Recent Aquisitions

Have you ever dug though your grandma’s attic or your mom’s cedar chest and wondered at the bits and pieces of family history you found there?  Obviously those of us in the museum business have more than an average curiosity about such things.  And, we tend to get very excited about certain pieces of art or cultural or scientific history that make their way to us.  Here are some recent ones:

• Handmade deerskin infant’s shoes from 1830.  Little Nancy Jane Oliver was carried through the woods as her family visited neighbors.  One shoe, which had been handmade by her father, was lost on the journey.  Years later, her brothers were clearing land and, in a squirrel’s nest within a tree they felled….they found the lost shoe!
• Three costumes worn by members of The Jackson Five on a 1974 episode of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour”.  Also, two equipment trunks used by the group during tours in the 1970’s.
• Hasbro GI Joe-series “Tuskegee Airman” action figure, belonging to 2nd Lt. Rayfield Anderson, Indianapolis, who served with the Tuskegee Airmen during WWII.  Anderson was a Crispus Attucks High School graduate.
• Two of perhaps just a dozen working RCA CT-100 televisions known to exist.  This television, manufactured in Bloomington, IN in 1954,  was the first commercially viable color television ever produced.