranchfolks. The blanket’s dimensions are 65 by 51 inches and it’s attributed to the famous Crystal Trading Post in the Chuska Mountains of northwest New Mexico. Ends at 7:03pm.

47 watchers, 12 bids, $45.44. An anthropomorphic lamp from Stilnovo, Italy’s premier postwar Mid-century Modern design firm, features a brass neck and a base that clamps to the side of a desk. The seller, fille.du.calvaire, is in Paris. Ends at 12:14pm.

35 watchers, 22 bids, $401.41. We’re pretty sure that whoever purchases this Tiffany Favrile bowl will not be using it to catch their keys when they walk in the front door of their home. In one of the photos, the seller, auctions.both.ways, shows off a scratch near the bottom of the bowl, as well as its number, 1285. Ends at 12:35pm.

When coins were withdrawn from circulation in the northern states during the Civil War, opportunists began minting private pennies that became de facto legal tender throughout the Union. The coinage of a few cents may seem like small change, but in 1863 alone, almost 9,000 different token designs, depicting everything from patriotic flags to beer barrels, were struck. Some so closely resembled real cents that the government banned private mints in 1864.

Coin collector Ken Bauer, who is a member of the Civil War Token Society, spoke to us about his almost lifelong interest in Civil War tokens, as well as the website he recently built to help new enthusiasts amass their own collections.

Collectors Weekly: How’d you get into Civil War tokens?

Ken Bauer: I started collecting Civil War tokens in 1973. It was a lower-cost alternative to coins, which I’d been collecting since I was six years old. Coin collecting was a pretty common hobby for kids in the 1960s. You’d go through the change in your pockets and fill up the holes in your blue Whitman coin folders. Quarters were kind of out of my league—today I’m sorry I didn’t collect standing liberty quarters back then—so I pretty much confined myself to pennies, nickels, and dimes.

After I was married, after college, I discovered some Civil War tokens in a coin shop. I thought they were really cool, and unlike coins, you could get rare ones in good condition fairly inexpensively. Plus, each one had a story to tell.

Die sinkers such as H.D. Higgins made tokens for themselves and other merchants. A beehive, such as the one at top, was meant to signify stores that were literally hives of activity.

Over the years, I photographed the Civil War tokens I collected and inventoried them in a spreadsheet. I only have 700 or so out of 10,000 different varieties, so when I started my Civil War tokens website in June of 2011, I knew I had to come up with something other than a comprehensive catalog of storecards and patriotic tokens as George and Melvin Fuld had done. I wasn’t expecting to supersede the Fulds; their work, especially the rarity estimates, is a huge gift to collectors.

My idea was to create a website that would make it easy for non-coin people to decide to collect tokens with, say, beer glasses or beehives or boots on them, so they could fill in a new kind of virtual Whitman blue book to complete small sets. I also list the Fuld index numbers for each coin.

Collectors Weekly: How does your system differ from Fuld’s?

Bauer: The Fuld storecard book, which is a catalog of all Civil War tokens with a merchant’s name or initials on them, is organized by state, city, and then alphabetically by merchant within that city. It kind of encourages people to pick a place like Milwaukee and then try to get one token from every merchant in town. That’s how storecard tokens tend to be collected.

Die sinker John Stanton of Cincinnati, who struck this storecard, is considered one of the finest craftsmen of the era.

Patriotic tokens, which have patriotic slogans and images on them, are in a separate catalog. In that book, there are photographs of each of the 537 dies that were used to strike the tokens. The Fulds listed all the obverse-reverse die combinations, and whether the metal struck was copper, brass, or what have you. People tend to collect patriotics by trying to get them all, but since there are thousands of patriotic tokens, that’s not really very obtainable.

So that’s why I added ID information, so a new collector could collect by what I call “type sets.” For example, if someone really likes the look of the flying eagles, they can click on the flying eagle description and see that there are six flying eagle tokens and try to get one of each. All of the description pages and individual photos include the Fuld die numbers for cross referencing, but type sets like flying eagles are my invention.

Collectors Weekly: So who decided that GWe, for example, should designate George Washington equestrian tokens?

Bauer: I did. I made all that stuff up.

Collectors Weekly: Not the term storecards, though, right?

Bauer: No, that’s been used for a long time, going back to the 19th century. It refers to tokens that have merchant names and advertising on them. I don’t know its origins, but I do know there are more storecard varieties than patriotics, roughly 8,000 versus 2,000, although those numbers have nothing to do with rarity. Relatively common Civil War tokens are designated R1, which just means that more than 5,000 are thought to have survived. If a token is an R10, then there’s only one example known to exist.

