Powders, potions and pills–those amazing patent medicines of old
Ayer’s Sarsaparilla–the best of its kind To strengthen the body and brighten the mind! Then what is more worthy of pencil or song Than Ayer’s Sarsaparilla? IT MAKES THE WEAK STRONG Where are they now, those wonderful patent medicines which promised to relieve every ailment, human and otherwise, from ‘female complaints’ to fallen arches and falling hair? Alas, they’ve gone; gone the way of the old-fashioned drugstore (remember when they just sold drugstore items, not everything from motor oil to appliances?) and the dinosaur. Victims of advances in medicine and, more importantly, tightened drug laws, they’re part of our vanished heritage, replaced by what we now call health supplements. One of the greatest successes in patent medicines was also its longest surviving institution, one that didn’t succumb to changing times until the 1970s. For generations Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable...
Read MoreOld Family Photos Cry Out to You
You see them all the time. At garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores, they stare back at you from over the years. How do these family photos, so very personal and, you would think, once so meaningful to their owners, find their way to a sales table? Who was he? For the prospective buyer, usually a collector of what’s fancifully termed ephemera, the thrill of the hunt can be dampened by a nagging sense of guilt. These were real people whose private lives so painfully preserved in family albums are now bared to the prying eyes of strangers–you! It’s an invasion of privacy They should be tucked safely away for family posterity. Instead, there they are for the world to see, jumbled in a box, sometimes still framed, or in their original albums. It’s a moral dilemma...
Read More16th-Century English Shilling Found in Gorge Waterway
The recent discovery of an English shilling, ca 1551-53, in Victoria’s Gorge waterway by treasure hunter Bruce Campbell brought back warm memories of my own metal detecting days. Not that I ever found anything of consequence let alone value. Ah, but the joy of the hunt, the hope that the next shovelful would yield, if not treasure in the form of gold, silver or gems, some historically significant find always kept me going. Mind you, if you saw what I had for a detector, made of plastic and plywood, you’d probably wonder how I found anything at all! I’m writing of the early 1960s when I sent away to Texas for a kit advertised in a western magazine, for about $35 that cost me half as much again to bring it through customs–as a Geiger counter, according to the...
Read MoreVictoria, B.C. Waterfront to Undergo Transformation
“Victoria’s Inner Harbour has come a long way since the days when it was surrounded by industrial operations that turned the water into an open sewer…” noted the Times–Colonist in a recent editorial. No doubt the editor’s reference to the harbour’s past commercial enterprises didn’t include its first major industry, the selling of ‘tanglefoot’–rotgut–whiskey and degenerative disease by the boatload. This was when Victoria was still a palisaded outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Co., in the days of, and following, the Fraser River gold rush. ‘Respectable’ Victoria merchants grew rich from illegal liquor sales to an estimated 20,000 white newcomers who joined several thousand local Songhees and other First Nations peoples from northern Vancouver and the Queen Charlotte (Haida Gwaii) islands. This unholy mix of nations, races, creeds and cultures created an overwhelming demand for liquor and some of...
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