Some clever die sinkers got around potential charges of counterfeiting by positioning their coins as IOUs.

Collectors Weekly: What about the C designations?

Bauer: I made those up, too. For the Fulds, all common token were R1s, but when you look at tokens aggregated in terms of type, they can be more common than that. For instance, there’s an Indian head made by an engraver named John Stanton of Cincinnati. It’s a very distinctive kind of Indian head and it shows very fine craftsmanship.

Stanton made up to 30 different dies with the same Indian head on it. The only differences are how the feathers point to the stars. It’s just how the elements were laid out on the token. Any one of those individual coins may be an R3 (which means fewer than 3,000 survive), but if you take the literally thousands of examples of the 30 Stanton Indian head dies from 1863 as a group, the type is more common than that. Stanton’s 1863 Indian head type is really a C4, meaning more than 200,000 token examples of that type are believed to exist.

The flying eagle token on the left bears a striking resemblance to the real coin on the right (photo courtesy indiancent.com).

Collectors Weekly: You’ve also got a section on cent facsimiles.

Bauer: That’s another invention of mine. The storecards are easy to classify because they have a merchant name on them, but there are an awful lot of tokens in the patriotic book that aren’t really patriotic at all. The intent of the tokens in the cent facsimiles grouping appears primarily to cause a person receiving a token in change to mistake it for a real cent. Many of these tokens have an Indian head on the front or a flying eagle, because the flying-eagle cents from 1857 and 1858 were still in circulation. I posted a real flying eagle in the flying eagle section of the site so people could compare the tokens to the real thing. You can see how similar they were.

“During the Civil War, northern die sinkers were literally minting money.”

The reason why we’re talking about these tokens at all is because the counterfeiting laws at the time were pretty vague about copper coinage. They were very clear about gold and silver coinage—you couldn’t make copies of those—but they were really not clear about copper and, hence, copper cents. So the die sinkers were willing to give it a try, but at the same time they were being cautious.

That’s how you end up with tokens in the Nc or the No groups. In general, the reverses of these tokens look fairly similar to the Indian head cents that were minted at the time. At first glance these might seem like they were the same thing, except for that disclaimer: “Not One Cent.” Again, that’s not especially patriotic.

As the front and back of this token shows, the complaint that there's plenty of money to make war but little to pay for its impact on the families of soldiers is not new.

Collectors Weekly: What did the words “Not One Cent For The Widows” refer to?

Bauer: Most of these dies were mixed and matched pretty freely. That particular one got matched up with an obverse die that shows an Indian head with the words “Millions For Contractors.” Turn it over and on the back it says “Not One Cent For The Widows,” which is what I mean when I say each one of these tokens has a story to tell. I don’t know all the details, but obviously the war department was spending lots of money on cannons, mortars, and materials for the war machine. Apparently something about the pensions for widows or soldiers killed in action was not to the liking of the person making this token.

Can you spot the spelling error in the patriotic coin on the right?

Collectors Weekly: Did the tokens vary in their quality?

Bauer: Yes, in fact that’s one of the things I find most interesting about the Civil War tokens, the range of quality. I mentioned John Stanton of Cincinnati. There was also Scovill Manufacturing Company in Connecticut, which produced tokens nearly equal in quality to what was being produced by the U.S. Mint. At the other end of the scale were some of the Midwest die sinkers who were literally doing this in their basement or out in a woodshop, hand-cutting their dies, spelling blunders and all, and striking their tokens on hand-turned screw presses.

In the section of my site on grading, you’ll see references to the kinds of issues that collectors wrestle with in terms of the quality of the strike and the quality of the planchet, or blank. There are tremendous variations in the quality of these things. A lot of the Civil War token collectors really like the stuff that shows evidence of cracked dies and errors.

Coins and tokens are referred to as being "struck" even though they are made on a coining press, which was the subject of this token.

Collectors Weekly: You said some of the die sinkers had screw-down machines. In that case, is the coin, strictly speaking, being struck?

Bauer: Yes, although it’s not struck with a hammer. I think all of these coins were either struck with a screw press like the one shown in the Mf group within scorecards or in a steam-operated press. A number of die sinkers and companies were mechanized to that extent during the Civil War. You could achieve a much more consistent evenness of strike with a steam press.

Collectors Weekly: What was in it for the die sinkers?

Bauer: There had always been advertising tokens produced many years before the Civil War in lots of sizes. There were also political medals, which were the forerunners of the celluloid political button that people wear. So there were already engravers and die sinkers out there making this sort of stuff.

Here’s where it got interesting for the die sinkers. Up until 1857, the U.S. government minted large cents. They were big, clunky, and pretty unpopular, but each one had one cent’s worth of copper in it. That was true for all the coins of that era—their bullion value nearly equaled their face value. That’s what people wanted.

Tokens bearing beer glasses or barrels, such as this example from Milwaukee, are a popular type.

The flying eagle cents dated 1856 were about the thickness of a nickel and the diameter of the current cent. So they were much thicker and had a mixture of copper and nickel in them. Still, the bullion value of the flying-eagle cent, these copper-nickel cents, was about one cent, nearly if not exactly.

The Civil War tokens, on the other hand, were really the forerunners of the current Lincoln cent because they’re the same diameter and thickness as a Lincoln cent but they were made, for the most part, of pure copper, which meant their intrinsic value was only about two-tenths of a cent at that time. It was quite a racket. Die sinkers would make tokens that cost them two-tenths of a cent and sell them to merchants for nine-tenths of a cent. The merchants would make a tenth of a cent for their trouble. The die sinkers were literally minting money.

(All photos courtesy www.cwtokens.com except as noted)

When it comes to Christmas albums, the top dogs on our Christmas records page are usually The Beatles, which mailed flexi-discs to its fans from 1963 to 1970, and Pearl Jam, which has been pressing 45s and 10-inch vinyl for members of its Ten Club since 1991 (skipping a year in 1994). Elvis Presley’s 1957 “Elvis’ Christmas Album” is the best selling Christmas album of all time, but 9-million copies sold means it’s not especially rare.

But if you’re looking for a Christmas album that just about nobody has, check out the private-label, mid-1970s vintage vinyl (shown above) called “Xmas Done Got Funky,” performed by Jimmy Jules and the Nuclear Soul System, with Jackie Spencer. Right now (auction ends December 15), the bidding for a copy of this seven-song, 12-inch, 33 1/3 RPM time capsule is pushing $130 (update: $521.12 was the final price), with more than 81 people watching. Last Sunday, a similar copy fetched $738, which is more than than the $597 price paid last summer and about what the LP was going for in 2009 ($715).

As vinyl futures go, this sounds like a rock-solid investment, but is “Xmas Done Got Funky” worth it for the music alone? Here’s the title track so you can decide for yourself.

On Tuesday, Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, sold a red Hermes Birkin handbag to an anonymous bidder for $203,150, including the buyer’s premium. This price dwarfs the previous record for most expensive handbag—last year in England, a Birkin went for the equivalent of $77,000. At the auction Tuesday, not one, but four, Birkins busted this record, the cheapest selling for $80,663.

Handmade from start to finish by a single craftsman, the Birkin is no ordinary handbag, and the priciest purse in the world was no ordinary Birkin. Not only was it made from the same Porosus crocodile (a native to saltwater estuaries in northern Australia) favored by Birkin lover Victoria Beckham, its hardware was fabricated of 14k white gold, although it might as well been made of tin since the surface was almost entirely obscured by diamonds.

But you don’t have to spend six figures if you want this Porosus crocodile “it” bag, if you’re willing to forego the diamonds. Right now, a similar, slightly larger Birkin (35cm vs 30) is available on eBay for only $32,500. At the moment, 40 people are watching it, although the reserve has not been met. Auction ends this Saturday.

Now for the bigger question: What does one put in a $200,000 purse? Presumably not crumpled receipts, broken lipsticks, and used tissues. While you’re pondering that one, take some time to peruse our new bags family. There, you can find a gorgeous piece of arm candy that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Every December, people of all stripes make the rounds of their neighborhood Christmas parties decked in their ugliest Christmas sweaters. Prizes are often offered at these seasonal soirees for the tackiest v-neck or wool knit, sparking fierce competition among family and friends.

If you haven’t snagged your piece of atrocious holiday outerwear yet, we know where you can glory in the gaudy, revel in the revolting, and win that coveted prize: our ugly Christmas sweaters page. In honor of the 12 days of Christmas, we’ve ranked our favorites from best to worst (or is it the other way around?). So pop a dramamine, sit back, and enjoy. Some are still for sale, but hurry: with looks this ugly, these sweaters won’t last.

12. One of the hallmarks of a truly ugly Christmas sweater is three-dimensionality. In the case of this vaguely patriotic 1980s beauty from Bravo, bows, beads, pom poms, and fabric candy canes protrude from the sweater’s acrylic knit surface. If only that mantel clock actually worked.

11. Here’s a handsome blue crewneck from Traditional Trading Co. that signals your holiday spirit and fondness for skiing, even if that means occasionally doing so upside down. Apparently, snowboarders know better than to wear a garment as tacky as this.

10. Awww. What could be cuter than fluffy white kittens playing with a ball of ribbon and an open Christmas box? How about anything.

9. This mock turtleneck from Cabin Creek proves that even the most innocuous imagery (a snowman in a hat, and cabin in the woods) can get deliciously ugly when it’s repeated enough.

8. Hillary and Paige is the company that’s blamed for this extra-large acrylic knit billboard. The tree is accented with pom poms, and that’s real fake gold stitching on the gifts.

7. This Berek from the 1980s teeters into ugly land because its imagery is so saccharin, and if it causes you to get Tchaikovsky stuck in your head, all the better.

6. Another Berek cardigan: not advised for wearing out of doors during hunting season.

5. It’s got gingerbread buttons, a gingerbread house, and gingerbread men floating into the sky. We’re hungry.

4. This fashion catastrophe from Tiara International has a nice balance of ugly and traditional style. Gotta love all that black; so cheerful for the holidays.

3. This is what the Christmas is all about: a three-dimensional “Baby J” doll on the front of a maroon sweater, surrounded by text and a star that’s all weirdly similar to graphics used on propaganda posters in the old Soviet Union. Be careful not to impale your loved ones on the spikes of straw when you give them that seasons-greetings hug.

2. Perhaps the most important genre within the ugly Christmas sweater universe is the mildly ugly sweater that’s been upgraded to resoundingly tacky by attaching stuff to it. In this case, a red-nosed reindeer with a crown of stars surrounding a clump of what appears to be Astro-Turf will buldge from the belly of whoever is crazy enough to wear this wool nightmare.

1. Finally, this testament to tinsel has everything: gold mesh, garlands galore, green and red bells dangling from the chest, lights, and it even plays “Jingle Bells,” as if it’s visuals weren’t already loud enough. Congratulations!

Tis the season for buying presents. As you peruse your local mall, you might find yourself drawn to beautiful geometric patterns in vibrant colors, long associated with Navajo rugs, Pendleton “Indian trade” blankets, and Southwest Native American pottery. They’ll be everywhere you look, on sneakers, pricey handbags, home decor, and high-fashion skirts, coats, and jackets.

But many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.

Chief Joseph wears a Pendleton blanket in 1901. He is famous for leading a long-standing resistance to the U.S. government, which had ordered the Nez Perce to move to an Idaho reservation. Photo by Major Lee Morehouse, courtesy of Bob Kapoun, via "Language of the Robe."

“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”

“Our land, our moccasins, our headdresses, and our religions weren’t enough? You gotta go and take Pendleton designs, too?”

Of course, this is not the first time Western fashion has appropriated imagery in the name of aesthetics, as fashion historian Lizzie Bramlett points out in her blog, The Vintage Traveler. For example, the pattern we think of as “paisley”—now most commonly seen on ties—was once a holy symbol of the Zoroastrians in Persia. And throughout fashion history, designers have been swiping motifs from other cultures—from China and Japan in Victorian times, Egypt in the 1920s, and West Africa and Latin America in the ’60s.

But Native Americans have a unique place in the history of the United States. Today, many Native American communities are still reeling from the impact of colonization, which started when white Europeans first invaded their homelands and continued as the colonists established a new order and repeatedly attempted to dismantle the native cultures. That this dismantling should continue at the mall can be especially disheartening.

This nine-element robe, named after the esteemed Chief Joseph, was first introduced as an Indian trade blanket by Pendleton in the 1920s. Via "Language of the Robe."

Even Pendleton, which has fostered warm relationships with various Native American communities since it began producing wool Indian trade blankets more than a century ago, has raised a bit of ire with its new fashion-forward collaborations and collections designed to appeal to a broad, if well-heeled, audience.

Pendleton’s latest foray into young, urban fashion is its fall 2011 Portland Collection, first available in September. For the line, the patterns and fabrics used in the company’s 100-year-old Indian trade blankets were incorporated into high-end cocktail dresses, nerd-chic cardigans, and big blanket-like Tobaggan coats covering the white models like sophisticated Snuggies (models wearing the coats are pictured at top).

This Pendleton travel bag sells for $180 at Urban Outfitters, a clothing retailer that has recently caused controversy with its own "Navajo" line, since renamed.

While these things are trendy and “in the now,” Pendleton blankets have a much more permanent place in Native American culture. In the 1992 book, “Language of the Robe,” Rain Parrish, a Navajo anthropologist, writer, artist, and former curator at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, explains that her family and friends always come to Navajo ceremonies and dances wrapped in their Pendleton blankets.

A look from Pendleton's 2009 collaboration with Manhattan brand Opening Ceremony.

“As the light from the fire illuminated the moving bodies and blankets, the swirling shapes, lines, patterns, and colors sprang to life. I no longer saw blankets, but rather the familiar designs of the Holy People coming to life from the sand paintings. I saw moving clouds, glowing sunsets, varicolored streaks of lightning, rainbow goddesses, sacred mountains, horned toads, and images like desert mirages—all dancing before my eyes.

“Colorful blankets are often the chosen gift,” Parrish continues. “We welcome our children with a handmade quilt or a small Pendleton blanket as we wrap them in our prayers. For our young men and women, we celebrate the transformation into adulthood, by discipline, values, acknowledgement, and gifts. As they lie on a thick bed of Pendleton blankets, we massage their bodies for good health. For a couple’s marriage, … the woman’s body is draped with a Pendleton shawl, the man’s with a Pendleton robe. As we move into old age, we pay tribute to the spirit world with ceremony, prayers, and gifts. Often we bury our people with their special possessions and beautiful Pendleton blankets.”

Does that make the hip, couture Portland Collection the same sort of exploitation of Native American culture as the Urban Outfitter “Navajo” line? Here’s where it gets tricky: Pendleton blankets, while marketed to and adopted by tribes across the United States, were not originally designed or manufactured by Native Americans. So to understand the debate about the place of what we assume is Native American iconography in contemporary fashion, you have to look at the history of the Indian trade blanket.

These limited-edition shoes, created by Japanese designer Taka Hayashi for Vans Vault in 2010, incorporate Pendleton wool weaves and now sell for hundreds on eBay.

Deep in the Southwest, as early as 1050, the Pueblo people had developed hand-weaving techniques on vertical looms. But the Spanish conquistadors, who invaded the Pueblos in the 1500s, had made their mark on the native weaving craft by the 1600s, seen in the use of wool and indigo dyes, as well as the simple stripe patterns. By 1650, the Pueblo Indians had taught their trade to the Navajo, who eventually developed their own distinct weaving style. They took inspiration from the land, and created geometric shapes to represent the things they saw, like mountains, clouds, owls, and turtles.

“We know that the blankets, especially the Navajo blankets, were inspired by the world around them,” Metcalfe says, explaining that these blankets had a story. “Sometimes, there were references to the geography, but they were abstracted.”

Four young women wrapped in blankets, circa 1890. From "Language of the Robe," courtesy of Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma library.

Tribes in the Northeast at the time relied on animal hides to keep warm. That’s why, in the late 1700s, insulating and water-repellent European felted wool blankets became the most coveted barter items for the local tribespeople trading with the Hudson Bay Company in present-day Canada. The most popular of these was Hudson Bay’s off-white, pointed “chief’s blanket,” striped with bands of cobalt, gold, red, and green on either end.

In the late 1880s, when the railroad finally opened the Southwest and the rest of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase to East Coast tourists, white Americans were enchanted with the beautiful geometric patterns used in Navajo blankets. The Victorians would take these blankets back to their overstuffed homes and use them as conversation-piece rugs. Traders, sensing an economic opportunity, encouraged the Navajo to weave these throws with stronger materials and more muted colors suitable for the floor.

A vintage Hudson Bay Trading Company Four-Point "chief's blanket."

Then, in 1895, a woolen mill opened in the Oregon town of Pendleton to sell blankets and robes to nearby Native American tribes. The mill went out of business, but in 1909, brothers Clarence, Roy, and Chauncey Bishop, who came from a family of weavers and entrepreneurs, reopened the facility as Pendleton Woolen Mills.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans, but also who gets to profit.”

Employing the Jacquard loom technology first imported to the U.S. in the 1830s, Pendleton and other new U.S. mills were able to make felted blankets with stunning colors and patterns. Naturally, all the these wool companies looked at the Native American populations, who had at this point adapted wool blankets, often striped or plaid, as a part of their ceremonies and rites of passage, and saw an opportunity.

To Pendleton’s credit, its loom artisan Joe Rawnsley spent a lot of quality time with the local tribes, such as the Nez Perce, to learn what colors and patterns would appeal to them most. As a side note, the Nez Perce most associated with the brand, Chief Joseph, who heroically stood up against the U.S. government for years, had very little involvement with the company. He was photographed by Major Lee Morehouse wearing Pendleton blankets in 1901, but according to Robert J. Christnacht, manager of Pendleton’s home division, that was “the extent of Chief Joseph’s relationship with Pendleton.”

A Pendleton striped shawl from 1910-1915, labeled as pure fleece wool. Via "Language of the Robe."

Rawnsley’s early blankets were well-received by the nearby Nez Perce, so the company sent him on a six-month tour of the Southwest, where he lived with Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi to find out what blanket designs those tribes would prefer. He returned with hundreds of ideas. “Baskets, pottery, weavings, and regalia all inspired Joe,” Christnacht says. “Pendleton blanket designs were a blending of the images and colors Joe saw with his own design aesthetic.”

“It’s a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it.”

Some might say that Rawnsley was simply inspired by the beauty of Native American arts and crafts, and he hoped to use his Jacquard skills to make beautiful blankets the tribespeople would love. And in that, he succeeded. Others might argue that this was an early and sly version of cultural thievery. It’s a slippery slope.

“From the beginning Pendleton marketed the blankets to various native communities, but the designs themselves are not authentic,” says Bramlett, a founding member of the Vintage Fashion Guild. “What’s ironic is that the Navajo were making blankets for the white tourist trade, and Pendleton was making blankets to sell to the native communities. That’s kind of a weird twist, but that’s the way it was.

Pendleton banded robe, first featured in the the 1904 catalog and also in the 1910 catalog. Via "Language of the Robe."

“And the Navajo designs were not even traditional designs,” she continues. “A lot of the motifs that they used were Mexican inspired. Or when traders came to them with oriental rugs, they’d use them as inspiration. So there are oriental motifs in some Navajo weavings, too. It’s just a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it. You’ve got the Pendleton blankets which are a mixture of native and non-native colors and motifs. Then you’ve got the Navajo blankets, which are the same way.”

What we do know is that Pendleton blankets were a hit, and quickly became a staple of life for Native Americans all over the country. They were used at powwows and rites of passage, as treasured gifts, as a means of non-verbal communication.

“Personally, when I think about that history, I think it’s a really cool, the fact that the entire company—and it wasn’t just Pendleton, there were other woolen mills as well—developed because the market for this item was so strong in native communities,” Metcalfe says. “These blankets were integrated right away into our ceremonies. Pendleton also realized that different communities and different tribes had different preferences for designs or colors. And then they created blankets that different communities would like.”

Patricio Calabaza, left, wears a Navajo blanket, and Rafael Lobato, right, wears a Pendleton blanket, at the Santo Domingo Pueblo, circa 1930. Photo by Witter Bynner, courtesy of Museum of New Mexico, via "Language of the Robe."

At the same time, Pendleton also sold the blankets to white people as exotic items for their homes.

“If you look back at the advertising of the day, it’s vague,” Bramlett says. “They didn’t come right out and say, ‘This is an authentic Navajo design,’ but they could lead you to believe that. They realized there was a market for non-native people to use these in their homes. Heck, they were in business to sell blankets. They didn’t care who bought them.”

All of this to say, it’s very hard to parse out the proper credit for these “native” textile patterns popularized by Pendleton and others—let alone when this appropriation first happened. In the early 20th century, Pendleton blankets seemed perfect complements to the rustic, spare style of the Arts and Crafts movement, and by the early 1910s, Christnacht says the company was expanding these patterns to couch covers, rugs, and robes. Later, they were adopted by cowboys and competitive horse riders as saddle blankets.

A Pendleton center point blanket from 1921. Via "Language of the Robe."

“The time when Pendleton came into existence, the 1900s, was the all-time low for native communities,” Metcalfe says. “This is at the height of the reservation era, when we were confined, we were essentially prisoners on these small plots of land. But in that same breath, while our cultures were under threat from this outside force, that’s when we turned internally to protect what we had, and we also get some of the most beautiful beadwork and most beautiful jewelry coming out of that period of great stress.

“Connected with that great assimilation movement was the height of collecting. The late 1800s was when a lot of our stuff left our communities. On the one hand, you have this push for trying to absorb or get rid of ‘The Indian Problem.’ Then, they were taking all of the items that embody that culture, to collect them and put them in museums and claim ownership on them.”

This Tomi Girl dress was made by Lakota designer Mildred High Elk Carpenter, out of a Pendleton blanket, for her MILDJ Native Fashion line. It's worn by N8tv Dyme's top model Katrina Drust. Photo by Tiara Carpenter, Native Doll Photography, Bellingham, Wa.

In the 1970s and ’80s, top American designer Ralph Lauren became enamored with Navajo rugs, Plains beadwork, and Apache pottery. He launched his Santa Fe line of clothing featuring concha belts, petticoat skirts, “Indian patterned” sweaters, and blanket jackets in 1981 as another defining aspect of American culture. In the 1990s, the Pendleton and other Native American-inspired designs swelled in popularity again with the return of “Southwest” style and rise of “new country” music.

In recent years, Pendleton has been going to town with collaborations using the iconic Indian trade blanket patterns. It had sold these patterns to Vans, famous for making skateboarder shoes; produced high-fashion lines with Manhattan couture company Opening Ceremony; and it is even offering products through Urban Outfitters. With Levi’s, Pendleton launched a line of jean jackets and cowboy shirts called Navajo Cowboys, hiring Navajo rodeo champions like Monica Yazzie as models.

Jessica Simpson and fiance Eric Johnson sport the "native look." Via UpscaleHype.com

“The reason why Pendleton was able to maintain themselves—and they’re the only woolen mill that survived—is because of their dedication to the native communities and realizing the native people were their main market,” Metcalfe says. “The blanket for us has become associated with idea of native pride, associated with achievement, community, and community service.

“Now Pendleton’s entering the mainstream fashion scene, doing these collaborations, and it is probably a smart move for them, as a business. But we feel like we have some ownership with this company, and we do question whether they’re stepping away from their relationship with us.”

For some, like Cherokee writer and Ph.D. candidate Adrienne K., who blogs at Native Appropriations, it’s confusing and saddening to see her beloved Pendleton selling stylized products to wealthy young Manhattanites who are as removed from the native way of life as any American could be.

“Seeing hipsters march down the street in Pendleton clothes, seeing these bloggers ooh and ahh over how ‘cute’ these designs are, and seeing non-Native models all wrapped up in Pendleton blankets makes me upset,” she writes. “It’s a complicated feeling, because I feel ownership over these designs as a Native person, but on a rational level I realize that they aren’t necessarily ours to claim. To me, it just feels like one more thing non-Natives can take from us—like our land, our moccasins, our headdresses, our beading, our religions, our names, our cultures weren’t enough? You gotta go and take Pendleton designs, too?”

Monica Yazzie, a 19-year-old Navajo barrel racer from La Plata, New Mexico, models the Levi's Workwear by Pendleton woolen poncho.

Metcalfe says she’s observed, to her amusement, that the Vans collaboration has been a big hit with Native American communities, but the Opening Ceremony line is dismissed as ridiculous. For Adrienne K., the stratospheric prices of the haute-couture Pendleton items just adds injury to insult.

“There’s the whole economic stratification issue of it,” she writes. “These designs are expensive. The new Portland Collection ranges from $48 for a tie to over $700 for a coat. The Opening Ceremony collection was equally, if not more, costly. It almost feels like rubbing salt in the wound, when poverty is rampant in many Native communities, to say ‘Oh, we designed this collection based on your culture, but you can’t even afford it!’”

This screen grab from the Opening Ceremony web site shows a model in three different Pendleton sweaters, all over $500.

On the other hand, Native American designers, too, like Sho Sho Esquiro, of Kaska Dene and Cree descent, and Mildred High Elk Carpenter, a Minucoujou Lakota living Montanna, have also taken inspiration from the Pendleton blankets, sewing them into to modern fashion items like skirts, jackets, dresses, and even hoodies.

“It’s really cool to see how they reinterpret the blanket,” Metcalfe says. “For Sho Sho, she’s using very vibrant colors and the bold graphics of the Pendleton blanket and giving it this hip-hop vibe, by making these hoodies for men and women. She’s made the wearing blanket something cool for Native Americans to wear again.”

A Pendleton six-element shawl from 1921. Via "Language of the Robe."

Bramlett says she’s glad Adrienne K. and other bloggers are speaking up, because it’s bringing up all the ways Native Americans have been exploited and misrepresented in mainstream culture. Having grown up in the ’60s, Bramlett remembers a time not so long ago when it was considered acceptable to portray “Indians” as violent enemies in movies, television, and children’s books and cartoons.

Even though the cultural tides are turning, a Cherokee-run company in North Carolina still makes knockoffs of ceremonial Sioux headdresses for children to play “cowboys and Indians” with. And Ke$ha and other young scenesters seem to think there’s nothing wrong with donning copies of sacred headgear for partying at summer rock festivals like Coachella.

“When you see pictures of some of these festivals where young white women are all dressed up in Indian regalia, you wonder, ‘What the heck are they thinking?’” Bramlett says. “What adult is going to do this? Do you not realize you just look dumb?”

The cover of the Pendleton catalog, circa 1901. This 24-page catalog offered blankets and photographs of the Plateau Indians by Major Lee Morehouse. Image via "Language of the Robe."

And even though she finds fashionistas wearing the high-end clothing made out of Pendleton fabrics much less egregious than concert-goers wearing headdresses, Bramlett says it still can look like children playing dress up. “If it’s something that’s that strong a design that is so strongly associated with one culture, it makes you look like you’re trying to be something you’re not.”

Still, Pendleton, who is also known for folksy Americana plaids (inspired by Scottish tartans) and The Dude’s sweater in “The Big Lebowski,”  has to find a way to stay viable in today’s brutal international market, Bramlett says, or it goes out of business—and its beautiful blankets go with it. Christnacht says that 100 percent of the blankets are woven and manufactured in the United States, and half of those, which go for about a couple hundred dollars a piece, are sold to Native Americans. In 2009, Pendleton, which employed about 900 people nationwide, had to lay off 43 workers and consolidate operations in response to slow sales during the recession.

“To stay in business, they have got to appeal to younger consumers,” Bramlett says. “They just have to. And so if they want to collaborate with Levi’s or Vans or whoever else they’ve been in bed with, that’s fine and good. If that industry were to collapse, it would be gone. I’ve seen this a dozen times. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and it’s very soon forgotten.”

A 1910 Pendleton banded robe, also offered in the 1904 catalog as a round corner blanket. Via "Language of the Robe."

Metcalfe says you’ll never get a consensus from the Native American community on what Pendleton should or shouldn’t do, but ultimately there is a great love of Pendleton, which has often produced blankets to give back to the community, like the one designed by Osage artist Wendy Ponca that benefitted the American Indian College Fund. It’s just—like you do in any long-term relationship—they get a little annoyed with the company sometimes.

“I think ultimately the collaborations are a good thing because they’re opening a door to greater understanding,” Metcalfe says. “Hopefully, those people wearing these clothes will learn a little more about Pendleton’s history and why we have respect for Pendleton. It is because their sense of service to native communities.”

Today the Steuben glass factory in Corning, New York, closed its doors (see local news report below). Although the name was sold for an undisclosed sum to Corning Incorporated, which once owned Steuben, it’s unclear if crystal objects such as the Gazelle Bowl (the 1935 example above is from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) will ever be produced again.

When Steuben opened in 1903, its biggest competitor was Tiffany, which introduced its iridescent Favrile line in 1894. Steuben co-founder and chief designer, Frederick Carder, countered with Aurene (the example, below, from the Corning Museum of Glass is from the 1920s), whose shapes were more classical than Tiffany’s and whose surfaces borrowed liberally from effects pioneered by 19th-century Bohemian glass artists. The Carder era at Steuben lasted until the early 1930s, when sculptor Sidney Biehler Waugh was named Steuben’s chief designer.

If the Carder years were marked by a preoccupation with surface and silhouette, Waugh championed line and form, leaving his large Art Deco bowls and vases untouched, save the figures and animals that were engraved into their sides. Carder may have been the one to breath life into Steuben, but Waugh let there be light, taking full advantage of the technological breakthroughs in clarity that had been achieved by Corning glass chemists.

As this new direction took hold, countless pieces from the Carder years were destroyed in a purge that Corning residents called “The Smashing,” which makes Steuben objects from the 1910s and 1920s particularly collectible today. Whether the same economic benefit will carry over to pieces from the Waugh years (or the postwar Walter Teague era that followed) due to Steuben’s closing is anybody’s guess, but lots of sellers will no doubt try to make such claims between now and the end of the year.